"The Music of Twin Peaks and Angelo Badalamenti'' at Seattle Symphony: Jan 17 | "How the Twin Peaks Soundtrack Came to Haunt Music for 30 Years" | The Guardian

This month Seattle Symphony and host Kyle MacLachlan invite listeners to join them in entering into what James Poniewozik posited for the New York Times as being more than a musical experience, "The ‘Twin Peaks’ Theme Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Portal". The music for one of the most notable television and film series of all time, is explored by The Atlantic in "Twin Peaks and the Remarkeable Influence of David Lynch". This convergence of director and composer came about during the production of one of Lynch's films, and was born of the inability to secure a licensing deal to 4AD label maven Ivo Watts-Russell's cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren". Outside of auteurs like John Carpenter, the films of Michael Mann, and the meeting of David Cronenberg and Howard Shore, the 1980s seemed to yearn for new confluence of the big screen's coalescence of moving picture and soundtrack. The meeting of David Lynch and composer and musician Angelo Badalamenti can be seen as a consequence of the director's first entry into into commercial studio distributed film with Universal and Paramount, thanks largely to the production funding of one Mel Brooks. Based on the Victorian era documents of Sir Frederick Treves and his patient Joseph Merrick, "The Elephant Man" met with both box office and critical success, including eight Academy Award nominations and multiple BAFTA awards. As a product, what followed was one of the stranger turns in the whole of the director's fortunes. The then most popular film franchise in the world, helmed by George Lucus, turned the spotlight on Lynch for him to direct the third installment in the Star Wars trilogy. He declined, citing Lucas' comprehensive vision of the fictional universe would allow for very little in the way of space to express his own. Following this, and the distribution deal with Dino De Laurentiis that came directly from Lynch's own science fiction epic. By the time of his fourth feature, the dominant facets of sound, and its influential role in the prevailing character of Lynch's film work had been established. It was with "Blue Velvet'', that the disparate components of massed strings inspired by the minor symphonies of Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Mahler, met with the, pulsing, churning drone of the underlying industrial sound design and the director's other great musical love. This third component was to be found in the dreamy, melancholic lament to be heard on the fringes of the popular radio-play of Lynch's childhood. A slow swinging rock n' roll defined by the plaintive, longing sound of Roy Orbison's crooning pop, the spacious productions of Phil Spector, and twang of Duane Eddy's guitar. These share a unifying element in their immersion of instrument and voice in echo and reverb, with its capacity to create the impression of vast horizons and spacious chambers of sound resonant with a lush, textured romanticism.

The meeting of Lynch and Badalamenti would happen overcoming the challenge of having the film's lead sing her own parts in a series of central scenes. One of the primary producers on "Blue Velvet", Fred Caruso brought in stage and theater composer Angelo Badalamenti to coach the lead actress on the performance of the film's titular song. Nearing the end of central filming, the club scene being the last of a series of shoots for the film, Rossellini's performance came together notably under the guidance of the Sicilian composer and pianist. Lynch then made efforts to secure rights to pieces of music he had in mind for the soundtrack. Foremost among them was the 4AD label in-house band, This Mortal Coil and their cover of Tim Buckly's "Song for the Siren". Badalamenti reports that while complete creative control and the important "final cut" were conditions of the contract with De Laurentiis, the film was on a strict budget, and the $50,000 rights to securing the Ivo Watts-Russell cover was unattainable. With the success had with Rossellini, Lynch approached Badalamenti about writing an original song to replace it. Supplied with a title, and a few short lines, Badalamenti recounts how their collaboration began for Film Score Monthly, "Isabella handed me a piece of yellow paper that had David's lyrics on it. On the top of it was the title "Mysteries of Love" I read it through. There was no rhyme scheme or hook to latch on to like songs were supposed to have." Approaching the director for insight into this minimalist coda, Lynch is quoted as offering; "Oh, just make it like the wind, Angelo. It should be a song that floats on the sea of time. Make it cosmic!". Julee Cruise, who had performed in a musical that Badalamenti had written in New York, was brought in to provide the vocals for the resulting track which replicated much of the atmospheric dreamscapes of the then "4AD sound". This Mortal Coil was an in-house collective of artists around Blackwing Studios, its producer John Fryer and Ivo Watts-Russell, co-founder at London-based record label. By the time of "Blue Velvet"'s production 4AD had cultivated a roster of artists who specialized in angular indie introspection, atmospheric dreamscapes, downtrodden post-punk, and gothically tinged chamber music. The collective's first release "It'll End in Tears" included Howard Devoto of Breathless, Cindytalk's spectral vocalist, Gordon Sharp, members of neoclassical ensemble, Dead Can Dance, and singing on the influential "Song to the Siren", Elizabeth Fraser from the Scottish band, Cocteau Twins. Progenitors of what would later be called dream pop, Cocteau Twins' sound was a swirling canopy of Robin Guthrie’s reverb-enveloped guitar, sharp drum machine and bass geometries, and Fraser's vocal gymnastics and interpretation-resistant lyrical glossolalia navigating the instrumental tide.

