FEATURING: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sharon Wilkins

PLOT: A teenager falls in with a group of anti-abortionists in her quest to become pregnant.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As if the plot isn’t off-beat enough, Palindromes‘s teenage porotagonist is played by a variety of actors of different ages, sizes, races, and even genders.

COMMENTS: The standout feature of Palindromes is the unorthodox casting of a series of different actresses (and one actor) in the role of Aviva Victor. The variety of thespians allows Solondz to express the evolution of Aviva’s self-image, physically reflecting changes in her emotional state during the movie. When we first meet Aviva, she is played by a young African-American girl who wears her emotions on her sleeves and in her facial expressions. She is the only child to middle class parents (Barkin and Masur) living in an anonymous suburb in the Northeast United States. Horrified at the probable suicide of her cousin Dawn and alienated by the material nature of her mother’s love, Aviva becomes obsessed with the idea of having lots of babies to ensure she has someone to love her. Then, as a Caucasian brunette in her early teens, she has an ill-advised encounter with the son of a family friend, and gets pregnant. As a reedy, red-haired, slightly older girl, she strenuously resists but eventually accedes to getting an abortion. As a more confident and more attractive brunette, she runs away with the help of a truck driver, with whom she has sex in the hopes of once again getting pregnant. Abandoned by the truck driver, she wanders through wilderness in the shape of a teenage boy and then is discovered—now as a large, older African–American woman—by the driven and very Christian Mama Sunshine, who runs an orphanage for children with medical infirmities. Here Aviva is least like herself: in a completely alien environment, she has to lie about her name and her past to fit in, and her self-doubt and anxiety are apparent in her magnified size, awkward movement, and change in race. The plot unfolds from there involving more pedophilia, a quest to assassinate the doctor who aborted her fetus, and a shootout in room 11 of a seedy motel, with Aviva switching from shape to shape, becoming more assertive and mature. At the point where she feels most grown-up, she returns to her family as a world-weary, bedraggled 20-something waif (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She holds her own in an existential debate with her older cousin, Mark, and easily wins arguments with her parents. But, as the title of the movie suggests, things come around: Aviva meets up with the boy who got her pregnant to begin with, reverts mentally through the chain of actors who have portrayed her, until she is once again the vulnerable, out-of-place, emotionally needy little black girl. As seductive as the message is that everything eventually returns to its beginning state, palindrome-like, some things in the film are irreversible: death, certain operations, and murder among them. In the end, it’s these things that will eventually shape the person Aviva will eventually become, but she’s not yet become them yet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What makes this strange story even stranger is Aviva is played by eight different performers… Solondz constructs a deadpan sheltering bubble around his film, thereby defusing most of the issues he raises. It’s all one Warholian shrug. Still, ‘Palindromes’ is unlike anything you’ve seen at the movies.”–Bob Longino, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske

FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets

PLOT:  A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso.  The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it.  Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.

BACKGROUND:

• The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day.  Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
• Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand.  She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden.  For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan

Original trailer for Blood Tea and Red String

Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world.  It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.

COMMENTS:  Artist Christiane Cegavske had been living with the haunting creatures of Blood Tea and Red String in her head for years before bringing them to life.  Her first visions of white mice were far more terrifying than the subtly unsettling red-eyed rodents who eventually made it to the screen.  In their first appearance in a Cegavske painting, the vermin torture a nude, bound woman in a rose garden: two of the creatures threaten her breasts with massive scissors, while a third kneels between her spread legs, sewing her up with red string.

Cegavske’s view of the creatures had softened by the time she conceived the story for Blood Tea, and their menace subsided into a background aura.  In her DVD commentary the artist consistently speaks of these creatures, along with other denizens of her subconscious world like the Oak Dwellers (sort of a mutant hybrid of shrews and crows), as if they were real beings with an independent existence; she has learned some things about them, she tells us, but does not pretend to have all the answers.  She confesses that she does not know the name of the Spider, or where the mice get the hemoglobin to brew their favorite beverage, or where the Frog finds the hearts he uses in his magic rituals.  Her understanding of the creatures evolved over time, and with greater familiarity it seems she no longer sees them as terrifying, as did the young girl who painted the first image of torturer mice.  By the time of Blood Tea the characters had become ambiguous, mysterious fairy tale creatures with inscrutable habits and customs, unfit to be judged by human standards.

I’m not implying Cegavske is a crazy woman who literally sees visions of twisted creatures and catalogs their behavior like some schizophrenic crypto-anthropologist.  It’s just that she honors these characters’ subconscious origins; she conceives of each entity in a dream and slowly cultivates a relationship with it, letting it divulge to her what it will over a period of many years.  Her approach to characterization is patiently Surrealist.  When she finally unleashed the results of her studies of these beings and their curious customs on the world, they simultaneously appear fully fleshed-out, breathing creatures, yet they remain full of secrets.

The affluent mice have somehow discovered a vintage Victorian portrait of a human woman with blood-red cheeks and lips, and they want the Oak Dwellers (obviously this world’s premier artisans) to create a simulacrum for them. The Oak Dwellers do so, but fall in love with their own creation, sew up an egg they find floating in a stream inside it, and mount it on their tree like a crucified savior (or a scarecrow).  The mice, arriving in the night in their turtle-drawn carriage, steal the doll and take it back to a mouse hole full of ticking clocks, where they get drunk on blood and play a game where they deal out hands of blank cards.  Meanwhile, the Oak Dwellers put on cloaks and set out on a journey to recover their creation.  They encounter carnivorous plants, but are saved by an amphibian wizard who feeds the hungry pods hearts in place of their prey.  And so it goes.  The story has the outline of a fairy tale or an epic fantasy quest that makes it easy enough to follow, but the details are gnarled, amazing and strange.  It’s a near-perfect blend of surrealism and story, with no language to nail it down to a single meaning (the Dweller’s squawks and the mice’s squeaks convey only the most basic of emotions, like anger or alarm).

