David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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piero
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David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

Post by piero »

Lynch will be in Italy next weekend to the Lucca Film Festival. From Sept. 27th until 30...
Here's the program of the whole event. I will be there.

http://luccafilmfestival.it/
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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Keep us updated piero; wish I could be there!!
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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Thanks, Piero, for the information. I might go to the festival as well. I have seen there are many free events. Do you know, Piero, if you can just go to these events, or do you have to make a reservation?
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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Tonight (28 Sept) there was a performance of songs from various David Lynch movies under the title "Lost Songs". It took place in a church, Chiesa di San Francesco in Lucca. An orchestra performed songs from Twin Peaks, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man, Wild At Heart, and Blue Velvet. I'll post more details.
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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Hi everyone. Sorry for my late reply. I was so luky to meet Lynch. Amazing experiences and amazing panels. You can watch some videos from the event on youtube here. I share with you a picture I took during one of the event in Lucca.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4g4rnL4_aY

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... ynch+Lucca
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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I was lucky to catch some of the events in Lucca last week and want to share my impressions. Matteo Marino has already posted many pictures and videos on davidlynch.it, containing most songs from the "Lost Songs" concert.

My girlfriend and I were travelling through Italy, and changed our itinerary when we learned that David Lynch would be attending the Lucca Film Festival. Quite fittingly, we stayed at the Casa del Gufetto ("The Owl's House"). A gufo is a male owl and apparently a sign of luck, if I understood our host correctly - as opposed to a female owl.

Anyhow, on Sunday night (28/09) we made it into the Chiesa di San Francesco for the "Lost Songs" concert. You could get free tickets in advance, which we did not know, so when we got to the church, the concert was "sold out". However, you could write your name on a list, so we were on standby for tickets that wouldn't be picked up, and in the end were able to get in.

At the beginning of the concert, DL said a few words to the audience, unfortunately his microphone did not work properly, but what I understood was that he basically thanked everyone and in particular Angelo Badalamenti. Then the orchestra started to play, and the acoustics in the church were just great. The song selection provided a good mix of DL's films, and for me evoked a range of emotions between dark, mysterious, and simply beautiful. I was happy that music from The Straight Story was played. The concert started and ended with selections from Twin Peaks, which I felt was a nice frame for the evening and probably TP and its music is still most widely known and popular with many people. As an encore, the wonderfully sung "Mysteries of Love" was played again. The singer did a wonderful rendition of the song, not identical to the Julee Cruise performance, but I felt it was true and beautiful.

For each of the songs, video was shown on a screen behind the orchestra. Sometimes the images matched the music in a very nice way. In some cases, for me the images didn't quite have the right feeling for the music, for example when during the TP montage some scenes were shown that in my opinion did not have the right tempo for the music, or for me expressed a different mood. But that's just how I perceived it. With the Adagio for Strings, the scenes from The Elephant Man that went with it just hit the mark for me, it was wonderful and very emotional. All in all, it was a great musical performance with great atmospheric images, and I bet lots of people put quite some energy into putting this evening together.

More to come...
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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Thank you for showing those and telling us about the show. I love these worldwide events!!
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Re: David Lynch at the Lucca Film Festival - Italy

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I think it was Fernanda who was also asking here how the festival was going. The Lucca Film Festival took place between 28 September 3 October, and I was only there on 28 and 29 September for the Lost Songs concert (28/09) and for a conversation with David Lynch as well as the prize ceremony/Mulholland Dr. screening (both on 29/09). Piero and the people over at davidlynch.it might have experienced more of the festival and stayed longer than I have.

Throughout the week, there were the screenings of basically every DL film, including many shorts. The program says that Mulholland Dr. (29/09), The Straight Story (02/10), Lost Highway, and Eraserhead (both 03/10) were shown as 35 mm projections. I couldn't stay for much longer in Lucca, so I could only watch Mulholland Dr. and hope to at least see Eraserhead one day on the big screen.

