David Lynch documentry

[7/4]

An attempt to chart David Lynch's mind proves there's no charting David Lynch's mind

by Jim Ridley, Village Voice

October 23rd, 2007 1:56 PM

Lynch

Directed by blackANDwhite

Opens October 26, IFC Center

After staggering out of Inland Empire like a mole groping toward sunlight, you could be forgiven for thinking that there should be a start-up kit for how to make a David Lynch movie. Fritzing overhead lights—check. Sound of candles being blown out, amped through a Marshall stack—check. Industrial decay, inexplicable dance sequence, mix-and-match identities—check, check, check. The lesson of the new documentary Lynch—well, one lesson, along with the sound advice not to perforate a bloated cow with a pick-ax—is that producing a fugue-state apocalypse ripped bleeding from the subconscious isn't as easy as it sounds.

Filmed over the two years spanning the inception and making of Inland Empire, Lynch carries a mysterious director's credit ("blackANDwhite") and apes its subject's style so thoroughly that it could pass for the world's longest director's-signature American Express ad. (Whoever the filmmaker is, s/he will appear at a Q&A on October 26 at the IFC Center, perhaps in a luchador's mask.) Chronologically vague and associative rather than linear in its linkage of sound and image, the film intersperses fly-on- the-wall footage of Lynch brooding, joking, and tending his website with the minutiae of the director shaping his unclear vision— from personally distressing a set with hammers and wheat paste to coaching Laura Dern on how to best fake a knifing on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Much of this is tedious—no more or less exciting than surveillance-cam footage of a regional sales manager, even if this one's desk offers a glimpse at one point of a legless baby doll. But the disconnect between Lynch's mundane method and his id-unleashed madness is more surreal (and revealing) than any of the movie's diligently scuzzed-out images, or its cutaways to, say, a roomful of anthropomorphized suburban rabbits. Famously clammed up tight about the symbolic or even, God forbid, political order of his conservative phantasmagorias, Lynch does no unpacking of his work here. Instead, and maybe more telling, there's just the evidence of his Warhol-like work ethic as he shepherds his crew, busies himself with tools and table saws, and digs a mine shaft into his imagination.

[7/4]

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

The director David Lynch in the documentary “Lynch.”

October 26, 2007

A Man, His Movies and, Sometimes, His Monkey

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: October 26, 2007

Whether you dig “Lynch,” a feature-length video visit with the director David Lynch, will largely depend on your views of his work and whether you think there’s something instructive and characteristically wonderful and weird about him telling an assistant, “I want a one-legged 16-year-old girl.” It says something about the unflappable nature of his employees or their familiarity with his desires that the assistant doesn’t appear startled by this request or his ensuing demands for “a Eurasian” and “a pet monkey.”

A one-legged lovely, a woman who might indeed be Eurasian and a small shrieking monkey all show up in Mr. Lynch’s most recent feature, the feverishly brilliant and nightmarish “Inland Empire.” In many respects “Lynch,” an expressionistic and minor portrait of the artist, works as a footnote to that 2006 work; it would make a great DVD extra. It shows us Mr. Lynch at work, prepping and shooting and cajoling and sometimes cursing his movie crew. He helps paint the floor of one set and even takes a broom to Hollywood Boulevard, where part of “Inland Empire” was shot. He also directs the actors, to whom he doles out somewhat cryptic instructions and thoughts, notably “You are solid.”

“Lynch,” which was shot in video and Super-8 film and will be shown in a digital format, reveals little obviously solid about its subject. We learn that he was born in Missoula, Mont., in 1946, but nothing of his family, his loves, his wives or his children. He appears fond of the actress Laura Dern, whom he calls Tidbit and who starred in “Inland Empire” and other of his features, including “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart.”

Is there anyone else? Certainly he has a cluster of mostly male assistants, all of whom seem young and scrupulously attentive. They facilitate his genius and listen to his stories, one of which involves a youthful attempt to puncture a dead, gas-inflated cow like a balloon. Sometimes one of those assistants presumably procures a monkey.

The video’s director is identified in the credits only by the silly construction “Blackandwhite,” though given his access — his gender is about all I can confirm — it’s clear he enjoys a trusting relationship with his subject. Mr. Lynch may shy away from dispensing the usual documentary revelations, but he fearlessly and openly voices the worries that surface during the making of “Inland Empire.” On several occasions during production, he actually confesses that he’s not sure what he’s doing, which may reassure those who thought the same while watching “Inland Empire.” Most movies about moviemaking emphasize the process and the personalities; this one shows us the artist battling with demon doubt and actively engaged in the struggle of creation.

If anything, at 82 fast minutes “Lynch” gives us too little: too little of that struggle to wrest art from cloudy uncertainty, too little of the artist-doubter himself. On his beautiful image- and text-filled Web site about the making of this movie (davidlynchdoc2007.blogspot.com), the video’s director reveals that he shot for more than two years, an impressive stretch, especially in view of those documentaries that speed through topics as quickly as possible. (Some of the Web site’s contents would also make nice DVD extras.) Here too we see the struggle to create in the video director’s copious notes about Mr. Lynch: “Ask him what he wants to talk about. Ask him what he feels is the best way to approach this film. Question him.”

You don’t see much evidence of that questioning in “Lynch,” which comes across as more devotional than interrogative or searching. Too many nonfiction works try to obscure their partisanship through formal devices meant to suggest some kind of journalistic-type detachment, like voice-of-God narration or the presentation of two (though rarely more) sides of an issue, never mind the documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio’s shrewd observation that “with any cut at all, objectivity fades away.”

Yet it’s precisely the worshipful feel of “Lynch” — including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr. Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog — that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing. It’s like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly.

LYNCH

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed and edited by Blackandwhite; directors of photography, Morten Soborg and Jason S; music by Sune Martin; produced by Jon Nguyen, Jason S, Brynn McQuade and Soren Larsen; released by Absurda. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 82 minutes. This film is not rated.

[7/4]

that's spelled documentary.

[Van Basten II]

Saw the movie a few weeks ago, it's as oblique as Lynch's work. I don't think that whoever was responsible for this film, considering the name of the director you might think it might be Lynch himself, had any intention about revealing anything about Lynch.

[7/4]

I thought that might be a possibility.