Obsessed as it is with the messier side of conception, consumption, birth, life, death, decay, and every conflicting/confounding emotion/impulse in-between and beyond, David Lynch's 34-minute
The Grandmother (1970) might be viewed as a dry run for his 1977 feature film debut
Eraserhead -- though
The Grandmother is anything but dry. Married at age 21 and the father of a baby girl the following year, Lynch had left the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (where he had switched his focus from painting to filmmaking due to a desire to see paintings move) and was working as an engraver for a photographer friend when he got the call that his 1968 short,
The Alphabet (1968), had won a $7,000 grant from the American Film Institute. Using the grant money to write, direct, photograph, and animate
The Grandmother -- the tale of an unloved young boy, the offspring of brutal and bestial parents, who grows a surrogate grandmother from a seed - Lynch gained entrée to the AFI's Hollywood branch, moving to Los Angeles in 1971 and studying at the AFI's Center for Advanced Film Studies under Czech emigre filmmaker Frantiek "Frank" Daniel: a path that led directly to
Eraserhead.
The Grandmother's evocatively sooty interiors were shot at Philadelphia's Peale House, a former hotel owned by Lynch's alma mater.
The Grandmother's sound editor, Alan Splet, would collaborate with Lynch on every one of his films through
Blue Velvet (1986) and win a 1980 Academy Award for special sound effects for Carroll Ballard's
The Black Stallion (1979).
By Richard Harland Smith
Producer: David Lynch
Director: David Lynch
Screenplay: David Lynch
Cinematography: David Lynch
Music: Tractor
Cast: Richard White (Boy), Dorothy McGinnis (Grandmother), Virigina Maitland (Mother), Robert Chadwick (Father).
BW-34m.
