/film/ - FILM

Blue Velvet's his most normal movie so it's a bad impression, Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead are his defining works.

>>9808

The first two episodes were shit but only because of exposition and impatience. There's a theme of patience and nostalgia throughout the entire season in which those who wait are rewarded with the gift of discipline, and that by focusing on the past you miss the present to make the future and therefore the past is now part of your future.

>>6638

Blue Velvet will be a let-down if you watch it after Mulholland

>>6638

Start with Eraserhead or his short films

New Lynch interview

He is in Tiblisi of all places

>>11223

He always loses me with the transcendental meditation stuff, but I'm glad he found some way to focus his creativity

>>11239

>The TM stuff is really just bizarre. I understand that he is trying to support a movement but it has a literal cult following. Whenever a large number of celebrities are endorsing and pushing something I'm generally apprehensive.

Maybe there are some benefits to meditation, but it really seems narcissistic to get so enthusiastic about it. "True happiness lies within." So, focus on yourself so much that you block everything else out. Perfect for LA.

>>11267

>Maybe there are some benefits to meditation

I don't doubt this at all. My issue lies with the organization itself.

>>6638

Blue Velvet is his best film. Mulholland Drive is a piece of shit, as is Twin Peaks season 3.

I vastly prefer Mulholland Drive myself.

The problem I have with Eraserhead is that for me I'm deeply struck by how plagarized it is from Beckett's Film (1965)

http://ubu.com/film/beckett_film.html

Film is a film written by Samuel Beckett, his only screenplay. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset of Grove Press. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script followed thereafter. It was filmed in New York in July 1964.

Beckett’s original choice for the lead – referred to only as “O” – was Charlie Chaplin, but his script never reached him.[1] Both Beckett and the director Alan Schneider were interested in Zero Mostel and Jack MacGowran. However, the former was unavailable and the latter, who accepted at first, became unavailable due to his role in a "Hollywood epic."[2] Beckett then suggested Buster Keaton.[3] Schneider promptly flew to Los Angeles and persuaded Keaton to accept the role along with "a handsome fee for less than three weeks' work." James Karen, who was to have a small part in the film, also encouraged Schneider to contact Keaton.

The filmed version differs from Beckett's original script but with his approval since he was on set all the time, this being his only visit to the United States. The script printed in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (Faber and Faber, 1984) states:

“This is the original film project for Film. No attempt has been made to bring it into line with the finished work. The one considerable departure from what was imagined concerns the opening sequence in the street. This was first shot as given, then replaced by a simplified version in which only the indispensable couple is retained. For the rest the shooting script followed closely the indications in the script.”

It was remade by the British Film Institute (1979, 16 mm, 26 minutes) without Beckett’s supervision, as Film: a screenplay by Samuel Beckett. David Rayner Clark directed Max Wall.

It first appeared in print in Eh Joe and Other Writings (Faber and Faber, 1967).

>>11300

I love Twin Peaks Season 3 even with all its flaws. In particular, episode 8 season 3 is excellent.

I've actually been watching and reading quite a bit about Lynch lately. Here is his biography. I'm in the middle of it right now and he's talking about influential films he saw when he was a student at AFI and about to start Eraserhead.

"Once I started working on Eraserhead I stopped going to classes, but I’d go

up from time to time to see a film. The projectionist in the big room at the AFI

was a film buff beyond the beyond and when he’d say, “David, you’ve got to see

this film,” I knew it would be something special. One thing he showed me was

Blood of the Beasts, this French film that intercuts between two lovers

walking through these streets in a little French town and a big old-style

slaughterhouse. Cobblestone courtyard, big chains, and steel things. They

bring a horse out and there’s steam coming out of the nostrils; they put this

thing on the horse’s forehead and boom! Down the horse would go. Chains

around his hooves hoist him up and they had him skinned in no time, blood

going in the grate; then cut to this couple walking. It was something."

>>9647

Thanks for this Lady Blue Shanghai.

The Grandmother was made in Philadelphia before he went to the AFI to study in Los Angeles. The soundtrack in particular shows his earliest experimentation in industrial sound.

Lots of his paintings online if you're willing to dig around Google image search

The man behind Winkies is one of my favorite Lynch moments. The filthy homeless man is the dreamer himself.

>>9639

>He says Inland Empire is indeed his last film.

Inland Empire isn't a "film" it's entirely digital video. Thus, Inland Empire was terrifically cheap to make. He claimed it cost him $125,000.00 to make with a tiny crew. With 35mm film you're going to spend well over $10 million just on film and film processing, plus huge expensive lighting problems. I think Lynch is sort of being sly in saying he'll never make a film again. By working so cheaply with digital media he liberated himself from big studio financing, a servitude which he obviously despises as anyone watching Mulholland Drive can see.

