Two sixty-second versions of David Lynch’s Eraserhead: one by Lee Hardcastle; the other by Martin Funke, which was made for the Jameson Empire Done in 60 Seconds competition.

It takes Lee Hardcastle 10 days to make one of his 60-second claymations, as he told Don’t Panic magazine:

I have some shortcuts, biggest ones are within the story – keep characters/locations down to a minimum because that stuff takes the most time to create. Something I learned over time is that whatever you do, do not skip out on the animation. People watch a video for animation, not a static image or boring moving graphics.

I re-use materials like cards & clay. Once in a blue moon, I’ll invest in something, last year I bought & made three armatures at £70 a pop. If I need something, I’ll search the apartment for props/materials. Check out my Eraserhead claymation, the bed sheet they’re sleeping in are in fact the underpants am wearing right now. It’s just the rent I have to worry about.

Lee has made a variety of other great 60 seconds films, including Evil Dead and The Exorcist, all of which can be found here.

Martin’s Eraserhead was one of the 10 shortlisted finalists, and more of his work can be found here.
 

 
Previously on DM

‘Inception’ in 60 seconds

 
A taste of things to come - two of David Lynch’s early films.

The Grandmother (1970):

The plot of the Grandmother centers around a boy who, looking for an escape from his abusive parents, grows a grandmother to comfort him. “There’s something about a grandmother…It came from this particular character’s need - a need that that prototype can provide. Grandmothers get playful. And they relax a little, and they have unconditional love. And that’s what this kid, you know, conjured up.”

The film has little dialog and combines animation with film, in its exploration of the “myths of birth, sexuality and death.”
 
The Alphabet (1968):

[David] Lynch’s wife, Peggy, told him of a dream her niece had during which she was reciting the alphabet in her sleep, then woke up and starting bouncing around repeating it. Lynch took this idea and ran with it. First he painted the walls of his upstairs bedroom black. Lynch painted Peggy’s face white to give her an un-real contrast to the black room, and had her bounce around the room in different positions as he filmed. This footage was edited together with an animated sequence where the letters of the alphabet slowly appear and a capital A gives birth to several smaller a’s which form a human figure.

 
The rest of ‘The Grandmother’ plus Lynch’s ‘The Alphabet’, after the jump…
 

 
David Lynch is releasing two singles Good Day Today and I Know on the UK independent label Sunday Best, as he told the Observer his first solo release Good Day Today came to him unprompted:

“I was just sitting and these notes came and then I went down and started working with Dean [Hurley, his engineer] and then these few notes, ‘I want to have a good day, today’ came and the song was built around that,” he said. Unlike his famously ambiguous and non-linear films, the song is accessible and, he readily admits, has a catchy “feel-good chorus”, with undertones of angsty electro-popsters Crystal Castles or veteran dance act Underworld. Why did he turn to electro for his first solo single? “Well, I love electricity so it sort of stands to reason that I would like electronics.”

The full interview with David Lynch can be heard here.
 
 

 
With thanks to Tommy Udo
 

 
Actress Sean Young’s Super-8 film footage offers a fascinating glimpse behind-the-scenes on the set of David Lynch’s Dune. See craft services, Sting, Kyle MacLachlan, David Lynch and Sean Young goofing around.

(via Minds Delight)

 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
Hausu (House), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, is the kind of movie that sends a writer scrambling for adjectives in an attempt to christen a new film genre. You pound your frontal lobes in the hope that you’ll dislodge some electrifying catchphrase that will be absorbed into film geekdom’s lexicon. I’ve been trying to come up with something hooky to describe the virtually indescribable mindbender that is Hausu. It’s not a J-horror film, it’s not a head film, it’s not some avant-garde psychological torture test, it’s not a cult film with an ironic smirk, it’s not…Well, I’m telling you what it is not. Let me try to wrap my brain around this and tell you what I think it is: Hausu is to cinema what a dream is to reality. It’s not just a simple record of events, it is the event itself. Hausu refers to nothing outside itself.

Though a mashup of pop memes, Hausu exists in a world of its own, devouring “reality”  and puking it back up in glorious Technicolor. It’s a mixtape compiled by a demented Carl Jung -  immersive, repellent, hysterical and visionary - forging a new consciousness composed of scraps of dead worlds.

Hard as it is to believe, Hausu was made in 1977. It feels as fresh and looks as startling experimental as anything being made by David Lynch or Guy Madden…except wilder.
 

 
Oh, the plot is about a demon possessed house, but that’s not important.
 
As for my new catchphrase, it’s a play on hypnagogic, that state between being awake and falling asleep. Hausu is hipnagogic.
 
Hausu will be released by Criterion in August on DVD.

