To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the first public exhibition of a film by French cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière, forty filmmakers were invited to contribute to Lumière et Compagnie (US: Lumière and Company, 1995), an anthology of tribute films crafted with a recreation of the Lumières' hand-cranked Cinematograph camera, patented in 1895. Lynch's Premonitions Following an Evil Deed (1995) was his first short film since the 1970s and also his shortest, at 55 seconds. Opening with the image of a trio of uniformed policemen advancing across a vacant lot towards the body of a teenaged boy, Premonitions echoes the introduction of Twin Peaks' dead Laura Palmer and the discovery of the severed ear in Blue Velvet (1986) before veering off unexpectedly to the interior of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, where a naked human struggles helplessly in a fluid-filled tank while mush-faced aliens beaver about, oblivious to her agonies. Though he had become accustomed to a high level of technical proficiency on his films since Eraserhead, Lynch took to the restrictions imposed on Premonitions: no electric lights, no live sound, and no more than three cuts. "It was a great experience. Pure Heaven," Lynch later said about contributing to Lumière et Compagnie. "I love restrictions." Premonitions director of photography Peter Deming would later shoot Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).

By Richard Harland Smith