A double feature! Starting the night with Erik Sutch’s new film Building of an Identity, followed by a brief Q&A with the director, and closing with a screening of David Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1.

Building of an Identity / Industrial Symphony No. 1
Dir: Erik Sutch / David Lynch
Runtime: 57 min. / 50 min.
Release Year: 2022 / 1990
Language: English
Starring: many animals and electronics / Julee Cruise, Michael J. Anderson, Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage, Elena Ferrante

Building of an Identity is a musical documentary about how personalities are formed by nature, pop culture, transportation, and close relationships. Consisting of eighteen segments depicting what people need from life and what they add to it, the film puts an emphasis on sound and quiet just as much as it does on light and shadow.

Featuring an original soundtrack by Erik Sutch and Lila Tublin, the movie was shot on digital video, film, and videotape over the last ten or so years in Australia, Chile, Egypt, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Romania, the US, and Vietnam. It commemorates a decade of having a video camera in your pocket at all times ready to capture whatever is worth taking the camera out of your pocket for.

“Industrial Symphony No. 1 tells the story of a heartbroken woman (played by Laura Dern) who floats over an industrial wasteland and sings ballads of love after her boyfriend (Nicolas Cage) leaves her. Made before the unprecedented success of his cult-classic TV show Twin Peaks, it is the footage from an original play which was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989. The soundtrack is made up of songs from Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night with music by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. Often seen as a companion to Lynch’s 1990 film Wild at Heart because it also co-stars Dern and Cage, Industrial Symphony No. 1 is a hallucinatory dream that explores the concepts of love and pain in the modern dystopia. Julee Cruise plays the dreamself of the heartbroken woman who sings beautifully, even singing from the inside of a trunk of a car at one point.” – Swapnil Dhruv Bose

1990 was a perfect year for David Lynch! The first season of Twin Peaks (and some of the second), Wild at Heart, and the lesser-seen musical of sorts, Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted.