‘Where your nightmares end…’
Eraserhead is a 1977 American surrealist feature film and the first feature film by David Lynch, who wrote, produced and directed.
Lynch began working on the film at the AFI Conservatory, which gave him $10,000 to make the film after he had begun working there following his 1971 move to Los Angeles. The budget was not sufficient to complete the film and, as a result, Lynch worked on Eraserhead intermittently, using money from odd jobs and from friends and family until its 1977 release.
Eraserhead polarized and baffled many critics and filmgoers, but has become a cult classic. In 2004, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Lynch has called it a “dream of dark and troubling things” and his “most spiritual movie.”
Reviews:
“Watching Eraserhead today, what emerges is the sheer, immersive clarity of David Lynch’s vision, the sense of a world unlike our own and yet inextricably bound to it: a world in which all the light has been sucked out, leaving only horror and isolation, desperation and unattainable dreams.” Time Out
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“Eraserhead is a projection: in many senses. (Watch it in a cinema for another). Yet this is no criticism: it is entirely appropriate for the depiction of the troubled, post-industrial psyche. The mind invents itself through the overlayering of myth upon myth, to make our own fantasy of the world: the glasses through which we see everything.” Doves & Serpents
Eraserhead parody music video by Steve Toner for the Half Man, Half Biscuit song ‘Restless Legs’:
