IN SHORT: DAVID LYNCH screens Thursday at 10PM on Sundance Channel.

David Lynch’s short films offer us a quick injection of what we might expect from his work… a little bit of mutable reality, a flexible trip through time and space, a taste of wry dead-pan comedy, and of course some grotesque body parts and fluids to both entrance us and make us squirm.

His earliest short, SIX FIGURES GETTING SICK (SIX TIMES), was made in 1965 while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and came out of Lynch’s desire to see his paintings move. What struck me about this short film and several of the others was David Lynch’s early interest in bodily processes (and bodily liquids) and how he projects that on the landscapes of his film in a variety of ways. For example…

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ERASERHEAD screens this Thursday at 10PM E/P on Sundance Channel.

The last time I saw Eraserhead on the big screen was in Prague in 2001. The place looked like a Lynch interior, had old ornate European furniture in the lobby and an escalator leading up to the main room. Again this is how I remember it and I’m not fact-checking with friends because memory is mutable in the David Lynch world and that’s where I was. The theater wasn’t made for movies but had a huge screen, a screen so big that it makes most of the current New York city arthouse theaters look like Ipods. It was sold out… sold out! I looked around at the audience, noticing that many wore geriatric and clunky looking headsets to hear a simultaneous live translation of the movie in Czech. Poorly designed, these headsets leaked their sound in murmurs. Somehow it was so fitting… all these strange mechanical humming devices just another layer of the soundtrack for this startlingly odd and wonderful film.

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