Boat

As being one of David Lynch's biggest fans, I am again very disappointed. this little short film, although being mysterious and stuff, is nothing but a an experiment meant to check if the camera is working... and, wow, it is. hooray! Lynch made this for his website, and this maybe the less interesting short he made, not only for the site, but maybe through his entire career. there is nothing in this film that makes you remember or think about his great shorts from the 60's and 70's like "the grandmother" or "the alphabet", films that are still beautiful and exciting to watch 30 years after. it seems to me that the video experiment doesn't do good with lynch.

At first we see shots of trees and a woman's voice over fills the soundtrack. she talks of things she can't remember, like much of the mystery in "inland empire". but the video shots are poor and really don't mean anything. they look bad. then we go into the river and to a boat. again, nothing happens apart from a man's hand operating the boat, starts it's engine. it is Lynch himself, the only actor in the film. he rushes into the water very fast and goes "into the night". and thats it. nothing happened. the short finishes.

I actually expected a lot of this movie ever since I read about it. I thought Lynch had come up with something serious after "Rabbits", but unfortunately this is not the case. this is not video poetry nor poetry of any kind at all. If you watch the DVD of davidlynch.com better stick to "out yonder" and the great parts where Lynch is talking to the members of his website, answering their questions. "A bug crawls" is not bad too.

I watched BOAT in the small theatre at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, the gallery in Paris which is currently hosting Lynch's art retrospective, "The Air is on Fire." The film is also available on DYNAMIC #1: The short is narrated by a confused- sounding young woman, who pronounces statements along the lines of "I was so tired" and "There was a man there," while narrating what's happening on-screen.

Although very short, this film contains a great deal of wit and visual beauty. Shots of the boat's wake and the lake itself interact well with the young woman's dreamy voice-over. I found BOAT to be a singularly transcendent short, even sort of sexy in a way. "I think I slept," the woman says. "I wanted to tell you I dreamt of you."

I have watched both Boat and Darkened Room this evening. At first, I was losing hope in Lynch because of Darkened Room. I thought it was pointless and boring. Then I saw this one and was very impressed with everything about it. It was filmed and narrated in an almost uncomfortable way and that may be what I loved so much about it. David Lynch has a wonderful way of making a normal shot creepy in every sense. I get so inspired when I watch his films and I want to see every single one of them. This is a must see for Lynch fans if you love his atmosphere and tone. I saw it on Youtube and I know it's not the easiest film to find but if it's still up there, be sure to check it out!

More David Lynch video art! Yeah?

There is no denying that some of Lynch's later short film projects are among his most divisive work yet, and it isn't very hard to see why this is. "Boat" is among many an avant garde short film in the Lynch cannon and it can be interpreted as either meaningful and beautifully enigmatic art or as pretentious drivel; personally, I rather enjoyed "Boat". I find this brief, self described "journey into the night" to be a haunting and poetic work with some very fascinating visuals in the mix. As the film rows onward (see what I did there?!), Lynch's boat moves faster and faster, splashing and speeding into darkness, and the visuals that ensue pertain a beautiful magic. Water sprints and dances in front of the camera so swiftly it no longer looks like water but rather like...I don't even know what...it's surreal, as expected from Lynch.

This little short film/experiment from Lynch is meant to be some kind of home movie-cum-fever dream where the basic act of going out onto a lake with a motor boat becomes like some sort of journey to some unknown destination. It's at it's best an immense jolt of visual splendor, shot on Lynch's hardy digital camera, where one of Lynch's expressed joys as a filmmaker- to be able to make the flow of water a truly cinematic feat- is put to a successful test. At first he just shows images of the boat, with a girl doing a voice-over meant to be very mysterious but somewhat cognitive of having an idea of what's around her (or it, as it might be). Then the boat goes off, Lynch himself (steering the boat) says to the camera "we're gonna try to go fast enough to go in to the night", and soon all there is to see is water rushing past, very fast, and then superimposed is night over day. The voice-over itself is probably the lesser part of the experiment; Lynch says on the DVD the short is on that he thought there was a story there, so he put on a voice-over track to go with the images. The narration, truth be told, makes it a tinge more poetic, but not necessarily for the better; I had flashbacks during some of the narrative bits to short films (and not the better short films) I used to see in film classes at school. Yet it's a good little effort that Lynch has strung together here at least by way of eye-catching digital video, where everything seems a little extra heightened (very bright by way of daytime, then nighttime is much darker, naturally) and the movement of water at such a fast clip, as one might take for granted, makes for some powerful viewing.