The Grandmother (1970)

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1. 

   greenhorg

   The only one who comes close to making art films this dark, alien, and unsettling before 1970 is Jan Svankmajer (who will remain unknown in the West until the 1980s). Jodorowsky is on a similar route with El Topo (1970). But really this kind of filmmaking is almost unbearably original. Nothing made before this film so successfully captures the surreal atmosphere of a nightmare. Or even made since, unless we include Lynch's own Eraserhead (1977).
   
   Think about it like this: Someone that makes a student film like this nowadays has certainly seen Eraserhead, and decades worth of horror films, animations, music videos, etc that contain this kind of gothy phantasmagoria. What visual references did David Lynch in the 1960s have? Maybe painters like Otto Dix, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch. Maybe a handful of art films like Un Chien Andalou, Blood of a Poet, Dreams that Money Can Buy, Meshes of the Afternoon. But the creative jump from those references to this is much, much larger than the jumps similar artists must make from what's now available.
   
   By analogy, imagine if the thrash metal band Slayer appeared out of nowhere in the mid-1960s, instead of the 1980s when the creative scaffolding for heavy metal had already been incrementally established.
   
   The Grandmother is like hearing a Slayer song from the 1960s. 11 years 11 months ago
2. 

   John Milton

   Quite disturbing, does echo Svankmajer indeed. Still, it was a little too experimental for my personal taste. (mod-edit: dead link removed) 9 years 5 months ago
3. 

   Siskoid

   The Grandmother is an early David Lynch short that combines his brand of dark surrealism with Terry Gilliam-like animated sequences to create at once a dream and a nightmare of childhood. Lynch's films can't always be understood except unconsciously, and I think that's the case here. On the surface of it, this is a very arty and weird film with people growing from seed pods, but it's really kind of a universal story. How many kids have secretly (or overtly) wished they could go live with their grandmothers, a woman who more than likely spoiled them where the parental units only dish out discipline and shame? In the case of little Mike here, he feels abused, shamed and dismissed by parents who can only bark out his name (the only dialog in the piece), and so he grows his own more loving surrogate parent. It's child logic in the same that when you're young, everyone else seems to come out of nowhere, full grown. And yet, there's a danger with growing them too old, and the boy will have to face up to the fact that what comes from the earth, must return to the earth... 3 years 11 months ago

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