by Vangelis Rassias

David Lynch, for me, had the same effect in cinema that Diane Arbus had in photography… I met him in Cannes. It was 1990. I remember when I entered the suite where he was giving an interview, to do his portrait, his gaze. The way he looked at me. An intense, penetrating gaze. What can I say about Lynch… His cinema taught me a lot in photography. And what can be said about his motion pictures! The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, won the Palme d’Or 1990, Lost Highway, The Straight Story’, Mulholland Drive’… He touched almost all forms of the visual arts. Screenwriter, actor, painter, musician, author and producer… known for his dreamy and surreal style, as well as the themes that unite his filmography, such as the deconstruction of the concept of America. Lynch is known for juxtaposing surreal or menacing elements with everyday environments, as well as for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or threat. Bon voyage David on en parlera… And a Psychoanalytic elegy ”David Lynch and the Paranoia of the Object of Dark Desire”. David Lynch’s art does not reproduce the visible, it makes it visible. The way in which the unconscious is invested in the gaze sets the framework within which the subject of representation will be introduced. In the perverted element, the erotic meaning prevails over the functionality. There lies the deconstruction that psychotic delirium brings about, even if artificially. David Lynch strips away the human personality, leaving it naked, in front of its dark desires. And suddenly the dark desires are illuminated in a wild psychoanalytic process that subjects us. This is the power of David Lynch’s Signified Image.