With the successes had in Rossellini's singing part and the "love at first sound" as Lynch described their first collaboration with Cruise, Badalamenti was recruited to try his hand at the score. As for Lynch’s working methods, in interview Badalamenti recalled how the director would further test working relationships of sound and sequence while shooting. “He would have me on set,” he recalled of the Blue Velvet scoring sessions. “I would actually play music live while they were filming so the actors could feel the mood". Badalamenti relates, "On the plane to Los Angeles I wrote the music and Lynch flipped; “It’s Russian, dark, a little dissonant - beautiful but strange at the same time”, the director is quoted as saying. Badalamenti's creative trajectory after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music had already taken the Brooklyn born Sicilian-American into the world of composing minor film scores and musicals for Broadway. He wrote songs for Nina Simone, and even a brief stint working alongside electronic pioneer Jean-Jacques Perry. Yet it would be this mid-career meeting with Lynch on the set of "Blue Velvet" that would be the defining junction. Even with the successes had in the production of that film, and it's global reception, could not have prepared the director and composer team for the chapter that was to come next. Their collaboration in sound and image was soon to be broadcast into nearly every home in America. In 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch assembled a band of veteran sessions and film musicians, including jazz drummer Grady Tate, and guiatrist Vinnie Bell, in small studio off of Times Square in New York to work on three simultaneous projects. These would be the avant-garde stage musical "Industrial Symphony No.1", Cruise's album "Floating into the Night'', and the Twin Peaks soundtrack, in which Cruise appears as the in-series Roadhouse band's chanteuse. From these sessions, Badalamenti's pieces born of chord suspensions and evocative of dissonance, loss and longing, singer and composer express, "‘We Felt Like We Could Do Anything’: Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise on the Music of Twin Peaks". This process recounted in detail for The Guardian, "'Make it Like the Wind, Angelo': How the Twin Peaks Soundtrack Came to Haunt Music for Nearly 30 Years". Lynch would sit with the composer at the side of his Fender Rhodes piano, quietly verbalising what he envisioned. “I haven’t shot anything, but it’s like you are in a dark woods with an owl in the background and a cloud over the moon and sycamore trees are blowing very gently…” I started to press the keys for the opening chord to “Twin Peaks Love Theme,” because it was the sound of that darkness, recounts Badalamenti. Lynch said; “A beautiful troubled girl is coming out of the woods, walking towards the camera… and she comes closer and it reaches a climax and…” I continued with the music as he continued the story. “And from this, we let her go back into the dark woods”. Lynch was ecstatic with the outcome. “Don’t change a single note, Angelo. I see Twin Peaks".

