Thread: Twin Peaks 2016
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Old 11-23-2014, 10:31 AM
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David Lynch: every picture tells a (small) story
18/11/14, 14.59 | NIELS RUËLL


There was widespread rejoicing at the news that David Lynch will soon start making a new series of the groundbreaking, wonderfully mysterious TV series Twin Peaks. But first, he is exhibiting some 40 photographs in Brussels, in the basement of the Galeries cinema, under the heading Small Stories. When he spoke to AGENDA, he didn’t announce that “The owls are not what they seem”, but told us that “the ideas dictate everything.” Which is true, too, of course.

Welcome to Twin Peaks. My name is Margaret Lanterman. I live in Twin Peaks. I am known as the Log Lady. There is a story behind that. There are many stories in Twin Peaks – some of them are sad, some funny. Some of them are stories of madness, of violence. Some are ordinary. Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery – the mystery of life. Sometimes, the mystery of death.” Those words introduced Twin Peaks, widely regarded as heralding a golden age of TV series. On my way to meet David Lynch, I thought of that intriguing intro. Firstly, because of the bombshell news that he is planning new episodes. And secondly, because that mix of strange stories also seems to characterise his photographic exhibition at the Galeries art-house cinema. It didn’t get a title like “Small Stories” by chance: each picture tells a small story from Lynch’s extraordinary world.

While those tales are dark, the Lynch I meet is sunny. That may have something to do with transcendental meditation and with the “damn fine cup of coffee” he is drinking, but what I see above all is a man, in clothes you don’t mind getting dirty, looking forward to a full day of artistic activity. We meet in Idem, an old art printing house in Paris that Lynch can’t tear himself away from since discovering its venerable presses, on which he makes lithographs. What’s more, Patrice Forest, the man behind the printing works, has arranged a meeting with Paul McCarthy, a well-known US artist who removed his work Tree from the Place Vendôme after it was vandalised by one of the many opponents who saw in its inflatable Christmas tree a butt plug. “It’s the first time I’ve met Paul,” observes Lynch with a smile, as McCarthy gets to work etching alongside us. “Thirty-seven years ago, he called me on the phone; we were going to have lunch, but it never happened.”

What do you like so much about this place?
David Lynch: I come here every day when I’m in Paris. I like the mood of it, the machines, the people, the history, and the smell of the ink. I’ve been coming here since 2007 and I’ve made over 200 lithographs – and on top of that, some woodcuts. I made some lithos in the 1960s, but I only really developed a taste for it when I discovered this place. A lot of people worked here. That’s part of the beautiful history. Those stones you see over there were probably used by Picasso, Matisse, and Miró. A romantic thought – and pretty interesting, no?

The Brussels exhibition is called “Small Stories”. Stories, I understand: the pictures are highly narrative. But why “small”?
Lynch: Because they’re not big. [Laughs]

What’s the difference between a small story and a big one?
Lynch: Told in a book, a small story would have very few sentences. A big story would be a thick book.

The photographs show a soft spot for decay.
Lynch: I like a lot of different things. One of them is decay. My initials are DKL, David Keith Lynch. My father started calling me “DK” when I was little. When my parents realised what they were saying, they stopped. [Laughs heartily] Perhaps that made me fall in love with decay. I don’t remember when it started, but I like organic phenomena. When you look closely at a sore or a cut that gets infected, you notice that it’s incredible. When the word “sore” comes up, many people tune out, but if they could see it pure, they would see it’s quite beautiful. It’s all part of the process. There is the going up and the going down. Both sides are beautiful.

Why black-and-white?
Lynch: I’ve made colour photos. Even some factory photographs were in colour. But the kind of factories I like should be in black and white. It’s kind of the world you’re in…I guess. Black and white is kinda magical. It takes you one step away from reality. It’s the greatest medium to go back in time and it’s graphic. It’s purer. But I don’t mind colour for certain things. It just depends. There are black-and-white ideas and there are colour ideas. Blue Velvet had to be a colour film. Eraserhead is a black-and-white film. The Elephant Man is a black-and-white film. It all depends on the ideas, the mood, the feel.

Why is there so much darkness in your work?
Lynch: Many ideas that come are conjured up by the world we live in. Right now the world is pretty dark. There’s also an absurd kind of a humour that I like. It’s not just dark things: a lot of light things come along too. A story can hold all those things at once. Besides, you don’t have to suffer to show suffering. You can show terrible stories and be happy in the doing of it. The ideas come and that’s what you fall in love with. You love the story and what cinema can bring to the story and you work with that. Some stories have life-and-death situations and torment; others don’t.

