In Dreams: A David Lynch Retrospective
- Eraserhead
- USA1977
- David Lynch
- 89 DCP
- 14A
- In Dreams: A David Lynch Retrospective
Screening Dates
“The images are so alien and frightening, yet so rapturously beautiful, that you feel as if you’re glimpsing the primal id of cinema … It’s clearly the work of an original and almost spookily confident talent.”
Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine
David Lynch’s hair-hoisting first feature is one of those rare movies that genuinely seems to have spilled directly out of the unconscious mind—unmediated, unadulterated, and “carrying bits of brain tissue with it” (Film Comment). Shot on a shoestring, and taking five years to complete, Lynch’s grisly comedy is set in a god-awful industrial wasteland where hapless factory worker Henry (Jack Nance) learns from girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) that he has become a father to a child quite unlike any other. The film serves up a Lynchian nightmare vision of love, sex, parenthood, and the nuclear family, rendered in remarkably textured black-and-white images and startling, unsettling sound. A midnight-movie paragon of the ’70s and cult classic ever since, Eraserhead marked the emergence of a once-in-a-generation artist who would arguably never again harvest so completely from his inner world.
“[A] demented and beautiful masterpiece … One of the most naked and horrifying self-portraits ever conceived by a filmmaker.”
John Patterson, The Guardian