The world Cegavske fashions recalls the earliest folk versions of fairy tales—before they were refashioned by Victorian moralists to teach children useful behavioral lessons—stories set in lands populated by inscrutable magical creatures with obscure motivations.  The meanings of these tales, which accrued and mutated over generations, are often unclear and often amoral; the point of the stories, invented to amuse, is to evoke wonder.  But meanings do suggest themselves, seeping through the fabric of the tale.  Though Blood Tea and Red String is decidedly and deliberately undidactic, motifs of female reproduction poke through the story.  The title itself subtly evokes a feminine hygiene product, and an obvious image of menstruation occurs with a shot of blood leaking between the doll’s feet.  Eggs are an important symbol, and are even kept inside the doll (the only clearly female character in this otherwise sexless world).  There is a pregnancy and a birth (rendered grotesquely, Alien style).  Creatures are continually being wrapped up into womblike containers—the carnivorous plant pods which envelop the sleeping Oak Dwellers, the spider that tighly wraps its captured prey in a red string cocoon, a corpse sewn snugly into a leaf coffin.  There are fewer symbols of the male reproductive system, but they do appear, in the form of acorns.  This seed first appears nonchalantly affixed to the lead Dweller’s staff.  Later the crew gets drunk on Frog’s brew (sipped from nut cups) and see a vision of an acorn which splits open and turns into an egg.  Why this reproductive imagery is in the movie is unclear (perhaps it has to do with the project’s long gestation), but it does help unify the unconscious rhythms of the film, while distantly linking the story to ancient fertility myths.

Visually, Blood Tea owes much of its look to Czech Surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, an influence whom Cegavske is eager to credit.  The white mice fashion their sartorial style on Alice‘s white rabbit, down to their white ruffled collars and scarlet frock coats.  Most of Cegavske’s models have that weathered, antique quality—like leftover wooden toys from a pre-plastic era—typical of the objects Svankmajer loves to animate.  Yet, while she takes cues from the Czech master, Cegavske does create a style of her own, by setting her action not in the real world but inside of carefully composed, pastoral dioramas that resemble children’s pop-up storybooks.  Svankmajer confines his creatures in claustrophobic interiors, but for the most part Cegavske lets hers roam in open fields and gardens—gardens where the sunflowers have faces.

Blood Tea‘s animation is necessarily herky-jerky, but the style works in favor of the mythical material by removing the action one step from reality while still remaining rooted in the physical world.  Like the movie’s story and visuals, Mark Growden’s score is off-key yet oddly melodic, mixing calliopes with recorders or lutes with a Jew’s harp to create tunes which sound medieval and otherworldly at the same time.

For a project that took an amazing thirteen years to complete, it’s remarkable that Blood Tea and Red String isn’t overly thought out—and I mean that as a compliment.  Half-rodent, half-crow creatures who live in oak trees and build dolls for blood-addicted mice don’t need extensive backstories.  It’s enough to know they tend sunflowers, sew eggs into puppets, and implicitly trust mystical frogs who carry endless supplies of hearts beneath their robes.  What seems like randomness to us to them is ritual.  We should feel honored and privileged to glimpse these noble and elegant creatures as they trek about their Faerie world on wispy business we’re too thick and pragmatic to fully comprehend.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain… Often grotesque, though never in the ‘Sick and Twisted’ juvenile gross-out mode, dreamlike feature is as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet, with Mark Growden’s avant-garde folk score in perfect synch.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (festival screening)

“…the tale becomes both increasingly macabre and bizarrely poignant… if the tale’s moral is less than clear, its haunting images speak directly to some dark, preverbal corner of the heart.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

“In a word, crazy, but while Cegavske’s craft… is nothing if not painstaking, her story unravels dispassionately, and with zero sexual innuendo—an arbitrary string of strange happenings that starve for subtext.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Blood Tea and Red String - There’s only a little bit of information on this page—plot synopsis, quotes from favorable reviews, and links to buy Blood Tea merchandise—but you may enjoy poking around the rest of christianecegavske.com

IMDB LINK: Blood Tea and Red String (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Blood Tea & Red String Panel – Brief clip of Cegavske discussing the film and her influences at the Anime L.A. convention in 2007

Seed in the Sand by Christiane Cegavske – Kickstarter – Information on the second part of the intended trilogy that started with Blood Tea and Red String, including a plot synopsis and a peek at a set.  The project is already funded.

DVD INFO: The Cinema Epoch DVD (buy) contains a wealth of revealing background material, as befits a labor of love like Blood Tea and Red String.  Cegavske shares some of her “miniature paintings” (many of which appear in the film) and shows and discusses the sketches in which the characters from Blood Tea first revealed themselves to her in a segment called “character and story development.”  The brief, narrated survey of “production stills” gives us insight into the sets and provides us with a sense of scale.  Most important and interesting is the commentary, which takes the form of a conversation between the creator and actor/film critic Luke Y. Thompson.  In the commentary Cegavske seems shy, very much the distracted artist; she’s pained to give answers to certain questions, but she warms up enthusiastically when talking about her creations.  She has a refreshingly different personality than most directors: she comes off as a cool, weird chick with an eternal girlishness about her.

(This movie was nominated for review by NGboo, who called it “one of the most creative and imaginative fantasies. Surreal, enigmatic, bittersweet, cutely-morbid & bizarre stop-motion animation.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

FEATURING: William Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

PLOT: He and She (the characters are nameless) are making love when their child tumbles to his death out of a window.  She falls into inconsolable grief, and He, a therapist, unwisely decides to take her under his personal care.  When He discovers the root of She’s anxiety and irrational fears centers around a woodland retreat they call Eden, He forces her to go there to face her fears; but when they arrive, nature itself seems determined to drive them both mad.

