Eraserhead

David Lynch built his first feature inside the disused stables of the American Film Institute, where he put up the sets and lived for a stretch. Production stopped whenever the money ran out. Jack Fisk and Sissy Spacek sent regular donations, Catherine Coulson, then married to Jack Nance, waited tables and handed over her wages, and Lynch delivered newspapers right through principal photography. Sound is the real material here. After building a soundproofed room, Lynch and Alan Splet spent close to a year making and cutting sound effects alone, with as many as fifteen separate sounds layered at once. Lynch never explained how the baby was made, and he had the projectionist who ran the dailies blindfolded. It opened at a midnight screening at Filmex in Los Angeles on 19 March 1977 to a very small audience. Lynch answered that reception by cutting roughly 20 minutes out of it. From February 1978 the Nuart in Los Angeles ran it on Friday nights for years. Kubrick liked it enough to screen it for the crew of The Shining. A good fit if you accept sound doing the work narrative usually does and do not need a scene to declare what it means. Not for anyone with a low threshold for physical discomfort during the sequences of tending the baby.