Director David Lynch passed away this week at the age of 78, and while he never shot a film in Prague, he did share a special connection to the city. Lynch visited Prague on multiple occasions to record the soundtracks for his films Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, three of his most celebrated works.
Lynch first traveled to Prague in the mid-1980s, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, with composer and longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. They recorded the soundtrack to Blue Velvet with the country’s Film Symphony Orchestra (FISYO), the in-house orchestra of Barrandov Studio that was nationalized by the government.
“There’s just a mood about this place,” Badalamenti told director Toby Keeler about Prague more than a decade later, when he and Lynch returned to score Lost Highway. “We just loved walking from the hotel and you come onto a very quiet street and you go into this place with these gigantic doors, they must weigh a thousand pounds each.”
Keeler followed Lynch and Badalamenti through Prague as they recorded the Lost Highway soundtrack in early 1996, and the footage was included in the documentary Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch. He captured Lynch trying to find the precise placement of orchestra members from their last recording session, based on indents made in the wooden floors by bass players.
Lynch and Badalamenti recorded in the same location with many of the same musicians, who had reformed as the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra in the years after the Velvet Revolution. Apart from working with Lynch, the orchestra has recorded soundtracks for hundreds of other feature films, including Arrival, Only God Forgives, and Melancholia.
Keeler’s documentary includes a two-minute montage of Lynch walking through Prague’s city center, including shots of the director in Wenceslas Square, at the Můstek metro station, and underneath the city’s famed Astronomical Clock.
For fans of the director, it’s no surprise that Lynch was a big fan of another famous Prague resident: Franz Kafka. The two share a stylistic and perhaps even spiritual bond, and Lynch has always been open about his admiration for the author.
“The one artist that I feel could be my brother—and I almost don’t like saying it because the reaction is always, ‘yeah, you and everybody else’—is Franz Kafka. I really dig him a lot,” Lynch told Chris Rodley in an interview for the book Lynch on Lynch.
Lynch had once even planned to make a film version of The Metamorphosis, but abandoned the idea after drafting a screenplay.
“Once I finished writing the script for a feature film adaptation, I realized that Kafka’s beauty is in his words,” Lynch told an audience at the Rome Film Festival in 2017. “That story is so full of words that, when I was finished writing, I realized it was better on paper than it could ever be on film.”
Lynch has a lot of fans in Prague, too. One of them is artist David Černý, who created the Kafka spinning head installation that has become one of the Czech capital’s most famous pieces of art. When contracted to make a sister piece in Los Angeles, Černý was given free rein to choose a subject—and immediately thought of Lynch.
Černý got Lynch’s approval before crafting the new sculpture. “He asked permission,” said Christian Hohmann of Hohmann Art Gallery, who represents Černý stateside. “And Lynch loved it.”
Lynch told Sight and Sound that he was suffering from emphysema due to years of smoking last summer, and passed away at the age of 78 on Jan. 15, shortly after evacuating his home during the still-raging Southern California wildfires.
The director and artist will be remembered in Prague this spring during In Flames, a retrospective at art gallery DOX that will feature a comprehensive selection of Lynch’s artwork alongside film screenings, music performances, and other events. The event, which was announced just days before the director’s passing, will run from April through November.
Lead photo: David Lynch by Chris Weeks, Prague Astronomical Clock by Wikimedia/Svajcr
One Response
wow I never knew this connection, makes sense that he would spend time Kafka’s hometown