Six Men Getting Sick

David Lynch has been one of my favourite filmmakers for most of my life now.

Having seen all of his feature-length films, I finally decided to watch some of the shorts, in chronological order.

"Six Men Getting Sick" had to come first, then, because it's the first movie Lynch made. He made it while in college, and when he intended to become a painter, not a filmmaker. In fact, the cost of making the movie caused Lynch to swear off filmmaking forever, but luckily for us he was tempted back to make another film.

There's not a whole lot to say about this movie. It reminded me less of a short film than a video installation, kind of like a (barely) animated painting. We see six abstracted figures in the background, unmoving, presumably from a painting of Lynch's. Overlaid is some basic animation, mostly showing bright fluid travelling up the figures' bodies and coming out their mouths.

A siren sound plays on a loop all the while.

What is it supposed to say, and what is it about? Who knows. Probably few people will be satisfied with it. I do find that it shares a common thread with much else of Lynch's filmography, though, and that is experimentation. Lynch's movies are always inches away from collapsing into an abyss that always feels like it's just barely being kept off-screen. But there's always light in his movies, too. And that light mostly comes from the joy he gets from experimentation, and invites us to share with him.

David Lynch once said about how he came to start making films.

• "One night I was drawing a garden in my studio, immersed in a thick black night, where green grass seemed to dilute this bottomless darkness, and I sat down beside my picture, began to peer at it, and I heard the wind blowing and My picture was rustled with grass, and then I thought, "Oh,the moving painting!" "

And so he realized that he wants to shoot / draw "moving pictures" called films. And this work, his first work, is so simple, so genius. In its essence, this is the true image of the philosophy with which Lynch still pictures his paintings. This is nothing more than a painting that constantly changes its state, and all this translates into a moving picture.

It is with this thought you need to look at this picture. It is she who will give you a complete idea of ​​the primary thought Lynch shot his greatest works ("Mallholland Dr.", "Eraserhead", "Blue Velvet").

Looking at this disturbing picture, you can experience the same sensations as when looking at pictures of surrealists, such as Salvador Dali. And if you are suddenly not familiar with the works of Lynch at all, then I advise you to understand and feel his view of the cinema precisely from this work, and what undisclosed potential the cinematography possesses, not playing with your intellect, and not even with your eyes, but with your subconscious mind ...

I remember Lynch was once quoted as saying that he was initially a painter, but he wanted the paintings to move, just a little bit, & that's what got him into animation.

This short is a good example of that - it portrays six figures on a wall vomiting, complete with visible internal organs, then catching on fire. The visuals are accompanied by a siren. Originally, the 40 second short was screened on a loop at an exhibition, which ran indefinitely. The DVD of Lynch's short films has it repeated 6 times.

No story, no characters - it really is more like a moving painting than a 'short film', more at home in a gallery as an installation than in a darkened cinema. The crude, but striking, animation style is similar to that which Lynch later used in 'The Alphabet' & 'The Grandmother', although they did include plotlines & characters, bizarre though they were.

Well worth a look, if only to see where this great director's career started.

This is the film portion of a sculpture that had images projected on it.

Its basically abstract people getting sick and throwing up.

Sort of.

As I said its all abstract so the figures are only reasonably human.

The image runs about a minute and then is repeated several times, which was then looped into endless illness.

How do you rate that?

I don't know. Its fine for what it is but as anything beyond that it isn't much.

Stills for this 60 second film are available on the Web, and the film itself is shown during the Pretty as a Picture documentary.

The images are quite arresting. Lynch himself said of the project "I always sort of wanted to do films. Not so much a movie-movie as a film-painting. I wanted the mood of the painting to be expanded through film, sort of a moving painting. It was really the mood I was after. I wanted a sound with it that would be so strange, so beautiful, like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth and turned, and there would be a wind, and then she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange."

By the way, Lynch shared the first-place in the second annual Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize. One of the judges on the panel funded Lynch's next film project, and there it is--the start of a career.