>>15113

Wow it's been a while for me and I forgot that scene. I love it.

>>6642

The best scene of this movie by far.

David Lynch made a public service announcement for New York City's rat problem

Oh god...

"I started living a bicoastal life after Blue Velvet, and I didn’t like that. I liked

being in New York with Isabella and I loved being in Europe when I went

there, but I’m way more of a homebody. When you’re moving around all the

time you don’t get any work done. Still, some really cool things happened

during that time. One time I was in Italy with Isabella when she was doing a

movie with some Russian director, and Silvana Mangano was in the film, too,

and I knew her really well. They were shooting south of Rome in the most

magical places. The ground there seems to rise up into these plateaus where

there are these dreamy, minimal Italian mansions with staircases going up to

beautiful terraces—they’re incredible.

One night Silvana invited Isabella and me to dinner and we went to this

outdoor restaurant with twinkling lights. It was mushroom season, so the

entire meal was mushrooms—the mushroom for the main course was huge

and thick as a steak, and there were all these mushroom courses that all tasted

different. There’s Silvana, me, Isabella, and also at dinner was Marcello

Mastroianni. I have to admit I was a little starstruck. He and Silvana went way

back and were good friends, and he’s the nicest guy and he’s telling stories—it

was just the greatest thing. Somewhere in there I told him that Fellini and I

were born on the same day and that I was a giant fan of Fellini. My favorite

Fellini film is 8½, but I love La Strada, too, and there’s great stuff in all of

them. The next morning I walk out of the hotel and there’s a Mercedes and a

driver who tells me, “I’m taking you to Cinecittà. Marcello has arranged for you to spend the day with Fellini.” So we drive into Rome, where Fellini is

shooting Intervista, and he welcomes me and I get to sit with him while he

works and we became kind of pals.

Yves St. Laurent commercial for Opium perfume, directed by David Lynch 1992

Wild at Heart won at Cannes but had yet to be released in the United States, and its

distributor, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, spent the next eight weeks gearing up for a latesummer

opening. Lynch had never liked test screenings, but with Wild at Heart he conceded

the value of seeing a film with a non-industry audience after a specific scene triggered a

mass exodus at two test screenings for several hundred people. “Harry Dean Stanton gets

shot in the head and his brains splatter against the wall,” Dunham recalled, “then the two

characters who kill him laugh manically over the stump of the neck, stick their heads down

into it, then come up and do this frantic, wild kissing. The second that scene went up on the

screen, a hundred twenty-five people walked out of the theater. We went outside and the

people from Goldwyn and Propaganda were crazed, and we said, ‘Hey, this is a Disney

crowd—we need a David Lynch crowd.’ We talked them into letting us do another screening

a few days later for a different kind of audience. This audience was glued to the screen, but

when that scene popped up, a hundred twenty-five people got up and left, and this crowd

turned violent. People started yelling, ‘This guy is sick! He should be put in jail and never

allowed to make another movie!’ ”

“People ran out of that screening like they were evacuating from a disaster,” said

Montgomery. “If David had his choice he wouldn’t have cut that scene—he would’ve made it

longer! But it had to go because it went too far.”

Lynch and Frost then embarked on a television series called On the Air. Lynch is a fan of

broad comedy, and as is the case with his unproduced scripts One Saliva Bubble and The

Dream of the Bovine—which Lynch describes as “the story of two guys in the San

Fernando Valley who are cows but don’t know it”—On the Air was a vehicle for sight gags,

pratfalls, and unbridled silliness; all three of these projects reflect his admiration for the

French comic genius Jacques Tati. Starring Twin Peaks alumnus Ian Buchanan, and set in

1957 at the New York headquarters of the Zoblotnick Broadcasting Corporation, the show

chronicles the endless disasters that befall The Lester Guy Show, a variety program that’s

televised live.

ABC responded well to the pitch for On the Air and ordered six episodes in addition to

the pilot, which Lynch co-wrote with Frost and directed himself. Various friends then pitched

in: Robert Engels wrote three episodes, Jack Fisk directed two, and Badalamenti did

music. Although the show got good marks when it was screened for test audiences, ABC

shelved the completed episodes for more than a year. They finally aired the pilot on

Saturday, June 20th, 1992, and it did not do well. Even the late David Foster Wallace, a

self-described “Lynch fanatic,” dismissed the show as “bottomlessly horrid.” It didn’t have

many supporters.

