Elephant Man
From the Kafkaesque journey of Henry Spencer in Eraserhead to the nightmarish drift of the protagonist of Inland Empire, David Lynch has never ceased to take us off the beaten track and over the edge of unsuspected cliffs. The winding roads of the human psyche and discomfort are answered by the intricacies of narrative breakdown and the mise en abyme. The filmmaker opens the doors to parallel worlds reflecting our distorted expectations and challenging our passivity as spectators. There's never a bad excuse to revisit this prolific body of work and experience its vertiginous nature.
In 1884, in London, surgeon Frederick Treves made a shocking discovery: an extremely disfigured and deformed man who had become a circus attraction. This man, named John Merrick and nicknamed "The Elephant Man", owes his name to a terrible accident that occurred when his mother, then only a few months pregnant, was run over by an elephant. Deeply affected by Merrick's deformities, Dr. Treves decides to buy him, freeing him from the violence of his owner and the daily humiliation of being put on show.
Initially, the surgeon believes that "Elephant Man" is suffering from a congenital mental deficiency. However, he soon realizes that Merrick is in fact a wounded man, intelligent and endowed with great sensitivity.
The plot is based on the true story of Joseph Merrick.

David Lynch
David Lynch est un cinéaste, scénariste, photographe, musicien et peintre américain. Il est l'auteur de 10 longs-métrages sortis entre 1977 et 2006, ainsi que d'une série télévisée notable, Twin Peaks, initialement sortie en 1990-91 et prolongée en 2017. Nommé aux Oscars du cinéma comme meilleur réalisateur pour Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986) et Mulholland Drive (2001), il a reçu la Palme d'or au Festival de Cannes en 1990 pour Sailor et Lula et un Lion d'or d'honneur à la Mostra de Venise en 2006.
Photo : Josh Telles
