Martin Scorsese says David Lynch’s death is ‘sad day for art of cinema’
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Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese has said it is a “sad day for moviemakers, movie lovers, and for the art of cinema” following the death of “visionary” director David Lynch. The US filmmaker, whose work included surrealist TV series Twin Peaks and films such as The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, died at the age of 78.
It came five months after Lynch revealed he had been diagnosed with emphysema, a chronic lung disease, after “many years of smoking”. Scorsese led filmmakers reflecting on Lynch’s back catalogue, including Eraserhead, Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, The Straight Story and Inland Empire, which he said will keep “growing and deepening” as the decades go by.
“I hear and read the word ‘visionary’ a lot these days — it’s become a kind of catch – all description, another piece of promotional language,” he said in a statement given to the PA news agency. “But David Lynch really was a visionary — in fact, the word could have been invented to describe the man and the films, the series, the images and the sounds he left behind.”.
Scorsese said Lynch made “everything strange, uncanny, revelatory and new” which were “right on the edge of falling apart but somehow never did”. “He put images on the screen unlike anything that I or anybody else had ever seen… And he was absolutely uncompromising, from start to finish.
