The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today the details for Lynch/Rivette, December 11-22. Jacques Rivette and David Lynch rank among the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of the past 50 years, uncompromising iconoclasts with sui generis sensibilities and devoted cult followings. On the occasion of the publication of Dennis Lim's new book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, the Film Society presents this dual retrospective, revealing the profound affinities and eerie correspondences between the dark, sometimes mystical, always fascinating visions of these two modern masters.
The seven pairings include Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating with Lynch's Mulholland Drive, L'amour fou with Wild at Heart, The Duchess of Langeais with Blue Velvet, and many more. Some of the couplings are premised on thematic similarities; others on tonal kinships. Each is a suggestive double bill that might allow us to see these films, and perhaps reality itself, anew. Rivette's career began as an offshoot from his film criticism of the 1950s and '60s for Cahiers du Cinéma, where he was a colleague of Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer, and an omnivorous cinephile; Lynch's originated in the post-industrial doom and gloom of late-'60s Philadelphia, where he transitioned to filmmaking from painting and sculpture. Rivette eventually found himself working on a grander scale and with some of the most lauded French actors of the post-New Wave period on films renowned for their singular atmospheres, radical use of improvisation, and marathon running times. The success of Lynch's landmark midnight movie Eraserhead (1977) launched his improbable, up-and-down career, which saw him enshrined as a central figure in American pop culture, influential yet inimitable, with an instantly identifiable if often hard-to-define signature.Videos