Premonitions Following an Evil Deed

An untitled one minute black and white short film from 1995 directed and written by David Lynch, which is known under the title 'Premonitions Following an Evil Deed'. Nightmare images flash into the mind of a mother as she waits for news of her son, who is now dead. With atmospheric flashes, all this was done by Lynch using the Lumiere brother's Cinematographe.

Of all the shorts David Lynch have made, this is my favorite one, managing to encapsulate many key elements from his weird creative universe in merely one minute.

I kinda wish Lynch had made this a series, similar to Twin Peaks.

I adore David Lynch. I have no idea why he did this film. Sometimes I think he is putting us on with these vignettes that the average person could say, "I bet I could do much better, given the opportunity." But we don't. This is one minute from the discovery of a murder victim to the telling of her family. OK. Now what?

"Premonitions Following An Evil Deed" is a fifty-five second long film produced by David Lynch as part of a collection that celebrated the Lumiere brothers invention of the first motion picture camera.

Lynch and his thirty-nine colleagues were commissioned to use the original wooden camera and make a movie akin to the kind the Lumiere brothers made. The filmmakers weren't allowed to use sound, and the films they produced had to use a continuous shot captured in no more than three attempts.

I've watched the movie a few times now and I can't really say what it's about. We see three policemen coming to the body of a man lying on the ground. A woman - perhaps the man's widow - is shown at home, turning her head perhaps in response to a phone call or house call of the police telling her what has happened. Then we cut to some kind of underground laboratory where we see a nude woman in a glass tube while scientists work around her. Then we go back to the woman's house, where she receives the cops we saw at the beginning, and then it's over.

What was the deal with the nude woman in the lab? I didn't understand that part.

I don't know what to say about this one. I guess it succeeds at what it was supposed to do. It's only really of interest to diehard Lynch fans, though, like the previous short of his I saw, "The Cowboy and the Frenchman", which was also made on commission.

Since Lynch made this on commission for other people's projects, you can't critique them too harshly. But nor can you really recommend them.