FSLC Announces Details for Lynch/Rivette Dual Retrospective This December

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.

Despite these vastly different artistic contexts and trajectories, both filmmakers share a number of pet themes that they have revisited obsessively: secrets, conspiracies, and paranoia; women in trouble; the supernatural manifesting itself within the everyday; the nature of performance and the stage as an arena for transformation; the uncanny sense of narrative as a puzzle without a solution, a force with a life of its own. Their best films act as spells, capable of overcoming characters and viewers alike. They conjure distinctive worlds in which the truth remains unknowable, nightmares masquerade as harmless reveries, and characters change identities amid impossible, self-consciously filmic situations.

Lynch/Rivette coincides with the release of Film Society Director of Programming Dennis Lim's new book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (out November 3 through Amazon Publishing/New Harvest and on sale at the Film Society Merchandise Shop), wherein he proposes several lenses through which to view pop culture icon, cult figure, film industry outsider, and master filmmaker Lynch and his distinctive body of work.

Programmed by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan.

Tickets will go on sale Tuesday, November 24 and are $14; $11 for students and seniors (62+); and $9 for Film Society members. Make it a Lynch/Rivette double feature and save with our 2-film discount package. Visit filmlinc.org for more information.

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