“ABC just hated the show, and I think it only aired three times before they yanked it,”

Frost recalled. “It was goofy and too off the wall for network television, but I think it was

just ahead of its time. David and I looked at some of it recently, and it still makes both of us

laugh and has some really funny stuff in it. After On the Air was canceled, David and I went

our separate ways for a while. It had been an intense six-year period and I wanted to go

write a novel.”

Tony Krantz, who helped get the show on the air, was mystified by the response it got.

“On the Air was the lowest-rated show on TV at the time, but I loved it and thought it was

great. Maybe it was too quirky or the bloom was off the David Lynch/Mark Frost rose—I

honestly don’t know why, but it failed miserably.”

>>15236

I lack words. I wouldn't handle living there.

Lynch was immediately onto the next thing, of course, which in that case was the

television project Hotel Room. A trilogy of teleplays set over several decades in the same

room at New York City’s Railroad Hotel, the show was based on an idea of Monty

Montgomery’s and developed by Lynch with Barry Gifford. Gifford wrote two episodes,

which Lynch directed, and Jay McInerney wrote a third before the project was canceled.

Shot late in 1992, Lynch’s two episodes—“Tricks,” set in 1969, and “Blackout,” set in 1936

—are arguably the most actor-driven works he’s produced. The writing is quite spare, each

episode was shot in a single day in extraordinarily long takes, and Crispin Glover, Alicia

Witt, Harry Dean Stanton, Freddie Jones, and Glenne Headly turn in bravura performances.

“There was one day when David was rehearsing with the actors all morning through lunch

and people were starting to panic because nothing was being shot,” recalled production

coordinator Sabrina Sutherland. Born in Massachusetts, Sutherland studied film at UC San

Diego, then got a job as a tour guide at Paramount Studios. By the mid-eighties she was

working regularly as a production coordinator, and landed that job with Lynch on the second

season of Twin Peaks. She’s worked with him regularly ever since, and produced Twin Peaks: The Return. “After lunch, people are just freaking out, then suddenly David started

shooting these ten-minute takes, one after another. It was the weirdest day, but if what he

envisions in his head isn’t happening with the actors, he keeps working with them until they

get where he wants them to be—and that’s one of the things I admire about him. He’ll never

settle for something or say, Okay, that’s good enough; let’s go forward. He won’t do that.”4

HBO aired the pilot, comprising all three episodes, on January 8th, 1993. Although the

Los Angeles Times hailed the show as “marvelously absorbing,” The New York Times

dismissed it as a “setbound omnibus drama” that “plays like a listless visit to a Lynch-style

Twilight Zone where stories go nowhere.” “We shot three episodes and HBO hated them,”

said Montgomery. “They were just too weird for them.

David Lynch, music video for Yoshiki. "Longing".

During the summer of 1993 I was in Madison and a musician named

Yoshiki, who’s in a band called X Japan, asked me to make a music video for

him. I said, “Okay, let me hear some music and I’ll see if I get any ideas.” So

they sent one piece of music over that was basically just talking with some

kind of music in the background, like a poem. I said, “I don’t have any ideas,”

and turned it down, and they called back in a giant panic and said, “We’ve

already announced it!” They offered me more money, so I did this thing for a

song called “Longing” that wound up being really fun. I wanted smoke, fire,

rain, and different-colored lights, and we went out to the dry lakebeds with

rain machines and these thirty-five-foot columns of fire.

We were out there in the dry lakebeds with these lawnmower smokers that

put out tremendous billowing clouds of white smoke, but it was windy and all

the smoke was blowing out into the desert. So we decided to work on

something else, a rain thing or something, and all of a sudden—it was one of

the most incredible things—all the smoke that had blown away came rolling

back in like a wall. Some of the frames are so fuckin’ beautiful you can’t believe

it. There were a lot of cool things in that video, but it all sort of fell apart and I

don’t know if Yoshiki ever used it. He wanted the video to end with him sitting

at a Victorian desk, writing with a feather quill in his hand and a bottle of ink

on the desk, but I thought, That’s not going to go with this desert scene, so I

didn’t shoot it. He hired me and wanted me to come up with an idea, but it’s

still his video, so I gave him all the footage I shot and that was the end of it.

