Next Door to Darkness: The Films of David Lynch

Next Door to Darkness: The Films of David Lynch

January 10–February 29, 2020

A retrospective of David Lynch’s big-screen work—a journey into a universe both banal and bizarre, incomparably strange and unsettlingly familiar.

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  • Black and white film still of a man with wild, upswept hair staring intensely upward, dramatic lighting.

    Eraserhead

  • Blue Velvet

  • Mulholland Drive

  • Lost Highway

  • Wild at Heart

  • The Straight Story

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Blue Velvet

    David Lynch
    United States, 1986

    Digital Restoration

    Friday, January 10 6:30 PM

    Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 

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  • Eraserhead

    David Lynch
    United States, 1976
    Saturday, January 11 8 PM

    Lynch’s debut feature, still creepy after all these years: “a masterpiece of texture . . . an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze” (Village Voice).

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  • The Elephant Man

    David Lynch
    United States, 1980

    Archival Print

    Sunday, January 12 4:30 PM

    Lynch turns the Victorian-era true story of “the ugliest man alive” into a study of prejudice, voyeurism, and human dignity, aided by a remarkable performance from John Hurt.

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  • Dune

    David Lynch
    United States, 1984
    Friday, January 24 7 PM

    Hired to adapt Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel about interplanetary palace intrigues, Lynch came up with this legendarily baffling, dreamlike missive from the subconscious, featuring Kyle MacLachlan and a leather-clad Sting.

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  • The Straight Story

    David Lynch
    United States, 1999
    Sunday, January 26 7 PM

    An elderly man drives his lawn mower across the Midwest to see his ailing brother in Lynch’s atypically sweet-natured work, released by Walt Disney Pictures. “It may be my most experimental film,” Lynch claimed.

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  • Wild at Heart

    David Lynch
    United States, 1990

    Wild at Heart also screens Friday, February 14, with an introduction by Barry Gifford.

    Wednesday, January 29 7 PM

    Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.

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  • Blue Velvet

    David Lynch
    United States, 1986

    Digital Restoration

    Friday, January 31 7 PM

    Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 

    View Details

  • Blue Velvet

    David Lynch
    United States, 1986

    Digital Restoration

    Saturday, February 1 8 PM

    Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, and Dennis Hopper inhabit a small-town America steeped in psychic dread. Thirty years later, Lynch's color-saturated noir is “still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain” (Guy Maddin). 

    View Details

  • Lost Highway

    David Lynch
    United States, 1997
    Friday, February 7 7 PM
    Introduction by Barry Gifford

    Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, and Balthazar Getty flicker across the nocturnal highways and haunts of a nightmarish Los Angeles in Lynch’s audacious “twenty-first-century noir horror film,” as he and cowriter Barry Gifford dubbed it. 

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  • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

    David Lynch
    United States, 1992
    Saturday, February 8 7 PM

    Lynch’s prequel to his cult television show Twin Peaks heads deeper into the woods of small-town Americana, a province of murder, perversity, and crap interior decorating. “Lynch’s masterpiece” (Village Voice).

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  • Wild at Heart

    David Lynch
    United States, 1990

    Wild at Heart also screens Wednesday, January 29 (without introduction).

    Friday, February 14 7 PM
    Introduction by Barry Gifford

    Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern are star-crossed lovers on the run from various maniacs, including Harry Dean Stanton, William Dafoe, and Dianne Ladd, in Lynch’s fantastical winner of Cannes’s Palme d’Or.

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  • Mulholland Drive

    David Lynch
    United States, 2001

    BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

    Saturday, February 15 8 PM

    An ingenue recently arrived in Los Angeles (Naomi Watts) becomes involved with a raven-haired amnesiac beauty (Laura Harring) in Lynch’s Chandler-by-way-of-Borges postmodern noir, one of Sight & Sound’s “greatest films of all time.”

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  • Eraserhead

    David Lynch
    United States, 1976
    Saturday, February 22 8 PM

    Lynch’s debut feature, still creepy after all these years: “a masterpiece of texture . . . an ingenious assemblage of damp, dust, rock, wood, hair, flesh, metal, ooze” (Village Voice).

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  • Premonitions: Short Films by David Lynch

    Saturday, February 29 7:30 PM

    Discover or revisit the rare short works of David Lynch, from films he made as a student in the late sixties to later evocations of dreams and nightmares.

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