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David Lynch: Director David Lynch
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David Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American independent film director. His movies include Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive. He was ... responsible for a television series called Twin Peaks, his overall most famous work. Eraserhead, his first movie , is still his most famous theatrical film. It was recently deemed socially important by the United States Library of Congress. He has done much work with Jack Nance, who has appeared in all but two of his movies.
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Avant-garde director David Lynch has had one of the more unlikely odysseys to film success. Born in Montana, the son of a Department of Agriculture tree scientist, he spent his youth in Idaho, Washington and Alexandria, VA and found his true vocation while experimenting with "film painting" at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On the basis of "The Alphabet" (1968), a five-minute short combining live action and animation, Lynch received a grant from the American Film Institute to make a 34-minute film, "The Grandmother" (1970). Over a five-year period, drawing on his own fears about the confinements of youthful marriage and fatherhood and working in and around the AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles, Lynch created his appalling black-and-white meditation on family life, "Eraserhead" (1977), a nightmarish vision packed with grotesque physical deformities and an unlikely quest for spiritual purity, starring Jack Nance in a hair-raising performance, his first of many collaborations with Lynch.
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Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married, and fathered future director Jennifer Chambers Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasably weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series _"Twin Peaks" (1990)_ , which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series "On the Air" (1992) was less successful.
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In the new documentary Lynch (... screening in this program), director David Lynch, at work on Inland Empire, announces that he's done with film — by which he means celluloid. The three-hour phantasmagoria that is Inland Empire — described by Lynch, with deceptive simplicity, as a film "about a woman in trouble" — was shot digitally on an ordinary consumer-grade camera, and earned Lynch a special award this year from the National Society of Film Critics in the U.S. for its "magnificent and maddening experiment with digital video possibilities." Maddening and magnificent indeed. Inland Empire's elusive dream-logic "plot" has Laura Dern (in a triumphal performance) as noted film actress Nikki Grace, who lands a plum role in a juicy melodrama entitled On High in Blue Tomorrows, then finds herself in an hallucinatory identity/reality crisis in which off-screen and onscreen roles blur and alternative worlds intersect. The warped Alice-in-Wonderland adventure gets even more bizarro when it turns out that the film is a remake of a dangerously cursed Polish production. This being Lynch, there are also giant bunnies in a surreal sitcom. Lynch's first foray into video is just as visually stunning as his work in 35mm" (New York Film Festival).
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Originally conceived as a TV series, this thriller from David Lynch is sure to mystify and enthrall viewers at the same time. The three principal characters, whose stories eventually intersect, are Laura Elena Harring, an amnesiac who has escaped a fiery car crash; Naomi Watts, a blonde wannabe actress newly arrived in Los Angeles; and Justin Theroux, a promising young director strong-armed by his producers into casting a particular actress in his new movie. Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya, Robert Forster ... star. 147 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks: English Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1; Subtitles: Spanish, French.
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Auteur David Keith Lynch was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana. Because his research scientist father -- who worked for U.S. Department of Agriculture -- kept getting relocated, David Lynch spent much of his childhood traveling from one state to another. He attended various art schools starting in 1966, when he relocated to Philadelphia where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and began his first experimentation with film. By the time he was twenty-one, Lynch would be married, and the father of future director Jennifer Chambers Lynch. That experience, plus attending art school in a tough and violent area of Philadelphia, most likely influence his making "Eraserhead" (1977). It was a film that he began writing in the early 1970s while he was producing several short films.
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Director David Lynch