"Dreams & Nightmares: The Films of David Lynch" at SIFF Cinema: Jun 16 - Jul 6

Over the course of the next month, SIFF Cinema will be presenting a near complete retrospective of the major works of David Lynch. Encompassing ten feature length films, an essay film, and a anthology of short films, "Dreams & Nightmares: The Films of David Lynch", begins mid-June with the premiere of "Lynch/OZ". Following non-chronologically, the series sounds the depths and heights of one of the great auteurs of the 20th century, with "Mulholland Drive", "Blue Velvet", The Short Films of David Lynch, "Dune", "Wild at Heart", "Inland Empire", "The Straight Story", "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me", "The Elephant Man", "Eraserheard", and "Lost Highway". Viewed together, it is clear that the landscape of American independent cinema would have an altogether different topography without the work of it's sublime sculptor of atmosphere, David Lynch. Referred to as "the greatest director of his era" by The Guardian's 2007 panel of critics, topping their 40 artists listed as having defined the last quarter century of cinema. His bold feature length entry of 1977 "Eraserhead" became one of the most influential midnight movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Playing in arthouse and independent cinemas late-night screenings alongside Jodorowsky's "El Topo", Water's "Pink Flamingos", Sharman's "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", and Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". More than a cult and underground phenomena, the film earned him the attention and funding of Mel Brooks and assistant director on "High Anxiety", Jonathan Sanger. Sanger became a champion of the young director, presenting him the working script adaptation from Sir Frederick Treves and Ashley Montagu's  "The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences" and "The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity". Distributed by Paramount and Universal worldwide, while independently funded, "The Elephant Man" would become Lynch's first feature film for a major studio.

Working with an exceptional cast of professionals was also a first, the film's central characters of Joseph Merrick and Frederick Treves, portrayed by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins respectively, remains among both of the actor's most notable roles on film. While Lynch sourced Peter Ivers for the soundtrack for his first feature, and John Morris for his sophomore effort, the director's hands-on approach was already evident in the film's sound design and audible palette colored by it's pervasive atmosphere of ruin. Not limited to his boldly experimental freshman effort, this looming industrial underworld buried beneath the facade of everyday existence remains one of the recurring themes throughout the totality of his work. Time Out London spoke with the director on expressing this theme through the period setting of his second feature and personal scouting of the locations and shooting of key scenes in Liverpool Street Station and Butler’s Wharf in Southwark; "I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories. So here is Victorian England, and I don’t know this land, but I know factories, I know this is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so that side of it resonated with me. Then one day I’m standing in East London Hospital. A derelict hospital, but it still had beds in the wards. Thousands of pigeons, broken windows, but long, glorious hallways, fireplaces, all the details. I’m there in the hall looking into a ward and a wind entered me, and I was back in time. I knew it: 100 per cent. Victorian England. And I said: “Now I know it. No one can take it away from me.”

One of the stranger of all the twists in all the director's turns of fate was to come in the wake of "Elephant Man"'s critical success. The most popular film franchise of the 1980s helmed by George Lucas, had turned the spotlight on Lynch for him to direct the third installment in the Star Wars trilogy. He declined, citing Lucas' comprehensive vision of the fictional universe would allow for very little in the way of space to express his own. Soon after, another notable science fiction property would come the director's way in the form of Dino De Laurentiis licensing Frank Herbert's epic, "Dune", in the wake of it becoming available following the now legendary aborted project from Alejandro Jodorowsky. In a 1985 interview with the German periodical Tip Filmjahrbuch, Lynch details De Laurentiis' approaching him with the project and the source of his personal conceptualization of Herbert's universe; "This is how it happened: I went to Venice, just for an afternoon, to see the Piazza San Marco. Dino De Laurentiis bought me a book, which inspired all these things... A book about Venice. It inspired the idea, that in the world of "Dune" a Renaissance had taken place thousands of years ago, and this Renaissance had been very powerful and far-reaching. And people built beautiful machines; they were so well-constructed, that they remained intact until now, the time, when the story begins. Of course this Melange enables the humans with certain mental abilities. But they need machines nonetheless, and these machines were built before discovering the "spice" Melange. This world is not a world of machines, but they are part of it." The final cut for "Dune" was in the hands of Universal Studios rather than its director, and the resulting film remains a subject rarely broached by Lynch to this day.

