Next Door to Darkness: The Films of David Lynch

January 10–February 29, 2020

A retrospective of David Lynch’s big-screen work—a journey into a universe both banal and bizarre, incomparably strange and unsettlingly familiar.

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Eraserhead
Blue Velvet
Mulholland Drive
Lost Highway
Wild at Heart
The Straight Story

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Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Premonitions: Short Films by David Lynch
- Saturday, February 29 7:30 PM
Discover or revisit the rare short works of David Lynch, from films he made as a student in the late sixties to later evocations of dreams and nightmares.
Eraserhead
- Saturday, January 11 8 PM
- Saturday, February 22 8 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1976
Lynch’s debut feature, still creepy after all these years: “a masterpiece of texture . . . an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze” (Village Voice).
Mulholland Drive
- Saturday, February 15 8 PM
David Lynch
United States, 2001
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

An ingenue recently arrived in Los Angeles (Naomi Watts) becomes involved with a raven-haired amnesiac beauty (Laura Harring) in Lynch’s Chandler-by-way-of-Borges postmodern noir, one of Sight & Sound’s “greatest films of all time.”
Wild at Heart
- Friday, February 14 7 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1990
Wild at Heart also screens Wednesday, January 29 (without introduction).

Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.

Introduction by Barry Gifford
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
- Saturday, February 8 7 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1992
Lynch’s prequel to his cult television show Twin Peaks heads deeper into the woods of small-town Americana, a province of murder, perversity, and crap interior decorating. “Lynch’s masterpiece” (Village Voice).
Lost Highway
- Friday, February 7 7 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1997
Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, and Balthazar Getty flicker across the nocturnal highways and haunts of a nightmarish Los Angeles in Lynch’s audacious “twenty-first-century noir horror film,” as he and cowriter Barry Gifford dubbed it.

Introduction by Barry Gifford
Blue Velvet
- Friday, January 10 6:30 PM
- Friday, January 31 7 PM
- Saturday, February 1 8 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1986
Digital Restoration

Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin).
Wild at Heart
- Wednesday, January 29 7 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1990
Wild at Heart also screens Friday, February 14, with an introduction by Barry Gifford.

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.
The Straight Story
- Sunday, January 26 7 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1999
An elderly man drives his lawn mower across the Midwest to see his ailing brother in Lynch’s atypically sweet-natured work, released by Walt Disney Pictures. “It may be my most experimental film,” Lynch claimed.
Dune
- Friday, January 24 7 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1984
Hired to adapt Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel about interplanetary palace intrigues, Lynch came up with this legendarily baffling, dreamlike missive from the subconscious, featuring Kyle MacLachlan and a leather-clad Sting.
The Elephant Man
- Sunday, January 12 4:30 PM
David Lynch
United States, 1980
Archival Print

Lynch turns the Victorian-era true story of “the ugliest man alive” into a study of prejudice, voyeurism, and human dignity, aided by a remarkable performance from John Hurt.

Next Door to Darkness: The Films of David Lynch

January 10–February 29, 2020

David Lynch has noted that when he was a child his mother, observing his passion for drawing, never gave him a coloring book; this allowed him to create unrestricted by any predetermined shape or line. Since discovering the film medium as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Lynch has gone on pushing formal boundaries, employing conventions only to resist, transcend, or complicate them. His first feature, Eraserhead—five years in the making at the American Film Institute—encompasses a completely unique, self-contained world, a nightmare vision of urban alienation and physical and psychological dread that is both incomparably strange and unsettlingly familiar. The uncanny intersection of the bizarre and the banal, so brilliantly depicted in Eraserhead, is the rich territory from which, in different ways, all of Lynch’s subsequent works for film and television have emerged. Drawing on, and often combining, the aesthetics of Surrealism, film noir, psychodrama, soap opera, and science fiction, Lynch has created a universe where characters struggle to do the right thing despite being compelled by external and internal forces that threaten their moral, psychological, and physical well-being. This retrospective of Lynch’s work for the big screen allows the opportunity to explore his singular vision (which recently earned the adjective “Lynchian” a place in the Oxford English Dictionary), from his earliest art-school films, The Grandmother and The Alphabet, through big-budget studio productions The Elephant Man and Dune, to his iconic masterpieces Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive.

— Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Series organized by Associate Film Curator Kate MacKay. Thanks to Brad Deane, TIFF Cinematheque; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Neil Calderone, Chicago Cinema Society; Todd Weiner and Steven Hill, UCLA Film and Television Archive; Juliette Spinner, Paramount Pictures; Dana Hillyer, Swank Motion Pictures; Chris Chouinard, Park Circus; and Jason Jackowski, NBC Universal.