The Image, The Film-Maker, His Cow, And Her Cheese [INLAND EMPIRE]
- Thread starter hundredmillionlifetimes
- Start date
borderpolice
Well-known member
I finally got to see INLAND EMPIRE; it's one of Lynch's finest, an overwhelming experience on every level; like Mulholland Drive in many ways (thematically - an actress in danger, in its switching between different worlds/realities), but far more dislocated and disturbing.
Lynch's sound design is fantastic, with an even greater use of noise and distortion than usual; in fact I was reminded strongly of Burial's production - e.g. the "Strange The Things Love Can Do" song, while a typical 6/8 blues shuffle in the familiar Badalimenti style, is swathed in reverb and low-end rumble, with the voice heavily effected. The opening scene features a crackling record turning and heavily distorted voiceover. He uses Beck's "Black Tambourine" in another scene, which as a muted percussion-heavy track works reasonably well (Beck's vocals thankfully low in the mix), but I couldn't help thinking how much better something like Burial's "Distant Lights" would have been...
Lynch's sound design is fantastic, with an even greater use of noise and distortion than usual; in fact I was reminded strongly of Burial's production - e.g. the "Strange The Things Love Can Do" song, while a typical 6/8 blues shuffle in the familiar Badalimenti style, is swathed in reverb and low-end rumble, with the voice heavily effected. The opening scene features a crackling record turning and heavily distorted voiceover. He uses Beck's "Black Tambourine" in another scene, which as a muted percussion-heavy track works reasonably well (Beck's vocals thankfully low in the mix), but I couldn't help thinking how much better something like Burial's "Distant Lights" would have been...
I really cant wait to hear this one again. I'll probably cop the dvd just for it.
Indeed. The opening almost had me shouting out "HAUNTOLOGY!" (ok- even if you are unaware of hauntology as blog meme the image of a crackling record in this context definitely aligns with all thing hauntological...) but I'm unsure quite how that image correlates with the rest of the film (beyond the broadest of hauntological brushstrokes- the haunting of the script, the simulatory properties of media vs Lynch's post-everything nightmare of actors/scripts/sets and ontological worm holes...)
That opening record I think says something oblique about "the world's longest-running radio play"... I'm not sure how/if it relates to the movie, but I'm tempted to extrapolate - the long-running play could be Hollywood's long-running reliance on film stock, linear narrative, stable identity, financial manipulation etc. - all things that Lynch's move to digital video has freed him from practically and artistically (even if he revisits them thematically and hauntologically).
Of course the concept of exposing the seamy underbelly of Hollywood as the underlying reality (or any such movement, a la the Matrix) is precisely the sort of meta-narrative that Lynch's practise refuses; there is no stable reality to rely on to make sense of the shifting and overlapping appearances and fictions; as in where Laura Dern's death scene (as which character? Dern was herself surprised to hear Lynch say that she played four characters; she had thought she was playing three) on Hollywood and Vine is followed by a "cut" from the director and the crew applauds; we think we are back in the movie-making world, but Dern staggers on, still trapped inside her own fiction, to a theatre where she sees herself on-screen... in the theatre, seeing herself on-screen... (cf also the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive - "It's all a recording...").
Interesting also that Lynch says that film is "dead to me now" - not just that he's not using it anymore, but that it's dead; therefore it is free to return as a ghost... it also sounds like what a someone says of a family member or friend they have been betrayed by...
Fitting also that the "film" (can we call DV film?) opens with a needle crackling across a record and ends with a remix; the movie (is DV still moving pictures?!) itself is a kind of fractalised remix of Mulholland Drive theme's of identity swap and Hollywood corruption (among other things).
dHarry: Film is, in a way, deterritorialized and then re-territorialized from the product of the business practises of Hollywood into all image making and role playing in the world...
You are right film itself is almost the ghost, the revenant, between being and unbeing (the curious flatness of image and the alienating pixelization of the medium at once no longer aims to reproduce reality as does film, but rather as K-punk points out in his recent piece on IE, it is itself the very stuff of our current reality in the digital video of camera phones and embedded youtube clips...).