BACKGROUND:

• Von Trier says that he was suffering from extreme depression when he made Antichrist and that working on the script and the film was a form of self-therapy.  Von Trier was still depressed at the time of screening and sometimes had to excuse himself from the set.
• In the title card and much of the promotional art, the “t” in “antichrist” is suggested by a figure combining the Christian cross and the symbol for “woman.”
• The therapy He employs in the film is called “exposure therapy” (where an anxiety-ridden patient is gradually exposed to the source of their irrational fear); von Trier had undergone this treatment for his own anxiety problems, and thought little of the practice.
• The idea for the fox came from a shamanic journey taken by von Trier.
• Besides this film, British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle also shot Slumdog Millionaire, for which he received the 2009 Academy Award, in the same year.  Of the two, Antichrist, with its extreme slow-motion photography, was the more difficult and magnificently shot film.
• Von Trier dedicated Antichrist to Andrei Tarkovsky, which caused jeers at Cannes and gave critical wags the opportunity to take deserved, if obvious, potshots (Jason Anderson’s “we now know what it would’ve been like if Tarkovsky had lived to make a torture-porn movie” was a typical dig).
• The film’s Cannes reception was tumultuous, with audience members reportedly fainting, and hostility between the press and von Trier (who proclaimed himself “the world’s greatest director.”)  Charlotte Gainsbourg won “Best Actress” for her brave and revealing performance.  The film received a special “anti-humanitarian” prize from the ecumenical jury (a Cannes sub-jury with a Christian focus), who called Antichrist “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Without doubt, the searing image is of the encounter between Charlotte Gainsbourg’s intimate prosthetic and a pair of rusty scissors.  However indelibly gruesome this scene may be, however, it comes out of von Trier’s shock toolbox rather than from his weird shed.  For an image with a power to make us do more than squirm, we turn to the scene where He and She are copulating in the woods, with her head resting on a bed of roots from a massive oak tree.  The camera slowly pulls back to reveal a number of disembodied human hands sticking out at various places from between the woody oak limbs.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Though the graphic torture-porn (and plain old-fashioned porn)

Trailer for Antichrist (WARNING: contains non-explicit sexual content)

elements have stolen the headlines and alienated viewers, at bottom this is von Trier’s spookiest and most mysterious film, a trip deep into the heart of darkness, and one the viewer may have as difficult a time returning home from intact as the characters do.  The irrational horror of von Trier’s vision is only magnified by the sense that you aren’t so much watching a story of madness as watching a director going insane in real time, before your very eyes: he seems to lose control of his story as it progresses, turning the climax over to his internal demons for script-doctoring, before reasserting some measure of control of his material in a surreal epilogue.

COMMENTS: Lars von Trier deserves to be roundly criticized for burdening Antichrist with four transgressive, shocking scenes: not because of their content, per se, but because these gratuitous displays dominate the experience and draw attention away from the rest of the film, forcing viewers (and reviewers) to deal with their reactions to these provocations first.  Their main function is to serve as obstacles to appreciating the grim beauty of the remaining film.  Whether their inclusion is a calculated act by a prankster director, or a lapse in judgment resulting from psychological impairment (von Trier claims to have written the script as self-therapy to help him deal with a crippling bout of depression much like the one suffered by Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character), they are a blight on a work that otherwise is startling, stark, and deeply disturbing.  Some are poisoned by these masochistic directorial indulgences and can’t move past them.   But, if your internal editor can cut about 1-2 minutes of gross, gratuitous gunk from the movie when you play it back in your head, you may witness miracles.

The artistically offensive scenes are a gratuitous shot of hardcore penetration, a needlessly graphic scene of Gainsbourg masturbating, and two scenes of graphic genital mutilation, one of which brings to mind the farcical climax of Nekromantik.  The penetration scene, though only seconds long, is in a way the worst offender, because artistically it adds nothing to the beautiful, monumental opening classical montage, but only distracts our attention.  There’s no point to it other than to send the prudes scurrying out the door early, and prepare the remaining audience to expect later shocks.  Although there is a thematic excuse for the clitorendectomy, there is little  aesthetic justification for look-at-me, “Hustler”-meets-Saw explicitness with which it’s depicted.  It evokes a visceral grossout response that’s far out of harmony with the meditative spiritual dismay that surrounds the scene; the literalism takes us out of the moment, forcing us to wonder what’s possessing the director rather than what is possessing Gainsbourg.  It has to be a mistake rather than a prank or a cynical ploy, because no director could be so self-loathing as to deliberately sabotage the transcendental tone he’s labored so painstakingly to create by inserting a Pink Flamingos moment into his sincerely despairing, metaphysical horror film.

Your ability to enjoy Antichrist may depend on your ability to deploy selective amnesia to those distracting scenes (and, of course, also with your ability to enjoy movies that are divided into chapters accurately titled “Pain,” “Grief,” and “Despair”).  The rest of the movie is a mood piece with an uncanny ability to unnerve and to pull you in scary psychological directions you’d probably prefer not to follow to their conclusion.  The film begins with an exquisitely (hardcore insert aside) realized black and white, slow motion prologue, scored to a yearning Händel oratorio whose title translates as “Let Me Weep,” in which Gainsbourg and Dafoe make love while their unattended one-year old child plummets to his death.  (Watch the way the water droplets hang magically in the shower as the couple hump; suspended particles, often linked to procreation, will become one of the film’s major visual motifs).  After the boy’s death, the movie becomes a searing psychological drama as Gainsbourg falls into inconsolable grief, and therapist Dafoe, fearing her psychiatrist is medicating her into oblivion and denying her the opportunity to heal, suspends his practice and his ethics to devote his life to helping her work through her bereavement and face her pain.  This section of the film is fascinating, and gives us the opportunity to observe two fine actors at the peak of their powers.  Gainsbourg, while avoiding histrionics, is credibly hysterical, while Dafoe’s performance is subtle; at the same time, we admire his devotion to his wife while knowing that his treating her is a Bad Idea (in capital letters).  There’s more than a hint of psychological sadomasochism in their sessions, but never a suspicion of deliberate malice; just the foreordained fear that one of them will inevitably and inadvertently scar the other by probing too deeply.

When the couple travel into the twisted forest to face Gainsbourg’s irrational fear of the hermetic retreat where she spent time writing her thesis on gynocide, things get decidedly weird.  Their psychological turmoil seems to manifest itself via a malevolent nature.  These tantalizingly deliberate middle scenes, where an unknown but terrifying tension builds through odd apparitions such as a deer galloping away from Dafoe with a half-born foal sticking from its hindquarters and the unaccountably anxious sound of acorns pounding on the roof, are perhaps the richest in the movie, full of mysterious implications.  Two more totem animals appear alongside the deer, each with a disturbing quirk (one of which will causes some watchers to laugh instead of cringe).  Things become more and more unhinged, as themes of sexual guilt and nature’s inherent antipathy to human desires become mixed with increasing otherwordly imagery and a slow-boil occultist plot that hints at much more than it reveals.  As Gainsbourg appears to heal, Dafoe becomes less and less controlled, until a final rustic therapy session boils over into shocking violence—and into that damned distracting, revolting imagery.  Inside the cabin, as the couple lays bloody and battered on the dirt floor, rationality finally departs altogether, replaced by mysticism.  Von Trier wraps it all up with an epilogue that brings back the black-and-white and the Händel, and ends on a mysterious, dreamlike image that raises even more unanswered questions.

