David Cronenberg

[RNL]

[Capo]

_1. Videodrome 1982
_2. Spider 2002
_3. The Fly 1986
_4. Crash 1996
_5. A History of Violence 2005
_6. The Dead Zone 1983
_7. Eastern Promises 2007
_8. eXistenZ 1999
_9. Camera 2000
10. Scanners 1980
11. From the Drain 1967

[ronnierocketago]

David Cronenberg, a master filmmaker that arguably is the greatest to have escaped from the frozen confines of Canada.....followed by James Cameron and Atom Egoyan.

FAST COMPANY - **
THE BROOD - ***
SCANNERS - **1/2
VIDEODROME - ****1/2
THE DEAD ZONE - ***1/2
THE FLY - ****
DEAD RINGERS - ****1/2
NAKED LUNCH - ****
CRASH - ***
EXISTENZ - **1/2
SPIDER - ***1/2
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - ****1/2

[donlights]

The Dead Zone

[svsg]

A history of violence

[jake]

1. Videodrome (1983)
2. Spider (2002)
3. Dead Ringers (1988)
4. Naked Lunch (1991)
5. The Fly (1986)
6. A History of Violence (2005)
7. The Brood (1979)

[jrod]

History of Violence

[Vercetti]

A History of Violence

[Jenson71]

www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=284&pageID=518

A History of David Cronenberg
By David D'Arcy
March 29, 2006 - 1:19 AM PST


"The template for movies these days is very clunky."

David Cronenberg has been shifting around multiple worlds for more than three decades now. He's a Canadian who's worked for American studios, a practitioner of the gore genre who infuses those movies with a serious spirit of inquiry that seems far too challenging for its market, a visual storyteller whose strongest sense often seems to be tactile, an ironist whose best laughs come from extreme pain, and a sci-fi guy whose stories of futuristic technologies defy the general obsolescence rule of science fiction. Cronenberg's tech-society has more and more verisimilitude as time goes by.

A History of Violence, just out on DVD, is low-tech Cronenberg, not in filmmaking, but in concept and content - even though its $32 million budget is the highest that the director has ever had. The melodrama may be his funniest in its tale of red-blooded passionate revenge in picket-fence red-state America. After all, revenge has been the fuel of American politics - and, for many, of American identity - in the last five years. It's a fuel that's turned out to be far more expensive than anything under the ground. As with everything else in Cronenberg's world, the evil really comes from within. Watch the film again, and you'll get a suggestion of how far the revenge has gotten us.

Neither Cronenberg nor his cast in A History of Violence got the Oscars that many of us thought they deserved. But if you believe in Hollywood justice, you're better off with Death Wish anyway. No surprise. He's never been a Hollywood Canadian like James Cameron or Jim Carrey, which may explain why, in his 60s, it still takes a long while for him to make each film, and why the films still push a lot harder than those of his peers at those things that films with any budget tend to repress.

I spoke to Cronenberg about 30 years of filmmaking.

You've been described as having made 15 or 16 films, and it's been said that Shivers was and wasn't your first feature. Could you clarify that?

I made two underground films - Stereo and The Future. I consider those to be films, and then my first movie was Shivers, which was called They Came from Within here when it was first released. I make that distinction because I actually got paid to write and direct Shivers, so I was suddenly a professional, and that was an important differentiation for me.

Much more at the link...

[bobbyreed]

I just saw Spider. It was wonderful. I listened to a couple of minutes of the commentary after the movie finished. Cronenberg has a great voice and I could listen to him talk all day.

How I feel about his films:

Love these:
Spider
Dead Ringers
Crash
eXistenZ
The Fly
A History of Violence

Can do without:
The Dead Zone
Scanners

Need to see again:
Videodrome
Naked Lunch



Wetdog, do you read tedg's reviews on IMDB?

