[Music] this week's short and feature pairing is an animation from 1979 called asparagus by Suzanne pit it's an incredibly beautiful trippy psychosexual animation and it's paired with David Lynch's cult classic eraser head Suzanne pit was fascinated by asparagus because she sees it as a plant that has a dual sexual ity and a dual nature in that it is initially very phallic looking but that if you leave it to Blossom it becomes something much more feminine asparagus is a viewing experience like no other it explores a woman's journey through her mental landscape and it's addressing psychological aspects of the artist's personality her sexuality her creativity she said that it was very much influenced by Daydreams that she'd had one of my favorite descriptions of asparagus is a quote from Jim hberman from The Village Voice who describes it as resembling Maya Darren's meshes of the afternoon done in the style of Yellow Submarine Suzanne pit is originally from Kansas City and she made asparagus when she was teaching at Harvard so she had begun to make 8mm animated films 16 mm and and then this was a 35mm handpainted cell animation which actually took her 4 years to complete pit has talked about the influence of yian ideas of images being pregnant so throughout the film each image almost seems to give birth to the next and she never wanted to make straight cuts in the film she wanted to transition from scene to scene in a more organic way VIA swipe sometimes images almost seem to sort of emerge out of each other she wanted the film to be felt more than thought [Music] about the story behind this short and feature pairing is a really interesting one because these films historically played together there was a programmer named Ben Baron Holtz and Ben Baron Holtz had established a reputation for himself on the New York scene as the king of late night movies so for example he was one of the first people to ever program John Waters Pink Flamingos he was transitioning to programming at the Waverly and he realized then that there was an opportunity to program asparagus because it would be a perfect amuz bu if you will for eraser head eraser head was David Lynch's first feature film but prior to that he had worked as a painter and he had made a number of short films many of which were also explorations of Daydreams and psychology like Suzanne Pitt's film this was a real labor of love for Lynch although the film came out in 1977 he had been working on it for 5 years eraser head follows a protagonist Henry played by Jack Nance whose girlfriend seems to have given birth to some kind of mutant Offspring both films have their own internal logic and while the things that we see on the screen might seem bizarre or uncanny they make sense within the very specific Frameworks of those worlds [Music] I think both filmmakers are attempting to externalize the internal and really explore their Daydreams or their nightmares and what you make of that is really up to you as the viewer so enjoy the show and sweet dreams