Two of the stunning displays created from sketches by David Lynch for the Galeries Lafayette department store, Paris. The series is entitled Machine-Abstraction-Women, and I don’t think Mr Lynch would mind too much having his description of the works translated in an extruded manner from French to English:
I was always fascinated by the spectacle of the women in front of the windows of the department stores. By designing the fronts of the Lafayette Galleries, I wanted to show all the identities which coexist at the woman of the 21st century. With the reflection of glass which returns the floutée image of the passers by, this set of parallel universes approaches my films, where the same actress interprets several characters. I drew very abstract decorations. Landscapes cubists populated of sculptures, wheels, pieces of furniture, of vidéos, sounds. I see these windows like a labyrinth, a street museum where to move through indices. A window, it is a transparent door on the unknown. (More.)
Much as I like Lynch’s films, I’ve never been very taken with his paintings, they always seem to lack the powerful quality he achieves in other media. But I like these a great deal and it’s a shame this is a one-off commission for a store. He’s also produced an attendant series of lithograph works, I See Myself.
• David Lynch aux Galeries
• David Lynch en vitrine
Previously on { feuilleton }
• David Lynch in Paris
• Inland Empire
Years ago in college I took 2 courses in French language. Even now, having lost track of most of what I learned, reading the article I can get the general feel and even some details behind what is being discussed, but if I were to watch a movie in French without subtitles I wouldn’t be able to understand what was being said. Since the article, and the number of times I’ve heard of him being in Paris, would indicate that Lynch is fluent, and he’s obviously despairing of the American film scene, and since I’ve seen some remarkably alright visceral/cult/horror type cinema come from France recently, perhaps it is high time that Lynch pull a Polanski and just relocate there. Of course this doesn’t mean he should mark the beginning of his relocation with the same sort of event that happened in Polanski’s case. I think Paris ‘could’ be a much more liberating atmosphere for his artistic nature, though almost every film Lynch has done thus far has been steeped in symbolic Americana and he may not want to leave a place he obviously loves behind.
I know many Spanish speakers who’ve told me the way they learned English was mainly by starting with subtitled movies and gradually working into unsubtitled American films. If Lynch started shooting French films, I may feel more inclined to learn again.
I’m the same with French, studied it for a while then lost most of it although I can read it haltingly. I don’t think Lynch needs to be fluent; one of the things you first learn in Paris is that loads of people there speak English, partly because the city is a huge tourist attraction. Last time I was there I kept up the French phrases but once people hear your accent they often speak English anyway. At a restaurant with friends one evening the waiter asked us to order in English since he was learning the language.
I’m not sure Lynch would ever move from LA, he seems to like the place too much. But the French really like him, I think the first French-financed thing he did was a short after Wild at Heart. Once again its down to Gallic culture to fly the flag for American weirdness, as Baudelaire famously did for Poe. I’ve been planning a week-long series of posts about some favourite European comic strips next week in order to focus a bit more on the Continental imagination. Too often the traffic is all one-way.
OK, this question has nothing to do with Lynch, but your comment regarding French culture struck my curiosity. You, living not far from them, might know well enough about this- Is France’s heritage more Gallic than it is Latin?
Don’t get me wrong, I know it was originally all Gallic, but I always figured the influence nowadays would be pretty equal in the end and hard to separate, kind of like the way Spanish and American Indian is throughout much of Latin America.
I know Paris more than the rest of the country and it’s difficult to extrapolate from a capital city since they’re always far more distinctive, with more immigration going on. But the country seems pretty Gallic to me, despite the Catholic church being a lot more dominant there than it was here. Paris still has an area called the Latin Quarter although the name doesn’t really mean what it used to. And France has some regions like Brittany and the Occitan areas in the south where they had their own language but the country as a whole is more of a unit than Britain which comprises four different countries forced together as a single entity.
Great thread. Keep up the good work.