Halloween at Bubblan, David Lynch's Inland Empire
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
The screening will take place the 29th of October at Bubblan, Fiskhamnsgatan 41B Kajskjul 46, Göteborg. The screening will start at 9 pm and the venue will open at 8 pm. We will serve some food for reasonable price. The number of seats is limited so be sure to book by sending an email to: kuf.kontakt@gmail.com
After the screening you are welcome to stay at the venue for a simple Halloween “hang out” with nice music and good company! Come with your nicest Halloween costume or just as you are. You can see the movie and stay or come right after it. The film ends approximately around midnight.
Entrance fee is 60 SEK for film club members only: register to the club by leaving your name and email directly at the door, or through mail when you book your seat.
Entrance after the screening is free of charge.
Here you can find the Facebook event.
Don’t forget to like us on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram. Also, the culture association Kuf has a You Tube Channel where you can find concerts and live performances from our lovely venue. And you are welcome to subscribe to the newsletter to get all updates directly in your inbox.
Welcome to our most terrifying screening yet. We are very happy to show David Lynch’s Inland Empire and contribute to give you a permanent scar in you subconscious, shake you to the very core and hunt your dreams forever. So, aren’t you excited? We most certainly are!
We would like to recommend some interesting readings if you wish to start your journey into the rabbit hole. But don’t worry, these texts seek not to find explanations or correct and definitive interpretations, rather, they reflect over the uncanny qualities of the film, the role it had within experimental digital art cinema and the extraordinary performance of the center character by Laura Dern.
I Can’t Explain, Film Comment
In this short piece Adam Nayman starts by pointing out how Lynch’s oeuvre has been “consistently and assiduously strip-mined for Meaning - symbolic, ideological, psychoanalytic, cinephilic” . But he then observes that even though it is utterly meaningless to embark on trying to exert too much sense from this film, as well as it is impossible to surpass the director’s own inscrutability, the tension between how the images across his filmography both “demands and resist exegesis” is always very palpable. Nayman also underlines an interesting thread throughout the film: that of female solidarity and resistance to male figures that are often associate with Hollywood. Indeed the filmmaker’s interest towards Hollywood’s mythology and malaise has been at the center of his last three films: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and finally Inland Empire. So you go on and try to search for meaning on Saturday, we are sure you won’t succeed.
Inland Empire, 4 Columns
Continuing on the thread from the previous writer in regard to the film’s relation to Hollywood, Nathan Lee expands this discourse and suggest that “with great no less than its immediate predecessor, Mulholland Drive (2001), Lynch’s 2006 dissociated epic of “a woman in trouble” (per the film’s tagline) is a coherent enigma, a mesmerizing discombobulation that consistently signposts its premises, the rules of its game, and the nature of the unanswerable questions upon which the movie is predicated. Cryptic to the max, Inland Empire is devoted to pondering an infinitely rich mystery: What is cinema?”
Lee also puts Laura Dern’s performance at the center of the way to engage with the film: “however erratic the film’s detours and whimsies, the sovereign empire being traversed is ultimately the sublime topography of Laura Dern. Onscreen for nearly the entire runtime, she pulls off the remarkable feat of being in total control of a scenario organized by undermining her identity, obliterating her characterization, and so scrambling the distinction between Nikki and Susan that one eventually comes to view Inland Empire not as a maze to exit, a puzzle to solve, an ouroboros to gawk at, but rather as both a generalized treatise on the enigma of acting and a very specific, exquisitely perverse mash note to one of Lynch’s most formidable collaborators.”
Hollywood From the Fringes, Jonathan Rosenbaum
The legendary American film writer and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum is onto something when he brings together two films by Lynch and points out how “Lynch transfers his own mercurial consciousness to his characters, and his two best films are about being trapped and being vulnerable, though each one has happy intervals of escape, all conceived in musical terms–a song about heaven in Eraserhead and the magnificent celebratory sequence behind the final credits of Inland Empire, a Felliniesque music video staged around Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.” Dern’s twisted features increase her vulnerability, even when she’s “bad.” And it can’t be a coincidence that unwanted pregnancies and related feelings of guilt play significant roles in both movies.
The titles Eraserhead and Inland Empire, his only metaphorical titles, point to his guarded way of coping with his own ambivalence: he either censors (erases) some of his darkest thoughts or retreats into the relative safety of his inner self. And the title Inland Empire might even suggest the insularity of America itself.
But Lynch also seems to have realized that in Hollywood remaining disengaged and innocent ultimately compromises his freedom as an artist, and like it or not, he’s had to take a political stance. Dern spitting gobs of blood on the Walk of Fame couldn’t make it plainer”.
A personal favorite of mine that I would like to recommend is Melissa Andersson’s small but dense book on Inland Empire by Firefly Press. Here, the writer focuses heavily on Dern: she looks at the actor’s career, family history, acting style and strongly asserts her authorial role, through her incredible performance, in the making of the film. She also reflects upon what it means to be such an object of gaze and the complex asymmetric relations that lie in both the power and pleasure in being an object. In the case of Dern she adds “there is power and pleasure in performing, instability, disintegration, abjection - and power and pleasure in witnessing how she paradoxically exerts such control falling apart”.
Last but not least, check out the discussion between film historian Peter Labuza and experimental filmmaker Blake Williams: The Cinephiliacs Episode 75
Here the two discuss the avant-garde nature of the film, its use of digital technology and how the film not only delves with experimental style but it is also invites experiential looking, privileging the way the images are felt rather then understood!