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Key Points
- American filmmaker David Lynch has died aged 78.
- His family released a statement on Facebook saying there’s now a “big hole in the world”.
- His distinctive style of filmmaking prompted the term ‘Lynchian’.
David Lynch, the American filmmaker, writer and artist who scored best director Oscar nominations for Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive, and co-created the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, has died at age 78.
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” a statement on Lynch’s Facebook page said.
“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.'”
With his visually stunning, disturbing and inscrutable works filled with dream sequences and bizarre images, Lynch was considered a master of surrealism and one of the most innovative filmmakers of his generation.
He received an honorary Academy Award in 2019 for his lifetime achievements.
The Lynchian style
The enigmatic artist preferred not to explain his complex, bewildering films, which included Wild at Heart, the 1990 Palme d’Or winner of the Cannes Film Festival, the 1977 horror film Eraserhead and the 1997 mystery Lost Highway.
“A film or a painting, each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there,” he told The Guardian in a 2018 interview.
His style of filmmaking prompted the term Lynchian, which Vanity Fair magazine described as weird, creepy, and slow.
In his films, Lynch inserted the macabre and disturbing into the ordinary and mundane and heightened the impact with music.
“His eye for the absurd detail that thrusts a scene into shocking relief and his taste in risky, often grotesque material has made him, perhaps, Hollywood’s most revered eccentric, sort of a psychopathic Norman Rockwell,” the New York Times said in 1990.
David Lynch and his wife Emily Stofle at the screening of Twin Peaks during the 70th annual Cannes Film Festival. Source: AAP / Sebastien Nogier
Lynch’s early life
David Keith Lynch was born on 20 January 1946, in Missoula, Montana, the eldest of three children.
His father worked for the US Department of Agriculture and the family moved frequently.
Lynch once described his childhood as a “very beautiful, sort of perfect world.”
But as an art student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s he encountered the seedier side of America while living in a crime-ridden, run-down area of Philadelphia with his wife and baby daughter.
He described the city as the biggest influence in his life.
In his later years, Lynch devoted himself to making documentaries, short films, painting and a YouTube channel. He released albums, music videos, soundtracks and books, including his 2018 memoir Room to Dream.
The acclaimed director was married four times and fathered four children.
