Now, even though Lynch branched out and crossed over into more mainstream filmmaking (if you can really call it that) with films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, it's easy to understand why many believe the director was heavily influenced by the work of one of the most well-known experimental filmmakers of her time, Maya Deren.
Check out the similarities between the work of both directors In this Fandor video essay, edited by Joel Bocko.
It's clear that the two directors, Deren and Lynch, are tuned into a poetically macabre version of the world and human existence that they are able to reproduce up on screen. In fact, Fandor tried to define Lynch's signature style back in December, mentioning writer David Foster Wallace's assertion that this "Lynchian" aesthetic is "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." And if you think about it, Deren's style can be described in a very similar way.
Both directors manage to put everyday life up on screen through the lens of a dream — or vice versa. Bocko writes:
Maya Deren and David Lynch are brilliant directors not merely because of their vivid images or ability to tell a story without precisely telling a story. They are attuned to something that runs much deeper than pure cinema or pure art, something that strikes a chord deep within. They have the ability to manifest our dream lives onscreen.
Even though Deren and Lynch may have unique styles all their own, they do deal in the business of capturing lurid dreams and packaging them inside something ordinary.
If you're new to the avant-garde work of Maya Deren and David Lynch — or if you're completely new to the genre altogether, definitely check out Deren's most famous work Meshes of the Afternoon (which you can watch right now on Fandor), as well as Lynch's experimental short films, such as The Grandmother, The Amputee, and my personal favorite, The Alphabet.
Source: Keyframe
