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| Jack Nance (Voodoo (1995)), with his characteristic crazy hairdo from the film, adorn the poster for David Lynch's Eraserhead |
Henry walks around an industrial, very noisy neighborhood, where he seems to have fathered something ... nonhuman.
Eraserhead is the very abstract and strange feature debut from Montanan master writer-director David Lynch (Blue Velvet (1986)), who also acted as producer, editor and co-composer on it. It has a Luis Buñuel-reminiscent dinner scene and nightmarish scenes one after the other. - Eraserhead is generally a film like none other.
It elevates unpleasantness into high style but remains a cold acquaintance; chilling but not very emotionally stirring, probably because it is so outlandish. - Lynch already overcame this inhibition in his following film, period-set biopic The Elephant Man (1980).
Eraserhead is technically astonishingly well-made; both its images, sound design and effects are incredible. Eraserhead is extraordinary.
Related posts:
David Lynch: Blue Velvet (1986) or, The Strange World
Dune (1984) - Lynch heads to space, with an (unsurprisingly) strange result
Top 10: The best biopic movies reviewed by Film Excess to date
The Elephant Man (1980) - Lynch's deeply moving second feature
Watch a clip of the 'lady in the radiator' from the film here
Cost: Reportedly 10-20k $
Box office: Reportedly 7 mil. $ (only USA)
= Mega-hit
[Eraserhead premiered 19 March (Filmex Festival, USA) and runs 88 minutes. Lynch was inspired by stories of Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol and the Bible as well as personal experiences of his own surrounding the birth of his daughter Jennifer with severely clubbed feet and living in a bad part of Philadelphia with his family. AFI's financing of the tiny-budgeted film was controversial, with the institute's dean threatening to quit if Lynch was not supported in his efforts. They erroneously assumed that his 21-page script would result in a short film. Instead, shooting of Eraserhead in LA, including at AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies, lasted from May 1972 - October 1976, an extremely long and highly unusual principal photography, which was fraught with financial issues and an artist filmmaker involved in every detail of production. The film was seen by just 25 people on its opening night. It kept playing as a midnight feature in a few theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York for years, which got its gross up to the very impressive 7 mil. $. It further snailed its way out to theatrical releases in foreign countries over the course of the following three decades. Critically derided at its initial release, the film has since been hailed by many and been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the US in 2004. Stanley Kubrick told Lynch that Eraserhead was his favorite film around the shooting of Lynch's second film, The Elephant Man (1980), and it inspired Kubrick's masterpiece The Shining (1980) as well as countless other films and filmmakers since. Eraserhead is certified fresh at 91 % with an 8.3 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Eraserhead?
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