David Lynch (Contemporary Film Directors) - Softcover

Nieland, Justus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252078519 ISBN 13: 9780252078514

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2012

Synopsis

A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of LynchÆs work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of LynchÆs plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform LynchÆs films and signature mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, Justus Nieland argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in LynchÆs films, an uncertain way of feeling essential to LynchÆs art, and the prime matter of LynchÆs strange picture of the human organism. NielandÆs study offers striking new readings of LynchÆs major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire) and his early experimental films, placing LynchÆs experimentalism within the aesthetic traditions of modernism and the avant-garde; the genres of melodrama, film noir, and art cinema; architecture and design history; and contemporary debates about cinematic ontology in the wake of the digital. This inventive study argues that LynchÆs plastic concept of life--supplemented by technology, media, and sensuous networks of an electric world--is more alive today than ever.

About this title

Review

"Offers a great deal to those beginning their investigations into David Lynch, as well as providing a stream of new insights and critical angles for those more familiar with the director's work.  Nieland has not only got inside David Lynch's house: he has exposed its interior to expert interpretation."--Senses of Cinema

"A stunning piece of work. One of the most provocative, erudite, and elegantly written--not to mention persuasive--writings on Lynch I have seen. It is a much-needed volume and will contribute to Lynch criticism, but its reach is much wider; it will signal the arrival of a significant voice to the field. This is the book."--Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)

"Justus Nieland's study is something of a revelation. . . . it breathes new life into a canon that had appeared to have reached a point of critical exhaustion. . . . an impressive achievement."--Screening the Past

From the Author

Justus Nieland is an associate professor of English at Michigan State University, the author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life, and the coauthor of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0252078519
• ISBN 13: 9780252078514
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190