ERASERHEAD

The first time I saw "Eraserhead" was in the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. My friend Gerry had already seen it in San Francisco and was still in paroxysms of praise for the picture so I went in with high expectations; even so, I still wasn't prepared for what I saw that night. I was meeting Gerry in the bar next door afterwards but when I left the cinema I was still in something of a daze, or perhaps a trance, and started walking in the wrong direction. I knew I had seen some kind of masterpiece but I also knew here was a film I wouldn't want to sit through again, at least not for a very long time. Well, here we are 40 years later and I've just seen "Eraserhead" again.

For anyone still ignorant of the fact, "Eraserhead" was the film that introduced David Lynch to the world and a few minutes into the film was enough to tell us that here was a singular new talent worthy to sit on a pedestal next to the young Welles, not that Welles would ever make a film like "Eraserhead"; indeed who, other than Lynch, would.

There is a plot of sorts but essentially Lynch's film, luminously shot in black and white by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell, unfolds like a living nightmare, but whose? Lynch's? Henry's, (the central character that established Jack Nance as a cult actor for a new generation), or our own? Certainly there are images here enough to give the strongest of us nightmares, images and sounds, (this film has some of the finest sound designs ever recorded).



It has been described as experimental, as avant-garde and by some just as a plain old horror film. You could say it's also a kind of love story, though a very warped and forbidding one. Lynch, of course, would go on to the likes of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks" and would never fully abandon the sensibilites first seen in this extraordinary film. I was more prepared for it this time but it still blew me away.