Chrystabell: The Spirit Lamp

Chrysta Bell Zucht, a.k.a. Chrystabell, is a singer, songwriter, and actress. She has been performing on stage since the age of seven, and she has released nine acclaimed albums and toured in more than forty countries. Her striking appearance and deeply expressive style, which oscillates between synth-pop, dream pop, and ethereal wave, caught the attention of David Lynch, who began collaborating with her in 1999. He supported her, calling her his muse, and contributed to three of her albums – This Train (2011), Somewhere in the Nowhere (2016), and Cellophane Memories (2024) – as co-author of the music and producer. In 2017 he cast her as FBI agent Tammy Preston in the sequel to the cult series Twin Peaks, which Time magazine named the best television show of the decade. In 2024, Lynch and Chrystabel released the album Cellophane Memories, with Lynch also directing the music videos for the songs “The Answers to the Questions” and “Sublime Eternal Love”, in which Chrystabell played the central role. Wire magazine published a cover photo of Chrystabell and Lynch to mark the release of the new album. The famous director said of her: “Chrystabell looks like a dream and Chrystabell sings like a dream. And the dream is coming true.”

David Gatten is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary experimental film. He systematically explores the relationship between the printed word and the moving image, blending a conceptual approach with moments of poetic introspection in his films. His latest work, The Spirit Lamp (2025), on which he collaborated with actress and singer Chrystabell, is a tribute to David Lynch. It is a performance that features songs written by Lynch and Chrystabell, accompanied by original 16 mm footage. Gatten’s notable films include Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002), The Great Art of Knowing (2004), What the Water Said, Nos. 1–3 (1998), and many others. His film The Extravagant Shadows (2012) was named the best experimental feature film of the 2010s by the magazine Senses of Cinema, and Gatten himself was ranked among the ten most important filmmakers of the century in a poll by Film Comment. His films have been presented by a number of prestigious institutions, including twice at the Whitney Biennial, and retrospectives of his work have been held by major galleries and museums such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, SFMOMA, the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna, and the National Film Archive in Prague.