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“When you told your secret name, I burst in flame.”
Buy Floating into the Night. More Julee Cruise. More Lynch. More Badalamenti.
David Lynch, Premonition Following an Evil Deed
For the 100 year anniversary of the Lumière camera, forty directors made one minute film segments using an original restored Lumière camera. The ground rules were rigidly enforced: a continuous shot had to be captured in a maximum of three attempts; no artificial light sources or synced sound, as those techniques were yet to be invented; the film had to be 55 seconds — the length of one reel of film for Lumière’s Cinématograph camera. Now watch Lynch bend the rules.
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (production still)
David Lynch, Inland Empire (Other Things That Happened)
“Maybe we met at the wrong time.”
“I didn’t mean to meet you.”
Anton Corbijn, Some Yo Yo Stuff
Anton Corbijn’s luminous tribute to Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart (“an observation of his observations”) is worth a shelf full of subsequent sedulous biographical research. Its opening shot sees the subject’s mother plant a little cut-out Don in the desert, as if to suggest that the retired/retiring ex-Captain is both a flatly iconic simulacrum of his former self and a very real presence rooted in the Mojave: a desert-visionary painter and (on the svelte evidence here) gnomically hilarious raconteur.
Corbijn frames Van Vliet’s fragile stillness with ravishing desertscapes and two Captain Beefheart tracks, but it’s his speaking voice that lingers. Illness may have grounded the flighty Captain’s whoops and hollers, but his halting delivery still swerves into gravelled, lucid insistence on a single syllable: “The fish I used on the cover of Trout Mask Replica stank so bad… Humans are so mean!”
He’s also a pure joy to watch: puffing on his cigar or suddenly executing one of those splayed, sweeping arm gestures that were the essence of his stage presence. Which is not to say that Some YoYo Stuff is a mere wake for pre-1982 Beefheart, evidence of some spectral half-life lived out after the fact. Here too is Van Vliet the artist and desert prophet, formulating ‘naive’ aphorisms (“When you sculpt little things, it makes your fingers feel delightful”) and obliquely generous tributes to his peers (“He was the only Frank Zappa I knew”).
His desert retreat may be legendary, but this is an artist still with an eye and ear outside his own myth: “I’d like to tell you people watching and listening… BOO!”
— Brian Dillon, The Wire
David Lynch, Lost Highway (film still)
“You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.”
Via iwdrm. More Lynch.
Henri-Georges Clouzot, L’Enfer
Watch Romy Schneider in several clips from Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 film L’Enfer.
In 2009, Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea released a 94 minute documentary with material selected from 15 hours of found scenes under the name L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot. Bromberg was caught for two hours in a stalled elevator with Clouzot’s widow, Inès de Gonzalez, during which he convinced her to release the footage to make his film.
In 1997, David Lynch turned the premise of L’Enfer — extreme jealousy leading to fugue state — into Lost Highway.
In 1994, Claude Chabrol used Clouzot’s screenplay for his own version of L’Enfer.
Chabrol died today. R.I.P.
David Lynch, Eraserhead (film still)
Via fuckyeahdavidlynch, exmk. More Lynch.
David Lynch, Blue Velvet (film still)
Via brunogiliberto. More Lynch.
“I’m seeing something that was always hidden. I’m in the middle of a mystery and it’s all secret.”
— Jeffrey Beaumont, Blue Velvet
David Lynch, Fire Walk with Me (Voice of Love finale)
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of first broadcast of Twin Peaks. As much as I loved the show, it was the much-maligned prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, that turned my head inside-out and ended up being one of five most important movies I’ve ever seen. Strike that, five most important anything.