So on 29/09, I went to the Chiesa di San Francesco once more, where the night before the fantastic Lost Songs concert took place. I was lucky to arrive at the church about an hour before the scheduled start at 11:00 a.m. of the conversation with DL, as already a crowd of at least 100 people had gathered. I'd say the church seats about 600-700 people, as a rough estimate. I should also say that seat reservations could only be made by school classes, so there was a number of school kids between 16-18 years who were also standing outside the church, and more kids arrived later on. When the people at the door let the waiting crowd into the church at about 11:00, we could see and were told that the seats on the left side were reserved for school classes. So that was quite interesting in my opinion, to have a big group of young kids there on a Monday morning for an hour or so to listen to a conversation with David Lynch, and I wondered if and how their teachers had prepared them for that talk, or if it was maybe only kids from arts class who might be interested in that kind of talk, or kids from a specific school. Anyhow, interesting to me and I think a very positive thing, especially since DL in his talk/his answers emphasized the importance of full artistic control/final cut and I thought this might make an impression on some of the kids.

The church filled up pretty quickly, and it turned out, maybe not unexpectedly so for the average DL fanatic, that there wasn't enough room for everyone in the church, and a group of people were not let in. Some of people who had to stay out started a little protest, I understand they protested against the organizers of the event, calling them idiots or some such thing. With the church doors open, you could hear their shouts pretty well inside the church in the first few minutes of the talk, and then the security guys just shut the doors. That was that. As far as I can tell, the shouts and the protest was not brought up in the talk that was ongoing, but then again I don't speak too much Italian. See the newspaper clipping report below for a report in a local newspaper from the day after.

The setup of the conversation was as follows: there were two men interviewing/asking questions to DL, one to the left and on the right of DL, then there was DL and his Italian interpreter sitting to his left and slightly behind him, whispering translations of the interviewer's (Italian) questions into DL's ear. DL answered in "translator-friendly" portions of sentences at a time, so that what he said could right away be translated to Italian. The interviewers always took turns in answering their questions, which to me was a bit irritating and I wondered why there were two interviewers and why the conversation always had to go from one to the other, then back again, and so on. Combined with all the translations going out, I think it was difficult to get a real conversation going. More like Q&A. Now I don't know who the two interviewers were, and they might be some well-known film critics in Italy, or professors, and there might be some significance to the two of them. For me and for the questions that were asked, I could have done with just one guy asking questions.

Since my understanding of the Italian language is rather limited, I certainly didn't understand every question that was asked. Most of the answers were what I would meanwhile call the standard David Lynch answers and topics that you can find in many of his more recent talks and interviews. So there was some (not too much) TM, an emphasis on full artistic control and the importance of final cut, as well as the meaning of an idea that comes to you and how one medium or another might be better suited for a particular idea.
Of course, hearing these things live and from the man itself was very nice and I just like to hear him talk and pronounce words.

Some topics and information that stuck out to me were: At one point, DL talked for some minutes about two friends and actors who have already passed away, Jack Nance and Richard Farnsworth. It was touching how DL talked about the two and his love for them, and he also brought some humor into his talk about Jack Nance. Very sweet and moving.

Talking about Dune and what it meant to not have final cut, DL mentioned that there was a point where it made him want "to leave the world" (wrongly translated to Italian as "leaving the world of cinema"). There is a similar hint to how depressed he must have felt I think in Lynch on Lynch.

Talking about the meaning of Eraserhead, DL mentioned that there was a time during the production of Eraserhead where he opened the Bible on random pages, pointing with his finger on some random sentence. Doing so, he came upon one passage where he thought "oh, that is what it (the film) is all about". This was completely new to me. Has anyone ever heard this story?

After the interview part, a professor/teacher from a local school came up and presented a virtual reality project that some students had realized in the summer. If I understood correctly, it is based on the Second Life platform, and you can wander around in this virtual world and there are some locations where you can watch DL-directed music videos or short films. So maybe this project was the point where some of the students got involved with DL, and that's how some school classes ended up in that church.

Then some Q&A with people from the audience, of course someone asked about the baby.
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