Eraserhead and The Short
Films of David Lynch

The experimental film world has made some serious inroads in the DVD marketplace lately, with compilations dedicated to the work of such hardcore mavericks as Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren hitting store shelves and Facets kicking off a series of series of releases highlighting the work of the Kuchar brothers, but let's face it, there are only so many nutcases like myself out there and I'm sure these titles aren't flying off the shelves like hotcakes. Experimental film is cinema's equivalent to jazz: the perception is that it takes a certain kind of intelligence to appreciate it and there aren't many who want that kind of challenge from their entertainment.

Still, there's a whole side of cinematic expression you're missing if you shy away from this kind of stuff and, in the same way that you can ease yourself into the world of jazz by listening to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker (before you go whole-hog into the world of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman), you can take some beginner steps into the world of experimental film by checking out some of the mind-expanding stuff in the work of David Lynch.

Lynch is an easy in to the world of abstract cinema. I mean, the guy is a Hollywood director, both in the literal sense (he lives and works in Los Angeles) and in the distribution sense (Universal and Disney released his last two pictures). His latest work is fueled equally by dream logic and modern virtuosity, but when you look at how he got there by examining the early work contained in these two new DVDs -- well, new to store shelves anyway: these discs have been available to hardcore Lynch fans via his website for a few years now -- you can see that his weirdness has been distilled and refined over the years. If you thought Mulholland Drive was weird, then baby, you aint seen nothing yet.

The work contained on The Short Films of David Lynch spans the length of the director's career, from his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (a film loop of six heads vomiting that was designed as kind of a "moving painting" by the director back in the late sixties), to a recent one-minute wonder made for the feature Lumiere and Company. To celebrate the centenary of the Lumiere Brothers' development of the movie camera, several directors were given a rebuilt version of the camera, a modern approximation of the film stock, and a single, uninterrupted, minute-long take to go hog wild. Lynch's 55-second horror show reveals that he did just that.

The standout film on the disc is Lynch's 40-minute wordless nightmare, The Grandmother. Alternately neglected by his parents and then abused by them due to a bedwetting problem, a young boy grows a loving grandmother by planting a seed on his bed and bringing her to life like by pulling her out of a tree. This film contains some imagery that could almost be the embryonic versions of shots in his debut feature Eraserhead (ie. trees that seem to bleed and an a bit of abstract animation toward the beginning meant to suggest the gestation and birth of the young boy).

Eraserhead is the best-known of Lynch's early films, probably due to the fact that it is feature length and it caught the attention of comedy mogul Mel Brooks (who is a closet fan of surreal horror that not only gave Lynch his first mainstream job directing The Elephant Man, but also brought Canada's uber-weirdo David Cronenberg to Hollywood to direct the remake of The Fly in 1986).

Both of these discs are identical to the ones available on Lynch's website and feature the same first-rate transfers and sound mixes so, if you already have these titles there isn't really a need to do a double-dip and pick them up again. Extras on both discs include video interviews with Lynch, in which he discusses each film (the interview on the Eraserhead disc, contained in a section entitled "stories," is as long as the film itself and does double-duty as a minimalist making-of).

There is, however, one small improvement with these new releases. Those of us that bought the films from Lynch's website got the DVD in an 8x8 box with fancy cardboard loops with the disc itself cradled in a paper sleeve that just seemed like an invitation for the disc to get scratched every time you took it out. Pretty much every person I know who bought these discs transferred them to a plastic DVD case before too long. Subversive Cinema has just gone ahead and packaged the discs in keep-case packaging right off the bat. The bad news is, you don't get the big, cool collectible books that came with the website versions. The good news is, these discs sell for about ten bucks less in stores. -- Christopher Hyatt