David Lynch’s film “Lost Highway” is one of our most important inspirations for this film project. I like the creepy atmosphere throughout the whole film and how he mixed up story lines to make the film more mysterious and harder to understand. I actually like the process of figuring out a confusing film, research about it and reading other audience’s opinion is very fun and also helped me know more about the film it self.

David Lynch himself once said ” If you don’t know what it is, a sore can be very beautiful, but as soon as you name it, it stops being beautiful to most people.”

I absolutely love this quote by David Lynch.

The film “Lost Highway” was often commented as the most chaotic David Lynch film. Not in a bad way, it is just a way to describe how confusing this film is. The story can be split into multiple story lines. Reality, imagination and dream. All three story lines have been mixed together. I think I of the best parts is the transition from Fred watching the video of himself killing his wife to Fred being interrogated by the police. These two scenes are not from the same storyline and also are not connected David Lynch actually hid a lot of things between those two scenes. But the arrangement here misleads the audience and made them think that Fred in in prison for killing his wife when he actually killed someone else.

I have just explained a confusing part of the film, and I think my explanation have already made it sound less artistic and beautiful. As an abstract work, the best thing is to get the audience curious, the work is at its best moment when people don’t really know what it is. For my own works, I also prefer my audience when they are confused and I love it when they ask me what is in the photo. I think it’s the same for “Lost Highway”, it is very amazing and beautiful when audience are confused about it because the complicated structure is just so well done and people are shocked that David Lynch is able to make such a cool film. This feeling will decrease little by little when the audience understands more and more about the film. When they finally figured out everything, they will just think “Wow, that’s a good film”. But the amazingness and surprises they felt when they first saw the film, will no longer be there.

Because “Lost Highway” is so amazing, we also tried to use a similar technique in our own film, mixing reality and memory together and also including shots to signify certain things (walking down the stairs in dark) and also the transition to mental illness. As a short film, we tried our best to make the style close to David Lynch’s. By making the structure more complicated, I hope it can get the audience to think more about the story and understand the emotion we are trying to communicate through the film.

 

I think in this film, David Lynch took abstraction to a very high level that most people couldn’t reach. To fully understand this film will require research and watch it for multiple times. The mysterious man, the lightning and windy effect in the hallway and the bright transitions between different scenes all look very abstract and adds some sense of expressionism and surrealism to the film. Instead of a movie, I consider “Lost Highway” more of an artistic film. This film made me want to learn more about David Lynch and it also helped our group develop more ideas for our own film.

Reference:

RMIT University 2018, David Lynch interview (2017), YouTube, 14 September, RMIT University, Melbourne, viewed 14 September 2018, <https://youtu.be/S8Tc5lV2wg8>