It’s difficult to divine what all of this—the erotic loathing, the marital dynamics, the battle between rational and irrational, the witchcraft and the feral mysticism, the evocation of anxiety and depression, the hints of religious allegory—is meant to add up to.  And yet, the picture feels cohesive; perhaps as nothing more than a terrifying vision of a universe hostile to human hope.  The movie’s  inscrutability didn’t stop many critics from dismissing it as pretentious and empty.  The most common complaint was Antichrist is blatantly misogynistic.  I find this interpretation both reductive and extremely hard to swallow, though easy to predict based on von Trier’s previous record of psychologically torturing and debasing his female characters (the sexual debasement of  Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Nicole Kidman’s rape in Dogville, and the fact that Bjork accused the director of being an “emotional pornographer” and refused to act again after working with him in Dancer in the Dark).  Certainly, misogyny is one of the subjects of Antichrist, but a movie does not become racist simply because racism is one of its subjects.  It’s hard to imagine that anyone actually sees the intended message of the film as a transparent “women are inherently irrational and literally evil.”  If anything is obvious, it’s that there is nothing easy or literal about the movie.  Gainsbourg’s She is an incredibly complex character, both victim and victimizer, powerless and powerful.  Her “evil” is a mental condition, largely created by unquenchable grief (itself a product of an unquenchable love); even at her most sadistic, she’s never an unsympathetic cardboard villain

I think true misogyny mocks women and reduces them to frilly, ineffectual nothings (as the quote from the genuinely misogynistic The Horrors of Spider Island goes, to “hot goods for cold nights.”)  Here, Von Trier depicts femininity as powerful and mysterious; the trappings of witchcraft can be seen as empowering, rather than debasing.  The female is associated with the irrational, but it is also much more attuned to nature and to procreation.  There is an uncomfortable, almost Buddhistic intimation throughout the film that sex is evil, because its purpose is to perpetuate a cycle of pain. From the moment her boy tumbles to its death as her face contorts in orgasm, the association of emotional pain with sexual pleasure is the explicit source of the crippling guilt She feels throughout Antichrist.  She suffers at the death of her child, and the cause of her final desperate act to cut herself off from the shame sexual desire inspires in her.  Images of reproduction as a horrific event recur in the stillborn fetus hanging from the hindquarters of the bounding deer and the sinister acorns that rain on the rooftop and around Dafoe’s head.  The feminine, nature, and sex are all connected here, and He is alienated from them and cannot understand or control them.  With her intimate connection to procreation, She is more directly trapped inside the evil of nature than He is, and She seems to realize and live a deep, despairing truth that he cannot grasp.  If this is misogyny, it’s a far more complex and nuanced form of misogyny than the simple prejudice that goes under that name; it’s also not something that can be immediately dismissed by name calling.

Von Trier is more disturbed here by existence itself than he is by women.  His philosophy in Antichrist appears to be a completely nihilistic one, at least until the enigmatic epilogue with faceless women arising as if freed from their graves.  Unlike most nihilist prophets, von Trier’s not self-congratulatory, not proud to have figured out a gnostic truth the unwashed bourgeois masses can never grasp.  With a philosophy forged in the fires of deep depression, he’s revulsed by the abyss he has seen.  The disgust that flows through Antichrist is genuine, and while it doesn’t totally absolve von Trier from the missteps in taste that weaken the movie, they do come from his desire to communicate—and to not glamorize or gloss over—his sincere loathing.

Von Trier’s decision to dedicate his ultraviolent shockfest to Andrei Tarkovsky moved Cannes audiences to catcalls.  Certainly, the tasteful Russian would never stoop to such cynical exploitation tactics as explicit genital mutilation, and the deeply Christian director would never endorse such a nihilistic message.  But there actually are many echoes of the mysterious minimalist master in von Trier’s hypnotic pacing; in his lingering on images of pure cinematic beauty; and in the enigmatic, supra-rational, irreducible meaning of the film, which seems channeled from some other plane of existence.  It’s just that, while Tarkovsky had angels whispering in his ear, von Trier has terrible devils.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the only honest way to deal with a movie as dreamlike and filled with self-hatred and sealed off from the world as ‘Antichrist’ is by resisting von Trier’s shtick…  this isn’t just the most personal film von Trier has ever made, but something like an unconscious film. As magnificent as Dafoe and Gainsbourg are, they’re specters in a shadow play excavated from the deepest recesses of Lars von Trier’s troubled psyche.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

“[Antichrist] speaks the language of madness with astonishing fluency.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle

“…an out-and-out disaster — one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I’ve ever seen in my life. On top of which it’s dedicated to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose rotted and decomposed body is now quite possibly clawing its way out of the grave to stalk the earth, find an axe and slay Von Trier in his bed.”–Jeffery Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

OFFICIAL SITE: Antichrist (2009) – The Criterion Collection – contains the trailer, a scholarly essay by film professor Ian Christie, and a collection of press clippings

IMDB LINK: Antichrist (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Antichrist Pressbook – courtesy of the Cannes Antichrist page.  Contains the “director’s confession,” a very intelligent interview with von Trier by Knud Romer, and more

Lars von Trier – ‘It’s good that people boo’ – von Trier’s first post-Cannes interview/profile, by a sympathetic Kaleem Aftab of The Independent

“I Don’t Hate Women”: Lars von Trier on Antichrist – von Trier briefly addresses the controversy surrounding the film, among other topics discussed in this Rotten Tomatoes interview with Luke Goodsell.  An earlier RT interview with Jonathan Crocker is here.

