For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch

David Lynch

David Lynch was born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana. He studied Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and cinema at the American Film Institute (AFI), in Los Angeles. He made his first short film, while studying in Philadelphia, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), from a desire to see his figures move and for the sound, as told by Michel Chion:

And, one day, something clicked, though he could not have known that this would be a definitive turning point. He decided to make `film paintings': «When I looked at these paintings, I missed the sound. I was expecting a sound, or maybe the wind, to come out. I also wanted the edges to disappear. I wanted to get into the inside. It was spatial...»^38(*)

After a couple of shorts, The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970), and a first feature length film made with the help of the AFI, Eraserhead (1976) - which took five years in the making - David Lynch moved into major studio productions with The Elephant Man (1980). He had some difficult experiences notably with Dune (1984) where he found that the demands made by a large production did not fit his intuitive method of working. He managed to find a place within the studio system without altering his approach to filmmaking with Blue Velvet (1986). It was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, like Dune, but on a much smaller budget thus giving him more freedom.

Lynch was brought to worldwide fame with the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) commissioned by ABC Worldvision Enterprises. While the success of Twin Peaks gave him more independence, his later forays into television On the Air (1992) and Hotel Room (1992), did not meet with the same success.

If sound and movement have been the decisive factors influencing his shift to films, Lynch's cinema has an arresting visual quality giving a careful attention to textures and colors as well as the lighting of his scenes - often demanding technical prowess from his cinematographers.

The work of David Lynch may in certain respects qualify only too easily for a reductive understanding of baroque - the extravagant settings and the weird or excessive behaviours of its characters. But the affinities go further and develop in unexpected directions.

Principles of Analysis

The films of David Lynch have often been submitted to a psychoanalytical interpretation for which many of their aspects lend themselves rather easily. Semiotic and psychoanalytical analyses of films can often fail by an excess of interpretation, thus pin-pointing the meaning of images as if it was a text to be read and emptying them of their complexity. On the other hand a textual analysis is at risk of remaining too formal, as remarked by the authors of Aesthetics of Film:

By setting out to return to the primacy of the signifier, textual analysis reveals its concern not to leap immediately to an interpretative reading. Instead, it often stops at the moment of «meaning,» and thus it regularly runs the risk of falling into paraphrase or purely formal description.^39(*)

This study will keep to a formal approach to Lynch's films but will try to avoid a purely descriptive analysis. It will be structured over the five principles of the baroque as set out by Wölfflin in Principles of Art History. The classical Hollywood cinema will be the contrasting partner of a possible baroque cinema. Each chapter will echo one of the principles of Wölfflin but it will also develop a resonance with the defining traits of the Baroque as elaborated by Deleuze.

The first chapter, Narrative Continuities, will transpose the linear rendering of the form of the Renaissance to a linear progression of the narrative in classical films. It will suggest the possibility of a non-linear continuity in the sequence of actions in time and space.

The second chapter, The Shot of Ambiguity, is concerned with the conception of the shot. It will draw parallels between the classical composition by planes and the development of editing in the classical system. The composition in depth of the baroque could find its translation into movements of camera and a more active depth of field. It will develop the question of point-of-view and the subjectivity of the image.

The third chapter, The Montage of Confusion, based on the notion of closed and open form, will be concerned with the montage of the film. The containment of the classical form is found in the montage of the classical film leaving nothing without resolution and thus controlling meaning. The open form will bring a form of montage which will multiply possibilities and leaves the spectator make his own interpretation.

The multiplicity and unity of the fourth principle, which concern the relative independence of the elements of composition, will deal with the organisation of the elements of the film in the fourth chapter, The Texture of Film. In the classical film the parts of a film are hierarchically organised according to their relevance to the narrative. The baroque unity could emerge from the absence of such distinction making an object or a particular texture as important to the overall structure than a scene of action. This will develop into a consideration of textures as a formative element.

The last principle concerns the treatment of light and darkness, clearness and unclearness. This concern with light easily transposes to the different types of lighting used in films. This will lead to the consideration of the realistic, expressionist or moralistic content of light and darkness in the fifth chapter, The Dark Depths.

As Wölfflin warns in his introduction to Principles of Art History, these principles of analysis do not stand apart from each other: they are necessarily interlocked. Each chapter does not so much examine a new aspect of the work considered than it proposes a new perspective on an aspect already approached. Repetitions and cross-over are bound to occur, but each part should have its own proceeding thus bringing new developments to attention.

In bringing together the formal elements of analysis of the baroque used by Wölfflin and the study of the films of David Lynch, this study hopes to shift the relationship between baroque and cinema toward a more formal and visual approach than has generally been made.

* ³⁸ Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian, London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1995, p. 10. `Et un jour le déclic se fait, dont il ne sait sans doute pas encore que c'est le définitif, et qui le décide à faire des «films paintings», des peintures animées. «Ce qui me manquait quand je regardais ces tableaux, c'était le son, j'attendais qu'un son, un vent peut-être, en sorte. Je voulais aussi que les bords disparaissent, je voulais entrer à l'intérieur. C'était spatial...»' Michel Chion, David Lynch, Paris: Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2001, p. 19.

* ³⁹ Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie and Marc Vernet, Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 175. `En marquant un retour au primat du signifiant, l'analyse textuelle manifeste son souci de ne pas aller d'emblée à la lecture interprétative. Elle s'arrête souvent au moment du «sens» et par-là, court le risque de la paraphrase et de la description purement formelle.' Poitiers: Editions Fernand Nathan, 1983, p.151.