Learning of the subtle, effortless and mysterious visual language of editing is like waking up from a long sleep for the first time. Finding out that your brain has been an accomplice in your own visual deception - creating ideas, assumptions, even conclusions in your head subconsciously is a rebirth! And a balance. One false step and the illusion is ruined.
When searching for editing inspiration and storytelling I thought to go straight to Daivd Lynch. He has certainly made a name for himself in stretching the viewers' imagination with deeply disturbing and symbolic images that create moods, and reveal characters and sometimes in the process confuse plots...but I guess that's where knowingly breaking the rules begins.
I chose to take a look at the opening scenes of Blue Velvet. It begins with establishing shots of a red tulips in front of a white picket fence, a man riding on the side of a truck waving as it drives left to right, another shot of yellow tulips in front of a different white picket fence, and cutaway to school children and a crossing guard walking right to left on an empty street, with a non-diegetic musical choice of Bobby Vinton's 1963 hit: Blue Velvet - all presenting a very wholesome, uniform, and eerily-so little neighborhood.
Next image is of a man watering the lawn on a sunny day (facing left), a cutaway to a woman in a house in the dark (facing right), cut away to a television on the 180-degree line and facing her. Cutaway to the man watering the lawn again, struggling with the hose, a loud gurgling sound from the faucet - aggressively disrupting the mood - almost signaling danger, and the man collapses to the ground. A dog and an unattended baby discover him. Cut to an extreme close-up of the grass, and following deep into the grass into the dirt where a mass of crunching and crawling beetles overwhelm the screen in a menacing return to the earth and hideous sense of decay. Not a single word is spent; yet relationships, atmosphere, emotions of loss, impermanence and horror are all visually communicated within the first few minutes. I chose to examine a Lynch film-clip because whenever I watch anything by him, I know that he will do his damnedest to jump through the screen and shake his viewers.