Cannes #6: A Devil’s Advocate for “Antichrist”- Roger Ebert’s Cannes blog entry goes much deeper than his official newspaper review of the film, offering an interpretation of the movie as a fantastical religious allegory

Antichrist’s Willem Dafoe: ‘We Summoned Something We Didn’t Ask For’ – Movieline interview with star Dafoe

Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist shocks Cannes – Reuters contemporary account of the furor Antichrist raised at Cannes

ANTICRHRIST: The man who made this horrible, misogynistic film needs to see a shrink – Chris Tookey, of the Daily Mail, is one of the few critics who actually outlined the case for Antichrist‘s alleged misogyny, rather than accepting it as a given

Is Antichrist director Lars von Trier a misogynist? – Slate’s Jessica Winter gives a nuanced and well-researched analysis of the title question, though she stops short of definitively answering “no”

DVD INFO: There was an Australian DVD release of Antichrist (with the “scissors” cover) that was pulled very quickly when Criterion became interested in acquiring the rights. It’s highly unusual for Criterion to issue a new release film, but they chose to do so with their 2-disc, director-approved Antichrist set (buy). Disc one provides the film, three versions of the trailer, and a commentary dialogue between von Trier and film scholar Murray Smith (von Trier stumbles a bit in the commentary; Smith seems to understand the film better than the author does). Extras on disc 2 include interviews with von Trier and stars Dafoe and a 45-minute session with Gainsbourg; footage from the Cannes premiere, including the star’s promotional interviews and footage of a reporter demanding von Trier “justify” the film; and seven “making of” featurettes, each about 15 minutes in length, covering the “test film” made with different actors, the visual effects, the soundtrack, the production design, makeup and props, the animal wranglers, and a bit by the movie’s “misogyny consultant” divulging her research into the history of witchcraft persecutions.
The film is also available, with the same features, on Blu-ray (buy).

FEATURING:  Charlee Danielson, Anthony Sneed, Mark Wilson

PLOT: Mutant genitalia drive their masters to stalk, copulate and kill.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:  Bad Biology is a campy shocker about rogue sexual organs.  It’s camp value stems from the director’s willingness to pull out the stops and include any bizarre scenes he deems appropriate, rather than from inferior filmmaking or a desire to make the movie look cheap or corny.

COMMENTS:  Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case, Brain Damage) finally got a decent budget and made his most delightfully freakish, slick and naughty movie yet. The opening line consists of a mutant girl (his real life girlfriend , the very pretty Danielson) stating, “I was born with seven clits.”

Jennifer is a living sexual anomaly and nymphomaniac perpetually seeking satiation as she struggles to puzzle out her destiny.  She mates, gestates and conceives in only a few hours, often inadvertently killing her partner and depositing her malformed, monstrous issue in any convenient waste receptacle.  Believing that she is deified by her “gift,” she considers herself to be a genetically advanced Eve.

Batz is a nervous stud with a personified penis that behaves more like an evil conjoined twin than a sexual organ.  A side effect of steroid abuse, it has a mind and a will of its own.  It is in the habit of detaching itself to embark on its own adventures . To keep it under control, Batz consumes powerful cocktails of animal tranquilizers.  This only curtails its wanderings.  It still dances in his pants to the beat of its own drummer, literally.  Batz’ bat is capable of inducing perpetual (i.e. permanent) multiple orgasms in his, or rather, its dubiously “lucky” partners.

The two sexual mutants, with their latently homicidal sexual super apparatuses, consume a succession of vapid sex partners as they strive to satisfy their own demented appetites—and to control, or perhaps just placate, their throbbing, pulsing, oozing out of control reproductive organs.  That is, until they “meat” each other.  Bawdy, tawdry, seamy, sordid, ribald and every bit as prurient, squishy, disgusting and hilarious as one could hope, Bad Biology just has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…more out-of-control than anything the director has done.”–Matthew Sorrento, Film Threat (contrmporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

FEATURING: William Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

PLOT: After the death of their only child, a therapist takes his grieving and anxiety-

ridden wife to a retreat in the woods to face her irrational fears; when they arrive, nature itself seems determined to drive them both mad.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Actually, von Trier’s troubled and troubling Antichrist is almost a shoo-in to make the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.  Though the graphic torture-porn (and plain old-fashioned porn) elements have stolen the headlines and alienated viewers, at bottom this is von Trier’s spookiest and most mysterious film, a trip deep into the heart of darkness, and one the viewer may have as difficult a time returning home from intact as the characters do.  The irrational horror of von Trier’s vision is only magnified by the sense that you aren’t so much watching a filmic depiction of madness as watching a director going insane in real time, before your very eyes: he seems to lose control of his story as it progresses, turning the climax over to his internal demons for script-doctoring, before reasserting some measure of control of his material in a surreal epilogue.  While worthy of consideration, Antichrist finds itself in the same situation as the Coen brothers A Serious Man; we’re not going to officially certify it for the List until it receives its home video debut and we have a chance to scrutinize it more closely than is possible in a cinema.

COMMENTS: Lars von Trier desreves to be roundly criticized for burdening Antichrist with approximately four transgressive, shocking scenes: not because such sights should never be shown, but because these tasteless displays dominate our experience and force every viewer (and reviewer) to deal with them first and foremost.  Their sole artistic function are to serve as obstacles to appreciating the grim beauty of the remaining film.  Whether their inclusion is a calculated act by a prankster director, or a lapse in judgment resulting from psychological impairment (von Trier claims to have written the script as self-therapy to help him deal with a crippling bout of depression much like the one suffered by Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character), they are a blight on a work that otherwise is startling, stark, and deeply disturbing.  Some are poisoned by these masochistic directorial indulgences and can’t move past them; I sympathize with them.  But, if your internal editor can cut about 1-2 minutes of gross, gratuitous gunk from the movie when you play it back in your head, you may witness a near-masterpiece.

The artistically offensive scenes are a gratuitous shot of hardcore penetration, a needlessly graphic scene of Gainsbourg masturbating, and two scenes of graphic genital mutilation, one of which brings to mind the farcical climax of Nekromantik.  Although there is the thinnest of thematic justifications for the clitorendectomy, there is no aesthetic justification for the ham-handed, look-at-me, “Hustler”-meets-Saw explicitness with which it’s depicted.  It automatically evokes a visceral grossout response that’s far out of harmony with the meditative spiritual dismay that surrounds the scene; the literalism takes us out of the moment, forcing us to wonder what’s possessing the director rather than what is possessing Gainsbourg.  It has to be a mistake rather than a prank or a cynical ploy, because no director could be so self-loathing as to deliberately sabotage the transcendental tone he’s labored so painstakingly to create by inserting a Pink Flamingos moment into his sincerely despairing, metaphysical horror film.

