"Lumiere" by David Lynch (1996)

This treasure of a short film by David Lynch is part of a larger collection of film shorts made as a 100th-anniversary homage to to the Lumière Brothers, Lumière and Company. Shot on a Lumière camera, each directior edited in-camera and was constrained by three historical rules:

1. A short may be no longer than 52 seconds
2. No synchronized sound
3. No more than three takes

enjoy this short jewel and then make the jump for a short breakdown on how Lynch is able to show us the "infinite opening" of time . . .

 

 

David Lynch, Gilles Deleuze, and the infinite opening of aberrant movement . . . jump!

The short is strange and disjunctive: The police find the dead body of a young girl, which is then suggested to be a premonition of a young girl (the same girl?) sitting on a couch. Has she actually died or is it simply a psychological universe and this is how she sees herself—a domestic nightmare? The screen goes black and then suddenly we are transported out of time and space to a bed in a forest where three (Victorian?) women look out of frame—seemingly in fear (possibly having been violated or actually in an edenic state?). By whom and when? White smoke, and then we are transported to an alien/demonic space where a woman is being tortured in a vat. Is this the girl that the police have found dead? Is this the girl in the calico dress? Is this the torture of a domestic space? Demonic time-travelers having their way with Earth-girls? We pass through fire; the police come to the door of the girl in the calico apron to notify her (of her own death?).

What we commonly call "Lynchian" is not simply his attraction to the macbre, but the way Lynch masterfully plays with time to open us to the possibilities of the transspatial and spiritual (Movement-Image 17). In an excellent little book called Devotional Cinema, filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky says this subversion of our absorption in the temporal opens us up to the possibilities of the depths of our own reality (Devotional Cinema 16). This is a major step in 1) moving beyond the literary quality of cinema towards cinema as a unique artform, and 2) moving beyond a cinema as mere entertainment and consumption.

Because traditional cinema is dependent on simulating the "natural" movement of things through space, it is implied that there is the possibility of an "aberrant movement"—a movement that is jarring in its absolute rejection of that organic logic. When that organic logic is undercut, then the burden of shot editing is placed on what an image shows. Each frame is an opening to a "Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space" (Time-Image 37).

What David Lynch accomplishes so skillfully is to remind us that to understand the depths of human experience—for good or (in Lynch's case) for ill—we must be willing to move beyond the illusion that time is subordinate to movement and action through space. We experience in time. Time is in us. Movement and action are subordinate to that reality. We are memory machines, and each passing moment builds an ever increasing circuit of meaning and understanding in our daily existence.

A skillfully crafted cinema can show us the depths of human existence—the scene of human living—like no other art form before. It can free us from cliche and illusion and open us up to profound depths and truths—both social and spiritual.