Filmmaker, painter and musician, David Lynch emphasized his close relationship with the arts, whatever they may be, and in particular with the painting of Francis Bacon. Like the Irish master’s famous triptych, David Lynch’s cinematographic work seems to revolve around three very distinct poles.
With the exception of his first feature film, Eraserheadwhich remains an early career experiment, although it is perfectly representative of the filmmaker’s signature, and A True Storyan unexpected detour towards purity and simplicity which still forms a strange parenthesis in his filmography today, the three figures of David Lynch are sometimes that of a commanding director, an enfant terrible of cinephilia and an illusionist of fantasies and enigma.
David Lynch, rebel puppet: Elephant Man, Dune et Fire Walk With Me
Although a symbol of the complete artist, of the free and provocative author, David Lynch has seen several of his projects overseen by major studios or, in any case, initiated by third parties. Elephant Manone of his most famous works, was a film commissioned by a Mel Brooks impressed by his Eraserhead. Dunea real traumatic experience for the filmmaker, is his first and last foray into the science fiction blockbuster, so much so that he will disavow the long version edited for television, signing the film by the famous pseudonym Allen Smithee, Hollywood convention of directors denying the paternity of the offspring which they do not assume. Finally, the prequel to Twin Peaks,titled Fire Walk With Meis a cryptic charade, a television project which, by the end, seriously began to wear down the artist.
If he will remain known as the champion of purely artistic cinema, Lynch was also a commanding director. Even if the said films are now considered cult, Dune et Fire Walk With Me are the subject, for Lynch, of an attraction/repulsion relationship due to their context of production. This work was a sort of initiatory journey for Lynch’s creative potential, who learned to know what he liked, what suited him, by doing precisely the opposite. Even if Elephant Man et Dune are not particularly representative of the Lynchian style, they are fundamental in his intellectual development. It is therefore through a form of sacrifice that Lynch grew and acquired a certain maturity, leading him to two of the most imposing foundations of his filmography.
Anglo-Saxon cinema revisited: Blue Velvet et Sailor & Lula
Grand Prix of the Avoriaz Festival in 1986 with Blue Velvethis perverse and hallucinatory rereading of thriller films in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, then Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990 for Sailor & Lulafree adaptation of the eponymous novel by Barry Gifford and surrealist deconstruction of the road movieLynch’s mid-career marks his cinephilia and his desire to overturn the codes. This diversion from classicism reveals a desire to take advantage of a certain Anglo-Saxon cinematographic culture, referring to the masters of the genre by adapting them to this fantastical, mystifying and cryptic style which will subsequently become his signature.
Lynch frees himself from the high authorities of the audiovisual sector and does as he pleases. Blue Velvet et Sailor & Lula are his first two truly personal projects since Eraserhead. The confidence of the studios and his aura among the public and critics helped him to put together these two works, feature films supporting his legitimacy because they were crowned with a certain recognition at festivals but also representative of a desire for discourse at the -beyond the form: despite the detours and hallucinatory sequences, Blue Velvet et Sailor & Lula have a common thread, a clear plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. David Lynch is a screenwriter on both films, he is finally in control of his entire project and no longer poses as a simple director, studio foreman, but truly as an author. A status which has for many years been particularly prized in the artistic world since it takes on the essence of its function, that which Michel Foucault underlines in his text What is an author?published in 1969 in the Bulletin of the French Philosophical Society :
« […] study discourses no longer only in their expressive value or their formal transformations, but in the modalities of their existence: the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, appropriation vary in each culture and modify within each; the way in which they are articulated on social relationships is deciphered in a way, it seems to me, more directly in the play of the author function and in its modifications than in the themes or concepts that they implement . »
Blue Velvet et Sailor & Lula ultimately form the two works which mark the artist’s maturity. Recognition in his pocket, he is now ready to give free rein to his scriptwriting and visual impulses, without limits of code or genre.
The trilogy of fantasies and illusions: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive et Inland Empire
This last pole of the filmmaker’s filmography is undoubtedly the one closest to the plastic arts, which he also likes: beyond the scenario, beyond the story and its characters, the trilogy of fantasies and Lynch’s illusion is made up of raw materials that he works to the point of wear and tear at each layer of the creative process. The last stage, editing, is truly the one that requires the most attention to detail because it is by deconstructing and reconstructing his story that he achieves the result visible in the theater: an excessively visual film subject to numerous interpretations. In his article on Lost Highway pour The Cinema NotebooksThierry Jousse highlights Lynch’s method of giving his film this aura of mystery:
“Reading the script for “Lost Highway”, which has just been published [Ed. Cahiers du cinéma]is very informative. She reveals to us that the final version of David Lynch’s film is the result of fine cutting work. All sequences of an explanatory nature were excluded. »
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The 1996 film is a work about transformation and deception, and Lynch presents his plot in this sense, making the characters sometimes interchangeable and thereby mystifying his audience. Mulholland Drive is more complex: if the roles are reversed again, so is the chronology and the work then transforms into a real film à clef requiring several viewings in order to touch on the multitude of plausible theories on its ins and outs.
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Finally, Inland Empire takes up the two previous characteristics by adding a much more violent distortion of reality than for its predecessors: parallel dimensions and films within the film are there. These three works form a trinity of the strange and mark the evolution of the Lynchian style to its paroxysm. The filmmaker disappeared from the screens for almost a decade after the devastation of his final feature film, and only returned in 2017 on the Showtime channel with the sequel to Twin Peaks25 years later, offering the public the synthesis of a filmography still full of mysteries.
Refusing to give the keys to his productions or even to launch into vague explanations or justifications, David Lynch is the node of a cultural loop: influenced by great visual artists, musicians and filmmakers, he created a style that others have chosen as a source of inspiration like Ryan Gosling for his first production, Lost Riverin 2014.
Ultimately, the author ofEraserhead was a crossroads of influences, a cultural messenger deconstructing and reconstructing heritages to better renew them, update them, and give new generations the keys to inspiration in the sense that Gilles Deleuze described it in 1981 in Logic of sensation :
“It is a mistake to believe that the painter is in front of a white surface. […] it is not so. The painter has many things in his head or around him, or in the studio. But everything he has in his head or around him is already on the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less currently, before he begins his work. […] a whole category of things that we can call “clichés” already occupies the canvas, before the beginning. It’s dramatic. »
Silence.
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