You could make a point perhaps about Lynch's journey from Lost Highway's video-camera horror ("I like to remember things my own way", the wielding of the camera as a weapon to be feared more than any gun by the "mystery man" etc) to Lynch himself as Digital video assassin, murdering film to allow it to re-occur outside of the cinema itself ("something has got out of the script" indeed...)
The weird thing is that whilst a lot of reviews point out as you do the superficial resemblance to "Mulholland Drive", in almost every way it feels entirely distinct- obviously texturally in the very stock it is shot upon, and ontologically (no easy master narrative to cosily and smugly fall back upon this time) but also in the manner in which the symbolic reference points are structured--- the Poles, the "good with animals" trope, the timings, "47" etc... no longer appear as simple and rote post-Freudian symbols, but rather as predictable (you know they will appear, and when) and yet inexplicable (their meanings seem closed)--- even the vaunted Lynchian "dream-logic" has been filled with holes this time...
Not just a remix, but a mimed remix to boot...
You are right film itself is almost the ghost, the revenant, between being and unbeing (the curious flatness of image and the alienating pixelization of the medium at once no longer aims to reproduce reality as does film, but rather as K-punk points out in his recent piece on IE, it is itself the very stuff of our current reality in the digital video of camera phones and embedded youtube clips...).
You could make a point perhaps about Lynch's journey from Lost Highway's video-camera horror ("I like to remember things my own way", the wielding of the camera as a weapon to be feared more than any gun by the "mystery man" etc) to Lynch himself as Digital video assassin, murdering film to allow it to re-occur outside of the cinema itself ("something has got out of the script" indeed...)
The weird thing is that whilst a lot of reviews point out as you do the superficial resemblance to "Mulholland Drive", in almost every way it feels entirely distinct- obviously texturally in the very stock it is shot upon, and ontologically (no easy master narrative to cosily and smugly fall back upon this time) but also in the manner in which the symbolic reference points are structured--- the Poles, the "good with animals" trope, the timings, "47" etc... no longer appear as simple and rote post-Freudian symbols, but rather as predictable (you know they will appear, and when) and yet inexplicable (their meanings seem closed)--- even the vaunted Lynchian "dream-logic" has been filled with holes this time...
Not just a remix, but a mimed remix to boot...
Last edited:
hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
Ontological Collapse: We're All Ghosts Now
Yes indeed, gek-opel, IE is a move on from the Mobius-Striped puzzle-solving narrative trajectories of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr (surely a female, soft-toned, albeit heart-rending, version of the former): there is here no escaping the - vertiginous nothing of the Real of - the unconscious (and the ridiculous sublime), just a recursive working out ... More like a complete break [from Hollywood too] than a recombinatorial synthesis, though.
Needless to say, as you've mentioned K-punk's post already, also worthwhile are these other blogosphere links to commentaries on the film:
Inland Empire [from Traxus at American Stranger]
The Spider In His Web [Daniel at Antigram]
Traumarbeit [from Owen at Sit Down Man, You're A Bloody Tragedy]
Something got out from inside the story [Mark at K-Punk]
Lynch, of course, is right in other ways - beyond the West being one giant film-set - about film being dead: the art-house modernist film and film market has now totally collapsed. Ironically, IE is one of the very few low-budget art-house films of the past year (out of thousands made) that has been critically and economically successful (Owen in his piece is mistaken on this, when he claims that the film has been a flop; on the contrary, its been hugely successful, and outside the Hollywood-hegemony of multiplex land: 99.9 percent of low-budget independent films no longer even receive a release, never making it past the festival circuit). The situation is so chronic that two of Europe's largest independent producer-distributors, the London-based Hanway and the Paris-based Celluloid Dreams [with titles by Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Peter Weir, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Francois Ozon, Wim Wenders, Michael Haneke, Todd Solondz, among others] have just downsized-merged to form Dreamachine, a company that's smaller than either of the original companies.
