The Purgatory of the senses. Lost Highway by David Lynch
by Guy Astic
Publisher : Deep red ( January 30, 2022 )
Language : French
Number of pages : 284 pages
Lost Highway is a black diamond whose dark clarity has been illuminating the firmament of cinema for twenty-five years. Like the hotel lost at the end of a road that appeared out of nowhere, taken over by dead or missing people who resurface, David Lynch's film has everything of purgatory. Purgatory for lost characters who keep crossing the borders of incompatible worlds; purgatory for suffering bodies, whose vulnerability the filmmaker overexposes to better explore the violence of impulses, penetrate the textures of the soul and the viscera; purgatory for the spectator immersed in an unprecedented audiovisual journey, released into a total experience, at the height of creation, in the burning and noisy heart of existence; purgatory, finally, for Lynch who achieves there a form of artistic purity in the intensification of each of the means of expression implemented. Between excess and incandescent tensions, abstraction and figuration never stop magnetizing and repelling each other, in a display of formal energy that is all the more resounding in that it is framed by a breathless world, a depressed history. Dizzying Breviary of Perception, Lost Highway plunges into the intimacy of the image to bring the sensibility to open.