(1986), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) has similarly
confronted the question of how we read a film and how it is related to
reality. So, just as Godard uses his films to question and revise the old forms
and conventions of cinema, so, too, does Lynch, arguably updating Godard’s
exposé of cinematic reality to revel in a truly postmodern reliance on
pluralities and multiple meanings. Thus, Lynch introduces the spectator to
these films with a shocking immediacy, and then the reality, the place where
the spectator was before, is revealed as an artifice, thereby suggesting the
unconscious and unstable characteristics of reality (Lash, 1990: 192). In
Mulholland Drive we observe the story of an aspiring actress who meets an
amnesiac woman who has suffered an accident. The film then adopts a
surrealistic/oneiric narration that makes sense only if we interpret the
images as part of a dream. The reinterpretation of the laws of cinema and
the confusion of the spectator’s perception of the film is the ultimate aim of
Lynch. As an investigative artist, Lynch, like Godard, is interested in the thin
line that separates reality and unreality, film and audience, and his mode of
research is the creation of his own films. In short, in films such as Lost
Highway and Mulholland Drive, Lynch confuses the spectators to demonstrate
the manipulability of the (un)reality of cinema.
The image has a quite unique ability to communicate, then, with its
semiological complexity, the representation of (un)reality. The (un)reality of
the image is explained by its inevitable comparison with reality, in other
words, the distance and relationship between the sign and the referent. In
this sense, fiction breaks with the conventions of language and modifies the
relationship of the sign and signifier. The creation of fictions in films is the
perfect example of the relationship between reality and unreality: fictions
are unreal in their composition but they have the ability to look real in our
perception. Thus, developments in visual technologies enable the image to be
both: a perfect reproduction of reality and/or a complete invention, an
image with no referent in reality. In this sense, the events that followed the
devastation which occurred on the 11th September 2001 in New York affected
the way in which we perceive films, transforming our symbolic and
epistemological system. This episode was beyond our imagination, beyond our
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