Eraserhead at the George Eastman House

Date published: February 2, 2005

Every Wednesday in February, the George Eastman House is showing a Lynch film. The films on their schedule are Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive in that order (which interestingly enough is the chronological order of them...1977, 1986, 1990, and 2001 respectively).

Just now, I returned home from watching Eraserhead, David Lynch's first feature film. Eraserhead is by far the least accessible of Lynch's films. It's sort of a surrealists dark view of fatherhood and the fears associated with it. That's my one sentence summary.

At the upcoming Twin Peaks Fest, just as we do every year, we're going to be watching a Lynch film on the big screen. This year it's Eraserhead, so I wanted to watch the Eastman House's print to see what the quality was like. The quality wasn't very good at all. The print had all kinds of scratches and spots and dust and other nasties. The shadow/highlight levels were muted too, so the whole films was a bit too dark. All this made me want to drive home and get my DVD version that Lynch spent years and tons of money restoring. The DVD really is a tribute to the DVD medium and how amazing old films can look if people spend the time and money to restore them. If they just projected the DVD, it would have looked at least 20 times better.

The sound quality on the print was better than the picture quality...but still wasn't that good.

The 35mm print that we'll be showing at this years Twin Peaks Fest is from David Lynch's personal archive so the picture and video quality are sure to be superb.

I happened to see Mike Fisher at the theater as well as Gil and Astrida. Due to the odd look Gil and Astrida gave Mike when he said Hi, I'm not sure they remembered where they should know us from. Who knows though, maybe I misinterpreted.