Your ability to enjoy Antichrist may depend on your ability to deploy selective amnesia to those distracting scenes (and, of course, also with your ability to enjoy movies that are divided into chapters accurately titled “Pain,” “Grief,” and “Despair”).  The rest of the movie is a mood piece with an uncanny ability to unnerve and to pull you in scary psychological directions you’d probably prefer not to follow to their conclusion.  The film begins with an exquisitely (hardcore insert aside) realized black and white, slow motion prologue, scored to a yearning Händel oratorio whose title translates as “Let Me Weep,” in which Gainsbourg and Dafoe make love while their unattended one-year old child plummets to his death.  (Watch the way the water droplets hang magically in the shower as the couple hump; suspended particles, often linked to procreation, will become one of the film’s major visual motifs).  After the boy’s death, the movie becomes a searing psychological drama as Gainsbourg falls into inconsolable grief, and therapist Dafoe, fearing her psychiatrist is medicating her into oblivion and denying her the opportunity to heal, suspends his ethics to devote his life to helping her work through her bereavement and face her pain. This section of the film is fascinating, and gives us the opportunity to observe two fine actors at the peak of their powers.  Gainsbourg, while avoiding histrionics, is credibly hysterical, while Dafoe’s performance is subtle; at the same time, we admire his devotion to his wife while knowing that his treating her is a Bad Idea (in capital letters).  There’s more than a hint of psychological sadomasochism in their sessions, but never a suspicion of deliberate malice; just the foreordained fear that one of them will inevitably and inadvertently scar the other by probing too deeply.

When the couple travel into the twisted forest to face Gainsbourg’s irrational fear of the hermetic retreat where she spent time writing her thesis, things get decidedly weird.  Their psychological turmoil seems to manifest itself via a malevolent nature.  These tantalizingly deliberate middle scenes, where an unknown but terrifying tension builds through odd apparitions such as a deer galloping away from Dafoe with a half-born foal sticking from its hindquarters and the unaccountably anxious sound of acorns pounding on the roof, are perhaps the richest in the movie, full of mysterious implications.  More totem animals appear alongside the deer, each with a disturbing quirk (one of which will causes some watchers to laugh instead of cringe).  Things gradually become more and more unhinged, as themes of sexual guilt and nature’s inherent antipathy to human desires become mixed with increasing otherwordly imagery and a slow-boil occultist plot that hints at much more than it reveals.  As Gainsbourg appears to heal, Dafoe becomes less and less controlled, until a final rustic therapy session boils over into shocking violence—and into that damned distracting, revolting imagery.  Inside the cabin, as the couple lays bloody and battered on the dirt floor, rationality finally departs altogether, replaced by mysticism.  Von Trier wraps it all up with an epilogue that brings back the black-and-white and the Händel, and ends on a mysterious, dreamlike image that raises even more unanswered questions.

Von Trier dedicated Antichrist to Tarkovsky, which caused jeers at Cannes and gave critical wags the opportunity to take deserved, if obvious, potshots (Jason Anderson’s “we now know what it would’ve been like if Tarkovsky had lived to make a torture-porn movie” is a typical dig).  Certainly, the tasteful Russian would never stoop to such cynical shock tactics as explicit genital mutilation, and the deeply Christian director would never endorse such a nihilistic message.  But there actually are echoes of the mysterious minimalist master in von Trier’s hypnotic pacing; in his lingering on images of pure cinematic beauty; and in the enigmatic, supra-rational, irreducible meaning of the film, which seems channeled from some other plane of existence.  It’s just that, while Tarkovsky had angels whispering in his ear, von Trier has terrible devils.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the only honest way to deal with a movie as dreamlike and filled with self-hatred and sealed off from the world as ‘Antichrist’ is by resisting von Trier’s shtick…  this isn’t just the most personal film von Trier has ever made, but something like an unconscious film. As magnificent as Dafoe and Gainsbourg are, they’re specters in a shadow play excavated from the deepest recesses of Lars von Trier’s troubled psyche.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

“[Antichrist] speaks the language of madness with astonishing fluency.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle

“…an out-and-out disaster — one of the most absurdly on-the-nose, heavy-handed and unintentionally comedic calamities I’ve ever seen in my life. On top of which it’s dedicated to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, whose rotted and decomposed body is now quite possibly clawing its way out of the grave to stalk the earth, find an axe and slay Von Trier in his bed.”–Jeffery Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

DIRECTED BY:  David Lynch

FEATURING: Jack Nance

PLOT:  Henry is a factory worker living in a dingy apartment in a desolate urban nowhere.  His girlfriend Mary’s mother informs him the girl has given birth to his child–although Mary objects, “Mother, they’re still not sure it is a baby!”  Henry and Mary get married and care for the monstrous, reptilian, constantly crying infant until Mary can take no more and deserts the family, leaving Henry alone to care for the mutant and to dream of the oatmeal-faced woman who lives inside his radiator and sings to him about the delights of heaven.

BACKGROUND:

• Eraserhead was started with a $10,000 grant from the American Film Institute while Lynch was a student at their conservatory.  Initially, the 21 or 22 page script was intended to run about 40 minutes.  Lynch kept adding details, like the Lady in the Radiator (who was not in the original script), and the movie eventually took five years to complete.
• When Lynch ran out of money from the AFI, the actress Sissy Spacek and her husband, Hollywood production designer Jack Fisk, contributed money to help complete the film.  Fisk also played the role of the Man in the Planet.
• Lynch slept in the set used for Henry’s apartment for a year while making the film.
• After the initial screening, Lynch cut 20 minutes off of the film.  Little of the excised footage survives.
• Eraserhead was originally distributed by Ben Barenholtz’s Libra Films and was marketed as a “midnight movie” like their previous underground sensation, El Topo (1970).
• Based on the success of Eraserhead, Lynch was invited to create the mainstream drama The Elephant Man (1980)  for Paramount, a huge critical success for which he received the first of his three “Best Director” nominations at the Academy Awards.
• Jack Nance had at least a small role in four other Lynch movies, and played Pete Martell in Lynch’s television series, “Twin Peaks.”   His scenes in the movie adaptation Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1990) were deleted. Nance died in 1997 after being struck in the head in an altercation at a doughnut shop.
  