[mikola]

Stereo (1969)
Shivers (1974)
Rabid (1976)
The Brood (1979)
Scanners (1980)
Videodrome (1982)
The Dead Zone (1983)
The Fly (1986)
Dead Ringers (1988)
Naked Lunch (1991)
M. Butterfly (1993)
Crash (1996) :
eXistenZ (1998)
Camera (2000)
Spider (2002)
A History of Violence (2005)


DAVID CRONENBERG is in my "top 10" directors of all time

Watching his movies means to dirty oneself: his cinema is oily,humid, sweaty and fleshy. He is attracted to the beauty: but not outside beauty, the beauty from internal organ.

[Michael]

wetdog said:

mikevronsky said:

This one was great:

Yeah, the one in my avatar too.

I'm glad you liked this as much as you did.

Can you believe that amazing final scene was thought up in a few minutes at dusk on the very last day of shooting? Cronenberg had his cast and crew running around the streets of Toronto setting up for one ending after another before telling them to take it all apart and hurry elsewhere because he'd just had a better idea.

;D

I think the script only went up to about the point where Max Renn assassinates his partners, the remainder of the film was whipped up on the fly.

"Slippery," Cronenberg has called it.

Other possible endings included Max appearing on Videodrome as an organic part of that wall against which they're tortured, the whole thing made of flesh, or two female Videodrome victims and Max developing new sexual organs, the women's clitorises transforming into penises, Max with his abdominal vagina...

What. a. film.

It makes life worth living.

The final 30 minutes were astonishing. I went from enjoying the film to staring at the TV screen with my jaw dropped (literally) for 30 minutes straight. Very few films have been able to completely grab me by the balls like that. I can't wait to see it again.

[Capo]

wetdog said:

It's funny that you say you feel [Cronenberg's] more suited to painting than filmmaking, because he's always playing down his visual side, he's always emphasising the fact that he started out as a writer and that he doesn't see his cinema as highly visual, but as more of a writer's cinema (or course his favourite writer was Burroughs, so, no prizes for controlled storytelling there). But I've always thought his films held immense visual power. It's a strange inferiority complex he has.

I would agree, I find his visual style rather generic, and his editing often formulaic, too prone to shot/reverse shot etc. But his films have self-contained images, which, if taken out of context, would be (and are) really something; just look at your avatar, we've all discussed how powerful some of Videodrome's images are. I love that part in a Cronenberg film where he can no longer resist having heads intact, and then comes the explosion. Like a kid who takes his time trying to make something brilliant out of plasticine, only to destroy it into a mess straight afterwards.

In fact, I don't find much of his work especially 'cinematic'. His themes and ideas (I've said before he strikes me more as an "ideas man") aren't specific to Cinema (apart from Videodrome, so far); he doesn't need a camera to get that across. He strikes me as a man with obsessions and recurring ideas (and hence praise as an auteur), and who just happened to decide to get those ideas across using celluloid, because he has no patience for writing novels.

I don't think it's any coincidence that his films are very much of the time they're made in; Videodrome's ideas are powerful and brilliant, but the film itself is, I think, very much of the '80s. I actually find a lot his films (probably due to acting and dialogue) a bit 'clunky'.

Forgive the sometimes harsh-seeming criticism; I felt the need to justify, but I appreciate that I have not yet given myself a full chance to connect with him or his films. I definitely want to explore his work further; but for now, I hold reservations for someone I could certainly fall in love with - keep in mind my generally consistent ratings of his work, and the fact I only rate one of his hideous, Scanners.

[Boz]

A History of Violence (2005)

[RNL]

I find his visual style rather generic, and his editing often formulaic, too prone to shot/reverse shot etc. But his films have self-contained images, which, if taken out of context, would be (and are) really something; just look at your avatar, we've all discussed how powerful some of Videodrome's images are.

You could seriously make those criticisms of nearly everybody who ever made a film... minus the powerful images.

Cronenberg sees all of the tools that cinema places at his fingertips as just that: tools. He doesn't see them as subject matter. He's not like Godard.

When he edits, he's not editing to highlight his editing.

