Il «Club Silencio» : alcuni aspetti dell'uso del sonoro nel cinema di David Lynch

In his own words, David Lynch moved from paintings to filmmaking, through his ear. Since the beginning of his career, he has been taking charge of every sound layer in his films – music composition, sound engineering, design, editing, mixing and post-production. Moreover, as it is quite known, he has been collaborating for the last twenty years with composer Angelo Badalamenti. What is most striking in Lynch’s production is that sound becomes a sort of ‘detonator’ in several layers of interpretation of his movies: narrative, linguistic, and aesthetic. Boundaries between music, sound effects, noises, and voices on the one side, images, colours, frames, and movement on the other become fluid, thanks to the ‘compositional’ approach of the director. That makes Lynch a remarkable case study as far as the redefinition of audiovisual analysis in contemporary cinema is concerned. I focus on a famous and enigmatic sequence extrapolated from Mulholland Dr. (2001) – the one set in Club Silencio – and I try to spot some remarkable features of the director’s treatment of ‘film composition’. The method of analysis I use, modelled on Michel Chion’s reflections, meets of course some difficulties by approaching this fluid and fleeting audiovisual text. Nevertheless, to take as a starting point the notion of ‘synchronous’ in Chion’s meaning, allows me to reconsider the meta-linguistic element such predominant in this sequence and to assume that David Lynch gives the spectator a subconscious key of interpretation, by manipulating the whole sound factor.