France's Legion d'Honneur to David Lynch -Digital Film Pioneer

Yup, France loves director David Lynch -but I still don't get the Jerry Lewis thing.

American filmmaker David Lynch was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, France's highest civilian honor, in a ceremony in Paris last week. The director of art house favorites such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and co-creator of cult-hit TV series Twin Peaks, was presented with the award by French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, an admitted fan of the auteur's work. The head-of-state told the director that seeing The Elephant Man as a teenager "definitely convinced" him that "cinema was a highly important matter." He praised the director for "constraining the real, to find the truth behind it," and for his quest for hope. He also expressed admiration for the "genius" in the director's work, adding that such "genius is vital to a society such as ours."

Lynch responded in broken French: "My French is poor, but my heart is rich today, thanks to you." Accompanied by his partner Emily Stofie, and joined on stage by expatriate director Roman Polanski and actresses Fanny Ardant and Charlotte Rampling, Lynch rhapsodized, "It's no secret that I love France, the art-making, art-loving and art-supporting people of France." This praise is sincere, as France's Ciby2000 and CanalPlus have financed Lynch's recent efforts, including Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and last year's Inland Empire (which Lynch distributed independently to select theaters in North America, rather than going through a mainstream distributor).

The Academy Award-nominated Lynch, whose feature directorial debut, Eraserhead, dates back to 1978, has been quick to embrace digital and online technologies. Inland Empire was shot entirely on DV, using high-end consumer-grade camcorder. In a New York Times interview coinciding with the initial release of the film, Lynch told reporter Dennis Lim, "The sky’s the limit with digital,” adding: “Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it!... I would die if I had to work like that again.”

Lynch clearly sees the Web as a viable commercial and artistic medium. His online presence at www.davidlynch.com, has featured subscriber-only content, such as a very crude (in style and content) cartoon called Dumbland, and Rabbits, a surreal sitcom featuring a cast dressed in (what else?) rabbit suits. He also sells signature coffee mugs and ringtones through the site, and also offers the Inland Empire 2-DVD set for sale at a price that trumps even Amazon by five dollars. Finally, for those seeking free content, Lynch's carrot-on-a-stick is a daily local weather report for the Los Angeles region, delivered via webcam from his home in the Hollywood Hills.

Working mostly outside the margins, crafting surreal experimental films that lack obvious narrative structures, Lynch has also played with traditional storytelling. Three such foray's were 1980's The Elephant Man, the story of John Merrick, a severly deformed man trying to integrate into Victorian society (famous for the classic line, "I am not an Animal! I am a human being!"; a 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune (famous for the sight of Police lead-singer Sting wearing nothing but a codpiece); and 1999's The Straight Story,  a G-rated, Disney-produced tale of an elderly man (Richard Farnsworth) who travels across Iowa on a tractor to visit his ailing brother (famous for being a G-rated Disney movie directed by David Lynch).
Lynch is also a painter of some renown, a onetime-syndicated cartoonist, and a furniture designer. He recently set up the David Lynch Foundation to promote peace through Trancendental Meditation. This rennaissance man is also very much in demand for commercial work and his latest project is an extended commercial for Gucci, in which he mates his unique visual sensibilities with Blondie's New Wave classic, Heart of Glass.

Posted by Christos Tsirbas

Links:
www.davidlynch.com
www.davidlynchfoundation.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lynch
gucci.com/us/video/gucci-by-gucci/

Comments

[Jack Butler]

Must agree with you about Jerry Lewis. What about Edgar Poe? I think he's a monotonous (in both theme and music) hack, but the French hailed him as a genius. Our current dominant poetic movement (it has been dominant for fifty years) is based on Les Imagistes, who greatly admired Poe. Hmm. Explains a lot.

[Jack Butler]

Must agree with you about Jerry Lewis. What about Edgar Poe? I think he's a monotonous (in both theme and music) hack, but the French hailed him as a genius. Our current dominant poetic movement (it has been dominant for fifty years) is based on Les Imagistes, who greatly admired Poe. Hmm. Explains a lot.

[Jack Butler]

Must agree with you about Jerry Lewis. What about Edgar Poe? I think he's a monotonous (in both theme and music) hack, but the French hailed him as a genius. Our current dominant poetic movement (it has been dominant for fifty years) is based on Les Imagistes, who greatly admired Poe. Hmm. Explains a lot.