Celebrated film director David Lynch returns to Philadelphia to speak about “Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain.”
This lecture is the first of many initiatives of his new foundation that helps students overcome stress though meditation. The free lecture will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 7 p.m. in the Harrison Auditorium at University of Pennsylvania.
Lynch will field questions about his upcoming film Inland Empire, due for a 2006 release. This year he plans to launch the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, a national non-profit organization aimed at bringing the benefits of stress-reducing meditation to students.
He started practicing transcendental meditation in 1973 while living in Los Angeles, Calif.
“I got the idea to start the foundation from my own benefits,” Lynch said. “My foundation raises money to any student who is interested in meditation. Our goal is to send a wave of peace across the world and United States and get the country out of negativity and suffering.”
Although Lynch is better known for his mysterious and haunting films Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, he does not see a discrepancy between his films and his foundation.
“All ideas are coming from the same place,” he said. “The medium of ideas is a thrilling thing to me. Through meditation you learn to dive within and everything gets better as a result.”
Lynch said he has a deep respect for all artists and various kinds of media. He is a painter, sculptor, furniture designer, songwriter, author and producer. Lynch even began his creative journey at Philadelphia’s own Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he first became interested in film. There he made four short films with grants from the American Film Institute.
Lynch said he respects the works of filmmakers Frederico Felini, Igmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock. Last year, the British newspaper the Guardian named Lynch the world’s best film director of the past 40 years.
His talk at Penn will also feature brain researcher Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of nuclear medicine at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and quantum physicist, Jon Hagelin, who was recently featured in the documentary What the Beep Do We Know? and neuroscientist Fred Travis, director of Center for Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at Maharishi University of Management.
SPEC Film, SPEC Connaissance, Fox Leadership and Cinema Studies are sponsoring Lynch’s talk. For more information call (215) 898-6533 or visit www.davidlynchfoundation.org.
Olga Dvornikova can be reached at olgad@temple.edu.
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