A companion explains what fascinated the director about the city

David Lynch, the American cult director, came to Berlin for a few days in 1999 to take pictures for his series “Factory Photographs”, for which he primarily photographed abandoned industrial buildings and which can be seen in the exhibition “David Lynch: On View” that has just opened in Berlin’s Pace Gallery.

Lynch was interested in the architecture of the buildings, in their decay and what this revealed, but also in the eerie, ghostly, hauntings of the past that could be found in these “lost places”. However, he did not illegally enter the empty factory buildings, as later became a popular activity for many (amateur) photographers, but rather obtained permits beforehand, says Reshöft.

The North German had met Lynch while filming a short film for French television and was later a production assistant on his series “Twin Peaks” and the feature film “Wild at Heart”. And now she accompanied him on his trip to Berlin, drove him through the city, to an old ice cream factory in Kreuzberg or out on the A24. She cannot remember which hotel Lynch was staying in during this visit. “But he liked to live nicely,” she says; the Adlon and the Savoy were among his typical places to go.

Lynch was interested in 20th century trauma

In the evening they went out to dinner and had long conversations. Lynch was interested in everything that had to do with the Second World War and the trauma of the 20th century, says Reshöft. He repeatedly asked her about her family’s tragic history during this time. He would have been interested in the psychological aspects of life under National Socialism, the conflicts of conscience and questions about what it does to someone when you don’t know who you can trust and who you can’t.

He was also interested in the GDR and the division of Berlin. “On New Year’s Eve 1989, I flew to Berlin from the USA, where I was living at the time, to knock off a piece of the wall for David,” she says and googles at the same time. “Ah, I just see this sold at an auction of his estate for $9,000.”

When Lynch died unexpectedly from complications of lung disease a year ago, a few days before his 79th birthday, Reshöft was on a plane to Los Angeles to visit him. The sadness still resonates within her. “He was such a sensitive person, always interested in others,” she says on the phone.

The queue in front of the gallery is a hundred meters long

The gap that Lynch left in the lives of many can also be felt at the exhibition opening. The Pace Gallery, which is located in a converted gas station in Schöneberg and has something Lynchian about it with its road movie charm, the spruce trees in the front yard and the koi resting in the half-icy pond, is packed to capacity on the opening evening. The line of people that formed in front of the gallery around 6:30 p.m. was probably 100 meters long, which was certainly not just because of the free drinks.

There are also some of Lynch’s companions inside, such as Sabrina Sutherland, who worked with Lynch as a producer for more than 35 years and became a close friend. She tells us how emotional the exhibition is for her. “I had to cry earlier because I can feel him in all these works,” she says.

The show shows the slightly less well-known but very extensive and important side of his artistic work: paintings, sculptures, photographs and an early short film. “The Alphabet” from 1969 combines Lynch’s painting work with film footage. In the video about a girl, played by Lynch’s first wife, who has to swallow letters and then spit out drops of blood, the themes for which he later became world famous can be seen: the absurd, the surreal, the (nightmarish) dreamlike. The horror of the banal and the innocent meeting raw violence.

“There is a certain kind of Lynchian language that is present and famous in the films, but whose origins lie in Lynch’s thinking as a painter,” says Oliver Shultz, chief curator of the Pace Gallery. This includes, for example, the dissection of the body into its individual parts, a motif that runs through Lynch’s art: the severed ear that lies in the grass in “Blue Velvet” finds its counterpart in painting and photography in individual limbs, disembodied heads and fragments of naked body parts.

David Lynch began painting as a teenager and studied it in Boston and Philadelphia. Even when he turned to the more lucrative work in the film business in Los Angeles, he never stopped painting. Lynch’s artworks are dark, dominated by black in varying textures and thicknesses, and have a peculiar beauty. “We are often afraid to look where the shadows are. David, despite his fear, went deeper and deeper into those dark places. For him, there lay a form of redemption,” says Shultz.

The fact that Lynch still inspires so many people is a good sign

Lynch liked to play with seemingly banal, domestic motifs that concealed a possible threat. Something’s wrong. But what? Like the famous scene in the red room in “Twin Peaks,” in which a man (played by Michael J. Anderson) speaks in an eerie, foreign language that you somehow understand. To achieve this effect, Lynch had Anderson speak sentences onto a tape, which Lynch then played backwards. Anderson spoke the words that had been played backwards again, and then the whole thing was reversed again. The result is strangely disturbing.

But as much as Lynch was interested in the depths and in evil, he also believed in the good in people. Lynch is known for having no airs and graces on set; his companions describe him as funny and lovable. He meditated twice a day for over 50 years and firmly believed that the world could become a better place through transcendental meditation. This conviction almost led Berlin to a “peace university,” which Lynch wanted to build on the Teufelsberg together with the guru Raja Schiffgens. The bizarre project failed due to building permits.

Just as there is a discrepancy between his personality and what he portrayed artistically, you can never fully grasp what is happening in Lynch’s art. The fact that it still inspires so many people of different generations and backgrounds in its mysterious, often obscure and far-from-mainstream way is at least a good sign for our world.