As part of the contractual details of directing the film for De Laurentiis, Lynch was under obligation with the producer to direct two more films, the first of which was to be a planned sequel. In the wake of the film's poor box office and mixed critical reception this sequel was never developed beyond the stage of its initial script. The other was a more personal work. Developed from ideas that had been gestating as far back as 1973, and a screenplay that had been shopped around by the director since the late 1970s, De Laurentiis then became both its producer and distributor. Where other studios declined the screenplay due to its tarnished depiction of smalltown American life, foreground presentation of violence, and strong sexual content, the Italian independent gave the director free reign within its budgetary constraints and most importantly, power of final cut. This project would go on to be considered one of the most notable, and influential independent films of the 1980s. Not only a significant film within the independent cinema landscape of the decade, "Blue Velvet" earned David Lynch his second Academy Award nomination, and came to rank significantly within the BBC's 2015 global critical assessment of the 100 Greatest American Films ever made. No discussion of Lynch's contribution to the language of cinema would be complete without his and Mark Frost's 1989 reimagining of the American soap opera. "Twin Peaks" struck a chord with the American consciousness of the late 20th century, reformatting television viewing itself into a serial artform. This being decades before such viewing would become the de rigueur of longform streaming tv. An equally dissonant chord was hit by the series' theatrical prequel, which delivered the dark and unexpurgated side of the "Twin Peaks" coin, one which many audiences were not prepared for.

Though Booed at Cannes and the target of frustrated Twin Peaks fans and critics upon its release, the film has since gained a reevaluation with context and distance, with pieces like Calum Marsh's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is David Lynch's Masterpiece" now increasingly more common. With the cinematic expansion of the series' narrative offered by "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me", and new context enriched by the even more experimental "Twin Peaks: The Return" miniseries of 2017. Since then many have returned to the prequel film with fresh eyes and decades distance, and found it to be less of a departure, and more true to "Twin Peaks" cinematic world and its concerns, making for an, "Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me". A set of less successful experiments with genre and tone would come after with the adaptation of Barry Gifford's novel, "Wild at Heart", and a G rated family film for the Walt Disney corporation, in "The Straight Story". Yet these were followed by a trio of the most adventurous and satisfyingly substantial of his films, which employed longer durations and expressly non-linear devices, and proved to be as boldly experimental as they were traditionally cinematic. A film of halves, "Lost Highway" is a compelling, yet lopsided neo-Noir thriller from the late 1990's utilizing a split-persona structure which Lynch later refined to greater effect in what many consider his masterpiece, 2001's "Mulholland Drive". This second film stands as a pinnacle of all things that make the work of this American auteur great; an inscrutable mystery, a shifting and ambiguous tonal palette, high tension, visitations from nightmare worlds and subjective intersections between the beyond and the everyday mundane. As if in a dream, the protagonists of the increasingly unstable realitie(s) depicted in these contemporary noir find themselves enticed into realms of ominous portent on their journey to discovery.

Thom Anderson's "Los Angeles Plays Itself" will remain the definintive exploration of film about film in The City of Dreams. Yet there are few contenders in the way of dramas set within the glitz, grime and glamour of Hollywood, that approach the corpus of Los Angeles as seen in the exploratory surgery of "Inland Empire". In a filmography of nonlinear, nestled, Borgesian structures and metaphysical dreamlike intrusions to the real, Lynch assembled his most expressly matryoshka vessel for "Inland Empire" in its amalgam of his own fictional cursed production and the mythic nature of some of Hollywood's greatest, lost and never-completed films. Lynch's film itself containing a contemporary variation on a Polish folktale in which a boy who, sparking a reflection after passing through a doorway, "caused evil to be born" by his doppelganger entering the world. In its other facet it also tells of a girl who, wandering through an alleyway behind a marketplace, "discovers a palace". These two threads are woven into the production of the fictional film-within-the-film, titled "On High in Blue Tomorrows", which is revealed to be a remake of the folklore's original cursed vehicle, a German feature titled "47". The multifaceted, multilayered nature of the "Perpetual Evolution" of Lynch's art, as seen in this film about film is possibly best encapsulated by Jim Emerson in his review for RogerEbert.com; "Inland Empire" presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard", Lynch's "Persona" or Lynch's "8 1/2", they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", Bunuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon", and others.".

