David Lynch, 75 years of a visual art guru

They called him the last man of the Renaissance, the authentic American surrealist, the most mysterious director in Hollywood. In reality, no definition fully fits the character and talent of David Keith Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana on January 20, 1946, who turns 75 on Wednesday. It is already difficult to call him "only" director, given that after a wandering adolescence following his father, a researcher for the Department of Agriculture, at 20 he moved to Philadelphia to attend the academy of fine arts. Painting is his passion, during high school he learned drawing at the Corcoran School in Washington, he considers Francis Bacon "a hero, the greatest modern artist" and is inspired by Oskar Kokoschka. He will also try to study it by going to Austria, but after only 15 days of stay in the neat Salzburg, he will return to his homeland in search of the "imbalance" of his land. In Philadelphia, however, he became passionate about the moving image and presented the short film "Six Figures Getting Sick" as a final essay. «It was only one of my paintings - remember-. There was a figure that occupied the center of the canvas. While I was looking at the figure in the painting I felt a slight movement of air and I caught a small movement. And I wished that the picture was really able to move, at least for a while. " From here began an adventure still shrouded in mystery for him: landed in Los Angeles in 1971, he used a scholarship from the American Film Institute to begin shooting his first feature film. The money is scarce and it will take six years for "Eraserhead" to see the light. The result is deemed impossible to distribute but, thanks to the help of some friends, Lynch manages to project it in some room as a midnight show and, with the film in his suitcase, lands in Europe at the Avoriaz fantastic festival. Tall, with the lost air of a provincial American, without even a jacket to defend himself from the cold in the French Alps, he wanders among film buffs and stars with the air of an alien landed on earth. The screening of the film, a surrealist nightmare with open eyes, shot in black & white and dominated by the terrifying incarnation of a fetus of uncertain origin (Lynch will never reveal what it is and will bury it in great secrecy by organizing a wake with the crew) , translates into an authentic event. "Eraserhead" wins the prize, becomes a cult object, arouses a thousand interpretations and for ten years it will be screened at night in many American art house theaters. The director will always refuse to explain the meaning of the subliminal and disturbing images that cross the film making his own a mantra that is then respected also in the future ("the films speak for themselves, useless overlapping intentions and explanations") so much so that none of his works distributed in home video contains explanatory interviews. After all, all his art is a continuous transfer of visual experiences, meditation, journeys into the unconscious and into youthful obsessions, as if to recreate the emotional fabric of a generation and of deep America. It is no coincidence that his greatest hits, from "Blue Velvet" to "The Secrets of Twin Peaks" are set in small isolated villages, between the cold of the mountains and the great plains of the North West. The turning point in David Lynch's career as a filmmaker comes with his second film, "Elephant Man" (1980) for which, thanks to the commitment of friends and collaborators with whom he formed a sort of "artistic family" that will last over time, he obtains the attention of Mel Brooks. The director of "Frankenstein Junior", after seeing the first film of the Philadelphia outsider, agrees to produce it: in exchange he will get nine Oscar nominations for a black & white film set in Victorian London and will deliver the new star of the moment to Hollywood . Paradoxically, the chance of a lifetime will become Lynch's greatest failure. Dino De Laurentiis gives him the project of life: the adaptation of a visionary saga such as "Dune" by Frank Herbert. Struggling with a blockbuster budget (45 million dollars in 1984) and the pressure of the media tamtam, the director gets lost and will not be appreciated by either the public or critics, ignoring the cuts imposed by De Laurentiis and even the longer version prepared for TV. On the verge of a deep depression and ready to return to his old loves (painting, but also music that will see him emerge as a composer and solo voice), David Lynch brings a new script to De Laurentiis, almost as a compensation for the previous flop . In a nostalgic frame of classic noir, he put all his obsessions in "Blue Velvet" (1986), the ghosts of the mountain villages where he grew up, the sounds of America in the 50s, the fascination of evil and mysterious dark ladies. He chooses inexpensive actors like the forgotten Dennis Hopper, his icon Isabella Rossellini, the young Kyle McLachlan discovered in "Dune"; meets the musician Angelo Badalamenti who will make his fortune, repay the trust of the producer with a real critical triumph and the second (of three) Oscar nomination for best director. Three years after the producer Mark Frost who opens the doors of TV to him with the ABC series "The secrets of Twin Peaks": the Americans had never seen anything like this and the series will become the reference point for all fiction turn of the century, as well as the director's obsession who will return to his characters in "Fire walks with me" (1992) and in the new "Twin Peaks" of 2017. In the meantime he won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with "Wild Heart ", made the most mysterious noir of the 90s (" Strade perdute "and" Mulholland Drive "), vented his surreal fantasy with" Inland Empire ", won a Golden Lion in Venice in 2006. The Oscar at career of 2019 puts a full stop to his talent. But outside the cinema he has meanwhile established himself as a leading artist with exhibitions all over the world (the collaboration with Loubotin is famous for the installations of "Fetish"), experimental discs and videos, worthy of a genius without schemes or limits. "Ideas - he says of himself - come in the most unexpected ways, just keep your eyes open."