SF/Arts Curator Insight

“There are, in movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head,” wrote the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis. “It is a head where the wild things grow.” One of cinema’s great visual stylists, Lynch, who has been called a pornographic fabulist whose dense, powerful imagery imprinted itself on the American subconscious and never let go, died in January. Mixing a singular brew of expressionism, surrealism, the macabre and emotional longing, he shared his nightmarish fever dreams with audiences for over forty years. The heavy erotic sensuality of “Mulholland Drive,” his deliriously bizarre, operatic, ultimately toxic Hollywood fantasy, as well as “Blue Velvet,” a film Guy Maddin once called “a hilarious, red hot poker to the brain”; “Wild at Heart” and “Lost Highway” are among the films shown. The latter was co-written by Lynch and Berkeley screenwriter, Barry Gifford. (They hoped it would be made in black & white. It wasn’t.) It’s worth catching the March 8 screening to hear Gifford, a lively raconteur with a colorful, picaresque past and pithy insights into Lynch and screenwriting.