I Know Catherine, the Log Lady

I Know the Log Lady is one of those fan funded amature documentaries that features as many of the production crew as interview subjects as there are people from the subject's life. Catherine Colson is certainly a wordy subject for such a documentary, and this film covers not only her famouse collabroations with David Lynch, but also her early history, her work in theater, her various romantic relationships, and her death. Unfortunately, the film is so horrendously edited that whatever moving emotional connection we are meant to have with Colson is batted around like a tetherball on the screen. The film is full of horrendous cuts audio mixing. It plays as if the director finished a 2 1/2 hour assemble and was told to take 31 minutes out but only given five hours to do it that, so in a mammoth coffee-fuled session he trimmed every shot a few frames as opposed to editing it down to the good 90 minute film this should be.

The first half of the movie bounces back-and-forth in time from young Catherine to dying Catherine to middle-age Catherine in ways that have no rhyme or reason, no narrative structure, and no visual design. Worst is when we get to the end that covers Catherine's final days and the filming of her cameo in Twin Peaks: The Return. The documentary drags out this seuqence to a length that feels damn disrespectful to its subject and assaultive to its audience. The constant cutting back-and-forth to different talking heads saying the exact same thing over and over again streches over dozens of minutes that feel like an eternatiy. It's almost as if everyone involved in this production felt that they deserved to express their feelings about loosing Catherine Colson even if they have nothing to say but what everyone else has said. This has the effect of pulliong focus away from the woman herself. And since almost no shot in this film last longer than 24 to 38 frames before a cut, it looses all meaning anwya.

It is as if director Richard Green (who appeared as an actor in Lynch's Mulholland Drive and produced I Don't Know Jack, about the life and death of Lynch star Jack Nance) cannot bring himself to let someone have an emotional moment and hold on it. There's one point with Colson's ex-husband is opening up and talking about when she had a hysterectomy and how that changed their relationship where the film starts to maybe give an inkling that it might slow down and let us be with these people as they talk. But no. It doesn't matter if interviewees are talking about something funny, something sad, something tragic, something living, or something etherial; everything is cut with as if with butchers knife.