David Lynch

A series of devastating California wildfires culminated just as the residents of the director's home were also forced to evacuate. Lynch's painting studio, art workshop, private cinema, sound studio and, last but not least, the location where Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette's characters from Lost Highway lived. Unfortunately, a few days later, Lynch's condition worsened rapidly.

His death, in its unexpected timing, is in many ways reminiscent of 2016, when (not only) the music world lost David Bowie. At the time, Bowie was set to return to the collaborative world of Twin Peaks by performing in Lynch's final eighteen-hour mesmerising return to the world.

It wouldn't be David Lynch if he hadn't done well by making Bowie's character an alien entity hidden in a device resembling a giant tea pot. In addition to the aforementioned timing and mutual respect, the two artists shared another common trait; their work was equally reflected (and revered) in pop culture but also at its margins, at the meeting points with avant-garde currents in film, music, and of course (and in the case of both, though especially in Lynch's case) visual art.

In a recent New Yorker magazine article loosely translated as Mourning David Lynch in a City Engulfed in Flames, recent Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Chang describes how, a week after Lynch's death, a sold-out screening of Inland Empire was held at the famed Egyptian Theatre. That is, not far from where Laura Dern's odyssey of the same name, largely improvised on digital camera, ends tragically and on the brink of homelessness. Just a few blocks away, local patriot Lynch settled in after the shoot with a banner to earn his longtime muse an Oscar nomination... 

"In his films, he likes to blend the city's past with its present, exploring the cultural and architectural remnants of old Los Angeles hidden among the city's newer facades. I think it's telling that all three of Lynch's L.A.-set films are so rooted in spasmodic identity games: think of the saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) who inexplicably transforms into the auto mechanic Pete (Balthazar Getty) in Lost Highway, or Laura Dern, who changes shape at will in every other scene of Inland Empire (2006). It's as if Lynch is pointing not only to the inherent plasticity of the film medium, but also to a city known for its endless self-renewal - and which is often unfairly considered a cesspool of inauthenticity," Chang writes in the article.

It's fair to say that Lynch's distinctive performance ended in failure at the time. David Lynch later summed it up by saying: "I love the light that is Los Angeles. I fell in love with the atmosphere of life here. And I always say that when you're in L.A. sometime in the summer, especially in the spring, when you can smell the jasmine at night and the wind is blowing, there's a golden age of Hollywood in the air, and it's just magical. There's the big movie studios, the soundproof factories, I love it. And the star system... all these things are one big dream. Despite all the evils that are also contained in it, this dream never ceases to draw people in powerfully."

In the coming months, we'll be working with the DOX Center to ensure that we leave summer nights together in convivial conversation over the work of David Lynch. Whether it's getting upset at someone else's hesitant analysis, laughing, being moved, or quietly immersing ourselves in our own thoughts. For we have just seen the work of a director who has taught several generations of his fans that a certain element of inexplicability also brings a greater degree of openness to knowledge.  

Film warm-up to the exhibition David Lynch: Up in Flames - - DOX Center for Contemporary Art

Curator of the exhibition: Otto Urban

Curator of the film program: David Havas