The Cinematheque

The lightbulb moment in David Lynch’s passage from painter to filmmaker almost doesn’t need repeating, so ingrained is it in the origin story of the American auteur: the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts student, contemplating one of his paintings, ​“heard a little wind” and felt the urge for the figure on the canvas to move. From there, a cheap wind-up 16mm camera and the prize-winning animation it produced—Six Men Getting Sick (1967), a loop of vomit and tape-recorded sirens—started Lynch down a path that would culminate a decade later with his avant-garde opus Eraserhead. Along the way, Lynch developed ideas that would persist across his career: fear of language (The Alphabet), domestic horrors (The Grandmother), and absurdism wrought from tragedy (The Amputee, in two variations). This program collects his formative early works, along with an eerie one-minute short from 1995 commissioned for the centenary of cinema.

Six Men Getting Sick
USA 1967
David Lynch
4 min. DCP

The Alphabet
USA 1968
David Lynch
4 min. DCP

The Grandmother
USA 1970
David Lynch
34 min. DCP

The Amputee: Versions 1 & 2
USA 1974
David Lynch
9 min. DCP

Premonitions Following an Evil Deed
USA 1995
David Lynch
1 min. DCP