While listening to filmmaker David Lynch speak at the BAFTA Awards in February 2008, Moby had an epiphany. Lynch’s message – creativity for its own sake is a beautiful, wonderful thing – was a simple one, but it hit Moby with the force of the Zen master’s cane. “At that moment, I decided to just make records that were more personal,” says Moby, “maybe more experimental, and a little more challenging, maybe not as easy to like, but things that I found to be artistically and creatively more satisfying. That was the idea behind making the new album.”
The album resulting from this epiphany, Wait For Me (to be released on June 30, 2009 via Mute), is a radical departure from Moby’s recent albums and the video for the album’s debut track, a moody and contemplative instrumental called “Shot In The Back Of The Head,” is a beautiful dark animation directed by David Lynch. Watch below!
To close out Sundance Channel’s May salute to David Lynch in style, check out this Goofy cartoon recut to mimic his aesthetic, making this the most eerie Goofy I’ve ever seen. Sure to give children everywhere nightmares!
IN SHORT: DAVID LYNCH screens Thursday at 10PM on Sundance Channel.
David Lynch’s short films offer us a quick injection of what we might expect from his work… a little bit of mutable reality, a flexible trip through time and space, a taste of wry dead-pan comedy, and of course some grotesque body parts and fluids to both entrance us and make us squirm.
His earliest short, SIX FIGURES GETTING SICK (SIX TIMES), was made in 1965 while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and came out of Lynch’s desire to see his paintings move. What struck me about this short film and several of the others was David Lynch’s early interest in bodily processes (and bodily liquids) and how he projects that on the landscapes of his film in a variety of ways. For example…
David Lynch presents INTERVIEW PROJECT on his website on June 1, featuring short interviews with hundreds of people — the result of a 20,000 mile road trip over seventy days across the United States. “The people told their story,” Lynch says in his video introduction, “It’s a chance to meet [them] … it’s human … and you can’t stay away from it.” Read SUNfiltered’s earlier post on this project if you missed it, and click the link below for more video and commentary.
David Lynch has a penchant for small cities and towns and the people in them, and he has set a lot of his films in such places. Towns like Deer Meadow (from TWIN PEAKS, not to mention Twin Peaks itself), Lumberton (BLUE VELVET) and Laurens (THE STRAIGHT STORY) come to mind. His bios seem to always remind us that he grew up in Missoula, Montana and was an Eagle Scout. So… in what seems like an ode to this world, David Lynch has embarked on INTERVIEW PROJECT with filmmaker team Austin Lynch (his son) and Jason S. This 121 part documentary series premieres on his website on June 1st and will continue unleashing its short (3-5 min.) episodes for a year, each episode featuring a person from a new place in the country. What exactly is INTERVIEW PROJECT? Watch David Lynch explain this “20,000 mile road trip” here….
ERASERHEAD screens this Thursday at 10PM E/P on Sundance Channel.
The last time I saw Eraserhead on the big screen was in Prague in 2001. The place looked like a Lynch interior, had old ornate European furniture in the lobby and an escalator leading up to the main room. Again this is how I remember it and I’m not fact-checking with friends because memory is mutable in the David Lynch world and that’s where I was. The theater wasn’t made for movies but had a huge screen, a screen so big that it makes most of the current New York city arthouse theaters look like Ipods. It was sold out… sold out! I looked around at the audience, noticing that many wore geriatric and clunky looking headsets to hear a simultaneous live translation of the movie in Czech. Poorly designed, these headsets leaked their sound in murmurs. Somehow it was so fitting… all these strange mechanical humming devices just another layer of the soundtrack for this startlingly odd and wonderful film.
In the spirit of this month’s Sundance Channel spotlight, here’s one of the better movie mashups I’ve seen recently: a DIRTY DANCING trailer edited in the style of David Lynch. Pretty excellent:
David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE is in some ways the ultimate expression of a story he’s been writing for decades. Shot on digital video, Lynch (who’s said he’d never work with film again) was free to explore the subconscious of himself and his characters without regard to things like the cost of film stock or the unwieldiness of large cameras and lighting setups. INLAND EMPIRE was shot without a script, and out of order, with Lynch hoping that it would somehow come together in the end. For him, it did.
Sundance Channel salutes David Lynch this month with a series of screenings every Thursday, beginning this week with INLAND EMPIRE. See screening times and more.
Last week I was talking to a student about his screenplay and the “rules” of screenwriting, basically the formula that most stories get plugged into (you’ve got your “normality” and then “disturbance” in the first few pages and then the “first act turning point” … and so on). If you’re not familiar with it, please stay blissfully ignorant. It can make movie watching a little less fun when you can too easily predict exactly what is going to happen and when.
My own writing experience using this structure has run the gamut from… get-down-on-my-knees-thankfulness for the backbone it provides especially when you have a bunch of ideas that felt like loose body parts…. to feeling like creative choices have been reduced to something akin to the choices you hear parents give their kids… you can either eat your asparagus or go to bed (i.e. you can either do a strong first act turning point by page 30 or risk alienating your audience). But story structure is hard to knock, as a well structured movie moves and moves well.
Sundance Channel salutes David Lynch this month with a series of screenings every Thursday, beginning this week with INLAND EMPIRE. See 
