A child’s nightmare, notice how child-like shapes are used the shapes used – circles and triangles. Also, the noises used – a baby crying. This sound was used when a capital ‘A’ gave birth to a lower case ‘A.’
After Six Men Getting Sick, Lynch was reluctant to continue working in film due to the high cost involved. However, fellow student H. Barton Wasserman saw Lynch’s moving painting, and gave him $1000 to create similar one. “He (Wasserman) would buy a projector and mount it to the floor next to his chair and it would be bolted down, so he’d just click on the projector and have a screen that this thing would play on. And when the projector was off, the screen would be just like a piece of sculpture.”1 Lynch used $450 of the money to buy a used Bolex camera, then went to work filming. After two months of work, he took the film to be developed, only to discover the film didn’t turn out. The camera had a broken take-up spool which caused the film to move through the gate freely instead of one frame at a time. When Lynch told Wasserman about the ruined film, Wasserman said Lynch could do anything he wanted with the rest of the money.
Lynch’s wife, Peggy, told him of a dream her niece had during which she was reciting the alphabet in her sleep, then woke up and starting bouncing around repeating it. Lynch took this idea and ran with it. First he painted the walls of his upstairs bedroom black. Lynch painted Peggy’s face white to give her an un-real contrast to the black room, and had her bounce around the room in different positions as he filmed. This footage was edited together with an animated sequence where the letters of the alphabet slowly appear and a capital A gives birth to several smaller a’s which form a human figure. The soundtrack starts with chant of the letters “ABC”, followed by a man singing. Mixed in are other sound effects including the wind, crying and a siren. An adult voice reminds us that we are dealing with a human form, which is followed by a girl singing the alphabet song. Lynch recorded his newborn daughter Jennifer crying with a broken Uher tape recorder for the film, and loved the sound it created. Lynch mixed the sound at a lab called Calvin de Frenes, which is where he first met Herb Cardwell who would later shoot part of Eraserhead. Lynch also would later meet Alan Splet there when it came time to mix The Grandmother.
this was the first time David Lynch shot live-action footage, in 1968 – David lynch’s film ‘The Alphabet’ is an experimental film which includes a variety of mediums and elements such as, animation and sound/sound effects.it’s like looking at a child’s dream as the film is predominantly made up of animations, which look to be drawn by a child. This makes the whole dream seem abstract, eerie and quite dark. It also seems obscure and out of the ordinary.the second-hand Bolex camera, was the “camera of his dreams,”- the short film was a big break for Lynch, who was awarded an American Film Institute production grant for his efforts.The sound effects throughout the whole film were quite scary, loud and very repetitive. For example, at the start of the film, there was a constant chanting of ‘ABC’, which was shouted by little children. This gave it more of an impact and left it imprinted, as we are familiar with the connection between nursery rhymes and children. This connection represents the innocence of children, which contradicts the whole film. The animation style -Stop motion – seem familiar –> pointing to the ones used in Sesame Street“The Alphabet” retains much of this animated-collage aesthetic, but also — significantly — contains one of Lynch’s first forays into live action, with all that that implies (mise en scène, editing, actors, cinematography, makeup…) As such, “The Alphabet” can be fruitfully read as a document of a young man in a state of aesthetic (and professional) transition, veering towards cinema, but refusing to accept its structures point-blank, choosing instead to reshape the medium into something of his own making — something morbid, something inscrutable, something darkly comic, in short, something Lynchian.David Lynch began his artistic training as a painter, at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia – a city whose industrial grittiness later became the backdrop and star of Eraserhead. His inspiration to make films is said to have come from seeing a gust of wind blow into his studio one day and picturing the painting he was working on become animated. Indeed, his short films — and arguably all of his films — can best be described as “paintings that could move”. Sure, it’s a nice anecdote and good analogy for film, but if we dig a little deeper, we can begin to see major components and themes within his work. For starters, the idea of wind moving a painting speaks to the wind, a tactile and auditory source, as a force. Like smoke, it can’t be tied down. These untamable and untraceable forces are present throughout all of his work.
