Talking about taking pictures, the celebrated war photographer Susan Meiselas once observed: “Despite the pleasure of making a photograph, I still feel the need to stitch it and weave it into something more. I want to know what the subject says, beyond what the picture shows.” The unwarlike subjects of her photograph here, David Lynch and Patricia Arquette, do not give up their secrets easily. The pair are pictured at the Sundance film festival in January 1997, where Lynch’s film Lost Highway was being shown for the first time. Arquette was the star of the film, playing two roles, both perversely enigmatic.

At the time the photograph was taken, Lynch was 51. People were saying that his best films – Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man – were now long in the past. There are twin peaks in Meiselas’s picture, but they are snowed over, indistinct and far behind him. Can we see some of this in Lynch’s face – is this what Meiselas sees him as saying? Or is he just projecting his well-worn mask of middle American niceness? The writer David Foster Wallace once called Lynch “Jimmy Stewart on acid”. When offering biographical details for promotional purposes, the director has still only ever used four words: “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.”

And what of his heroine? In an interview about Lost Highway for the festival, Arquette said: “I have gone from the esoteric to the absurd in trying to understand this movie. But in the end I just feel like I am in good hands with David.” One of those hands holds her paternally close here, in her perfectly pastel cardigan, striped by the blind. They both look intently down the wintry valley outside. Lost Highway – in one tradition of the more singular cinema championed each January by Sundance – didn’t register at the multiplexes, divided the critics, but found its audience just the same.