Freud Lynch

The films of David Lynch are sometimes said to be unintelligible. They confront us with strange dreamscapes populated with bizarre characters, obscure symbols and an infuriating lack of narrative consistency. Yet despite their opacity, they hold us transfixed. Lynch, who once told an interviewer, "I love dream logic," would surely agree with Sigmund Freud's famous claim that "before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms." But what else might the two agree on? Rather than presuming to fill in what Lynch leaves open by positing some forbidden psychosexual reality lurking behind his trademark red curtains, this book instead maintains a fidelity to the mysteries of his wonderful and strange filmic worlds, finding in them productive spaces where thought and imagination can be set to work. With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles, and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, Freud/Lynch takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one.

The Oneiric in the Films of David Lynch is the first systematic book-length study to explore the nature and function of dreams in David Lynch's different phases and audio-visual formats. There is hardly a contemporary film director whose name is as closely linked to the dream(-like) as that of David Lynch. Both popular and academic discourse frequently identify Lynch's films by their dreamlike qualities. However, in the existing literature on Lynch, these qualities tend to remain underspecified in terms of their experiential dimension. Departing from an interest in the phenomenon of dream experience, this is the first systematic book-length study exploring the nature and function of the oneiric in the director's different phases and audio-visual formats. It shows that, over the course of 50 years, Lynch has developed a cinematic aesthetics of the oneiric ? an ensemble of four dream-related dimensions that unfolds its full potential in the dynamic interplay between sensory address and reflective medialization. On the one hand, the Lynchian oneiric presents a markedly sensory-perceptual mode of experience – both characters and viewers are challenged in their perceptual patterns, while at the same time being immersed in the material dream scenario. On the other hand, the Lynchian oneiric provides a mode of both psychological and medial reflection. Not only the characters, but the films themselves are inclined to 'turn back' on themselves in a dream, exploring the preconditions, possibilities, and limitations of their own existence and ability to know the world. The oneiric in Lynch's films is thus of phenomenological, media-theoretical, and philosophical interest.

This book distinguishes itself from earlier books on David Lynch by taking in-depth consideration of his entire oeuvre. Besides his films and the Twin Peaks series, David Lynch: Blurred Boundaries includes discussions of Lynch’s paintings and drawings, music videos, commercials, short experimental works, digital projects on the YouTube channel David Lynch Theater and the Internet documentary The Interview Project, as well as the exhibition The Air is on Fire, which Jerslev regards as one of Lynch’s main works. David Lynch: Blurred Boundaries offers a view of Lynch’s total work, in which one medium or genre is no more important than the other. It discusses the ways in which Lynch has worked throughout his career with different art forms and has right from the start experimented with the blurring of boundaries between media and genres. And it discusses ways Lynch creates atmospheres by different audio-visual and visual means.

This is a study of one of Hollywood's most popular and critically acclaimed directors. Films discussed include 'Blue Velvet', 'Wild at Heart', 'The Straight Story' and 'Mulholland Drive'.

Todd McGowan studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasise the odd nature of normality itself. In Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world.

History films were a highly popular genre in the 1990s, as Hollywood looked back at significant and troubling episodes from World War II, the Cold War era, and the techno-war in the Persian Gulf. As filmmakers attempted to confront and manage intractable elements of the American past, such as the trauma of war and the legacy of racism, Susan Linville argues that a surprising casualty occurred-the erasure of relevant facets of contemporary women' history. In this book, Linville offers a sustained critique of the history film and its reduction of women to figures of ambivalence or absence. Historicizing and adapting Freud' concept of the uncanny and its relationship to the maternal body as the first home, she offers theoretically sophisticated readings of the films Midnight Clear, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Nixon, Courage Under Fire, Lone Star, and Limbo. She also demonstrates that the uncanny is not only a source of anxiety but also potentially a progressive force for eroding nostalgic ideals of nation and gender. Linville concludes with a close reading of a recent 9/11 documentary, showing how the patterns and motifs of 1990s history films informed it and what that means for our future.

TWIN PEAKS . . . BLUE VELVET . . . DUNE . . . THE ELEPHANT MAN . . . LOST HIGHWAY. . . . In order to understand the work of filmmaker David Lynch, one must set the conscious mind aside, according to film professor Martha Nochimson. In this innovative study, she draws on such strategy to offer close readings of Lynch's films, informed by unprecedented, in-depth interviews with the man himself. 68 photos. 296 pp. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Vols. 8-10 of the 1965-1984 master cumulation constitute a title index.