In Crash, in the scene in the carwash where Ballard watches Vaughn fucking Catherine in the backseat, he edits in such a way that the action of the carwash mechanism on the car is paralleled with the action of Vaughn's hands on Catherine's body. In the screenplay, for the opening scene in the airplane hangar, he specifies that the rivets in the airplane wing should be edited so as to be likened to Catherine's nipple. In The Dead Zone, he edits in such a way that Johnny's environment blends seamlessly with his visions - a technique he developed further in eXistenZ for the transitions between realities. In Dead Ringers, he elaborated significantly upon the existing motion-controlled matting technology so he could have Jeremy Irons play both twins and still move his camera however he wanted. The film wasn't about radical motion-controlled matting, the radical motion-controlled matting was used in a film about the fragility of identity. In A History of Violence he edits every one of Tom/Joey's violent conflicts so they appear balletic and exhilerating, then cuts quickly to the grisly aftermath, editing for sharp tonal shifts.

I've listened to his commentary tracks, and he talks frequently about how much he loves a particular camera movement (his camera's nearly always moving). He says he feels physically ill when he looks through a viewfinder and feels the composition is wrong. He considers himself an aesthetician. He doesn't have a distinct visual style that immediately identifies his films in the way that, say, Malick or Herzog do. He adapts his eye to suit the film, or, as he says, gives the film what it needs to be the best film it can be. You can see in Stereo, which he shot himself ("before there were Steadicams there was my grandmother's wheelchair") that he has a rich visual sense, but also that his imagination is highly visual. The creatures in Shivers, not to mention their bulging movements within their hosts' bodies (a huge influence on Alien), are among the most deeply grotesque in any film, like giant, fleshy, phallic slugs covered in shit. The day after watching it for the first time, I had trouble eating my lunch thinking about it. He hooked up with Mark Irwin on Fast Company and his camera gained some character. The finale of The Brood is a stunningly powerful image of a very unconventional birth. The Dead Zone might be his first film where the general aesthetic tone is controlled with masterful precision, and, in my opinion, it has been since. His penchant for visual allegory goes right back to his earliest shorts. In Stereo he represents the mingling of the characters minds by their bodies' entanglements, this image crops up again in Dead Ringers, on which he joined with Peter Suschitzky and his craft became even more refined. Naked Lunch looks absolutely pitch-perfect, and anyone who's seen it and read the novel should agree with me, however they feel about the way the material was handled. Cars and bodies have never, ever been photographed the way they were in Crash. Spider is just deeply, hauntingly gorgeous, from those ominous smoke-stacks to that isolated toolshed under the craning camera to the empty expressionistic streets. That image of Spider poised over the sleeping Mrs. Wilkinson with the hammer and chisel inches from her face is burned into my memory.

As far as these images being 'self-contained' and more suited to painting... how is that so? They're moving, photographic images, conceived as such and realised as such, and (although you somewhat implied to the contrary in the Proview thread) are not arbitrarily compiled under the narrative pretext of a freeform 'fantasy', they're an absolutely essential part of oneanother, each contributing to the development of the ideas the film is exploring. How could they belong anywhere but in cinema?

I don't find much of his work especially 'cinematic'. His themes and ideas (I've said before he strikes me more as an "ideas man") aren't specific to Cinema (apart from Videodrome, so far); he doesn't need a camera to get that across.

This is a really bizarre criticism. You're saying that 'cinematic subject matter' is stuff that deals directly with themes of seeing, viewing, visual mediation, cameras, filmmaking, etc? Then how is Béla Tarr a 'cinematic filmmaker'?

What would novelistic subject matter be? Writing about writing?

It'd be severely limiting if you pursued that line of criticism.

Painters painting painters painting painters painting...

What about all the subjects that artists explore that are not obviously tied to specific mediums? Are they fair game or should they always be layered under 'film within film' tropes and self-reference?

There was theatre for over 2000 years before Shakespeare put plays within plays and wrote plays about playwrights.

