‘The short films of David Lynch Vol.1’ (1966- [1974]1996)
The long-reigning king of the American bizarre. Nothing needs be said to introduce the man’s work – his name is a genre unto itself, immediately conjuring up those unhinged, paranoid, disturbedly beautiful fever-scapes so peculiar to him.
Besides the unprecedented employment of sound, the canonical images, and the sheer genius of his masterworks, his greatest contribution to American cinema is perhaps that, with Lynch, viewers finally got hold of the notion that you don’t have to understand a film to appreciate its beauty; that film doesn’t have to make itself understood. Before Lynch films could be weird, but they had to make sense - the ‘weird’ had to be qualified somehow, contextualised, patted on the head. ‘Eraserhead’ (Lynch’s debut feature film) completely exploded that quaint rule.
‘The short films of David Lynch Vol.1’ is indispensable to anyone interested in experimental cinema in general, and Lynch in particular.. Starting with his film-student works, the collection traces the painter becoming the director, then leads into the mid-70s shorts that would contain some of the sparks and cues destined to become central to his cinematic art. Appendixed is Lynch’s 55-second contribution to Lumiere et compagnie.
From a little boy growing his own grandma in the attic; to alphabetic nightmares and concertos of vomiting heads; a dull lady auto-dictating letters while her amputated legs retch gunk; and indescribably deeper into Lynch’s labyrinthine trip of a mind, these shorts make most of his eventual films rate PG on the Bonkers scale.
First published in Muse magazine
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