A recent article in The New York Times Magazine brings again to the surface somebody whom we have missed in the last years, partly due to his choice to focus on different things (meditation) and, as we hear, partly because of health issues: David Lynch.

I have always admired David Lynch for his non-mainstream activity as a director and, more generally, as an artist. A specific voice (literally—as explained in the Times article—and metaphorically) in the very diverse panorama of movie directors, his way of understanding cinema, as a medium and as a world of fantasy, has often been imitated but never surpassed, even by today’s cinematic standards.

My very personal list of his masterwork, in order of importance:

• Twin Peaks (the TV series)
• Mulholland Drive
• Blue Velvet
• Dune (even if he repudiated it, is a great movie and very close to Frank Herbert’s novel)
• The Elephant Man