Eraserhead | David Lynch

David Lynch’s first full-length feature film was created during his time as a student at the American Film Institute over several years of painstaking work.

In snapshots it depicts the crisis of the worker Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), who becomes a father to a deformed alien-like baby and leads a life somewhere between dream and nightmare in the clutches of his girlfriend's hysterical family.

With its unsettling surrealist images, inspired by expressive silent films, and its rousing sound production, Eraserhead has slowly become a cult film, as a midnight movie from the late 1970s.

Together with the sound designer, Alan Splet, Lynch worked on the Eraserhead’s sound track for nine months.

The sound track from Eraserhead is a good example of a sound design score. It is shaped by a permanent “carpet of ambient noise” that rises and falls. It consists of rhythmic, constantly rotating machine sounds, noises in the most diverse forms and deep, atmospheric buzzing. Organised into interweaving islands of sound, they structure the film.

Not least, Eraserhead confirms David Lynch’s reputation as the “sound man” among directors.