Ladies & Gentlemen, put your hands together for this theatrical and smoky poster for Alexandre O. Phillipe's film theory documentary Lynch/Oz. Ostensibly, the film about David Lynch's obsession with the Wizard of Oz, and it certainly is that. Really though, the titular conceit is as a springboard to deliver a 100 minute master-class on how images are repurposed, re-appropriated, and refined in cinema history; often as a result of the obsessions of their filmmakers. It consists of video essays from filmmakers crafted almost entirely out of images from films.
Designed by prolific illustrator and art director Andrew Bannister with a creamy Polaroid style photo-matte, on point for a film about images. There are only a few key elements: The Spotlight, the Microphone, the Curtains (note Lynch's iconic zig-zag floor below), The Auteur Director (smoking a cigarette), and the Witch (profiled in the smoke). The curtains and tint lighting are, of course, in green to further evoke the iconic make-up design on Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of The West.
The design is minimally clean and uncluttered, which very is much of a piece with Philippe's wonderfully crafted, surprisingly accessible film.
The dual italicized title fonts separated by a slash is a nice way to further emphasize one of the key themes in the film. I like that OZ is done in an outline-style font, because it is the chief pool of cinematic images Lynch/Oz dives into. It uses the filmmography of David Lynch as the forward thrust, however spends as much time or more demonstrating just how much Victor Fleming's iconic technicolor fantasy from 1939 has become, as writer-director Justin Benson puts it, "public real-estate" for creative dreamers in many mediums. But mostly film.
Postscript: In my mind, I also see the spotlight doubling as a coffee ring stain. Coffee & cigarettes are Lynch's creative fuel and also a kind of reward. My projection here, dovetails into the idea of reading cinema with a healthy dose of detective work, but no shortage of confirmation bias. Lynch/Oz is in a way an extension of Room 237. This is not a stretch, considering Rodney Ascher, the director of that film -- about critical conspiracies and phantasmagorial over-reading of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining -- joins the video essay party as one of the key narrators in the film.
