David Lynch in Cannes, May 25, 2017 (AFP / Valery HACHE)
One of the most influential filmmakers of his time, the American David Lynch, who died at the age of 78, was a wizard of the image, who bewitched a cohort of admirers fascinated by the disturbing strangeness of his films.
Director of ten feature films, all cult, released between 1977 and 2006, and a series broadcast in 1990 and 2017, the filmmaker with a sober appearance – shirt buttoned under the chin and puff above the forehead – was named at the Oscars for “Elephant Man” (1980), “Blue Velvet” (1986) and “Mulholland Drive” (2001). He received an honorary Oscar in 2019 for his entire filmography.
In France, from the release of “Eraserhead” (1977), his first feature film, David Lynch was the subject of veneration. He received the Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Sailor and Lula” (1990) as well as a César for best foreign film for “Mulholland Drive”.
In 1990, he created “Twin Peaks”, a legendary series which revolutionized the genre and transformed millions of viewers into detectives haunted by the mysteries it unraveled over two seasons. A quarter of a century later, he reproduced the miracle with “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017), an 18-episode UFO which takes up the intrigue around the disappearance of agent Dale Cooper.
– Lost characters –
David Lynch in Rome, November 4, 2017 ( AFP / TIZIANA FABI )
Born on January 20, 1946 in Montana (northwest), he grew up in a Presbyterian (Protestant) family of five children. His father, a scientist at the Ministry of Agriculture and his mother, an English teacher, moved regularly depending on his father’s assignments. David, bad at school, is a sociable child who collects rotten pieces of wood in the forests where his father works.
After uneven studies, he found his happiness at the Beaux Arts of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The city, in full industrial decline, will permeate his imagination. He reproduces in his paintings the “cut-throat” atmosphere of his miserable neighborhood, populated by lost characters. Dwarfs, clowns, a woman with a log: these films will all be punctuated by these crazy appearances.
With his first wife (he had four), he put himself to the camera, wanting to “make a painting that moves”. He is editing “The Alphabet”, a short film inspired by a sleepwalking cousin who recites the alphabet while trembling. “Grandma” follows: a lonely boy makes a grandmother from a seed. “Little by little, I fell in love with this medium,” he wrote in his autobiography “My True Story.” “Cinema is a language. It can say great abstract things.”
Penniless, father of a little Jennifer, he stayed five years in Philadelphia then moved to Los Angeles.
In 1973, his sister introduced him to transcendental meditation. “I felt like I was in an elevator whose cable had been cut,” he says after his first session. “Boom! I fell into complete bliss – pure happiness (…) You are carried away into an ocean of pure consciousness”. From then on, he will meditate twice for twenty minutes a day.
– Otherworlds –
With “Eraserhead” (1977), his first feature film which he financed through odd jobs over five years, he entered head-on into the surrealist malaise. It tells the story of a zombie, a strange young girl and their child, a repulsive creature agitated by unbearable screams, all filmed in black and white in a setting of industrial ruins. “It’s my most spiritual film,” he says, always sparing with explanations. Stanley Kubrick loved him and called him a filmmaker of the unconscious.
Surprisingly, Mel Brooks, the American comedian known for his fart jokes, produced “Elephant Man” in 1980. This deformed creature from Victorian England touched the whole world and made Lynch the mascot of Hollywood. He was entrusted with the production of “Dune”, the famous science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. The result was a flop at $40 million.
In 1986, he became his own author again and signed with “Blue Velvet”, one of his most beautiful films. Behind the clean facades of a small Carolina town, sadomasochistic orgies take place. Isabella Rossellini as a bewitching cabaret singer and Dennis Hopper, who cannot reach orgasm without inhaling a euphoric gas, terrorizes.
Four years later, it was the consecration at Cannes with “Sailor and Lula” (1990) then “Twin Peaks”. With “Lost Highway” (1997) and “Mulholland Drive” (2001), he continued his trips into otherworlds with disturbing contours, made of decaying memories, vivid impulses and absurd humor.
After the commercial failure of his last film “Inland Empire” (2006), he continued his artistic life as a photographer, engraver, singer, publicist and even decorator. Asked about the darkness of his films, he replied: “Most films reflect the world we live in. I am infatuated with certain ideas. (…) If I told you (…) that my films were the works of an enlightened man, then that would be another story, but I’m just a guy from Montana, I do my thing, I follow my own path, like everyone else.
