Short of the Week: ‘The Grandmother’, a bizarre David Lynch experience
As the modern master of cinematic surrealism, David Lynch has quite a few works in his illustrious filmography that can be classified as “bizarre” or “strange”. Having developed a global reputation for making uniquely disturbing films like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, Lynch’s cinematic vision operates in the liminal space that exists between reality and nightmares. That’s exactly why so many audiences find it difficult to articulate the strangeness of Lynch’s art.
While his features obviously get most of the attention, Lynch’s short films are on a completely different level when it comes to the weird quotient. Right from his first film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), it was apparent that his experimental sensibilities were trying to conjure up a completely different visual framework which defied the rigid categorisations of mainstream cinema. Naturally, the shorts kept getting weirder as he polished his own skills.
For this edition of Short of the Week, we have decided to highlight Lynch’s incredible 1970 work called The Grandmother. Made during a time when he was transitioning from his former pursuits as a painter to a filmmaker, The Grandmother was actually submitted to the Amerian Film Institute as a script which was later made on a budget of $7200. It’s a foundational film for Lynch’s development as a director, not just because it had a direct influence on Eraserhead but also because it showcased his creative background.
“All I wanted to be was a painter, since the ninth grade. Painting led to film, but in between every film, I’m painting,” Lynch once said. It was only when he saw that paintings could move that cinema started to draw his attention. He added: “I’m looking at this painting of a garden at night, mostly black, and it started to move. From the painting came a wind. There was sound and moving picture, and I said, ‘Oh, a moving painting,’ and that’s what led to film for me.”
In The Grandmother, Lynch definitely makes the pictures move as he tells the story of a troubled little boy who is suffocated by the abuse he experiences at the hands of his parents. In order to escape the unbearable loneliness that has become a central part of his life, he decides to create a loving grandmother for himself by planting seeds. It’s the same bleak vision of the human condition that has haunted most of Lynch’s later projects.
Even when he had just sent in the script, AFI head George Stevens, Jr. knew there was something special about Lynch’s ideas, and this was proven beyond any doubt once The Grandmother was finished, especially because it was almost impossible to pigeonhole it into the strict boxes of genre filmmaking. In many ways, The Grandmother kickstarted Lynch’s directorial journey because it helped him get accepted into AFI’s prestigious program. The rest is history.
Watch the film below.
