Authorship and the Films of David Lynch by Antony Todd - Chapter 2 (Research)

Authorship and the Films of David Lynch ~ Chapter 2 - link


Chapter 2 of Antony Todd's book "Authorship and the Films of David Lynch", entitled "David Lynch: The Making of a Post-classical Auteur". This book was published by I.B. Tauris in 2012.

This chapter attempts to explain how Lynch went from the director of a midnight-movie and American independent to his own sub-genre of "A Film by David Lynch", while also examining how Lynch is different from the New American Cinema movement.

Key Quotes

"...the Hollywood system has adapted to accommodate elements of modernist and avant-garde cinemas that duly set the ground for a more expressive new Hollywood to emerge."

"A signifying feature of an artwork is that it is personal; that the text somehow represents the personality of its author."

"Lynch's legend is built upon a juxtaposition: a childlike and personable Pacific North-Western conventionalism coupled with an interest in themes of a psychosexual and surreal nature."

"Artistic autonomy must be seen to exist, or, better still, prevail, in the former categories while it is nullified by economic imperatives in the latter. In other words, art cinema and commerce, despite being co-dependents, are still widely held to be inimical in most auteurist judgements."

(on Eraserhead) "Godwin suggests that the film offered an experience that was ‘intensely personal, unshared’."

"Lynch, though, offered a more ‘feasible case for assimilation’, since for all its ‘unbalanced composition and attraction to darkness’, Eraserhead still ‘exhibited strong ties to narrative’ (Wyatt 1996: 90)."