'The Art of The Real": David Lynch Conference

At the end of June we decided to head over to the David Lynch Conference, 'The Art of The Real', which took place at The Roter Salon in the Volksbühne in Rosa-Luxemburg Platz. The conference was special as it was the first ever academic event in Europe to focus on the career and films of David Lynch. Being big David Lynch fans ourselves, we were looking forward to finding out more about him and his work. 

The conference itself took place over three days with the majority of events in English. It featured an international crowd of renowned researchers and academics who focused on psychoanalysis, intermediality, genre composition and InterArt. It also featured a lot of people sporting David Lynch hairdos!

In the beginning we were a little disheartened because we were hoping to hear more about the career of Lynch and not just specialists psycho-analysing his films and career. In fact, for us, it was a little bit too methodical how the meanings of aspects of his work were broken down. Sometimes the talks were a little long too. We forgave the organisers though as they supplied free and glorious pretzels and fruit during the breaks. We don't have any pictures of the fantastic pretzels as we were way too involved in eating them. We can assure you it was well worth the visit.   

In total we saw around a day and a half of the conference and our favourite section was where the shorts about and by Lynch were aired. As seen above, one of the shorts was 'The Alphabet' and there was also a very interesting documentary which focused on his life as a painter, craftsman and musician which gave us a fresh perspective about this often misunderstood artist.    

People watching an interview with Lynch

In fact, during the event, we did discover something. People who are too specialist about his work sometimes destroy the spark by deconstructing too deeply. Although the talks were varied and interesting, people will always see his world through different eyes and, for us, the beauty of Lynch's art is that we don't necessarily understand exactly what he's going on about! Maybe only Lynch himself will ever completely understand his work (and, according to the interview we saw, even he doesn't know why he films some of the things he does!). 

One of the fun things we learnt about him during the conference is that he never likes talking about his motivation or the meanings behind his art because he cannot express himself as well in words as he can through his art. It's a good job he didn't decide to be a writer then!