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UAlbany film professor Rick Barney discusses impact of filmmaker David Lynch

Rick Barney
Lucas Willard
/
WAMC
Rick Barney

Filmmaker David Lynch died last week at age 78. The pioneering director and artist created works that have been puzzling, repulsing, and captivating audiences since his 1977 debut “Eraserhead” through the third and final season of his television series “Twin Peaks” in 2017.

Lynch’s films had a profound effect on University at Albany film professor Rick Barney.

Barney taught a course on Lynch’s unique camera techniques, a class he said brought together his personal and professional interests.

WAMC’s Lucas Willard spoke with Barney to learn more about the filmmaker and his impact.

When I was in grad school, 1979, I went to see Eraserhead in what was then the only way you could see it, which is a kind of a midnight movie situation. And as I wrote to Lynch much, much later, when he was very cautiously approaching being interviewed, I said, because the only language I could think of was, was this, “The top of my head came off!” Which is sort of how you experience it psychologically, because your mind is just blown. You can highly believe what you're seeing. It's enrapturing, it's horrifying, it's strangely appealing. And I simply said at that moment, I have to see everything this guy makes right after this. So that's exactly what happened. I got to the 90s, began my career as professor, and then slowly decided, well, yeah, I can figure this out. I can make this appeal to my colleagues, who are the ones who have to agree when they set up a schedule.

The thing about Lynch is that there is a very deceptive appearance in the way he talks and the way he presents himself, which is quite literally an “Aw shucks golly gee.” He's really well known for these kinds of folksy ways of talking. But the thing you can already tell, but you certainly do when you talk to him in person, is that there was an enormous intelligence there, just incredible. He would not have thought of himself as an intellectual. He was actually a little nervous around academic types, university professor types, like me, but the amount of smarts going on there was, was just phenomenal.

What were you able to communicate with him?

Well, I had to really work at it to make it a successful encounter. I interviewed him three times, and the first, really, was just kind of a trial balloon. I realized I was trying to get places with it, but it really was just about us becoming familiar, because when I first started talking to him in the year 2000, he still said that he wasn't really very good with words.

One of his former lovers, Isabella Rosselini, used to call the time when she was with him in the late 70s and 80s, his pre verbal stage. He will just say flat out that he doesn't particularly think of himself as having a strong suit in talking.

But did you get the impression that he was observing? I mean, David Lynch had practiced transcendental meditation, and was always talking about the world and what's around us, and drawing inspiration from sort of, you know, from being. Did you get a sense that when he was speaking with you, that he was also taking a lot in and observing you while you were reacting and speaking with him?

Certainly, to some degree. The thing is that for all of his hesitation to explain things or to respond to some kinds of questions, he's an incredible conversationalist. I mean, the one thing I knew was working, even the very first time we met, was that they had set this time period like, I think, was an hour, maybe hour and 15 minutes, and his assistants had to come in like, three times and say, “David, you're running over time.” So, I knew that then we were probably going to be, we would get somewhere eventually, even though it took a while because he's notoriously…I'm going to, I'm pausing here because it's inevitable I'm going to shift in and out of present and past tense because I'm still dealing with the fact that he's not with us now.

So, if that's the case, it's really about the way I'm still living with this and the way it's still alive for me, which I think is the only consolation all of us have now given the loss, but I knew that if we just kept talking, we would find interesting things, and we did.

Sometimes, I would be surprised by something I thought was casual in my remark or question, and he would really pause over that. Other times, one of his responses was, “Tell, that's your thing.” Because, no, no, we weren't. We're not going there. It was his very pleasant way of saying what, what he wasn't willing to do. But, man, we could talk. I mean, I, I knew, I realized that he's it's part of his creativity that things do not go in a straight line, even if you're just talking, and there's a kind of…it's not really meandering, but it has it can deflect and go in a new direction at any moment, and you just have to be ready for it as best you can be. So that's really fascinating, because it's a part of…trying to interview a person like him that is, of course, also very relevant to the kinds of movies that he makes.