• Lynch has written that when he was having difficulty with the direction the production was heading, he read a Bible verse that tied the entire vision together for him, although he has refused to cite the verse and in a recent interview actually claims to have forgotten it.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The iconic image is Henry, wearing that expression permanently lodged between the quizzical and the horrified, with the peak of his absurd pompadour glowing in the light as suspended eraser shavings float and glitter behind him.  Of course, Eraserhead is nothing if not a series of indelible images, so others may find the scarred man who sits by the broken window, the mutant infant, or the girl in the radiator to be the vision that haunts their nightmares.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Eraserhead is probably the greatest recreation of a nightmare ever

Original trailer for Eraserhead

filmed, a marvelous and ambiguous mix of private and cosmic secrets torn from the subconscious. Or, as Lynch puts it, it’s “a dream of dark and disturbing things.”

COMMENTS:  When you tell people you are interested in “weird” movies, I’d wager at least half the time they respond with, “You mean like Eraserhead?“

“Normal” folks despise this film.  The most common complaint is that the imagery is needlessly repulsive, followed by an objection that it’s incomprehensible and meaningless, followed by an accusation that it’s slow and boring.  Eraserhead is intense; it’s like being thrust into someone else’s expertly produced nightmare.  There are no comforting narrative guideposts, no way to predict what is coming next.  Eraserhead absorbs you into its own warped world, and the experience is simply too unpleasant for many.  No one can be convinced to admire it, but it’s one of the must-see features in the weird canon.  And, like it or hate it, with its unique textures and anxious rhythms Eraserhead expands the possibilities of what film can achieve, making it a landmark film for anyone interested in the art of cinema.

Eraserhead is totally original in every element: the look, the sound, and the feel.  Despite the tremendous waves the film made after release and its imposing underground reputation, it’s remarkable that so few filmmakers who followed have attempted to imitate Eraserhead’s overall style (Elevator Movie [2004] is one film that does mine similar territory, with limited success).  The style of later Lynch films has proven much easier for poseurs to copy, but as a whole Eraserhead remains inimitable, which is one suggestion of its greatness.

Lynch has said that the look of Eraserhead was inspired by Philadelphia (a point that the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce fails to mention in its brochures).  It just as easily could have been modeled after any decaying northeastern U.S. city.  Henry’s world is an expressionistic urban hellhole; rubble lines the empty streets, and industrial fixtures, smoke and steam are everywhere.  His squalid apartment has a window that doesn’t exactly look out on a brick wall; it appears that the bricks have been laid directly on top of the window pane.  The sparse and ruined look of Henry’s world has led many to assume that Eraserhead takes place in some post-apocalyptic future, although no other internal evidence justifies that leap.

The black and white cinematography is extraordinary; each frame is packed with visual textures, from the industrial to the organic.  Any still selected at random demonstrates extraordinary detail and composition.  In the prelude to the love scene between Henry and his neighbor across the hall, the most dimly lit sequence in the film, Lynch’s use of the inky end of the grayscale is incredible; the lovers faces blink out of existence in the darkness, then slowly fade back into frame as they move out of the shadows.  Ignoring the content of the movie and viewing it simply as a work of photography, Eraserhead is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.

Using low-budget ingenuity, the film creates several startling visual effects.  The baby itself is a masterpiece of instinctive horror, and Lynch was careful to never explain how it was made.  There is a (to my knowledge unsubstantiated) rumor that it was created from, or modeled after, a calf fetus; whatever the case, it’s an alien, reptilian thing.  Makeup is simple but effective; the radiator girl looks like Shirley Temple, but with grotesquely puffy cheeks.  Lynch even manages to create his own planet for the film.  Although none of the effects would be mistaken for CGI, the monochrome color scheme is forgiving, and the props and makeup do have the perfect qualities to convey a strange and alien visual message that reinforces the odd narrative.

The sound design, by future Academy Award winner Alan Splet, is crucial to Eraserhead’s power to draw us into its world.  There is hardly a moment of complete silence in the film; whatever we are seeing is always accompanied, at the very least, by a distant industrial hum.  Lynch and Splet seemed acutely aware of the omnipresence of machines in our world, and they draw attention to the ever present background buzz of electric filaments and the drone of distant machines working with mysterious purpose.  These mechanical noises, which vary in pitch and intensity, blend with the sound of a howling wind (a noise especially associated with the mysterious planet) in an ever shifting soundscape that mixes in off-key organ chords or bowed cellos and rises to an onerous howl during particularly intense sequences.  The ceaseless bleating of Henry’s baby–a sound which is fearful because it’s not quite human, but one that also engages our sympathy because it is so clearly a cry of distress–is haunting.

Lynch’s directorial style forces the visual and sonic elements to the forefront.  The film is deliciously slow-paced, like a silent film; it even plays for more than ten minutes before the first line of dialogue is spoken.  Lynch holds a single shot for far longer than another director would, allowing us time to soak up the detail in the frame.  In a faster-paced film we might miss the fact that Henry constantly wears a pocket protector to protect his suit from leaking pens, and oddly prophylactic character trait in a man who has supposedly fathered an illegitimate child.  At times, this slow pace is deliberately disturbing, as when the elevator door in Henry’s lobby takes what seems like forever to close; we are left with an uncomfortable feeling, although Henry stands there impassive and expressionless.  There is a constant social awkwardness throughout the film; characters pause and stare for just a bit too long before responding to simple questions, creating an isolated, alienated ambiance.

Thankfully, the film is more than just an unending, unbearable parade of drawn-out disturbances.  Lynch’s eye finds the beauty amidst squalor and despair as well as any filmmaker ever has.  There is enough humor in the film to lighten the way, although much of it is so subtle and absurd that it may take a second viewing to appreciate it.  The uneasy dinner with Mary’s family is a minor masterpiece of black comedy; Mary’s comatose grandmother helps toss the salad, despite being completely paralyzed, and the new manmade chickens Henry is asked to carve squirm their legs when poked with a fork.  Lynch also inserts a mild slapstick moment into one of Henry’s dreams in order to break the tension.

