Giant of American cinema, David Lynch has died at the age of 78 – rts.ch

“It is with great regret that we, his family, announce the death of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” notes the press release. The director, author of ten feature films released between 1977 and 2006, had captivated a cohort of admirers fascinated by the disturbing strangeness of his films.

“There is a big void in the world now that he is no longer with us,” adds his family, who did not give details on the causes of his death and asked for respect for his privacy.

Works that have become cult

Born in 1946 in Montana, David Lynch is considered a master of cinema who revolutionized the image and marked this art with the disturbing and haunting atmosphere of his films.

After uneven studies, he found his happiness at the Pennsylvania Fine Arts 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. “Grandmother” follows, the story of a lonely boy who 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, the aspiring filmmaker stayed five years in Philadelphia, then moved to Los Angeles.

The consecration with “Sailor and Lula”

With “Eraserhead” (1977), his first feature film which he financed through odd jobs over five years, he entered fully 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.

In 1986, he once again became his own author and made one of his most beautiful films with “Blue Velvet”. 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 et Lula” (1990). This couple who are madly in love with each other are pursued by Lula’s mother’s henchman. This alcoholic witch wants to get rid of Sailor out of romantic spite and to neutralize an embarrassing witness to the suspicious death of her husband. The chase towards Texas leads the two rogue lovers to have strange encounters in no less unusual places.

Then 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.

He was also entrusted with the direction of “Dune” (1984), the famous science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. The result was a flop…at $40 million.

Honored at the Oscars, crowned in France

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 did it again with “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017).

Nominated several times for the Oscars, he received an honorary statuette in 2019 for his entire filmography. In France, he won the César for best foreign film for “Mullholland Drive”.

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.

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