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Thomas Britt | 2026

Image and Ether and Lynch, Oh My: An Introduction to Auteur Series No. 1

Any viewer who has spent time watching and listening to David Lynch's movies has sunk into his worlds, and no two viewers have experienced those worlds alike. The artist, filmmaker, and musician, who was born on this day in 1946 and died just more than one year ago, was eloquent in discussing these worlds, their depths, and the phenomenology of journeying through them.
Zachary Sheldon | 2026

Saint David

David Lynch is gone. But David Lynch is also all around me, basically every day. I am confident in saying that I cannot be alone in feeling like it is impossible to get away from him—not that I want to, to be clear.
Max Romanowski | 2026

The Film is the Talking: The Paradox of Analyzing David Lynch

This is the paradox at the heart of any retrospective about Lynch and his work. How can scholars seek to understand this creator of strange and impenetrable cinema when, at the prompting of that filmmaker, those films are meant to speak visually and on their own terms?

Other Recent Publications

19 January 2026
Stephen Kurczy | 2026

Trapped in Twin Peaks

I don’t like cherry pie. But I loved this cherry pie. I was in North Bend, Washington, sitting at the counter of Twede’s Cafe, which played a starring role as the Double R Diner in David Lynch’s genre-bending early ’90s television series Twin Peaks.
02 April 2025
Bruce Isaacs | 2019

The Mechanics of Continuity in Michael Bay’s Transformers Franchise

In perhaps the most scathing review in the mainstream media of Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) – the fourth release in the franchise in seven years – Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine suggests that the film is ultimately “dull, dumb and soul-sucking.”
02 April 2025
Bruce Isaacs | 2008

Toward a New Film Aesthetic

Film and theory have always gone hand in hand. In many ways, the professional academic study of cinema grew out of the revolutionary surges in literary and cultural theory in Europe
02 April 2025
Bruce Isaacs | 2020

The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators

In a now-famous interview with François Truffaut in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock described his masterpiece Rear Window (1954) as "the purest expression of a cinematic idea." But what, precisely, did Hitchcock mean by pure cinema?
02 April 2025
Thomas Britt | 2024

Potential and Power in Black Superhero Film Comedies

This article revisits a small subgrouping of Black superhero comedy films that were critically denounced at the time of their release but which merit reevaluation in light of contemporary calls to move away from an overemphasis on traumatic narratives in twenty-first-century Black films.
02 April 2025
Andrew Gibson | 2021

Producing Historicity

In 1988, Guy Debord presciently noted that a combination of‘incessant tech- nological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy and unanswerable lies’ was being shored up by the appearance of an‘eternal present’ .
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