David Lynch’s Interview Project has recently and quietly come to its scheduled end. The well-produced online-only project comprises a full 121 video interviews with random people, shot by Lynch’s team (led by his son Austin) on a year-long road-trip around the United States.

Lynch and co. manage to tap deeply into the wealth of personal stories in the great American working class that was first mined by the likes of oral historian Studs Terkel. But Interview Project filters Terkel’s ultra-earnest approach through the post-thereputic present, often getting a surprising amount of confessional material from a literal stop-and-talk encounter.

(Portrait of Nan, New Mexico, 1984)
 
How to now make sense of that master of the dark tableau, Joel-Peter Witkin?  Unlike some photographers whom I seem to have an ongoing fascination with (Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin to name a few), Witkin came along in the ‘80s, and I’ve hardly paid attention to him since.  His images, though, continue to startle and provoke—as does the rigor with which he makes them.

With his relentless focus on freaks, deformity, and the ravages of the flesh, Witkin’s obsessions back then overlapped a bit with ‘80s David Lynch.  In fact, you could easily plop the Eraserhead baby into a Witkin still-life.

My entirely spontaneous—and possibly reductive—theory as to why Witkin peaked in ‘80s?  AIDS was peaking, too.  The horror of what the body was capable of was, sadly, all too apparent everywhere.  Witkin perhaps was simply channeling that dread.

The photographer’s own version of what sparked his obsessions is as fitting as it is notorious:

It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived.  We were going to church.  While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help.  The accident involved three cars, all with families in them.  Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand.  At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars.  It stopped at the curb where I stood.  It was the head of a little girl.  I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it—but before I could touch it someone carried me away.

To hear, and see, more of what makes photographer Joel-Peter Witkin tick (including an account of his initiation into sex with a pre-op transexual), check out the following segment from Vile Bodies, a ‘98 Channel 4 documentary made on the body and the “crisis of looking.”  A link to Part II of Witkin’s segment follows at the bottom.

 
Joel-Peter Witkin Vile Bodies Part II

 
For some time, bizarro auteur David Lynch has paid the bills by directing quirky/beautiful television commercials for products like Clear Blue home pregnancy tests, Gucci perfume and Nissan’s Micra. (He directed a particularly odd one for cigarettes.) Now Lynch is back with “Lady Blue Shanghai” a 16-minute short for Dior with French actress Marion Cotillard making mysterious moves around Shanghai locales searching for a glowing purse. All the (in)famous Lynchian touches are there, with the addition this time of John Galliano’s stunning art direction.

Translation: It’s a weird little film. The House of Dior is getting double its money’s worth by funding this project: every hip blog on the planet—including this one—will race to post about the latest from David Lynch. This is a good thing, of course. How else would these diversions get funded?
 

 
While the sandstorm clouds of another Dune movie threaten to gather once again, tidbits of the visually striking David Lynch version keep rolling in.  Back in ‘83, the one-time future Mrs. Novicoff actress Sean Young, who played Chani against Kyle MacLachlan’s Paul Atreides, brought her video camera to Mexico City’s massive Dune set.  Here’s a bit of what she experienced:

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Frank Herbert & David Lynch discuss Dune

 
How did David Lynch and Mark Frost capitalize on the zeitgeisty momentum sparked by Twin Peaks?  With 1992’s On The Air, an unlikely mash-up of, well, Happy Days and 30 Rock.  From its Wiki entry: “The program followed the antics of the staff of a fictional 1950s television network (Zoblotnick Broadcasting Company or ZBC), as they tried to put on a live variety program called ‘The Lester Guy Show’ with disastrous results.”

I loved it.  America did not.  ABC took On The Air off the air after airing only 3 of its 7 filmed episodes.  Why not decide for yourself, and watch some of it below?  If you like what you see, you can, for now, find a whole lot more of it here.

 
Photorealistic David Lynch head by contemporary sculptor Jamie Salmon. From the artist:

I like to use the human form as a way of exploring the nature of what we consider to be “real” and how we react when our visual perceptions of this reality are challenged. In our modern society we have become obsessed with our outward appearance, and now with modern technology we are able to alter this in almost anyway we desire. How does this outward change affect us and how we are perceived by others?

(via Nerdcore)

Thanks to the never-ending French love of Frank Herbert’s Dune, we’re in store for a new adaptation of the book to film. What is this?

 
Vodka brand 42 Below is the creative sponsor behind One Dream Rush, a Beijing-based film festival of incredibly short films.  42 filmmakers from around the world were given 42 seconds.  The results from David Lynch, Dream #7, and Kenneth Anger, Death, follow below:

 
More on OneDreamRush

In that case, so must growing up reading William Burroughs, the Illuminatus trilogy, conspiracy theory books, dropping acid and listening to Firesign Theatre records!

From Science Digest:

Reading a book by Franz Kafka ?