“Erasure Head,” E. Hastings, Vancouver, 1991

You dream of razor blades
marching across the delicate flesh
of your trembling vision
marching over the very delicate flesh
of the moment
marching where it is twilight
and you cannot always stay
where you dream a concrete solution
for a question you never meant to formulate
Your eyes turn about in their sockets
Still nothing is certain
Then something dark and massive
collapses onto shining steel

~ Second #2, Mainline No.13, University of Windsor, 1973

Surrealism, the movement in art and literature that arose in Europe in the aftermath of World War I, speaks to me like no other. Since I discovered the genre in the 1960s, it has influenced all of my creative endeavours. Perhaps because I’ve always enjoyed (a relative word depending on the content) a rich and vivid dream life, recently populated by hoards of zombies ignoring social distancing, the world of surrealism does not strike me as fantastic so much as a photographic interpretation of inner life.

I’ve written about how, in high school, I saved to buy a sumptuous Salvador Dali book, its gold dust cover fronted by The Persistence of Memory, and my friendship with artists of Vancouver’s Melmoth Group, in the 80s.

In the early seventies I attended screenings of Un Chien Andalou and Le Age d’Or, the early surrealist films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel in cooperation with Dali, though the latter proved too controversial even for Dali, who distanced himself from the film.

As I recall, I was introduced to the Buñuel classics in Vancouver, maybe at UBC, then at a Buñuel film festival in Calgary, in 1973, along with his other masterpiece (in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Considering Un Chien Andalou inspired outrage among cinema patrons on its release in 1929 (not to mention the metaphoric basis for my poem above), I’m not sure what nerve Buñuel touched with his second surrealist opus, released a year later. I loved both of them. So, when I saw David Lynch’s masterpiece, Eraserhead, around 1983, it was a homecoming of sorts.

I can’t recall where I first saw Eraserhead — perhaps The Ridge, a wonderful Vancouver repertory cinema destroyed in 2013 to make way for more condos. When I lived in Kitsilano, at 1st and Vine, my entrepreneurial roommate supplied the cinema with a secret concoction of spices and brewers’ yeast that set the popcorn apart.

I remember well the second time I was treated to Lynch’s freakish film school fantasy, which had by then become a cult classic. Eraserhead was paired with Night of the Living Dead at the Venus on Main Street, perhaps better remembered for its later incarnation as a porn theatre.

While the Living Dead relies on over-the-top, technicolor gore for its shock value, Lynch’s  86 minutes of surrealist angst (aside from the mewling monster/baby) is underpinned by subterranean psychological disorientation built on extraordinary black and white visuals and perhaps the gloomiest soundtrack in the history of film. It’s great fun.

I was also born, in England’s Black Country, to black humour. And Lynch’s film produces, at least in me, that kind of nervous laughter that arises when you see your own, not to mention archetypal, anxieties lampooned so well.

Aside from the other losses documented on this site, Vancouver has, like so many cities, seen its single screen cinemas close one-by-one. As a result, where can one go today to see films like Un Chien Andalou and Eraserhead … or “Erasurehead,” if the person responsible for the marquee can’t spell? The East Van and The Varsity among others are gone.

Perhaps the surviving Park Theatre or Dunbar provide a venue for movies out-of-the-ordinary. Happily, West Broadway’s wonderful Hollywood Theatre has also survived, reborn as a community arts venue. I propose a David Lynch festival. From Eraserhead to Blue Velvet?

Anyway, these films and these venues are indelibly fixed in my mind.

If you’ve persevered through this discursive post, the Lux Theatre, on E. Hastings Street, just east of Main, was built in 1939 and closed not long after I made the photo above. A colourful paint job and $2.50 double bills like the dark duo advertised in my picture weren’t enough to keep the doors open.

Today the Lux name lives on as a social housing scheme funded by the Provincial government and operated by Raincity housing, built in 2009.  As seen in the Street View below, the area known as the Downtown East Side, long plagued with poverty and drug use, is suffering one of the country’s greatest social crises, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a situation no surrealist film could match.