Did You See This?

The Donut, Not the Hole

James Stewart and Donna Reed in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Announcing “with deep regret” that artist, musician, and filmmaker David Lynch had passed away on Thursday, his family noted that he would have said, “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.” It’s hard not to feel the hole, though, even when we’re not staring into it.

Lynch would have turned seventy-nine this coming Monday. While several tributes and appreciations have already appeared, there will be many more over the coming days, and—perhaps with a little perspective—we’ll be able next week to at least begin to take measure of this loss. For now, we can turn to Dennis Lim.

In 2015, Lim had written David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, and talking to Nick Newman at the Film Stage, he noted that Lynch had “made an era-defining work in every phase of his career: Eraserhead is synonymous with the golden age of midnight movies; Blue Velvet is an emblematic text of the postmodern ’80s; Twin Peaks represents a breakthrough for television and serial narrative; Mulholland Dr. marks the death of a certain romantic idea of Hollywood, and maybe of celluloid itself. He hasn’t been that prolific, but it’s an amazingly sustained career.”

“Like Frank Capra and Franz Kafka,” writes J. Hoberman in the New York Times, “two widely disparate twentieth-century artists whose work Mr. Lynch much admired and might be said to have synthesized, his name became an adjective.” In his book, Lim writes that the “paradox of the Lynchian sensibility is that it is at once easy to recognize and hard to define. A common trap is to fall back on the vaguest of terms: feeling, impressions, moods. But vagueness, of course, is a central quality of the Lynchian, tied as it is to ineffable notions—the sublime, the uncanny, the abject—and to the uncontainable sensations that define Lynch’s best work: abysmal terror, piercing beauty, convulsive sorrow.”

On to some of the best of what else this past week has had to offer:

  • Over the past several years, three features by Michael Roemer—Nothing but a Man (1964), The Plot Against Harry (1969), and Vengeance Is Mine (1984)—have seen triumphant revivals long after they were neglected upon their initial releases. Starting next Friday, New York’s Film Forum will present the first-ever theatrical runs of two more of Roemer’s films, the newly restored Dying (1976) and a new 35 mm print of Pilgrim, Farewell (1982). “Dying is as sober and direct as its title suggests, chronicling three adults, of varying ages, in the final months of their lives,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. In Pilgrim, Farewell, written by Roemer, Elizabeth Huddle plays a thirty-nine-year-old cancer patient. “When I first saw Pilgrim, Farewell more than ten years ago,” writes Anderson, “I found its psychic volatility barely tolerable. But, as ever with Roemer’s work, the film was waiting for me to rediscover it.”

  • “By the grave of a loved one. This is where John Ford has his characters speak with true and unguarded honesty,” writes Oscar Pedersen for Sabzian. “What’s incredible about these scenes is the conviction with which they are carried out. ‘In Ford’s movies,’ Tag Gallagher reminds us, ‘people are more real than everyday real. They live in storybook images. We believe in them as we believed in our mother’s bedtime stories.’ To this, I would add that it is by allowing us to drift to the times and places of elsewhere that Ford’s imagery also grounds us in the here and now. In front of Ford’s graves—or even when just thinking about them, living with them—the material world gains depth, wonder, melancholy.”

  • Sabzian is also running a 1964 piece by Frieda Grafe on Jean-Luc Godard and Vivre sa vie (1962): “The verisimilitude of his art does not rest on faithful imitation of reality but manifests itself in the recognition of its fictional character.” There’s a neighboring notion in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Preliminary Remarks on Querelle,” now up at e-flux. These are notes on his approach to his 1982 adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest (1947), which for RWF, “may be the most radical novel in world literature.” With production designer Rolf Zehetbauer, he set out to conjure “a kind of surreal landscape” within which “there will be several walls for projection. They will enable us to project particles of the real world into this artificial world, and thereby to expand it infinitely.”

  • In their ongoing discussion at the Reveal of each and every one of the top one hundred films that made the list of the “Greatest Films of All Time” when Sight and Sound conducted its poll of more than 1,600 critics in 2022, Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias, working their way toward #1, have arrived at #66, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki bouki (1973), in which two Senegalese lovers dream of emigrating to France. A key point in the conversation is a comparison and contrast with Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), a portrait of a Senegalese woman who has taken that route only to find herself trapped in her employers’ apartment. “Touki bouki is full of fantasy and wild discursions, but it’s also as committed as Black Girl to showing how people actually live in Dakar,” notes Tobias. “Mambéty may not be as strictly interested in social realism as Ousmane Sembène, but his film is nonetheless grounded in the same simple dreams of have-not characters.”

  • Karina Longworth’s essential podcast You Must Remember This is back with a new season. The Old Man Is Still Alive will explore “the late careers of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and ten other directors who began their careers in the silent or early sound eras and were still making movies in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.” Following last month’s preview and a flashback to an earlier piece on John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), the first full episode focuses on how Frank Capra, one of the most acclaimed directors of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood—It Happened One Night, for example, makes Kristin Thompson’s list of the ten best films of 1934—“became embittered by an industry that he felt had left him behind.” But when he had it, he had it. Take two minutes to watch (or rewatch) David Lynch respond to another viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

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