This is the story of a lost film, but to care about its loss you first need to know what happened in 1976. Back then, a 30-year-old Montanan painter called David Lynch completed his first feature after five years of shooting and editing. Nihilistic and Freudian, Eraserhead was about a character whose detached head is taken over by a mutant baby, and who exists in rooms vacated by the mysterious "woman in the radiator." The film was a revelation of textures. For visual inspiration, Lynch had dissected a cat, seeing an abstract beauty in its membranes, hair and skin which he translated into the glistening, fleshy imagery of the film. Variety called it a "dismal exercise in gore... commercial prospects nil."
But an alternative New York distributor, Libra Films, which had screened the psycho-western El Topo for over a year in the city, bought Eraserhead and ran it in a single cinema for as long as El Topo. Lynch described the process by which such experiments gain recognition: "First, the real weirdos will see it; they'll see anything if it's running at midnight. If it clicks with them it'll enter the next phase, which is a slightly bigger group of people. All these transitional areas are critical. You can't tell how long it will take for word to spread."
Stanley Kubrick admired Eraserhead, though Lynch wouldn't tell him how he filmed the mutant baby. Sounds, the British rock magazine, raved about the film. Its soundscapes influenced metal-industrial noise bands like Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept. David Bowie claimed that all he wanted to see in the 21st century with was a videotape of it.
Eraserhead is now a staple of student film societies, and considered a work of high surrealism. Its additional interest, for those of us who care about the relationship between the avant garde and what we still call the mainstream, is that it also provides a model of how to cross over. If it hadn't been for Libra Films and the midnight weirdos, Lynch's textural, allegorical masterpiece would have disappeared.
This is the fate facing a new film which has much in common with Eraserhead. Like Lynch's film, the experimental epic Cremaster 3 was directed by an artist; it too is a textural nightmare (in this case the texture is that of solid and melting Vaseline), featuring deformed human beings. The film's soundtrack is as layered with low-frequency feral and cavernous noises as Lynch's. Yet whereas the reputation of Eraserhead grew and grew, Cremaster 3 has been dropped from the British release schedule.
Director Matthew Barney is already an acclaimed figure in the art world; the New York Times has called him the most important artist alive today. Overall he has made five Cremaster films, a quintet of metaphorical investigations into the nature of sexual differentiation, named after the muscle that lowers the human testicle. (The films were created out of order between 1994 and 2002; Cremaster 3 is the final one.) Together, they are as physically astonishing as great silent epic films such as Ben-Hur or Cabiria, and have attracted some US public sector arts funding (as did Eraserhead). All five films have played in film festivals in Britain. This, however, is where the good news ends. Although Cremaster 3 is even more of what the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called a "head" experience than Eraserhead, and is even more original and considered, the cancellation of its British distribution means that only hardcore cinephiles will see it.
So what accounts for the reversed fortunes of epic avant-garde cinema since 1976? Well, people are taking different drugs for a start. And DVD and home cinema have taken many of the more obsessive film fans off the streets. But there can't be fewer of those edgy weirdos who took a risk on way out films, can there? If anything, opposition to the mass consumption of formulaic western culture is greater today than it was 28 years ago. The most likely answer has been put forward by film historian Chris Rodley: "It would be virtually impossible to deliver [Eraserhead] to an audience now, because that underground circuit barely exists. Theatrical venues and distributors rarely take risks today."
The picture isn't all bleak. New experimental film clubs are being formed in some of Britain's major cities, but these usually screen on 8mm and 16mm, not the 35mm widescreen format which Cremaster 3 needs. A more encouraging development is planned at Edinburgh's Filmhouse, which is launching "Secret Cinema" in March, a new regular commitment to midnight alternative screenings. More cinemas should follow this welcome innovation, and if necessary share prints and find a way of distributing Matthew Barney's masterwork themselves. This is not only because the film is valuable in itself, but also because, just as Lynch's avant-garde Eraserhead made possible Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, so a filmmaker of Barney's talents might also contribute much to the art of future cinema. In order to do so, Cremaster 3 must enter the mainstream. If it does, our film culture will be healthy. If not, and if other edgy films are blocked too, then horizons of British cinema will be that much lower.
