An overview on Eraserhead
Eraserhead is the directorial debut of director, painter, sound designer, and overall artistic marvel David Lynch. The film was started as a student project while Lynch was studying at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, which is a graduate film school. He had created a few short films beforehand (The Alphabet, 1968. And The Grandmother, 1970) Eraserhead was filmed over a long period of time, filming started in 1972 and concluded in 1975. The reason it took so long to film was that they kept running out of money. And would film until they had literally nothing. Below is the IMDb plot synopsis.
‘Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.’
After the film was fully complete, Lynch met sound designer and musician Alan Splet, and the pair spent over a year creating the industrial and unnerving sound design that Eraserhead would become famous for. One example of how they created the sounds for Eraserhead would be this excerpt that you can read below.
“For a scene in which a bed slowly dissolves into a pool of liquid, Lynch and Splet inserted a microphone inside a plastic bottle, floated it in a bathtub, and recorded the sound of air blown through the bottle. After being recorded, sounds were further augmented by alterations to their pitch, reverb and frequency”.
Here is the scene they are talking about, the clip starts at the 3:42 mark.
How it influenced this project
The industrial hellscape that Lynch & Splet created for Eraserhead is iconic at this point, and for good reason. It was groundbreaking for the time and still is. The general tone of Eraserhead was what influenced the concept of the darkness throughout the piece, both sonically and through the spoken word. As in ‘Eraserhead’ you follow this character (Henry) who doesn’t really know what to do with his life. He has an unwanted child who is not even that human. He has a girlfriend that hates him and has a dead-end job. Which sparked this idea of ‘Life is a dark corridor’ which I used as the centre point of the spoken word. This character in this dream doesn’t know what to do. just wandering around this industrial and hellish landscape.
Sonically Eraserhead has influenced this project. The use of dark drones. field recordings, noise, and samples had an impact on this project.
References
www.imdb.com. (n.d.). Eraserhead. [online] Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074486/.
Areti Efstathiou (2016). The Grandmother – David Lynch. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liVa7nEm3JU.
Matteo Pini (2014). David Lynch The Alphabet. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ_t1eOAipo.
www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Eraserhead – The Woman Across the Hall. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr10sVW0h2g