> For one example of a director who candidly will admit to not knowingly adding specific meaning to a scene, see David Lynch. He'll say, I don't know, it felt right, or words to that effect.
Yeah, you gotta treat Lynch like an abstract painter, at times: sometimes, something's there not because it's part of some coherent subject, but just because it seemed right. It contributed to a mood, perhaps. Or he just thought it was funny, or it made him feel something (maybe not even related to the narrative!) when he looked at it. Or he liked the way it juxtaposed with something else, just aesthetically, even if together they don't really mean anything. You can ask "what effect does this have on the viewer?" with his works, and usually that bears fruit, but you have to accept that sometimes even very basic narrative questions simply don't have a fixed answer, for anyone, including Lynch, or that things like "why is this scene included?" may have plausible answers, but none that strongly connect to the rest of the work (at least, on a narrative level—theme and mood, often, they do).
It's the kind of thing only someone very special can pull off. Anyone with worse taste or judgement or a worse gut couldn't do what he does, and produce anything worth watching (except to laugh at). Plus he has to be good at the basic mechanics of film-making, for it to work at all.
Yeah, you gotta treat Lynch like an abstract painter, at times: sometimes, something's there not because it's part of some coherent subject, but just because it seemed right. It contributed to a mood, perhaps. Or he just thought it was funny, or it made him feel something (maybe not even related to the narrative!) when he looked at it. Or he liked the way it juxtaposed with something else, just aesthetically, even if together they don't really mean anything. You can ask "what effect does this have on the viewer?" with his works, and usually that bears fruit, but you have to accept that sometimes even very basic narrative questions simply don't have a fixed answer, for anyone, including Lynch, or that things like "why is this scene included?" may have plausible answers, but none that strongly connect to the rest of the work (at least, on a narrative level—theme and mood, often, they do).
It's the kind of thing only someone very special can pull off. Anyone with worse taste or judgement or a worse gut couldn't do what he does, and produce anything worth watching (except to laugh at). Plus he has to be good at the basic mechanics of film-making, for it to work at all.