[And just to add: Dreamachine will be concentrating on English-language, Hollywood-narrative-driven, commercial projects, while "milking" the internet for digital distribution of its film libraries. While, on the other hand, one of Britain's biggest-budgeted movies of recent years, Boyle's Sunshine, with its surgically slapped-on, re-assurringly twee and cathartic Hollywood denouement, gets dismissed as a speculative, daring "indy" movie! Ha!]
Yes indeed, gek-opel, IE is a move on from the Mobius-Striped puzzle-solving narrative trajectories of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr (surely a female, soft-toned, albeit heart-rending, version of the former): there is here no escaping the - vertiginous nothing of the Real of - the unconscious (and the ridiculous sublime), just a recursive working out ... More like a complete break [from Hollywood too] than a recombinatorial synthesis, though.
Needless to say, as you've mentioned K-punk's post already, also worthwhile are these other blogosphere links to commentaries on the film:
Inland Empire [from Traxus at American Stranger]
The Spider In His Web [Daniel at Antigram]
Traumarbeit [from Owen at Sit Down Man, You're A Bloody Tragedy]
Something got out from inside the story [Mark at K-Punk]
Lynch, of course, is right in other ways - beyond the West being one giant film-set - about film being dead: the art-house modernist film and film market has now totally collapsed. Ironically, IE is one of the very few low-budget art-house films of the past year (out of thousands made) that has been critically and economically successful (Owen in his piece is mistaken on this, when he claims that the film has been a flop; on the contrary, its been hugely successful, and outside the Hollywood-hegemony of multiplex land: 99.9 percent of low-budget independent films no longer even receive a release, never making it past the festival circuit). The situation is so chronic that two of Europe's largest independent producer-distributors, the London-based Hanway and the Paris-based Celluloid Dreams [with titles by Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Peter Weir, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Francois Ozon, Wim Wenders, Michael Haneke, Todd Solondz, among others] have just downsized-merged to form Dreamachine, a company that's smaller than either of the original companies.
[And just to add: Dreamachine will be concentrating on English-language, Hollywood-narrative-driven, commercial projects, while "milking" the internet for digital distribution of its film libraries. While, on the other hand, one of Britain's biggest-budgeted movies of recent years, Boyle's Sunshine, with its surgically slapped-on, re-assurringly twee and cathartic Hollywood denouement, gets dismissed as a speculative, daring "indy" movie! Ha!]
Last edited:
Doubt it. There's a snippit of the remix available here: Amazon product ASIN B0000ACAO3 and that sure as hell wasn't what I heard.
It does sound totally full-on though but perhaps that's testament to your local cinema's PA? Or, knowing DL's love of sound, perhaps he tweaked it?
borderpolice
Well-known member
I heard the (a?) felix remix. It's proper house, i.e. prominent 4/4 bass drum. not what was played at the end of the movie. Sinerman has been covered a lot. i heard a horsepower version recently (with a male singer).
hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
Another thrilling and intense write-up on the film here, with a follow-up here.
Finally after three hours of being tossed through the body, spun through non-narrative sequences about narrative and the unconscious, lulled by Lynch’s masterful use of light and sound, the entire movie lets go into an absurd musical number in which the whores seem to take the narrative by the reigns, rise into their glory and belt out a song while Laura Dern sits front and center and stares back at us. It seems as though the female constructions rise to the surface and take control of this madness. Or do they? Or have they always been in control of the narrative? After all, the vaginal wall does have that leak.
“I don’t know where I am,” says the faceless actress in the opening scene. The answer is that she is everywhere and nowhere. She is today, yesterday, and tomorrow. She is a never-ending story. David Lynch’s story. Inland Empire explodes everything Lynch has done before in his obsessive reproduction of the history of the female body as produced by the male unconscious (Lynch’s conscious grasp of his unconscious specifically). Inland Empire has left behind any rational grasp of the outside world. We now are entirely Inland – inside the body, inside the sexual unconscious, inside the narrative constructions of that body and unconscious. And do you know what? I like it inside there. It feels just like home to me. More ...
