A Film Auteur Goes Digital
David Lynch's three-hour opus "Inland Empire" is, as you have probably heard over the Internet transom, his first feature foray into the murky realms of digital video. Lynchophiles may grumble over the decision, or puzzle over the director's reported born-again devotion to the burgeoning medium. But its use in "Inland Empire" should come as no surprise and, in fact, forms an integral part of the film's thematic concerns.
"Empire" is not only a movie shot on digital video, it's virtually a movie about digital video. The film's shifting labyrinth of oneiric style and nebulous substance not only embraces but luxuriates in digital's possibilities for back-alley and back-of-the-mind darkness. "There's lots more room to dream," Mr. Lynch marveled of the image in one interview, and in another, presented a daunting prospect: "If you can think it, you can do it."
Rarely has the potential for raw image quality and super-tight close-ups been so appropriate as for the ragged mental state of Laura Dern's layered character(s), but it's also clear that Mr. Lynch has woven a few anxieties about his digital transition into the film's nightmare of the Hollywood factory. One strand among the tapestry of run-on realities is a series of cryptic sequences about Polish gangsters and prostitute mills. These were shot, as the credits disclose, in Lodz, Poland. The setting could be attributed to Mr. Lynch's desire to return there after a pleasant festival visit, but the city is also known in cinema for one big reason: It's home to the classical Lodz film school that has trained ace cinematographers and directors like Roman Polanski. For a director who's usually happy with bogeyman gangsters, and whose oeuvre constantly draws attention to itself, it's a telling detail, especially paired with a recurring image and scratchy audio of a needle on a record. If you can think it, you can do it, but first you must record it.
Digital video is plainly not a choice Mr. Lynch has made lightly, but if anyone could handle the rigorous unhinging of a Lynch narrative, it's cinematographer Odd-Geir Saether, Peter Watkins's DP for the seamless, sceneless "Edvard Munch." The result is a film that demands reviewing and recollecting, a psycho-ramble through the inland empire of the mind that will leave you speechless but head achingly full of images. Permission to quote Mr. Lynch again? "The explaining of things in words is always a huge problem."