David Lynch & Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks: The Return" Airing on Showtime: May 21 - Sept 10 | "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" released on Criterion Collection: Oct 17 | David Lynch Movie Night at Seattle Art Museum: Jul 18 | 25th Annual Twin Peaks Festival: July 28 - 30

For those that read the initial reviews of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" from Cannes in 1992, and found that we were to get a significantly truncated cut of the film in theaters stateside, the decades-long wait to has came to a close in 2015 with the release of the "Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery". Now to be rereleased this fall by The Criterion Collection in an upgraded 4K restoration overseen by the director, the only notable remaining "missing piece" is the integration of the excised footage into the cut as screened at film festival on the Riviera some 25 years ago. Lynch spoke with The Guardian on the eve of its release, exuberant at the opportunity to return to the content and reassemble a narrative from their fragmented form. The director made good on his promise editing these deleted scenes from the film into a stand-alone viewing experience featuring 90 minutes of previously unseen footage as The Missing Pieces. Along with both seasons of the original series these were given a hi-definition restoration and transfer packaged together in the lavish box set edition. Not only revealing the larger world of Twin Peaks cut from the cinematic prequel, it present scenes from the series and promotional content, the details of which documented by Nick Newman in his piece for FilmStage, "Twin Peaks’ Reborn With David Lynch-Approved Blu-ray Box Set".

Though Booed at Cannes and the target of frustrated Twin Peaks fans and critics upon its release, the film has since gained a reevaluation with context and distance, with pieces like Calum Marsh's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is David Lynch's Masterpiece" increasingly more common. With the cinematic expansion of it's narrative offered by the Missing Pieces the film watches as a connective thread between the first two seasons of the original and the current Twin Peaks: The Return miniseries. Allusions to both the Latin American connection, David Bowie's errant FBI Agent Philip Jeffries and the relationship these bear to the Lodge Entities seen in the meeting space depicted above an anonymous convenience store are all expanded upon. There is also a epilogue sequence cut from the theatrical version featuring events that follow immediately on the conclusion of the second season. Cause to rejoice, it's been a long and circuitous path from "How ‘Twin Peaks’ Got Lost, and Found Its Way Back" arriving in the midst of the abundance of cinematic, longform television. Rather than a recreation of the concerns, technical form and approach of the original, the miniseries advances the art beyond the standards of what one would expect to experience even in the current environment of longform streaming content. Retaining only the themes of Angelo Badalamenti's original score, the series also features a selection from Chromatics' Johnny Jewel, who "Recorded More than 20 Hours of Music for 'Twin Peaks'". While dispensing with much of its self-referential style and form, the series also exhibits the director's love of film, in its numerous nods to cinema history.

Delivering a experience that watches like nothing else, it is truly "Beautiful, Grandiose, Cryptic, and Punishingly Tedious: That's Why Twin Peaks is So Beguiling". For those who are following the new miniseries, an assembly of critical interpretation, enhancement and viewing aides have been thankfully documented by Criterion via their ongoing "Twin Peaks Returns" column. Expertly insightful weekly recaps can also be found on Mubi, The New York Times (concluding with a serving of weekly "donuts") and The Guardian, for those looking to delve deeper. Returning to the subject of the film; I found myself among the minority of fans of the original series who considered "Fire Walk With Me" to be the metaphorical icing on the cake at the time of its release. Though not the theatrical epilogue to the series that many viewers had hoped for, on the big screen it watched as a condensation of Lynch and Frost's central themes unadulterated by quirky small town americana, willfully eccentric surrealist intrusions, and soap opera tropes. It marked a forceful return to the essence of the story and it's concerns after the guest directors of the second season and their often hollow attempts at replicating all things Lynchian. (Tim Hunter of "River's Edge" fame was an exception. His episodes still hit the right notes while expanding the world Frost/Lynch created). Hunter aside, the Frost/Lynch directed episodes still watch as though on a higher operating level than much of the series' content. They are almost without exception, the singular Twin Peaks magic-in-a-bottle concoction of myth, small town drama, suggested surrealism, tone and ambiance.

