The AllMovie Blog may not seem like the most likely forum for a tribute to author David Foster Wallace, who died this past weekend of an apparent suicide, but it happens that the insightful writer’s talents were by no means limited to fiction. Wallace often wrote on the topic of film, bringing a larger cultural perspective to the medium that few essayists were capable of. Also, and probably just as importantly, many of us here on staff were tremendous fans.

Wallace wrote about movies the same way he did all the innumerous subjects he tackled over the course of his career: with incredible intelligence, perception, and empathy. His most famous — and most accessible — piece on film is probably David Lynch Keeps His Head, the account of his visit to the set of David Lynch’s Lost Highway. In it, Wallace describes every element the cinematic world with symphonic precision, from his personal reaction to Blue Velvet, to the mundane workings of a movie set –- not to mention finding room to clearly delineate exactly what the phrase “Lynchian” connotes. That article appears in his first collection of non-fiction works, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a book that also offers a reprint of E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, an essay where, using St. Elsewhere and other examples, Wallace explains how post-modernism negates meaning and hampers an artist’s ability to communicate. This, of course, despite Wallace himself being one of the most important voices in postmodernist literature.

He broached the topic of film in his fiction as well, illustrating the corrosive effect of our irony-driven culture on personal relationships in The Appearance, a short story from the anthology The Girl With Curious Hair. Additionally, his novel Infinite Jest gets its name from a movie within the book — a film that turns out to be so impossibly entertaining that it becomes deadly, as everyone who sees it inevitably dies (probably of dehydration), when they’re unable to do anything but watch it over and over again.

Wallace’s brilliance as a writer, a commentator, and a humorist makes his passing painful for the culture at large, but his insight into the strange and beautiful world of movies makes it especially painful for us at AllMovie. We treasure the precious works he offered in his short but prolific career, but we can’t help anticipating a certain disappointment in the years to come, whenever a film comes out that we just know Wallace would have had something clever to say about.