Here is a portrait of the artist as a young man. With family photos and cine footage, David Lynch recalls his family background and the beginning of his career as an artist and painter, moving into experimental film. The documentary finishes with Lynch still only in his mid-20s, having landed a grant from the American Film Institute that allowed him to move to Los Angeles and labour for years on his early masterpiece, Eraserhead.
Lynch says that his work astonished and appalled his father, who told him never to have children and to give up art in favour of a proper office job. Lynch had grown up in Montana, Idaho and Virginia, the middle America he fetishised and ironised and exalted in his movie work, and he recalls the key moment when he saw a strangeness beneath the picket-fence normality. As a child, he witnessed a naked, beautiful woman in deep distress stumble down his neighbourhood street: an extraordinary, unexplained event that perhaps sparked his entire creative life.
What is so extraordinary about this film is that it doesn’t show Lynch as the cinephile or the movie brat or even someone with any great interest in art history. No other film-makers or artists are name-checked. It is as if Lynch was in a state of innocent primitivism, without ever knowing about anyone else doing the same thing. When he ponders the possibility of moving from art to film, he says: “A moving painting … with sound …” – it’s as if he just didn’t know about the history of experimental film. This film underscores his utter uniqueness.