Its truncation due to ABC's cancellation and David's hurried reconciliation of the series is still as abstract, brutal, emotionally dissociative and heartbreaking to watch as it was over two decades ago. "Fire Walk With Me" can be seen as a reconciliation of sorts to the series' abrupt and dramatically tragic conclusion. For it's 20th anniversary, Alex Pappademas of Grantland returned to the prequel with fresh eyes and decades distance and finds it less a departure, and more true to what David's cinematic world and it's concerns are really about, making for an, "Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me". This next week also sees the 25th annual Twin Peaks Festival held as it is every year since 1993, at the locations featured most in the series itself; the towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie. The three days of the festival consisting of the annual night of film screenings, site tours and celebrity dinner and Q&A with select members of the series' cast and creators, which for this year's iteration includes; Charlotte Stewart, Kimmy Robertson, Sabrina Sutherland, Sherilyn Fenn, James Marshall, Al Strobel and others, with the annual tradition of surprise guests (past years have included Ray Wise and co-writer Bob Engels). Or even, as was the case earlier this year, Sheryl Lee attending the screening. Proceeding the festival, the Seattle Art Museum hosts their, "David Lynch Movie Night: The Art Life & Wild at Heart" with a screening of the new documentary on the artist's early life and the 1990 Cannes Palme d'Or winning feature length film.

"Now It's Dark: The Films of David Lynch" at SIFF Cinema: April 14 - May 14

Recent years have seen touring retrospectives of central figures from the late 20th Century in the New German Cinema movement "Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road", and the Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s, with "Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien". The landscape of American independent cinema of that decade would have an altogether different topography without the work of it's great sculptor of atmosphere, David Lynch. Referred to as "the greatest director of his era" by The Guardian's 2007 panel of critics, topping their 40 artists listed as having defined the last quarter century of cinema. His bold feature length entry of 1977 "Eraserhead" became one of the most influential midnight movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Playing in arthouse and independent cinemas late-night screenings alongside Jodorowsky's "El Topo", Water's "Pink Flamingos", Sharman's "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", and Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". More than a cult and underground phenomena, the film earned him the attention and funding of Mel Brooks and assistant director on "High Anxiety", Jonathan Sanger. Sanger became a champion of the young director, presenting him the working script adaptation from Sir Frederick Treves and Ashley Montagu's  "The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences" and "The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity". Distributed by Paramount and Universal worldwide, while independently funded, "The Elephant Man" would become Lynch's first studio feature film.

Working with an exceptional cast of professionals was also a first, the film's central characters of Joseph Merrick and Frederick Treves, portrayed by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins respectively, remains among both of the actor's most notable roles on film. While Lynch sourced Peter Ivers for the soundtrack for his first feature, and John Morris for his sophomore effort, the director's hands-on approach was already evident in the film's sound design and audible palette colored by it's pervasive atmosphere of ruin. Not limited to his boldly experimental freshman effort, this looming industrial underworld buried beneath the facade of everyday existence remains one of the reoccurring themes throughout the totality of his work. Time Out London spoke with the director on expressing this theme through the period setting of his second feature and personal scouting of the locations and shooting of key scenes in Liverpool Street Station and Butler’s Wharf in Southwark; "I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories. So here is Victorian England, and I don’t know this land, but I know factories, I know this is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so that side of it resonated with me. Then one day I’m standing in East London Hospital. A derelict hospital, but it still had beds in the wards. Thousands of pigeons, broken windows, but long, glorious hallways, fireplaces, all the details. I’m there in the hall looking into a ward and a wind entered me, and I was back in time. I knew it: 100 per cent. Victorian England. And I said: “Now I know it. No one can take it away from me.”