But even more than the occasional comedy, what elevates Eraserhead above a mere mood piece is the drama.  The world Henry inhabits may be almost unrecognizably unreal, but his predicament–a young father with a deformed child, deserted by his weak wife and forced to care full time for his ugly, sickly, needy offspring–is real, human, and tragicomic.  We can identify with besieged Henry, whose bandaged babe’s bleating rises to alarming levels when he so much as touches the doorknob to leave his apartment.  At the same time, we feel for the baby, who is innocent and vulnerable despite its loathsome appearance.  Henry cares for the unnamed baby with true tenderness at times, even as his frustration and loneliness grow.  Although they are united by blood, Henry and his child are at bottom antagonists, and our sympathies are torn as we are able to empathize with both sides.

Although it’s taboo to admit, new parents inevitably have moments when they resent the control their own offspring seizes over their lives.  Eraserhead mines these forbidden, repressed feelings and pushes them to an absurd, horrifying conclusion.  Henry’s trapped situation creates a unique and tense emotional texture that reflects a real human truth.  The strained relationship between father and child is the anchor which keeps the movie upright, even as waves of dream imagery threaten to capsize it.

Interpreting Eraserhead—in the sense of laying out a schemata that says “the Man in the Planet represents X, the baby represents Y” and wrenching out some sort of philosophical conclusion—is a popular but misguided parlor game.  Lynch himself has said that “no reviewer or critic or viewer has ever given an interpretation that is my interpretation, since the 25 or more years that it’s been out.”  That’s fine; after all, Lynch is only the co-author of the script.  The other half of it is composed by Lynch’s subconscious, working uncredited.  It’s worth noting that at approximately the time he conceived the script, Lynch was living in a cheap apartment in Philadelphia with his then pregnant wife.

Most perceptive critics have pointed out that the film centers around an impressionistic theme of horror at the idea of procreation, and have wisely left it at that.  Sexual imagery is pervasive, and it overwhelmingly operates at the biological, reproductive level, almost never at the erotic level.  Small monsters, a cross between a mutant spermatozoa and a fetus with the umbilical cord still attached, reappear throughout the film.  When smashed, they burst in thick, white, semenous splashes.  In the beginning of the film, one of these beings appears superimposed over Henry’s head; when the Man in the Planet pulls a lever, it shoots out and splashes into a pool of liquid.  Later, these same sperm-monsters creatures fall on the Lady in the Radiator from above, and she casually grinds them beneath the heel of her shoe with a smile.  Fertilizing sperm, which is after all the ultimate source of Henry’s suffering, appears as the enemy.  At one crucial point, the baby’s head grows out of Henry’s neck and displaces his head, which falls to the ground disregarded—as if his own offspring has replaced him and made Henry himself irrelevant.

Despite filmgoers vain desire to find concrete symbolism so as to “make sense” of the film in a conventional way, Eraserhead doesn’t have a rational “meaning.”  It’s effective precisely because it’s not pedantic, does not attempt to shove a point down the viewers throat, but instead forces you into an otherworldly space inside someone else’s head.  Any meaning that may be gleaned from it is a quintessentially weird one, an expression of an irrational, nightmarish feeling that can’t properly be described in literal terms.  It’s a touchstone film that provides an important link between the classical surrealists (Buñuel, Cocteau) and today’s neosurrealists.  Even more than that, Eraserhead is not so much a movie as it is an amazingly immersive experience, one that everyone who claims to be a fan of weird cinema needs to dip him or herself into at least once.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a sickening bad-taste exercise… little substance or subtlety.  The mind boggles to think that Lynch worked on this for five years.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“…watching this daringly irrational movie, with its interest in dream logic, you almost feel that you’re seeing a European avant-garde gothic of the 20s or early 30s… The slow, strange rhythm is very unsettling and takes some getting used to, but it’s an altogether amazing, sensuous film; it even has an element of science fiction and some creepy musical numbers, and the sound track is as original and peculiar as the imagery.”–Pauline Kael

“The black-and-white world of ‘Eraserhead’ disturbs, seduces and even shocks with images that are alternately discomforting, even physically off-putting, and characterized by what André Breton called convulsive beauty. It also amuses, in its own weird way, with scenes of preposterous, macabre comedy…”–Manohla Dargis, New York Times (rerelease)

IMDB LINK:  Eraserhead (1977)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Radiator Heaven: Eraserhead – an excellent, well-written summary of the background of the movie

David Lynch Eraserhead – a German fan site that has not been updated in a while but contains behind-the-scenes stills and links to articles of interest (including many in languages other than English)

City of Absurdity: David Lynch’s Eraserhead – another unofficial fan site, with more archived articles

DVD INFO:  The 2000 single disc of Eraserhead (buy), the version reviewed here, has been impeccably remastered by Lynch.  (For a while, it was exclusively sold through his site, but can now be purchased from retailers).  The film looks and sounds absolutely pristine.  The primary extra is 90 minutes of wandering but fascinating reflections (titled “stories”) about the creation of Eraserhead by Lynch, who smokes throughout the interview and puts Catherine Coulson (assistant director and assistant camera) on speakerphone to add her remembrances.   The disc also includes the original trailer.  Of note is the fact that the menu sequence consists of a deleted scene, with Henry observing a scary looking dead cat (we discover the history of this cat in the” Stories” extra feature).  There is also a minor Easter egg you can locate by cycling through the chapters, although it doesn’t make much sense.

Because Lynch was so meticulous in his black and white cinematography (the film contains some lingering afterimages in certain fades that you may miss), the disc also includes a feature which allows you to calibrate the brightness and contrast on your television set.  Although it’s a nice idea, you may find it annoying if your DVD player insists on auto-playing this feature every time you place the disc inside it.  Like the feature presentation, the menu sequence also moves at its own slow pace, not allowing you to access the movie or the extras until it’s good and ready.  Also, Lynch doesn’t believe in chapter menus and hasn’t included any, which means you’ll have to use the fast-forward button to reach a particular scene.

The movie is also available in a limited edition two-disc gift set together with The Short Films of David Lynch (buy).  It comes in a special gift box with a twenty page booklet. Short Films consists of six short subjects, with introductions by Lynch, and includes all three of his pre-Eraserhead works.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Felipe A.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)