MatthewTHuff The Grandmother in my opinion was a surrealistic look on some childhood experiences. The caring grandmother, the abusive parents, and the realistic look on life. The film in imagery has no real sense in direction, but what is known is that in todays society this movie could relate to some kids living with there grandparents or liking their grandparents better then there abusive parents. Contrast B W, and the overall small shades of red are by far a great start off to this film, and i thought that the eerie, yet happy music " with the grandmother further down into the short" , was a perfect placement and added great emotion to the film. I loved this short even with some mess ups and overall confusion.David Lynch never gets old and his original imaginations overthrow many horror and artistic surrealism films today. From what i could tell you is that this film overall had me on the edge of my seat waiting for the next scene, or some confusing event to just throw itself right in front of me. The actors were plain out abusive, and the short yet sweet scriptwriting was written exactly how i thought it would be. Without doubt David Lynch has brightened my day… Well or brightened it in a horrifying, disruptive kind of way.

druid333-2 David Lynch,who started out as a painter,moved into conceptual art,then moved into film,first with a piece that involved six animated heads vomiting something like six times (Six Figures Getting Sick). He then moved on to his first short film,'Alphabet',some time later. In 1970,he directed his second short film,'The Grandmother'. To call this film short surreal would be like calling the Grand Canyon vast. 'Grandmother' told the tale of a young boy (played by Richard White,who is just credited as "The boy"),who has to deal with two of the most dysfunctional parents (Virginia Maitland & Robert Chadwick),who crawl around on all fours,bark & whine like a pair of dogs,and make the boy's existence sheer hell. The boy figures there must be something better out there,and from a seed found in a bag marked "seeds" plants the biggest one,from which a kind of spiny vegetation sprouts. When the vegetation/plant gives birth to a full term,adult grandmother (Dorthy McGinnis),the boy now has some kind of link to parental love. David Lynch,in addition to writing & directing this bizarre,dreamy (and occasionally nightmarish),surreal film,also photographs,edits,creates stop motion animation & has a hand in the sound design (with Alan Splet,who also worked with Lynch on Eraserhead). Not widely screened,but well worth seeking out for fans of experimental/avant garde/midnight cult films (it was shot in 16mm,which would somewhat limit it's distribution to cinemas that are equipped for films of that nature). Not rated by the MPAA,but does have some rather unsettling,if not outright disturbing sequences that would give some young 'uns some screwed up nightmares.

Polaris_DiB Okay. Basically I have only one major thematic element I can really comment on.In this short, Lynch seems to be particularly keen on dehumanizing humanity in every sense of the word. First, they characters are grown as plants, and they germinate (?) children rather than birth them. Then they're animals, both in personality and actions. Beyond just barking and snuffling and whining like dogs (Matt! Matt! Matt!), the way they treat each other is very abusive and inhuman.So then what's this whole thing about the grandmother? Is she supposed to be more human because of the love she shares with Matt? That's the reading that's readily apparent, but it doesn't really work out like that. If she was human, why is she a teakettle? Why does she birth, literally, from a tree? The short goes to levels that are hard to really comprehend.Which is fine. Fully comprehending a Lynch film isn't really the point.However, I would like to mention that this short has some of the strongest imagery, in a sense, of Lynch's career. The shots especially of the staircase just scream art even though they really aren't that particularly stylistic as compared to a lot of what else he's done. This is a much more aesthetically intriguing world, this short.--PolarisDiB

Ben Parker One of the most disturbing things i've ever seen. The actors in this film, David Lynch's third film technically, but his first narrative film, were never in any other movies - one of them, Father, died a few years ago - it is as if they exist only in the frightening nightmare world of this boy's life, which consists of two dog-like parents who only bark at him with unintelligible sounds, and beat him and rub his face in the urine when he wets the bed, like a puppy. The subject of the film (and if i don't tell you this, it'll make so little sense to you, because its never properly explained in the film) is the boy has no love from his parents, and no grandmother to give him respite from them and comfort him, so he grows one in the attic.It is a horrifying, brilliant film, which creates an imaginative world very successfully - albeit one you desparately want to escape from as soon as possible, but it does this well at least.The Lynchian oeuvre is almost fully formed here, right from the start. Little dialogue, atmospheric soundtrack of constant sound effects which you find in Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr; impressionistic approach to performance and makeup/costume and sets; the quality of estrangement in the direction, and most importantly there is the union of terrible, twisted darkness and optimistic naivety (developed to the full in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr).For Lynch fans, this is a thing to see. Unlike Six Men Getting Sick or The Amputee, this is not just an experiment or an early film of a Director that ruins your impression of them, it stands on its own, irrespective of Lynch's subsequent work (though it also sets the tone for his subsequent narrative work) as a great surrealist/impressionist narrative short.