Ішкі Империя: Давид Линчтің соңғы туындысы

2006 film by David Lynch

Inland Empire is a 2006 experimental psychological thriller film written, directed and co produced by David Lynch. As of , it is the last feature film Lynch has directed, marking his longest hiatus between film projects. The film's cinematography, editing, score and sound design were also by Lynch, with pieces by a variety of other musicians also featured. Lynch's longtime collaborator and then wife Mary Sweeney co produced the film. The cast includes such Lynch regulars as Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and Grace Zabriskie, as well as Jeremy Irons, Karolina Gruszka, Peter J. Lucas, Krzysztof Majchrzak, and Julia Ormond. There are also brief appearances by a host of additional actors, including Nastassja Kinski, Laura Harring, Terry Crews, Mary Steenburgen, and William H. Macy. The voices of Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey are included in excerpts from Lynch's 2002 Rabbits online project. The title borrows its name from a metropolitan area in Southern California. Released with the tagline "A Woman in Trouble", the film follows the fragmented and nightmarish events surrounding a Hollywood actress (Laura Dern) who begins to take on the personality of a character she plays in a supposedly cursed film production. An international co production between the United States, France, and Poland, the film was completed over a three year period and shot primarily in Los Angeles and Poland. The process marked several firsts for Lynch: the film was shot without a finished screenplay, instead being largely developed on a scene by scene basis; and it was shot entirely in low resolution digital video by Lynch himself using a handheld Sony camcorder rather than traditional film stock. It received generally positive but polarized reviews from critics, with attention centering on its challenging and surrealist elements. It was named the second best film of 2007 (tied with two others) by Cahiers du cinéma, and listed among Sight & Sounds "thirty best films of the 2000s", as well as The Guardians "10 most underrated movies of the decade". The film was remastered by Lynch and Janus Films in 2022. When asked about Inland Empire, Lynch refrained from explaining the film, responding that it is "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it." When presenting screenings of the digital work, Lynch sometimes opened with a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe. New York Film Festival official Richard Peña summarized the film as "a plotless collection of snippets that explore themes Lynch has been working on for years", including "a Hollywood story about a young actress who gets a part in a film that might be cursed; a story about the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe; and an abstract story about a family of people with rabbit heads sitting around in a living room." Critic Mark Fisher wrote that the film "often seems like a series of dream sequences floating free of any grounding reality, a dream without a dreamer [in which] no frame is secure", but argued that "it is the film that is mad, not the characters in it  it is Hollywood itself that is dreaming". He also commented that "to see Lynch's worlds captured on digital video makes for a bizarre short circuiting: as if we are witnessing a direct feed from the unconscious". Scholar Anne Jerslev has argued that the film "constitutes multiple and fractured modes of perception in a world of digital screens".

Inland Empire is the first Lynch feature to be completely shot in digital video; it was shot in standard definition with a hand held Sony DSR PD150 by Lynch himself. Lynch has stated that he will no longer use film to make motion pictures. He explained his preference, stating that the medium gives one "more room to dream", and more options in post production. He did not work with frequent collaborator and editor Mary Sweeney because "there wasn't a real organized script to go by and no one knew what was going on except him." Interviewed at the Venice Film Festival, Laura Dern admitted that she did not know what Inland Empire was about or the role she was playing, but hoped that seeing the film's premiere at the festival would help her "learn more". He asked if Lynch was joking when he requested a one legged woman, a monkey and a lumberjack by 3:15. "Yeah, you're on a David Lynch movie, dude," Dern replied. "Sit back and enjoy the ride." Dern reported that by 4 p. m. they were shooting with the requested individuals. Instead, it premiered at Italy's Venice Film Festival on 6 September 2006, where David Lynch also received the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award for his "contributions to the art of cinema". The film premiered in the United States on 8 October 2006 at the New York Film Festival. The film received a limited release in the US beginning on 15 December 2006; distribution was handled by the specialist company 518 Media. Lynch hoped to distribute the film independently, saying that with the entire industry changing, he thought he would attempt a new form of distribution as well. He acquired the rights to the DVD and worked out a deal with StudioCanal in an arrangement that allowed him to distribute the film himself, through both digital and traditional means. A North American DVD release occurred on 14 August 2007. Among other special features, the DVD included a 75 minute featurette, "More Things That Happened", which compiled footage elaborating on Sue's marriage to Smithy, her unpleasant life story, the Phantom's influence on women, and the lives of the prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard. 15 years after the North American DVD release, The Criterion Collection announced a two disc Blu ray that was scheduled to release on 21 March 2023.

Lynch contributed a number of his own compositions to the film's soundtrack, marking a departure from his frequent collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti. His pieces range from minimalist ambient music to more pop oriented tracks such as "Ghost of Love". 518 Media released Inland Empire to two theaters in the United States on 6 December 2006, grossing a total of $27,508 over its opening weekend. It later expanded to its widest release of fifteen nationwide theaters, ultimately grossing $861,355 at the American box office. In other countries outside the United States, Inland Empire grossed $3,176,222, bringing the film's worldwide total gross to $4,037,577. It was released on 20 August 2007 in the United Kingdom, by Optimum Releasing, 4 October 2007 in the Benelux, by A Film, and 6 August 2008 in Australia, by Madman Entertainment.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 72% based on 113 reviews, with an average score of 7.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Typical David Lynch fare: fans of the director will find Inland Empire seductive and deep. All others will consider the heady surrealism impenetrable and pointless." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times classified Inland Empire as "fitfully brilliant" after the New York Film Festival screening. Peter Travers, the film critic for Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "My advice, in the face of such hallucinatory brilliance, is that you hang on." The New Yorker was one of the few publications to offer any negative points about the film, calling it a "trenchant, nuanced film" that "quickly devolves into self parody". Jonathan Ross, presenter of the BBC programme Film 2007, described it as "a work of genius  I think". Damon Wise of Empire magazine gave it five stars, calling it "A dazzling and exquisitely original riddle as told by an enigma" and Jim Emerson (editor of RogerEbert. com) gave it 4 stars out of 4: "When people say Inland Empire is Lynch's Sunset Boulevard, Lynch's Persona or Lynch's 8½, they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, Jean Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou, Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou, Maya Deren's LA experimental Meshes of the Afternoon (a Lynch favorite) and others". However, Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them involving actual rabbits) that eventually it just disappears for good". Dern received near universal acclaim for her performance, with many reviews describing it as her finest to date. Lynch attempted to promote Dern's chances of an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination at the 2007 Academy Awards by campaigning with a live cow, though she was ultimately not nominated for the award.

Inland Empire was restored and remastered by Janus Films in 2022, and was screened throughout the year beginning on April 8. The restoration of the film and soundtrack was overseen by David Lynch. For the restoration the original upscaled HD footage from the editing process was first downscaled back to standard definition to discard "false detail", then converted to 4K using an AI upscaling algorithm.