The Grandmother (David Lynch,1970)

The Grandmother (David Lynch, 1970) follows a young boy who suffers through an abusive relationship with his parents but strives to cope by planting a seed that soon sprouts into a caring grandmother.

The film is immediately distinctive, as it switches between live action and 2d animation made up of paper clippings. Both aspects of the film’s form are artistic, as even the live action uses fast paced and rapidly edited together still shots to create stop motion movement. David Lynch creates extremely unnatural and sometimes disturbing moments by combining live action and 2d animation, and also uses sound design to make very surreal and unusual effects that have a lasting impact on the audience. I remember this film for its very strange and unique story, effects and animation. The performances are also very unnatural, as the characters do not act at all human, which makes the film feel more like a surreal and dream-like experience, that more than often evolves into a nightmare.

The film is artistic, and favours interesting techniques and an unconventional story told through surreal and unusual methods like 2d animation and mise-en-scene to leave a lasting impression on the audience. I remember in particular the impressive cocoon that was built to show how the grandmother came to be born from a single seed. The mise-en-scene here is very disturbing to see, as the spectacle of a human growing from a plant-like organism is hallucinatory, and very ambitious from the director. What is also impressive is how Lynch establishes characters through actions rather than dialogue, as music and performance shows personalities and dynamics between them, as seen in the opening scene where the boy’s father abuses him as the whole family act like a pack of dogs. Another interesting aspect to talk about is how the film will often end a sequence through a sudden and jarring freeze frame where audio will echo out until the shot fades to black. This is very unexpected each time, and is done to establish, over time, the living situation of these characters. It is a unique and abnormal method of showing the passage of time, and the exaggerated expressions and screams of the characters makes the film feel more like theatre, as their inhuman characters seem to echo real emotion, through bizarre screams, barks and shouting. As Lynch’s methods of portraying these themes and emotions are so extreme, I doubt that I will take any inspiration for my own film project.

Characters are established at the beginning, as Lynch uses the 2d animation style in the film to show how they came to also be born from the ground. His use of the animation here is to show what cannot be shown through live action, but his execution is very artistic and makes an immediate impression on the audience as to the tone and aesthetic of the rest of the film. It is definitely the most unique and unconventional shirt film that we have studied for our coursework, and I think that David Lynch achieved in his goal of creating a lasting impression on the audience.