Another time I’m in the living room in L.A. and my phone rings and there’s

Michael Jackson on the phone, telling me he wants me to do some kind of

trailer for his album Dangerous. I said, “I don’t know if I can do it; I don’t

have any ideas for it,” but as soon as I hung up and started walking toward the hall, all these ideas came up. I called back and said, “I got some ideas,” and I

worked on that with John Dykstra in his studio. We built this miniature world

that was a red room with a little teeny door, and in the room were these weird

modern-shaped wooden trees and a mound with silver fluid that was going to

erupt in flames and then reveal Michael Jackson’s face. It was stop-action, and

it took a long time to do. For me, things don’t have to be so exact, but these

people working on it plotted it out to the nth degree. The trees were lacquered

red or black, and the people who went in to move them wore white gloves and

moved them along this precisely marked-out route. That was one part of the

thing. The other part was shooting Michael’s face, and we had a camera rig for

that with a circle of lights that created this fantastic look of focus with no

shadows. All Michael had to do was stand in one place for a few minutes, but

he was in makeup for eight or ten hours. How could somebody be in makeup

for ten hours? It’s someone very critical about their looks. Finally he was ready

and he came out and I met him for the first time and all he wanted to do was

talk about the Elephant Man. He tried to buy the bones and the cloak and all

his stuff from the museum, and he asked me questions and was a really nice

guy. Then he stood there and we shot it and one minute later he was done.

Obviously he had final cut over it and if he didn’t like it he wouldn’t release it,

but it came out in theaters and it looked cool and I loved doing it.

Now this one is interesting;

David Lynch - Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995)

In 1995 Lynch was invited to be one of forty directors participating in Lumière and

Company, a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of film. Participants were

asked to make a fifty-five-second film comprising one continuous shot using the original

Lumière Brothers camera. In an effort to simulate conditions at the turn of the twentieth

century when the camera was invented, the directors were allowed just three takes,

couldn’t use artificial light, and there were to be no cuts; it was to be a single fifty-fivesecond

shot. “The Lumière project is bite-size David Lynch, but it’s as satisfying to watch as

any of his feature films,” said Neal Edelstein of Lynch’s Premonition Following an Evil

Deed. “Gary D’Amico is a practical-effects guy and a wonderful human being who lives in

La Tuna Canyon on a huge piece of property, so we built a set in Gary’s front yard. It was

one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. David was massaging four or five segments at

once, each had to go off perfectly, and it was high-risk filmmaking. We were all laughing like

kids that we were managing to pull this cool thing off.”

Lynch’s film is widely acknowledged to be the most ambitious and successful of the forty

shorts. “They thought we cheated,” recalled D’Amico of the visual sophistication of the film.

Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, D’Amico got a job sweeping floors at Disney

when he was nineteen, worked his way up to the props department, and by the end of the

1980s was a skilled special-effects artist. In 1993 Deepak Nayar called D’Amico to the set

of On the Air and asked him to create a machine that spit plumbing parts. “I rigged that up

and David came over to my trailer to check it out,” D’Amico recalled, “but he was more

interested in looking at my stuff, because he’s a nuts-and-bolts guy. David is very hands on and loves building things, and the day we met he struck me as inquisitive, low-key, very

polite, and calm as a Hindu cow.

“When they were preparing the Lumière project, I got a call from his office and they said,

‘David wants you to work on this thing.’ They gave me the date and I said, ‘I booked a

commercial and can’t get out of it.’ I hear his assistant holler, ‘Gary’s on a commercial that

week and isn’t available,’ and David said, ‘We can’t do it without Gary,’ and pushed the

shoot until I got back! Every director should go to the David Lynch school for how to treat

people on set. He’s a total pro and a super guy, and there’s not a finer person in the

industry.”

Lynch’s home recording studio was operational by the end of 1997, and musician and

engineer John Neff had come on board to run it. On August 25th, 1998, Lynch released Lux

Vivens (Living Light), a collaboration with British musician Jocelyn West. Lynch had met

West—who was married to Monty Montgomery at the time and went by the name Jocelyn

Montgomery—two years earlier, when he was working in a New York recording studio with

Badalamenti and she stopped by to meet him. She wound up spending the next seven hours

recording a vocal for “And Still,” a song Lynch wrote with studio owner Artie Polhemus’s

wife, Estelle Levitt. Lynch and West worked well together, and once the studio was

completed he invited her to work with him. The music on Lux Vivens is based on verses by

Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century German artist, musician, and visionary Benedictine

abbess whose compositions are largely comprised of single melodic lines.

