BFI David Lynch Season – The Shorts (1968 – 1974)

After almost three and a half hours of Lynchian weirdness I was subjected to some awfully strange dreams on Wednesday night, unconsciously exhausted I found myself mysteriously wandering around a parched, sun drenched Middle East furtively divining for water – maybe a combination of elements such as this and a recent viewing of this had infected my subconscious*, an ominous sign as I embarked on my most ambitious project yet at the Menagarie. Whilst not necessarily emulating the man’s greatest works let’s begin at the beginning with a trio of short films from the mindscape of David Lynch, one of the most catalytically distinctive American directors of recent years, a polymath whose heteroclite career veers from screens big and small, from music to opera, from nightclubs to painting he is being honoured with a comprehensive BFI retrospective throughout the month of February in the gloomy screening rooms of London’s South Bank. Firstly in the interests of transparency I am an enormous fan of ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’, his four decades of work are firmly situated  in the top-tier of my personal pantheon, with a fascinating career to date in which he has carved out an almost unique position as the premiere photographer of delicious dreams and our limitless imaginations, of our subconscious drives and supernatural speculations. As much as I would have loved to have spent every day revisiting his work I had the draw the line somewhere, so I have selected a programme of films that I have not yet seen on the big screen, unfortunately this means that the likes of Wild At Heart and Lost Highway will not be on the agenda, the latter a real shame as I particularly wanted to revisit it if only to witness this classic moment again, but you never know what I might try to add to the roster so we’ll see how my stamina and schedule develops over the coming weeks. I will be filling in the gaps on the small screen however to keep the intellectual momentum going, therefore tonight I shall be revisiting The Elephant Man before tomorrow’s double bill. There is also a couple of events to break things up in terms of my coverage, as such I’m minded to kick things off with a context setting report on the season introduction and some brief coverage on the three short films which screened before Lynch’s nebulous debut, I think we can all agree that Eraserhead is worthy of its own, separate diagnosis? Excellent…..

The season opened with an hour-long discussion with academic Anthony Todd, author of this recent publication and as a senior Film Studies lecturer at the London College Of Communication he was an ideal delegate to begin proceedings. The aim of this context setting was two-fold, firstly to briefly touch upon the first phase of Lynch’s career, from the trio of shorts up until the critical darling Blue Velvet, and secondly (and perhaps more importantly) to examine the production and aesthetical frameworks into which the likes of Eraserhead could deliver its mutant nativity. It was a rather dry but convincing cantor through the first chapter of Lynch’s career, with Todd mapping two simultaneous shifts in the cultural and infrastructural developments of the film business, firstly the shift of the truly underground, non-narrative, avant-garde cinema toward the mainstream through the likes of Andy Warhol’s patronage in the late Sixties, causing the likes of Newsweek and The Village Voice to support, celebrate and promulgate articles on the Midnight Movie phenomenon that really came of age in the grindhouse abatoirs of the Seventies. In tandem with this shift of the visual culture was the storming of the means of production by the new brats, the movie-savy, art house admiring, genre championing likes of De Palma and Coppola, Scorsese and Schrader whose movies dominated the early Seventies cultural palette with an invigorating attraction to more psychological driven, more sexual tenebrous and narratively challenging fare. Thus the avant-garde surfaces to the mainstream from below, and the Hollywood hierarchy descends to embrace the experimental, and it’s in this Venn diagram overlap that filmakers like Lynch connected with an audience that were hungry for new and faintly taboo movie experiences. Further discussions of the first four films also emerged but I’ll keep those details clandestine until the actual reviews, he did however make the point that it wasn’t until Blue Velvet that any mention of ‘A David Lynch Film’ was present in the marketing or promotional drives during this first decade of operations, and such a sobriquet only appears to have been attached retrospectively to the first four features, a point illustrated with screenings of the first few trailers which emphasised the unique aspects of the films – a SF behemoth, a Victorian humanist melodrama, a suburban nightmare, a radical incubus – in order to extract the film-goers from their hard-earned cash. All in all this was a skim across the surface, but an accomplished prologue for the screenings to come;

The Grandmother – The darkness begins. I’d seen this before back on late night TV many moons ago and it demonstrably has a bewitching power, as some of its miscreant qualities – the barking parents, the powder bone faces, the droning, industrial soundtrack – came rushing back at me from a smoldering cauldron of memories. At a brutally long 34 minutes this does begin to drag, it could easily have been sliced in two and still retained its power, but nevertheless it emerges as the embryonic work of a major future talent. Key echoes of his later work are seen here with the pallid, chalk faced figures (Lost Highway), the almost Gilliamesque animation interludes (Mullholland Drive), the compassionate elderly figure (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet), a protean directorial avatar in the shape of the faintly neglected boy (see also Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks) and most importantly the seething, clanking, mechanical soundtrack which has remained one of Lynch’s core aesthetic drivers.

The Amputee – This was a first, I hadn’t seen this before and at a more compact 4 minutes this was a slightly more copacetic experience. An amputee woman muses over her relationships as a male nurse (Lynch) tends to her seeping wounds, seen through the veil of a distancing and flickering VHS manteau one is reminded of the Log Lady’s incomprehensible musings. After some digging around I’ve discovered that the actress playing the amputee actually was the fucking Log Lady – so that’s nice. Lynch shot this during a break of the five year shoot of Eraserhead, it’s a glimpse of the macabre that struck when budding cinematographer Frederick Elmes was offered the chance to test some new video cameras for the AFI. Faintly distressing but also humourous, this raised some nervous laughter.

The Alphabet – Another short, erm, short which consecutively speaks for itself, I like to think of it as David’s version of Sesame Street via Francis Bacon and a smattering of Samara. So to close this first installment of our phantasmagorical campaign here is some more context setting material, to celebrate the season Time Out have drafted a fantastic resume of  the angelic and demonic denizens of his films that you can argue or agree with here, (although the lack of Audrey Horne in that list is a shocking oversight) it contains some terrific leads concerning little known examples of his work such as Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted,  Premonition Following an Evil Deed  and On the Air which even I had never heard of before. Given the importance of sound in his work I’ve just had the damn fine idea of closing each individual review with a musical piece to complement the visuals and wordplay, and I’m also minded to throw in a few cinematic references and inspirations to Lynch’s work  as contrary to some opinions he’s not necessarily a throughly unique talent, like all great artists he has clearly been affected and inspired by his fellow hypnagogics as we can see here;

An eye-watering experience I think you’ll agree. Now, onto the mind rubbers….

*A superb, moving and harrowing film by the way which should have got last years best foreign film Oscar – highly recommended.