One of the stranger of all the twists in all the director's turns of fate was to come in the wake of "Elephant Man"'s critical success. The most popular film franchise of the 1980s helmed by George Lucas, had turned the spotlight on Lynch for him to direct the third installment in the Star Wars trilogy. He declined, citing Lucas' comprehensive vision of the fictional universe would allow for very little in the way of space to express his own. Soon after, another notable science fiction property would come the director's way in the form of Dino De Laurentiis licensing Frank Herbert's epic, "Dune", in the wake of it becoming available following the now legendary aborted project from Alejandro Jodorowsky. In a 1985 interview with the German periodical Tip Filmjahrbuch, Lynch details De Laurentiis' approaching him with the project and the source of his personal conceptualization of Herbert's universe; "This is how it happened: I went to Venice, just for an afternoon, to see the Piazza San Marco. Dino De Laurentiis bought me a book, which inspired all these things... A book about Venice. It inspired the idea, that in the world of "Dune" a Renaissance had taken place thousands of years ago, and this renaissance had been very powerful and far-reaching. And people built beautiful machines; they were so well-constructed, that they remained intact until now, the time, when the story begins. Of course this melange gives the humans certain mental abilities. But they need machines nonetheless, and these machines were built before discovering the "spice" Melange. This world is not a world of machines, but they are part of it." Final cut for "Dune" was in the hands of Universal Studios rather than its director, and the film remains a subject rarely broached by Lynch to this day.

As part of the contractual details of directing the film for De Laurentiis, Lynch was under obligation with the producer to direct two more films, the first of which was to be a planned sequel. In the wake of the film's poor box office and mixed critical reception this sequel was never developed beyond the stage of its initial script. The other was a more personal work. Developed from ideas that had been gestating as far back as 1973, and a screenplay that had been shopped around by the director since the late 1970s, De Laurentiis then became both its producer and distributor. Where other studios declined the screenplay due to its tarnished depiction of smalltown Amercan life, foreground presentation of violence, and strong sexual content, the Italian independent gave the director free reign within it's budgetary constrains and most importantly, power of final cut. This project would go on to be considered one of the most notable, and influential independent films of the 1980s. Not only a significant film within the independent cinema landscape of the decade, "Blue Velvet" earned David Lynch his first Academy Award nomination, and came to rank significantly within the BBC's 2015 global critical assessment of the 100 Greatest American Films ever made. Next month SIFF Cinema brings the restored print of this defining work in the Lynch canon along with six other features and the 2017 documentary on the artist's life as, "Now It's Dark: The Films of David Lynch". Running non-chronologically the month of April through May, the series begins with what the director endearingly refers to as his own personal "Philadelphia Story". A Philadelphia of perpetual gloaming ambiance, industrial ruin and decay. It's populace scratching out an existence through indecipherable patterns of domestic ritual in "Eraserhead"'s world of musically inclined radiators and innards-disgorging infants.

Lynch's intertwining of the lives of the historic figures of Joseph Merrick and Sir Frederick Treves, is to be screened in a rare print of "The Elephant Man" on 35mm. And the one birthing the other, his twinned projects for De Laurentiis, "Dune" and "Blue Velvet" will be presented in both new 4K digital restorations and on celluloid. The most recent in numerous documentaries on, "David Lynch: The Art Life" examines the artist's singular creative process through the lens of his multifaceted artistic endeavors. With beguiling charm, Lynch's personal (and psychological) philosophy are applied to the process of generating the paintings, sculptures, furniture design and music of this one-of-a-kind American original. SIFF's series concludes with the Los Angeles trilogy of films that have defined the director's recent work bridging the millennial cusp. Employing longer durations and expressly non-linear devices, this trio of works are as boldly experimental as they are traditionally cinematic. A film of halves, "Lost Highway" is a compelling, yet lopsided neo-Noir thriller from the late 1990's utilizing a split-persona structure which Lynch later refined to greater effect on his masterpiece, "Mulholland Drive". This second film stands as a pinnacle of all things that make the work of this American auteur great; an inscrutable mystery, a shifting and ambiguous tonal palette, high tension, visitations from nightmare worlds and subjective intersections between the beyond and the everyday mundane. As if in a dream, the protagonists of the increasingly unstable realitie(s) depicted in these contemporary noir find themselves enticed into realms of ominous portent on their journey to discovery.