When Lynch went to Paris to oversee the installation of the first iteration of the show, he

met Patrice Forest, proprietor of the lithography workshop Idem. “Hervé Chandès is a

friend, and Idem is just a few blocks from the Foundation,” Forest said. “There were

periods when David had to wait while things were being built, and Hervé asked him, ‘Do you

want me to show you a place you might love?’ David came and opened the door and fell in love.”1

Born and raised in Lyon, Forest was a radio journalist covering the arts until 1987, when

he established a lithography workshop in Paris. Ten years later, a historic printshop dating

back to 1881 and located in the heart of the city was for sale, and he moved his operation

there. A fourteen-thousand-square-foot space with skylights, outfitted with beautiful old

presses that printed work by Picasso and Miró, among many others, Idem has become a

haven that Lynch returns to annually.

“I asked David if he’d ever made a litho and he said, ‘Never and I’m very curious,’ and he

went to work immediately,” Forest recalled. “He worked on zinc plates and made three

lithos that were included in the exhibition, and those three lithos turned into a series of

twelve called The Paris Suite. After we finished that I asked if he was interested in working

on a stone, and he said yes and understood it immediately. Since that time we’ve made

more than two hundred lithos, and when he comes to Paris he has as much time in the

studio as he wants.

David being interviewed at Idem.

“Cinema is big, and David works with hundreds of people when he makes a film,” Forest

continued. “At Idem he works basically alone and can conceive of a work and make it come

alive in a single day. It’s quiet in the studio and some of the people who work there have

never heard of him, and I think he appreciates that because it allows him privacy. He loves

hotel life, and he always stays in the same room at the same hotel, within walking distance

of Idem. He arrives at around eleven in the morning; he likes the coffee from around the

corner, and he can smoke in the studio.” The work Lynch produces at Idem is only available

through Forest, who sells directly to collectors. “It’s rare to see David’s prints on the

market. We don’t do galleries or auction houses, and the work sells well and is quickly

absorbed by the market.”

He's working on a biography of the Maharishi

In December of 2009 there was a grand unveiling of the Gehry plans for the Camerimage

Film Festival center in Łódź, which had been in the works since 2005. Gehry and Lynch

attended the ceremony, and spirits were high. “Then, two months later, the mayor of the

city, Jerzy Kropiwnicki—a great, forward-thinking man David nicknamed ‘Old Boy’—was

recalled, and a new government came in and destroyed the project,” Zebrowski recalled.

“During that same period David and Marek [Żydowicz] had developed the EC1, an

abandoned power plant they’d bought from the city in 2005 and transformed into a postproduction

studio. The building won all kinds of architectural prizes, then in the summer of

2012 that same new mayor visited David in L.A. and said, ‘Mr. Lynch, you can come to

Łódź anytime, we’d love to have you, but the property is ours. You can be our guest.’ David

—who’d put his own money into this—just looked at her and said, ‘How do you dare? If I

don’t own it, I’m not coming.’ Marek filed several lawsuits in Poland, but you can’t fight city

hall. So David and Marek built this place, then the government expropriated it and simply

took it away from them.” In 2010 the Camerimage Festival relocated to Bydgoszcz, a small

town two hundred miles from Łódź. EC1 continues to be referred to as the David Lynch

Studio.

I thought that with the end of Lynch's biography I was done with this thread but YT keeps throwing Lynch stuff at me with it's algorithm assessing my past interests.

This thread was about what you think is Lynch's best work. Off the top of my head I'd say Mulholland Drive and episode 8 season 3 of Twin Peaks. BUT I have reservations even there. Two films that I think are closest to perfection in Lynch are Blue Green and Steps

making movies that cant be understood is a cop out. you have to skate the line between literal and cryptic. his movies are like melvins lyics all surface and sensation, with no actual narrative or message.

people who like lynch are wannabe art faggots.

>>15516

You really don't get it. His films have meaning. They're not just randomness for randomness sake. Each film is deeply symbolic to him.

>>15518

>Each film is deeply symbolic to him.

>>15516

>making movies that cant be understood is a cop out.

i already addressed that

>>15524

So he should spoon feed you? Is thinking and analyzing the movies too hard for you to handle?

Lynch is like Tarantino, extremely normie. The movies are not deep (Eraserhead being a prime example) and he fucked up Dune, which would have been easy to adapt. There are numerous other directors who touch on the concepts that he does, that do so in a much more succinct and beautiful way. Schrader and Linklater being very good examples of that.

>>6638

Pabst's Blue Velvet

Eraser Head

Short Films

Lost Highway

Rabbits

Mulholland Drive

Oh Son, What Have Ye Done [Producer. Herzog dir.]

Twin Peaks S3 not before seeing at least Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but S1&2 will be fine. He's fanatic about Kafka's Metamorphosis, and watch films he mentions in interview like Sunset Blvd. His casting choices very often have uncanny resonances in character name and subject matter, and are worth seeing thereafter.