[ ... ]
But maybe now that I’ve told you how sublimely cathartic the movie was on second viewing, I can come back to it a third time and dissect it scene by scene by scene by scene. Utterly brilliant. Utterly beautiful. Utterly sublime. I am overwhelmed. I am a woman obsessed. More ...
“I don’t know where I am,” says the faceless actress in the opening scene. The answer is that she is everywhere and nowhere. She is today, yesterday, and tomorrow. She is a never-ending story. David Lynch’s story. Inland Empire explodes everything Lynch has done before in his obsessive reproduction of the history of the female body as produced by the male unconscious (Lynch’s conscious grasp of his unconscious specifically). Inland Empire has left behind any rational grasp of the outside world. We now are entirely Inland – inside the body, inside the sexual unconscious, inside the narrative constructions of that body and unconscious. And do you know what? I like it inside there. It feels just like home to me. More ...
[ ... ]
But maybe now that I’ve told you how sublimely cathartic the movie was on second viewing, I can come back to it a third time and dissect it scene by scene by scene by scene. Utterly brilliant. Utterly beautiful. Utterly sublime. I am overwhelmed. I am a woman obsessed. More ...
don_quixote
Trent End
out on dvd today, in case you missed it
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Should be able to post a waffle-less dissection of the film here soon - my genius bro' is on the case.
No pressure. ;-)
No pressure. ;-)
Last edited:
ambushed by samples
actually kind of annoyed me when i noticed. you're taken out of the film at an important moment and start thinking "oh that's the bit burial pinched". oh well.
and then burial went and sampled the film for the intro to untrue.
actually kind of annoyed me when i noticed. you're taken out of the film at an important moment and start thinking "oh that's the bit burial pinched". oh well.
Last edited:
version
Well-known member
This one's just been remastered,
"The restoration was… kind of magical. But all of the things there try to be true to the original ideas that conjured the whole thing to begin with. So because we were shooting with the Sony PD150 it was low-res, then it was up-ressed with that day’s technology, and now things have progressed—we’ve got this AI thing going towards it with algorithms, or whatever they use—and lo and behold: I saw now this… depth coming. Beauty coming. Deeper colors. More focus. Richer look. It was a miracle. It was so beautiful. And then in sound, these new technologies for cleaning dialogue. Both those things were utilized for this restoration. So it is a much better INLAND EMPIRE because of this modern technology, but it’s the same in another way. Same ideas and being true to the same ideas."
"The restoration was… kind of magical. But all of the things there try to be true to the original ideas that conjured the whole thing to begin with. So because we were shooting with the Sony PD150 it was low-res, then it was up-ressed with that day’s technology, and now things have progressed—we’ve got this AI thing going towards it with algorithms, or whatever they use—and lo and behold: I saw now this… depth coming. Beauty coming. Deeper colors. More focus. Richer look. It was a miracle. It was so beautiful. And then in sound, these new technologies for cleaning dialogue. Both those things were utilized for this restoration. So it is a much better INLAND EMPIRE because of this modern technology, but it’s the same in another way. Same ideas and being true to the same ideas."
Strange What Love Does: David Lynch on Remastering INLAND EMPIRE
Suffice it to say interviewing David Lynch constitutes a white whale for yours truly, let alone the Film Stage as a publishing entity. But let’s not turn sentimental. This conversation occurs on the occasion of Janus Films' 4K remastering of INLAND EMPIRE, which commenced its national rollout at...
thefilmstage.com
DLaurent
Well-known member
I'm a Lynch fanatic so do like this film. Having seen it several times now, it's not that 'non narrative'. She just goes through that backstage door and descends into a nightmare, but then again, I say similar about Lost Highway. Both make narrative sense if you work out the symbolism and dark humour.