These are well known stories. He really believes in chance. When he's already got a complete script, everything is set out. He knows how everything's supposed to go. And then an accident happens, or something that wasn't planned, and Lynch will go, “Oh, that’s gotta now has to be in the movie.” That's how we get the character, Bob from Twin Peaks. We were never supposed to see Bob, but an accidental angle with a mirror and a camera in one of the scenes he was shooting led to one of the assistants saying, “David, we have a problem.”

“Oh, what's the problem?”

Well, one of the grips, one of the assistants for carrying props and whatever had been caught in that mirror, crouching behind a chair.

With the wild hair and outfit and everything?

Yeah, it's almost like it was almost like destiny, because he had the look that was terrifying when they actually put him on screen. But Lynch thought about it, they shot that scene, but then he realized, no, actually, Bob is supposed to be in the movie.

So, I wanted to just back up a little bit and talk about your teaching in in working with students and showing them the works of David Lynch. And a focus, of your course, was the volitional camera, which I'm pretty sure I know what you mean, if you've seen any of David Lynch's films, where, sort of, the camera will move away from what's supposed to be on screen, or what the audience might suppose to be on screen….but maybe you can help explain it. Why did you want to focus on that?

Well, two things, one thing, if you're teaching in film studies, you're always wanting students to know about past movies, film history, what's going on before and how are directors responding, even if they don't tell you that they're responding to those kinds of movies. And again, while Lynch does not intellectualize his work, it's very clear that he's watched The Surrealists, and he's watched Hitchcock and he's watched on and on. So, I set up initially, the way the course was structured was something I called “David Lynch and his Others,” which was pairing one of his movies with some earlier film. So, the students would get a little bit of film history and then understand a little bit more about why Lynch was doing what he was doing as a response. So as an example, we did An Andalusian Dog along with Eraserhead. And I just said, “OK, guys, this was his first feature film. So you're just gonna have to get used to this. This is gonna be one of the stranger of the ones we'll watch, but you're gonna get the full treatment here, one way or another.” But we basically, without thinking of him as derivative, thought of him as responding to that kind of thing. The other thing, though you've just mentioned, the camera very often seems to have a mind of its own, but it's not associated with any one person or character.

Usually when the camera starts moving or tracking in certain ways, we consume its representation of someone walking or turning their head or whatever. But Lynch will, in a certain way, animate the camera, and it will do stuff that no character is doing or could even could do. And I asked the students to figure out what, what is this for? What? Why? Why does Lynch keep doing this? Because we've we tracked it from early way back up to Eraserhead all the way into Mulholland Drive. I haven't taught the course since his last feature film came out, Inland Empire, but it's there too, and it's also there in the third season of Twin Peaks, which is the last major thing he did, for Showtime some time ago. And I'm still working on it myself. I haven't written it up yet. I've given lectures and talks and incorporated into classes. But there's something…I mean, Lynch is always interested in things that take us out of ourselves, our typical way of seeing things, our habits of mind, our assumptions, even our preferences. And I think that he brings that over to the camera as well. The camera becomes, if you will, inhabited by something that's going to be more than us. In a sense, the camera becomes more than just a tool or a thing we use, but a thing that may, in fact, use us or bring us places we don't have any desire or plan to get there. So, I'm really fascinated by that, because I don't think that...I think it would be wrong to say that Lynch believes in all these worlds that He's given us in those but he didn't believe in that specific world. But he was absolutely fascinated with finding new worlds. However, he could get there, whatever means, strange stories, odd use of camera, visualizations. He was always trying. His famous saying was that when he wants to get his best experience from a movie it would be to make him dream. And I didn't know what that meant for a while, but I think that dreaming is about the possibility of other worlds and other possibilities.

Lucas Willard is a news reporter and host at WAMC Northeast Public Radio, which he joined in 2011. He produces and hosts The Best of Our Knowledge and WAMC Listening Party.
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