Lynchian Cinema: To Live is to Dream
In January 2025, American surrealist filmmaker David Lynch passed away just days before what would have been his 79th birthday. His singular vision of this world “wild at heart and weird on top” presents a deeply moving argument for the indivisibility between the darkest and most joyous aspects of human existence—desire and destruction, love and fear, beauty and the grotesque, disillusionment and knowledge, dreams and nightmares, self and other. This course pays homage to the late director through the critical lens of Auteur Cinema, which addresses his filmography as an elaboration of a signature style which he uses to explore a consistent set of themes over the course of several decades. Lynch’s affinity for the absurd, the alluring and the uncanny asks us to see the world through the eyes of the dreamer so that we may reevaluate some of the most core modern American values and beliefs about individual identity. This course will situate Lynch’s cinema in the context of other artistic and cinematic influences and suggest the ways in which his work continues to shape the arts today. Topics include, but are not limited to, art cinema, film noir, melodrama, sound studies and dadaism.