Editor’s Picks: David Lynch Re-Releases Stories of Small-Town America

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

David Lynch Presents Interview Project

This summer, David Lynch will re-release his unnerving collection of 121 short documentary portraits of Americans in high definition. This bleak project – shot by his son Austin Lynch and collaborator Jason S. in 2009 over 70 days and across 32,000 kilometres of the poorest parts of America – once struck me as dark and exploitative, even if it was completely engrossing. Fifteen years later, the series now seems a prophetic vision of the United States that would eventually respond to the optimism of Barack Obama (then newly elected) with the cynical politics of Donald Trump (now on the verge of re-election). It remains an uncomfortable investigation into poverty, drug abuse and class resentment, lacking Lynch’s arresting dreamscapes while retaining his characteristic surrealism in the garbled speech of a deranged America.

Leonardo da Vinci (Original Score) (2024), Caroline Shaw

Documentarian Ken Burns has tapped Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw to score his forthcoming two-part documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. The first track, ‘Intentions of the Mind’, is a tribute to the intellectual life of the great Florentine inventor and painter, with sparking violins splintered by the airy beats of Sō Percussion quartet and the vocalizations of ensemble Roomful of Teeth. A genre-bending classicist whose music is inspired by pop and folk,  there is perhaps no better living composer than Shaw to soundtrack Burns’s portrait of Leonardo, an artist famously averse to fixity and hard lines and who abhorred the restraints of convention. 

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life (2024), Richard King

Since his death from AIDS in April 1992, the composer and cellist Arthur Russell has become a singular influence in American music. Richard King’s oral history – handsomely illustrated with snapshots, scores, photographs and letters – delves into the life of Russell, from his early days in Iowa and California to his legendary run as the musical director of The Kitchen in New York, to his final years as an aspiring pop star, when both Talking Heads and Philip Glass turned to him for inspiration.

Russell has always been difficult to pin down: he was moved by Eastern mysticism and Beat poetry, he composed folky pop and hard-hitting disco, and he was both an immense improvisational talent on stage and a master in the recording studio. By bringing forth the voices of those who knew and worked with him, King draws us into Russell’s complex and contradictory world, searching not for a coherent narrative, as a biographer might, but more a feeling.