Directed by blackANDwhite. Featuring David Lynch. Fri-Mon, Jan 11-14. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
2 Stars

I’ve never seen a documentary that reveals less about its subject than Lynch. Now, the film’s creators would probably just say that, as is the case with the films of Mr. Lynch himself, one has to do a little work to make sense of this thing. You’ve got to peer around corners, squint into the dark, ponder, muse, open yourself to a different way of experiencing cinema...

Well, I did all that—and nope, nothin’.

Shot on lots of over- and underexposed digital video, Lynch follows its titular subject around as he scouts locations, holds meetings, and shoots footage for his 2006 film Inland Empire. We’ve got creepy old factories, empty warehouses, a bleak stretch of L.A.’s Sunset Strip... it’s all very Lynchian. Unfortunately, ripping off the man’s style proves not to be the best way to tell a story about him.

I didn’t walk away from this film learning anything I didn’t already know about David Lynch. If you’re totally unacquainted with the director, though, here’s what you might learn: he swears quite a bit when he’s stressed out on set. He used to live in Philadelphia. He’s really big on transcendental meditation. He likes actress Laura Dern. 

And that’s about it. We get brief glimpses of his creative method, but nothing too revealing. (He’s really big on “atmosphere” in his movies. No kidding.)

The filmmakers obviously worship their subject. Unfortunately, they seem to have no discrimination about what is and isn’t interesting about him—so we get such scintillating scenes as the one in which David Lynch tests some microphones, or the one where he looks through dozens of photographs to choose a location to shoot part of a movie, or the one where he... Oh God, I watched this yesterday and I barely remember it.

Besides subjecting us to the frankly boring minutiae of moviemaking, the film is shot in a dreamy, surrealist style that does its best to alienate viewers even further. Interviews are shot from 10 feet away, underexposed and out of focus, for no apparent reason. Random colour filters are applied. Every so often a silent black-and-white shot taken from a moving train crops up. There doesn’t seem to be any purpose to these arty affectations—and they certainly pale in comparison to Lynch’s own work, which they so obviously aspire to emulate.

The film’s best moments are the ones in which Lynch himself is just allowed to talk, uninterrupted. For all the non-sequential, nonsensical Moebius-strip inversions and weird plot twists he crams into his movies (if they can even be said to have “plots”), Lynch is a first-rate storyteller. Listen to him talk about walking around a dangerous Philadelphia neighbourhood with a modified walking stick. (It had nails stuck through it, the better to beat off potential assailants.) Or another story about trying to explode some rotting, bloated roadkill with a pickaxe. He’s a captivating speaker, unspooling his oddball, entertaining yarns in that nasally midwestern drone of his. I’d like to have heard a lot more of him.

The direction of Lynch is credited to the enigmatically named “blackANDwhite,” who isn’t nearly an interesting enough filmmaker to earn himself such a ridiculous pseduonym, whoever he is. I say “he” because it must be a “he”—it’s always pretentious fanboys who hero-worship intensely cerebral auteurs like Lynch. He probably takes girls to Lynch films on first dates and then gets sniffy when they find them weird. He probably went through a Kubrick phase. He’s probably insufferable to be around. (I wonder if he makes his friends and acquaintances call him blackANDwhite.)

Whoever he is, he’s no David Lynch.

[Lynch is part of a large-scale David Lynch retrospective at Metro Cinema, which will also include screenings of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. See metrocinema.org for showtimes.]