The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood

Couverture
University of Texas Press, 17 août 2012 - 288 pages

“This is the best book on David Lynch that has yet been published. Nochimson’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary cinema.” —Brian Henderson, former chair of the Department of Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo
 
Filmmaker David Lynch asserts that when he is directing, ninety percent of the time he doesn’t know what he is doing. To understand Lynch’s films, Martha Nochimson believes, requires a similar method of being open to the subconscious, of resisting the logical reductiveness of language. In this innovative book, she draws on these strategies to offer close readings of Lynch’s films, informed by unprecedented, in-depth interviews with Lynch himself.
 
Nochimson begins with a look at Lynch’s visual influences—Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and Edward Hopper—and his links to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, then moves into the heart of her study, in-depth analyses of Lynch’s films and television productions. These include Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Lynch’s most recent, Lost Highway.
 
Nochimson’s interpretations explode previous misconceptions of Lynch as a deviant filmmaker and misogynist. Instead, she shows how he subverts traditional Hollywood gender roles to offer an optimistic view that love and human connection are really possible.
 
“Nochimson deftly deploys a mixture of feminist criticism, the Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, and an intriguing blend of Jungian and Freudian concepts to make one of our most complex filmmakers seem quite accessible after all.” —J. P. Telotte, Film Quarterly

 

Table des matières

Portrait of the Director as a Surfer in the Waves of
16
Wild at Heart
46
3
72
4
99
Dune
123
6
148
Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me
173
The Lady or the Highway
199
Notes
225
Bibliography
255
Index
261
Credits for Illustrations
272
Droits d'auteur

Autres éditions - Tout afficher

Expressions et termes fréquents

Fréquemment cités

Page v - good ambiguity” in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics.

À propos de l'auteur (2012)

Martha P. Nochimson is Professor of Film and Literature at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. She also has taught for ten years at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Informations bibliographiques