Six Men Getting Sick

So nine people have seen this film?

Seeing as the film was essentially a temporary piece of installation art, a loop of film projected onto a sculpture as part of an exhibition back in 1966, I have a very genuine interest in talking to those people - they must have some interesting stories to tell.

Lynch explains on the DVD that he was inspired to make a moving painting and that is just what he did. As per usual with Lynch, there is no explanation for what is going on (actually, with this short, there doesn't even seem to be a reason for what's going on) but it is somehow beautiful in its repetition.

This is the film portion of a sculpture that had images projected on it.

Its basically abstract people getting sick and throwing up.

Sort of.

As I said its all abstract so the figures are only reasonably human.

The image runs about a minute and then is repeated several times, which was then looped into endless illness.

How do you rate that?

I don't know. Its fine for what it is but as anything beyond that it isn't much.

This first film from David Lynch is not really a film at all. It is better to think of it as a moving painting. Its origins bear this out. Lynch was working on a picture while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts when he felt a 'little wind' and wished that the painting could move. This set him to work on creating an animated composition which became Six Men Getting Sick.

It consists of a screen with three sculptures built into its top left corner. These three figures are casts of Lynch himself. This screen then has an animation projected onto it. The animation adds a further three figures. It connects the stomachs to the heads. They fill up, hands appear over the distressed heads, the word 'Sick' flashes up and the heads catch fire and vomit. All of this is accompanied by a repetitive siren wail.

Because the image is projected onto a sculpture it's fair to say that this is really a 3D art installation rather than a film. When it was shown at an art competition it was repeated on a continual loop. On DVD this is reduced to six cycles. The repetition does make sense though as it allows you to see different things each time. It certainly indicates what an original artist Lynch was even at this early stage.

Stills for this 60 second film are available on the Web, and the film itself is shown during the Pretty as a Picture documentary.

The images are quite arresting. Lynch himself said of the project "I always sort of wanted to do films. Not so much a movie-movie as a film-painting. I wanted the mood of the painting to be expanded through film, sort of a moving painting. It was really the mood I was after. I wanted a sound with it that would be so strange, so beautiful, like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth and turned, and there would be a wind, and then she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange."

By the way, Lynch shared the first-place in the second annual Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize. One of the judges on the panel funded Lynch's next film project, and there it is--the start of a career.