I’m from Brussels, so I have to ask whether you like René Magritte?
Lynch: I love Magritte. He’s one of my all-time favourites. I like a lot of his paintings. I just saw the Magritte show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and I was overwhelmed by The Menaced Assassin. You know the painting with two people hiding outside the door, inside the door there’s a woman on a doctor’s thing and there’s a phonograph? It’s a mysterious, beautiful thing.

We know you as the director of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, but you also take photographs, paint, etch, and make music. Which of the arts first attracted you as a child?
Lynch: When I was little, I liked to draw. My mother refused to give me colouring books. That is so beautiful. She convinced my father to bring home scrap paper from his office. I had stacks of white paper with writing on the back and I drew knives, pistols, and airplanes. My favourite was a Browning automatic water-cooled submachine gun.

That’s a lot of violence for a kid.
Lynch: Yeah. It was right after the war. Weapons were still in the air. I don’t know how.

What about photography and film?
Lynch: I never took photos until 1979, when I bought my first camera. I loved my Canon. And I never really learned filming. I only started because I wanted paintings to move. I knew the principle of stop-motion. I knew I needed a camera with single-frame capacity. I got the cheapest one that I could find: a Bell & Howell camera. I never really took on motion pictures until I got my Bolex camera.

The medium is just a medium?
Lynch: All these media are thrilling to me and to many people. Ideas take you different places. In places like this [the printing works – NR], the ideas take you to lithographs and woodcuts. The ideas dictate everything. If you have cinema ideas, you write them down and over time you work on a script. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Well, it sort of happens now.

How come you haven’t had any more cinema ideas since Inland Empire in 2006?
Lynch: It’s a different kind of world now for cinema. Alternative cinema is more difficult now. It is harder to get the funding arranged and to drum up enthusiasm and there is nowhere to show alternative films. Except at film festivals. The art houses are gone. To me, a feature film is built for the big, big screen with great sound. It’s very depressing if you can’t do that.

Have there been film projects you haven’t been able to carry through?
Lynch: If I really wanted to, maybe I could have persisted. Anyway, we’re gonna make Twin Peaks now.

That’s for the small screen.
Lynch: No that’s for the biggest screen you can get in your house. I’ve made television before. You build it for that. At the time, it was network television: the sound wasn’t good. Now it’s not so bad any more.

Is the difference not mainly that you now actually get a lot of freedom and TV-makers don’t have to restrain themselves any more?
Lynch: I know. But we had freedom on Twin Peaks. Way more than you imagine. I don’t know how it happened, but there were hardly any restrictions. So it’s not like we’re saying now: “Oh boy, we’re gonna really do some raunchy things.” We’re gonna do the same things, but in better quality. And film remains the best quality.

The prospect of new episodes was welcomed worldwide. Does that enthusiasm touch you?
Lynch: It’s beautiful. I like the world too. Somehow back then ideas came and a world was made. It’s great that people like that world and want to go back into it.


What triggered the new ideas?
Lynch: Lunch. With Mark Frost. In Los Angeles. Musso & Frank.

The actors from 25 years ago must be dying to get involved again. Is that so?
Lynch: I’m not talking about Twin Peaks now. Not until 2016.

Your work is often described as “dreamlike”. But in your book I read that dreams rarely trigger your work.
Lynch: Hardly ever. But I love dream logic. There’s something about a dream that tells you a bunch of things in strange ways. Cinema can do those things too: abstractions that conjure up something that’s hard to say in words. That’s a magical thing about cinema. Sound and pictures (and the way they’re put together) can do some fantastic things. But first you need cinema ideas.

Have you become better at catching ideas over the years?
Lynch: It’s like fishing. You need patience. A desire is like the bait on a hook. If you desire ideas, you become a magnet. Ideas start swimming in. Then you start catching them. You may not fall in love with the ones you’re catching, but once in a while you get a fish you fall in love with. It may just be a fragment of something that will be big. This fragment holds a promise. That one fragment you love is more bait on the hook. More ideas come swimming in. Just like in the ocean you have schools of different kinds of fish. Somehow the fish come swimming in that are tied to the captured fish you love. The more you have, the faster they come. I see an idea like it was on a television screen in my brain. Something happens and there it is. It’s not like the whole thing is there. But you see enough of it, hear enough of it, feel enough of it to have a fragment that you fall in love with. But you can’t force them to come. They are like gifts on Christmas morning.

Are you afraid of the day the ideas will run out?
Lynch: I’m never gonna run out of ideas.

http://www.agendamagazine.be/en/blog...ls-small-story
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