Interesting look back at a pivotal film

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/01/2018 (3180 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The documentary Blue Velvet Revisited, directed by German filmmaker Peter Braatz, is ostensibly an impressionistic journey through the creative process of David Lynch when the filmmaker, fresh from his box office bomb Dune, was joyfully toiling on his masterpiece Blue Velvet.

But the premise of the subtitle — “a meditation on a movie” — feels a bit disingenuous. The film is a cobbled-together mish-mash of images and snippets of interviews captured after Lynch generously allowed Braatz behind-the-scenes access to the making of the film in 1985.

Using a Super-8 camera, Braatz effectively shot home-movie footage of the process and sat with Lynch and other participants for some interviews. The fact that Braatz hasn’t done anything with his materials until now indicates he had poor raw material to begin with. It feels credible that it took Braatz 30 years to assemble the material together in a way that would reflect Lynch’s experimental sensibility.

But since Lynch himself has not always been especially available to film journalists since Blue Velvet, you take your value where you can get it.

In this case, there is a substantial interview snippet in which Lynch extols the use of computers to expand the horizons of what film can do. This was a prescient sensibility in 1986. Having recently watched the CG-heavy Got a Light? episode 8 of Lynch’s rebooted Twin Peaks series, the segment felt downright topical for me, reflecting Lynch’s willingness to utilize anything in pursuit of realizing his most outlandish fantasies.

And, indeed, even the filmed material on Blue Velvet feels fairly fresh in context. Here is Lynch making a movie traversing the light and dark hemispheres of Kyle MacLachlan’s character — and three decades later, he’s doing exactly the same thing with his Twin Peaks project.

You have to admit: Lynch is consistent.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing