Six Men Getting Sick

This first film from David Lynch is not really a film at all. It is better to think of it as a moving painting. Its origins bear this out. Lynch was working on a picture while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when he felt a 'little wind' and wished that the painting could move. This set him to work on creating an animated composition which became Six Men Getting Sick.

It consists of a screen with three sculptures built into its top left corner. These three figures are casts of Lynch himself. This screen then has an animation projected onto it. The animation adds a further three figures. It connects the stomachs to the heads. They fill up, hands appear over the distressed heads, the word 'Sick' flashes up and the heads catch fire and vomit. All of this is accompanied by a repetitive siren wail.

Because the image is projected onto a sculpture it's fair to say that this is really a 3D art installation rather than a film. When it was shown at an art competition it was repeated on a continual loop. On DVD this is reduced to six cycles. The repetition does make sense though as it allows you to see different things each time. It certainly indicates what an original artist Lynch was even at this early stage.

So nine people have seen this film?

Seeing as the film was essentially a temporary piece of installation art, a loop of film projected onto a sculpture as part of an exhibition back in 1966, I have a very genuine interest in talking to those people - they must have some interesting stories to tell.

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.

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 ...

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.