New David Lynch film Inland Empire shot on DV

None the less I'm very curious about this movie. David Lynch was painter and an abstrac artist before he got into movies. This could turn out very interesting.
 
rawfa, I couldn't agree more with you about the stuff on this board being better than what David Lynch put out on IE.
As I watch the Drama fest entries, I'm utterly amazed at the talent and potential of digital filmmaking, then I realize how off David Lynch was on Inland Empire.
 
I was pretty shocked when I heard he was making his next film on DV, and after seeing it yesterday I'm still shocked! I'll always go and see anything Lynch puts out (I did my dissertation on him at college years ago, and coming from a painting to film background myself, he’s kind of my hero), so I was looking forward to this, and really interested to see if he could pull something off here. I thought the footage held up surprisingly well on a lot of shots, but on about a third I found the low resolution really distracting, especially the wider shots. If there had been a mixture of low res and hi res, it could have been a more legitimate and interesting effect, but for a whole film I was just sitting there wishing for the infinitely nicer look of his previous output, which is probably not what he intended.

Having been "in love" with film, and having produced such fantastic images with it, I just don't understand how he could downgrade this much and think it looked ok! The argument for less constraining production values makes sense, but I don't get why he didn't just use some cheap HD variant for at least some of it (or expensive HD variant, I can't imagine that would have been a problem for him).

I think for this kind of long mood piece, it really demanded better aesthetics than DV. I think it would really have been a better film if shot on a better format. I know there is an argument that content is king, tools are just tools, but this kind of confirmed for me that image quality really does matter, certainly on a 3 hour long mood piece. I think without the low res video look I could have sat back and let the film wash over me more.

As for the content, it's a very long experimental video that feels like some sort of test run for Mullholland Drive. I could also imagine it as a gallery installation. I don't think the long takes and easy experimentation that DV affords served him so well here as judged next to his other work, which is interesting in itself. I've nothing against experimental work and am into making it myself, but here there just felt like there was less going on at unnecessarily greater length. I got the impression, and he has said this, that he didn’t really know what was going on whilst making it, and it didn’t feel to me as strong or coherent a piece of art as his other work. The next day, it is not quite in my head still the way his last two films were.

The rabbits were great though :smile:
 
I love David Lynch. Eraserhead is one of my all-time favorite films. I really want to see Inland Empire, but sadly, my town doesn't have any kind of arthouse theatre, and very rarely ever shows films like this (well, not really Lynch type films, just independent films in general), so I'll probably have to wait for the DVD.
 
Well at least you'll be able to pause it for a toilet break (I was wishing I could!) and stretch out etc. Because of the low res videoishness of IE, I wouldn't say it's essential to see in the cinema, although his sound design deserves hearing on a good system as always.
 
This bit made me laugh. He's definitely a one off!

"Someone brought a new high-def camera up to the house a while ago to show it to me, and I looked at something on the lens and said, 'What is that thing?' And he said, 'That's the focus knob.' And I said, 'You don't have automatic focus?' And he said, 'No.'

"I didn't want to be mean to this man," Lynch says after a considered pause, "but I wouldn't buy this camera if it was the last camera in the world! I don't care if the lens buzzes 15 times [to search for focus] in the middle of the shot. It'll get it and I can float around the set and be inside the scene without having somebody there focusing the lens." Working that way after his experience using the PD150 on autofocus, he says, would be like "the theater of the absurd!"
Click to expand...
 
Just saw Inland Empire tonight. I was astounded. I just thought it was amazing. Completely nonsensical, and that would normally send me around the bend. But in this case, Lynch so masterfully took me through this crazy nightmare, I was riveted from beginning to end. Who needs a Red Camera if you can make films this interesting with a PD150 (okay, I'm still going to get a Red...but Inland Empire proves to me that the camera has almost nothing to do with the making an incredible movie).
 
Article: Village Voice

The Super Fun Of It
'Lynch made good on this promise—or bad, depending on your point of view—with last year’s release of Inland Empire, a movie shot with the Sony PD-150, a low-grade digital-video camera considered obsolete for serious feature filmmaking......

'Audiences expect the unexpected from Lynch, but many critics were appalled by this new direction. In thrall to the vanishing art of 35mm cinema, they failed to appreciate the extraordinary variety and visual richness of Inland Empire, with its encyclopedic investigation into the spatial and textural possibilities of video as video, not a low-rent replacement for film: the distortion of objects looming in the foreground and evocative ambiguity of background shadows; the unique beauty of a video dissolve and the dissolution of forms in "overexposed" light. To dismiss the medium of Inland Empire is to miss the message. Just as Mulholland Drive can be read as a cautionary tale about the effect of movies on consciousness, Inland Empire speaks to the isolation and fragmentation of the post-cinema psyche, the splintering of self in the matrix of the Internet. As such, it may be the first movie masterpiece that doesn't properly belong in movie theaters.....

“With traditional shooting on film, the equipment is so big and so heavy you need a large crew,” he says. “And the setup between shots takes a long time—sometimes a very long time. With digital, you have much less downtime—sometimes just moments. So what happens is, you stay in the scene, and there are less things around to break that scene. You’re in it-—you’re in it!”

full article at:

http://www.villagevoice.com/screens/0732,lee,77431,28.html
 
NoahK said:
It reminded him of the early days of 35mm? Lynch was directing in 1892? No wonder he's so weird. :)

Noah
Click to expand...

Sweet.

The one thing I will definitely credit this guy for is that he takes one of the most difficult parts of making a film, which is coming up with a good and solid ending, and finds a solution.

He just doesn't bother.

He abandons the narrative, tacks on some weird crap, and that's it. Many films that go wrong, do so at the end because the story hasn't been fleshed out well enough, or the resolution is poor, etc. Not so with Lynch.

No ending...no problem. Just throw on some wacked out scenes of non-sequitor and let the public attribute whatever deep meaning to them that they please. Take credit, take money, repeat.
 
Inland Empire basically said ,in 3 hours...all you dudes including myself, who wasted the cash and credit on all the "toys" and that useful BFA hanging on the wall, can't beat a little Sony cam, and a true artist.

I don't care, if you shoot on a friggin Cinealta, with Chrosziel Matte box, an SGPRO, w/ a collection of Zeiss Superspeeds and Primo anamorphics. Lynch, who is of age to collect social security checks, took all indie filmmakers to school with this film.


SD never looked better.
 
going to watch this this week.

I'm not sure anymore where I stand with mediums.

I love DV just as much as Film and just as much as I will 4k.
 
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