Inside: an unpublished Lynch interview from 1984 and filmmaker tributes; Steven Soderbergh on Presence; Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste on Hard Truths; Walter Salles on I’m Still Here; and Céline Sciamma on Chantal Akerman
“It’s hardly hyperbole to say that [David Lynch] was one of the very few absolutely unique visionaries cinema has had in its 130-odd-year history; using the word ‘visionary’ should ordinarily give us nervous pause, but not this time. Of course, uniqueness has always had its pitfalls: for most observers, going back to the 1980s, characterisations of Lynch have been variations on the idea of him being a chugging, unchecked id, a ‘surrealist’ dream engine spewing racy weirdnesses without a filter, farmed out of the post-war American midlands.
“The reason for this appeared to be thinly disguised nonplussedness – though to be fair, we all invented ‘Lynchian’ as a descriptor in the 80s because there was no extant word that met the challenge. There still isn’t. (One hopes that over the decades he might’ve been amused, rather than maddened, by the mainstream attempts to articulate his work.) But, surprisingly, with mystification has come culture-saturated adoration, as though even Gen Z media-gulpers saw in the Yankee-scapes of inner Lynchistan a physics of derangement that rhymes with their sense of their inherited world.”
