I recently saw two David Lynch films for the first time: Eraserhead & Mulholland Drive. Both were highly intriguing; Lynch is one of those directors whose films you can watch multiple times and always find something new each viewing. Both films were also very dreamlike, something I can appreciate as my favorite video director, Jonathan Glazer, has a similarly dreamy style.
Eraserhead, at first, comes off as a student art film. It's shot in black and white, there's very little in terms of set design, and I swear I could almost see the strings holding up some of the props in the film. But all of this takes a backseat to the very strange story at hand. I won't ruin it for those of you who haven't seen it, but Lynch is a director known for films with much depth to them. What begins as a disturbing and sometimes confusing piece... well, it ends as one, too. But a little internet research and some reading of a few critiques of the film, and I'm eager to watch the film again, if only to view it in a completely different light than I did during my first watching.
Mulholland Drive has very similar stylistic qualities to Eraserhead, though they were shot 25 years apart. The story at hand centers on several characters, but primarily "Rita," an amnesiac who takes her new name fom a movie poster, and who finds herself in the apartment of a young Hollywood-bound actress named Betty. There are many points in the film where a storyline and characters are introduced, only to have their plots semi- or completely unresolved. This technique lends heavily to the dreamy quality of Mulholland Drive; the viewer is never really sure where one story ends and another begins, or whose story we're even following. This might sound frustrating to some, but Lynch handles it in a way that, to me at least, makes you want to watch the film again and again to try and make sense of it all. NGL, after watching this film, I hit up its Wikipedia page and my mind was totally blown, again. This one is definitely worth watching a second (or third... or fourth) time.
Anyways, I'm a big fan of well-done psychological thrillers and the only other director whose films I've been this eager to watch in the genre is Stanley Kubrick. So, internet friends, who are some of your favorite directors?
