How a moment of darkness on a painter’s canvas led Lynch to film
The exaggerated behaviour and histrionic gestures of silent cinema introduced the masses to an unrivalled exultation in the image. Talkies changed all that, yet there remains to this day a hierarchy of image over words. A wisecracking cop in a Michael Bay movie may comment on the action, but the explosions have already told you the story. Sound — as long as it isn’t the human voice — is also key to the equation, although for the most part it is pure function in thrall to pyrotechnics, the hijacked ‘magic’ of cinema.
That an experimental voice like Godard or Lynch can also be forged within these constructs is perhaps the real magic. Godard recalibrated systems of image-music-text by pulling apart the subject of Hollywood itself; Lynch’s films may have more to do with the Hollywood dream machine, but are less concerned with cinema as a form. A series of car crashes in Weekend may lead us to a single crash in Wild at Heart, but an apparently borrowed shot in the Lynch film becomes his own. The genesis for Lynch’s work lies in a moment of darkness on a painter’s canvas, his cinema simply grew out of that.
Weekend, Dir: Jean-Luc Godard
Wild at Heart
While studying at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, David Lynch found the impetus for filmmaking during work on an experimental painting and sculpture contest. “I was painting a black painting,” he tells us on The Short Films of David Lynch DVD. “I was looking at this painting and I heard a wind and I saw the painting move a little bit. And that’s what started the whole thing. I wanted to see a painting move and have sound.”
Six Men Getting Sick
Six Men Getting Sick (1967) was the result of this thinking. One minute of animated film was projected onto a sculptured screen, accompanied by a siren loop. Even watching this on DVD, you get a sense of dimension, the figureheads protruding violently along the top of the frame, like part-submerged heads in Dante. A fragmented stillness gives way to the gush of vomit, overloading the screen in an act of removal. The figures eat up their existences, breaking down life into a gush of fluids and consumption of the resulting nothingness. But negation takes on a funny edge of renewal, an early instance of hope in Lynch’s work — something he is perhaps not given enough credit for.
The Alphabet (1968), which was shot on 16mm, offers a shattered glimpse into primal development. A dark haired girl writhes on a bed reciting the alphabet, letters spilling from the screen. Language is key, just as it is in Godard. But here it is fractured, almost inhuman. The letters themselves do not unlock the door to communication, but are dreamt by the sleeping girl, a nightmare of the subjugation to come. It posits language as a barrier, but one it is necessary to pass through. And, over the course of 34 minutes, The Grandmother (1969) presents us with David Lynch the fully-formed filmmaker.
Eraserhead
But it is an incident during the protracted filming of Eraserhead that best illustrates Lynch’s relationship with technology. Cinematographer Frederick Elmes had been asked to test two types of videotape by the American Film Institute. After mentioning this to Lynch, the director wondered aloud if it mattered what was actually shot. Elmes believed it did not. Lynch completed what became The Amputee uncharacteristically quickly, having written it overnight and filmed it the following day. Catherine Coulson (The Log Lady) is the titular protagonist, composing a letter as her leg stumps are treated by a silent doctor (played by Lynch) As her dull but melodramatic monologue unfolds, her wounds begin to suppurate, fluids spurting and sloshing out at an alarming, sickeningly comic rate.
It was filmed twice, subtly different on each occasion. The picture is murky, but the lack of clarity speaks directly of and for the subject, which is something Lynch has embraced in his recent infatuation with consumer grade DV technology.
This article originally appeared in issue 17 of Plan B magazine (December 2006/January 2007)
- Death of the Author: Paul Auster - May 1, 2024
- Naum Gabo – F. Lux (DFA) - March 10, 2024
- Concrete Islands Albums of the Year 2023 - December 7, 2023