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In 1967, a young David Lynch grabbed his new Bolex 16mm camera, to film his friend and mentor Bushnell Keeler and brother Dave Keeler sailing on the Chesapeake Bay in Bush's King's Cruiser. This was David Lynch's very first film, which he prefers to call a "home movie". It depicts a man, a painter, who changed David's life forever pursuing the artist's life, which he continues to this day.
me: h sailing with bushnell keeler - a home video by david lynch: woooHhooooOooooooOOo oooooooHooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo hOOOOOooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh oooooOoooooOOooHhoooooooooooooooooo
David Lynch transforms an ordinary home movie that feels like you're adrift and disorientated in the lead up to some kind of horrible accident all by his use of canted angle, cuts, and [ethereal whooshing] I love this man
All in all, just some footage of a bunch of guys, one of them a young David Lynch, estranded in the Bermuda Triangle.... or some random beach. Rumor has it this was the first ever video the director ever shot.
Singularly haunting, “Sailing with Bushnell Keeler” repurposes footage that would normally serve as (and is billed accordingly) fodder for a home video and turns it into something far more sinister. The canted angles, the sudden cuts to disorienting close-ups, the jagged zooms, the strange dissolves and especially the eerily slowed-down shots create an air of ill ease, especially on the monochrome film stock that renders the blue sky into a grayed-out canvas. And the sound multiplies this feeling tenfold, as the plaintive wind just persists unceasingly. It is almost inevitable, though no less striking, that the short would end on a freeze-frame followed by a fade to black.
Though he certainly engages in overt and typical surrealism, the heart of Lynch’s surrealism — so definitive as to just be ‘Lynchian’ — is in the skewing of normality. The prosaic doesn’t exist here, every incidental moment is either tilted or is suffused with the possibility of the surreal. Ostensible reality is made impossible, things are perpetually an inescapably uncanny.
It’s all achieved through an overt cinematic language and, in these pre-Eraserhead shorts, it is certainly more rudimentary. The sound design is very effective but is doing almost all of the lifting — in terms of the effective unease. However, things are shot (canted and presented in black and white) so as to be indelibly odd, compellingly so. Lynch being Lynch,…
Weird how you find stutters of The Return in a home movie that preceded it by 50 years.
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