Thom Anderson's once difficult to see licensing labyrinth, "Los Angeles Plays Itself" will remain the defining film on film in the City of Dreams. Yet there are few contenders in the way of dramas set within the glitz, grime and glamour of Hollywood that approach the body of Los Angeles as seen in the exploratory surgery of "Inland Empire". In a filmography of nonlinear, nestled, Borgesian structures and metaphysical dreamlike intrusions to the real, Lynch assembled his most expressly matryoshka vessel for "Inland Empire" in its amalgam of his own fictional cursed production and the mythic nature of some of Hollywood's greatest, lost and never-completed films. Lynch's film itself containing a contemporary variation on a Polish folktale in which a boy who, sparking a reflection after passing through a doorway, "caused evil to be born" by his doppelganger entering the world. In it's other facet it also tells of a girl who, wandering through an alleyway behind a marketplace, "discovers a palace". These two threads are woven into the production of the fictional film-within-the-film, titled "On High in Blue Tomorrows", which is revealed to be a remake of the folklore's original cursed vehicle, a German feature titled "47". The multifaceted, multilayered nature of the film as a film about film is possibly best encapsulated by Jim Emerson in his review for RogerEbert.com; "Inland Empire" presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard", Lynch's "Persona" or Lynch's "8 1/2", they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", Bunuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon", and others."

David Lynch and Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery" released on Blu-Ray: Jul 29 | 22nd Annual Twin Peaks Festival: Aug 1 - 3 | David Lynch Movie Night with "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" at Seattle Art Museum: Jul 31

For those that read the initial reviews of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" at Cannes in 1992, and found that we were to get a significantly truncated cut of the film in theaters stateside, the decades-long wait to has come to a close. Years since David Lynch made clear his intentions to release a significant amount of deleted scenes from the film this past May it was announced that the entire series and 90 minutes of previously unseen footage from the former will be given a hi-definition restoration and transfer packaged together as "Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery". Not only revealing the larger world of Twin Peaks cut from the cinema prequel to the series, it promises to present facets of the series and promotional content never before seen, the contents of which obsessively documented by Nick Newman in his piece for FilmStage, "Twin Peaks’ Reborn With David Lynch-Approved Blu-ray Box Set".

Though 'Booed at Cannes' and the target of frustrated Twin Peaks fans and critics who almost universally were expecting a continuation of the series' quirky balance of small town rural oddity, the film has since gained a reevaluation with hindsight and distance, with pieces like Calum Marsh's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is David Lynch's Masterpiece", increasingly more common. I for one found it at the time of it's release to be the metaphorical icing on the cake. Though not the theatrical epilogue to the series that many of us hoped for, on the big screen it watched like a more pure condensation of Lynch and Frost's central themes unadulterated by willfully eccentric surrealism and quirky intrusions from awww-shucksville. With the film we got back to the essence of the story's concerns after the series' meandering half-season of guest directors and their poor attempts at aping all things Lynchian. (Tim Hunter of "River's Edge" fame was a nice exception within all of that, his episodes still hit the right notes and dig deeper into the heart of the world Frost/Lynch created). Hunter aside though, it's only the Frost/Lynch episodes that really catch the spirit of the series and it's magic-in-a-bottle concoction of mystery, melodrama, myth, ambiance and tone. It's truncation due to ABC's cancellation and Lynch's hurried reconciliation of the series in two episodes is still as abstract, brutal, emotionally dissociative and heartbreaking to watch as it was over two decades ago. "Fire Walk With Me" acting as a reconciliation of sorts to the abrupt and dramatically tragic series' end.

For it's 20th anniversary, Alex Pappademas of Grantland returned to the prequel with fresh eyes and decades distance and finds it less a departure, and more true to what David's cinematic world and it's concerns are really about, making for an, "Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me". The release of these new restorations coinciding with this year's 22nd annual Twin Peaks Festival, held as it is every year since 1993 at the locations featured most in the series itself, the towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie. The three days of the festival consisting of the annual movie night, site tours and celebrity dinner and Q&A with select members of the series' cast and creators. For this year's iteration guests include; Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne), Jennifer Lynch (author of the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer), Chris Mulkey (Hank Jennings), James Marshall (James Hurley), Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran), Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley) and Charlotte Stewart (Betty Briggs), with the annual tradition of surprise guests (past years have included Ray Wise and co-writer Bob Engels). And inaugurating the festival as they do every year the Seattle Art Museum hosts their Lynch-themed night, "Twin Peaks/David Lynch: Coffee, Cherry Pie & The Dark Night of the Soul" with a screening of the new hi-definition print of the feature length film!