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He didn’t like answers — much less the idea of forgetting an idea. The filmmaker had been diagnosed with emphysema six months ago. “The most living person” died at the age of 78.
The American filmmaker David Lynchdirector of “A Wild Heart” and “Blue Velvet”, died this Thursday, aged 78, his family announced on the social network Facebook, on the official page of the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1990.
“It is with deep sorrow that we, his family, announce the death of the man and artist David Lynch,” says the message, which asks for “some privacy at this time.”
“There is a great void in the world now that he is no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘keep your eyes on the donut and not the hole’”, the message continues, which concludes: “It’s a beautiful day, with golden sun and blue skies everywhere”.
“Your name has become an adjective”
“Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka, two very disparate 20th century artists, whose work Lynch greatly admired and who can be considered to have epitomized, your name became an adjective“, writes critic J. Hoberman, in the New York Times, citing the monograph “David Lynch: The Man From Another Place” (“David Lynch: The Man From Another Place”), by Dennis Lim.
“The Lynchian is both easy to recognize and difficult to define […]. Lynch’s films were characterized by their dreamlike images and meticulous sound design, as well as Manichaean narratives that pitted exaggerated, even saccharine, innocence against depraved evil.”
“The most alive person I’ve ever met”
The American actor Kyle MacLachlanwho starred in Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” series, reacted to the filmmaker’s death by stating that he owes his entire career to the director’s vision, “the most authentically alive person” he met.
In a tribute Thursday on his official Instagram account, MacLachlan recalls how Lynch plucked him “from obscurity to star in his first and last big-budget film,” “Blue Velvet,” “for reasons beyond” the actor’s understanding. : “he clearly saw something in me that even I didn’t recognize. I owe my entire career, and indeed my life, to his vision.”
Kyle MacLachlan defines Lynch as “an enigmatic and intuitive man, with a creative ocean exploding inside him“, someone who “was in touch with something we all wish we could have achieved.”
“Our friendship blossomed on ‘Blue Velvet’ and then ‘Twin Peaks,’ and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’ve ever met,” the actor continues, adding, “David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination at a level that seemed to be the best version of the human being. I wasn’t interested in answers because I understood that questions are what drive us to be who we are. They are our breath.”
“While the world lost a remarkable artist, I lost a dear friend who imagined a future for me and allowed me to travel through worlds I could never have conceived on my own,” acknowledges the actor.
“I will miss you more than the limits of my language can express and than my heart can bear”, continues MacLachlan, ensuring that his “world is much more complete”, because he met David Lynch, “and much more empty , now that he’s gone.”
“There goes the Willy Wonka of the cinema“, said actress Lara Finn Boyle in a statement to : “I feel like I won a golden ticket by having the opportunity to work with him. We will miss you very much.”
Lynch “was courageous, brilliant, and a maverick with a great sense of humor,” recalled Nicolas Cage, who co-starred with Laura Dern in Wild at Heart: “he was a singular genius in cinema and one of the greatest artists of this or any other time”, he said about the director who could not bear the idea of forgetting an idea.
“If you forget a good idea, you want to commit suicide,” he said several times throughout his career.
Emphysema prevented him from continuing
David Lynch was in Portugal in 2007when he was honored with a retrospective in the first edition of the current Lisbon Film Festival (Leffest), by producer Paulo Branco. At the time, Lynch took the opportunity to give a conference on transcendental meditation, a technique he has practiced since the 1970s and which led him to create a foundation.
“Eu was a person affected by depression and anger. With meditation I was able to overcome negative emotions such as fear and anger, I freed my consciousness, and creativity began to flow”, he described to journalists at the time.
According to the magazine, Lynch revealed last year that he was diagnosed with a emphysema after a lifetime of smoking, which prevented him from leaving home to make films.
In 2017, the director had already due to the current state of the industry: “times have changed immensely in the last 11 years, including the way people perceive films”, he said at the time in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.
Early talent for the arts
The creator of the series “Twin Peaks” was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, in the United States. He moved frequently with his family as a child. He had a precocious talent for the visual arts and a passion for travel and discovery that led him to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and embark on filmmaking as a producer of short films.
Since the 1960s, he has also extended his artistic practice to music, painting, experimental video and photography. But his work was recognized mainly in cinema and television, in particular from “Eraserhead” (1977), the origin of the filmmaker’s particular language, and of films that followed one another as “The Elephant Man” (1980), one of his first major successes, without giving in to Hollywood’s commercial parameters, “Something” (1984), at the time a commercial failure that ended up creating its own cult following, and “Blue velvet” (1986), the ‘thriller’ beyond the white picket fences of small American towns of which “Twin Peaks” prefigures itself as a “spiritual ‘spin off’”, as the newspaper writes today, with the suspense about the death of Laura Palmer dominating the original 1991-92 episodes.
In the following years, films such as “A wild heart” (1989), Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, “Lost highway: Lost highway” (1997) e “Mulholland Drive” (2001), the masterpiece that the New York Times defined as “a poisonous calling card for Hollywood”, and the ultimate feature film, “Inland Empire” (2006).
His productions mix elements of horror, film noir, detective, take elements from European surrealism, but are also capable of the most stripped-down narrative line, as happened with “A Simple Story” (1999).
Or “palmares”
At Cannes, David Lynch won the Palme d’Or in 1990with “A Wild Heart”, and the award for best director in 2001with “Mulholland Drive”. The Venice Festival gave him the Golden Lion career in 2006.
He never won an Academy Award, but received nominations for “The Elephant Man”, “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive”. In 2019, it received a Honorary Oscar for the entire work.
His autobiography, “Room to dream”, co-written with Kristine McKenna, was published in Portugal by Elsinore in 2018.
Casa do Cinema, in Coimbra, has an ongoing cycle dedicated to David Lynch’s cinema, which will run until the 23rd, and which includes films such as “Eraserhead”, “The Elephant Man”, “A Simple Story” and “Inland Empire” (2006).
“The Fabelmans”, by Steven Spielberg, gave David Lynch his final appearance in cinema, here as an actor, taking on the role of John Ford, the director of “The Missing” and “The Quiet Man”.
