Lynch on Catching Fish
Two quotes from David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Penguin, 2006). Lynch discusses transcendental meditation and a lot about artistic process in short chapters. Most interesting for the insight offered onto his films and how they come together in different ways, and how their meanings are sometimes planned, sometimes aleatory, and sometimes unknown even to Lynch. A quick read that is worth the time even if you aren’t a fan of Lynch’s.
“Cinema is a language. It can say things–big, abstract things. And I love that about it.
I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium.
For me it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. It’s not just words or music–it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film.” (17)
I can’t read this section and not think about the language of comics and its unique abilities. Comics have some of these same elements that film has, but there are differences, such as the ability to juxtapose multiple images and a less strict relation to “reading” time.
“Cinema is a lot like music. It can be very abstract, but people have a yearning to make intellectual sense of it, to put it right into words. And when they can’t do that, it feels frustrating. But they can come up with an explanation from within, if they just allow it. If they started talking to their friends, soon they would see things–what something is and what something isn’t. And they might agree with their friends or argue with their friends–but how could they agree or argue if they don’t already know? The interesting thing is, they really do know more than they think. and by voicing what they know, it becomes clearer. And when they see something, they could try to clarify that a little more and, again, go back and forth with a friend. And they would come to some conclusion. And that would be valid.” (20)
In a way blogging is like this idea of talking over something with friends. I don’t really have any comics reading friends, so this blog gives me an outlet for comics talk and a process to find and clarify ideas.
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