Post by Capo on Apr 7, 2007 13:24:35 GMT
Inland Empire
David Lynch 2006 USA / Poland / France
An actress in Hollywood may or may not have an affair with a co-star, and her persona splinters into several parallel dimensions.
Lynch's most self-indulgent film is three hours long, and could quite have easily been double that without seeming it - there's absolutely no conventional narrative arc, no way of foreseeing where things are going or anticipating what's to come, so that it's impossible to measure how long it's been going on and how long it might continue to go on. It's incredibly innovative, a step forward in Lynch's personal ambitions: instinctive, imaginative, entrenched in its own world - its own worlds-within-worlds - so that any approach to it which might seek some kind of connection from the hermetic fiction to the environment in which it is consumed (i.e. anything outside of the film) seems to be missing the point. Indeed, rather than requiring active deconstruction (as almost all narratives do), it's a textural experience, a fabrication which is meaning, not an encoded narrative which has meaning. The move to low-budget DV has freed him up in two senses: visual expression and narrative flexibility. Lynch is a master of 'uncomfortable space': some of the shot compositions are frighteningly intimate; very few scenes have establishing shots, so that conversations, even presented in the most basic, shot-reverse shot fashion, have a disturbing edge; and each intra-scene cut seems to be ever-so-slightly delayed. It's erotic at times, funny at others, agreeably bizarre, and often terrifying: unique, original, and easily reduced to pathetic superlatives or wordy descriptions. A quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities might be telling: "I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language [...]".
David Lynch 2006 USA / Poland / France
An actress in Hollywood may or may not have an affair with a co-star, and her persona splinters into several parallel dimensions.
Lynch's most self-indulgent film is three hours long, and could quite have easily been double that without seeming it - there's absolutely no conventional narrative arc, no way of foreseeing where things are going or anticipating what's to come, so that it's impossible to measure how long it's been going on and how long it might continue to go on. It's incredibly innovative, a step forward in Lynch's personal ambitions: instinctive, imaginative, entrenched in its own world - its own worlds-within-worlds - so that any approach to it which might seek some kind of connection from the hermetic fiction to the environment in which it is consumed (i.e. anything outside of the film) seems to be missing the point. Indeed, rather than requiring active deconstruction (as almost all narratives do), it's a textural experience, a fabrication which is meaning, not an encoded narrative which has meaning. The move to low-budget DV has freed him up in two senses: visual expression and narrative flexibility. Lynch is a master of 'uncomfortable space': some of the shot compositions are frighteningly intimate; very few scenes have establishing shots, so that conversations, even presented in the most basic, shot-reverse shot fashion, have a disturbing edge; and each intra-scene cut seems to be ever-so-slightly delayed. It's erotic at times, funny at others, agreeably bizarre, and often terrifying: unique, original, and easily reduced to pathetic superlatives or wordy descriptions. A quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities might be telling: "I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language [...]".