From David Lynch's debut 'Eraserhead' to Yorgos Lanthimos' quirky romance 'The Lobster', here are five movies which use absurdism within their narratives. Cover Story: Joanna Sternberg BFI: Italian Neorealism (Credit: Press / Focus World)Film » Features » Lists ...
(Credit: Universal Pictures)Exploring David Lynch’s obsession with ‘troubled women’ Wed 14 February 2024 22:15, UKIt wasn’t until 1986’s Blue Velvet that surrealist auteur David Lynch began to predominantly centre his work around ‘troubled women’ – those who suffer from abuse, addiction, violence, mental health issues, and possibly even end up dead. While the movie follows a male protagonist, Jeffrey, Blue Velvet’s main allure is really the story of Dorothy Vallens, both a woman in danger and...
In Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film, David Huckvale traces body horror in cinema back to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, who states that a human takes pleasure and suffers pain only by means of the senses or the organs of the body (p. 1). Such a corporeal philosophy, Huckvale continues, strongly anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche, who was eager to have a positive attitude towards life despite its horrors. This book, then, aims to explore the profound anxieties we ...
Magical coins appear throughout Twin Peaks and in other Lynch projects. Henry in Eraserhead, for example, keeps a little wishing well full of coins in the top drawer of his dresser. In Wild At Heart, silver dollars play a coded role in hiring assassins. In the Secret Diary, a gold coin appears to Laura after she, perhaps possessed by BOB, rapes Harold Smith. On the way out of Harold’s, Mrs. Tremond’s grandson, Pierre, saw me and came up to me and pulled a gold coin out of my e...
Samuel Liu on David Foster WallaceDavid Foster Wallace had, in the best and worse sense of this word, a divine compulsion, a spiritual irritation. Many great figures of history had such a madness, an incapability of keeping themselves silent, from speaking, from researching, from driving every fiber of their body into gathering together energy and straining to release this impulse in a work of immortality.History shows us people with such single-minded conviction that their actual ability (su...
