Dir: Stephane Ghez | France, Doc 63′
At the CANNES FILM FESTIVAL premiere David’s eldest son Riley was there to introduce An Enigma In Hollywood to a packed audience. Joining him was the film’s French director Stephane Ghez who offers up a cohesive and enjoyable sortie into ‘Lynchland’ that certainly makes us want to visit the archive again and even re-watch this modest 63 minute outing.
Amongst the talking heads, Laura Dern is particularly engaging in her efforts to decipher David’s work explaining how small towns, such Bois Idaho, where he grew up during the 1950s, fascinated the director because they embodied for him an era of safety and unlimited promise in those iconic items such as the diner, the milkshake and the drive-in. But beneath the safety and comfort lay a weird and often unpalatable truth.
In his film Lynch sets about pealing away this homeliness to reveal the weirdness, such as the time he saw a naked woman running through the streets of his neighbourhood, and was frightened rather than appalled. It meant the safety had been compromised. The sequence, starring Isabella Rossellini, was brought to life in Blue Velvet (1986).
Later, of course, David himself describes Philadelphia’s industrial wasteland as the ‘perfect place to have a picnic’. It was his enduring obsession with art that allowed David the possibility to access the darkness within him, to show things as they’d never been seen before.
Kyle MacLachlan describes how Twin Peaks allowed David the possibility to take his unique film language and sensibility to the TV and elevate the medium. Isabella Rossellini, Naomi Watts
give their valuable impressions of each of the films they appeared in, along with two of David’s wives Peggy Lentz and Mary Sweeney who talk about his personality in relation to his creative output, Eraserhead emerging as the most personal.
Rather than trying to fathom out a general meaning, everyone should interpret each film personally and and take away a unique impression. A enjoyable and absorbing mini doc. @MeredithTaylor
CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | CANNES CLASSICS 2025