David Lynch: The Art Life | Little White Lies

David Lynch: The Art Life

11 Jul 2017 / Released: 14 Jul 2017

Words by Anton Bitel

Directed by Jon Nguyen and Rick Barnes

Starring David Lynch

Elderly man painting a large red cross on a white canvas in a dimly lit room.
Elderly man painting a large red cross on a white canvas in a dimly lit room.
4

Anticipation.

Insights into the Lynch aesthetic are always welcome.

4

Enjoyment.

A documentary that mimics the oblique quality of Lynch’s own work.

4

In Retrospect.

Portrait of an artist as a young man – and older.

The cult film­mak­er reflects on his remark­able career in this com­pelling docu-portrait.

Every time you do some­thing like paint­ing – or what­ev­er – you go with ideas, and some­times the past can con­jure those ideas and colour them. Even if they’re new ideas, the past colours them.” The speak­er is the Mon­tana-born writer, direc­tor and artist David Lynch, and even though we can see him sit­ting, smok­ing furi­ous­ly, before a con­denser mic, he is silent, as the inter­view is pre­sent­ed in voiceover.

That dis­con­nect between what we see and what we hear is at the heart of the way this beau­ti­ful­ly shot doc­u­men­tary has been con­struct­ed. Lynch, now a grey-haired old man, rem­i­nisces about his dis­tant past, while fam­i­ly videos and old pho­tographs are jux­ta­posed with his ear­ly and more recent works. It sug­gests the per­sis­tent, if invis­i­ble, influ­ence of his for­ma­tive years on his entire artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty, as he con­tin­ues reach­ing into the dark­ness in search of his own identity.

Although Lynch may be best known as a film direc­tor, the focus here is on his work as a painter and sculp­tor. The biog­ra­phy that his nar­ra­tion out­lines, from his idyl­lic child­hood to his sub­se­quent pur­suit of the art life” and an emerg­ing inter­est in what he terms the mov­ing paint­ing”, in fact ends where his career as a film­mak­er prop­er­ly began, with the lengthy ges­ta­tion of his 1977 fea­ture debut Eraserhead.

Nonethe­less, when we see a pho­to­graph of Lynch’s moth­er Edwina car­ry­ing a log, or hear him recall­ing how, as a young boy in Spokane, Wash­ing­ton, he wit­nessed a woman walk­ing one evening down his sub­ur­ban street, stark naked and with a blood­ied mouth (“kin­da like the strangest dream”), it is as if the imag­i­na­tive land­scapes of his future work were already being sown in the past.

In his pri­vate stu­dio in the Hol­ly­wood Hills, Lynch is now ful­ly liv­ing the art life that he imag­ined when younger. He is joined there some­times by his young daugh­ter Lula (the documentary’s ded­i­ca­tee) whose own char­ac­ter is no doubt also being forged by child­hood experience.

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