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Longing
The Grandmother
Lynch’s favourite collision of live action and animation took root here. Having made short The Alphabet, the director moved onto The Grandmother with the help of the American Film Institute, who chucked $5,000 at the short film.
A nod back to the silent movies of time gone by, Grandmother follows a young boy who grows himself a grandmother after feeling neglected by his parents. Not for the last time, Lynch’s odd, fascinating film proved difficult to categorise for the AFI.
Dumbland
More delights from Lynch’s official website. This series of eight shorts was written, directed and voiced by our favourite auteur in 2002, and were later released on DVD in 2005.
They follow the daily woes of white trash Randy, who lives with his wife and child, and a neighbour who freely admits to being a “one-armed duck-fucker”. Similar in style to his Moby video, the shorts are crude black and white – but typically brilliant.
Lady Blue Shanghai
Marion Cotillard works with Lynch on a characteristically stylish and bizarre Dior advert. She reads out a poem entitled ‘It Holds The Love’, written by Lynch himself . Then she dances with a handbag to music oddly reminiscent of that from Twin Peaks.
At 16 minutes long, the ad mixes in black and white, surreal smoky effects, direct to camera monologues and a dreamlike mood. Unmistakably Lynch, then.
The Angriest Dog In The World
Dreamed up by Lynch in 1973, this comic strip ran between 1983 and 1992, and appeared in the L.A. Reader . A small caption introduces each strip: “The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.”
The images themselves stay the same in every issue, but the speech bubbles change as unseen family members in the house spout odd paradoxes (“If everything is real... then nothing is real as well”). Sometimes, the dog gives his own unique verdict. Nuts.
Fine Art
Ah, right back to the very beginning. Before he became a virtuoso director, Lynch actually trained as a painter – which explains why a lot of these entries are to do with various forms of visual art.
“All my paintings are organic, violent comedies,” Lynch says. “They have to be violently done and primitive and crude, and to achieve that I try to let nature paint more than I paint.” Lynch also admits that he hates using colour, while Francis Bacon is his “hero painter”.
Bruehl Installation
A fine art exhibit based entirely around David Lynch’s paintings, the Max Ernst Museum Bruehl of the LVR presented 150 of Lynch’s works earlier this year.
Some were created specifically for the installation, while others were older works – all were linked to a world of mysteries and inexplicability. Eraserhead was also shown. Why Bruehl and nowhere else? Well, why not?
On The Air
After his Twin Peaks -shaped stab at TV garnered huge critical success (despite going slightly awry), Lynch re-teamed with Peaks co-creator Mark Frost for this curio. A sitcom that aired in 1992, it followed the employees of a ‘50s TV network who attempted to put on a variety show called The Lester Guy Show , but got into all manner of scrapes.
Seven episodes were filmed, only three were ever aired. Lynch felt abandoned by network ABC, who shoved the show in a deadly Saturday night slot. “Those things make me feel pretty bad,” he said at the time.
“When I love the show, and people seem to love the show, what's wrong when we're not given a primo spot? The same thing happened to Twin Peaks. It was moved to Saturday night, and that's when we started losing every bit of momentum.”