If you really want to go down that road, then Scanners is all about mediation, of the inner self via technology (and the body). The Dead Zone is about sight and seeing. In The Fly, Brundle makes a video documenting his degeneration, which the film itself could be said to be. It's also about mediation, the video image as death. Video destroys an image and reconstitutes it as 1s and 0s, before reimagining it in playback, exactly like the telepods. Cronenberg himself has said he feels that something's missing from an image after it's been put through a computer, "like the steak in The Fly." In Dead Ringers, the identities of two twins played by the same actor merge when they begin a relationship with an actress playing an actress, and their insanity is encapsulated in an artpiece. Cronenberg played the gynecologist in The Fly. Naked Lunch's pivotal notion is expressed in its tagline: "David Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs invite you to lunch." It's a meeting of artistic minds, Cronenberg the filmmaker meets Burroughs the writer in, I think, the single greatest biopic ever made. He said one of the trickiest things was the portrayal of insects in the film, since he'd always loved them and Burroughs always hated them. It's the only film he's made that's really very directly about its own creation (though Videodrome of course has elements of that too). Crash is about the actual eroticisation of car crashes for the audience watching the film, an attempt to awaken/transform their sexualities to the point that they realise they do find the film arousing. Experimental pornography, loaded with all of Ballard's references to movie stars and cinema, having cast himself as a filmmaker. Cronenberg casts Vaughn as his surrogate, the "renegade TV scientist" (there is a "scientist" of some description responsible for the tragedy and drama in most of Cronenberg's films up to and including The Fly, and debatably beyond), whose experiment is, in his own words, "the transformation of the human body by modern technology" (Cronenberg's earliest cinematic obsession, and here represented by photography), which he later shoots down, self-referrentially, as a "crude sci-fi concept", moving onto more Ballardian motifs from there. Cronenberg is also the voice of the car salesman in the showroom, selling the "sex toys." The novel upon which Spider is based is written in the first-person. What the reader reads is Spider Cleg's personal diary, the one Fiennes fills with meaningless glyphs in the film. Spider's narration is lucid and articulate in the novel, so the experience is one of the camera having penetrated the world in which the novel is being written, where Spider mumbles incoherently, and watches his memories while the camera watches him watching... you more or less need cinema for all of that. Not to mention the moving images.

He strikes me as a man with obsessions and recurring ideas (and hence praise as an auteur), and who just happened to decide to get those ideas across using celluloid, because he has no patience for writing novels.

That's rather presuptuous. Perhaps he chose to get his ideas across using cinema because he tried it and found that he had an affinity for it, then found he was getting better at it, getting international praise for it, and decided to pursue it as a career. And that's actually what happened.

I don't think it's any coincidence that his films are very much of the time they're made in; Videodrome's ideas are powerful and brilliant, but the film itself is, I think, very much of the '80s. I actually find a lot his films (probably due to acting and dialogue) a bit 'clunky'.

Again, criticisms you could apply to anybody. Aguirre hardly looks like it was made yesterday, nor does Weekend, or Eraserhead, or Taxi Driver, or Don't Look Now. They're all totally of their eras and environments. No artwork is really timeless in the sense that it could've been made 100 years ago or 100 years from now ("art is not created or consumed in a vacuum" - Cronenberg), but what's the difference between Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizen Kane? One will be rendered utterly irrelevent and ineffectual in two years when George Bush is dethroned permanently, the other will be as relevent 1000 years from now as it is today and was in 1941. That's timelessness. It doesn't mean the big dance number with the conga line won't scream "FORTIES HOLLYWOOD!" You wrote in your Proview of The Fly (which I'm glad you liked) that it "may or may not be about AIDS." Cronenberg dislikes that interpretation for the very fact that it ties the film to a specific period and specific transient political concern. "One day AIDS will be history and there'll be some other disease making headlines. The Fly isn't about AIDS. It's about the disease all of us have. The disease of being finite." It's about one partner suffering through the slow death of the other, and about the betrayal people feel as their own bodies turn against their perfectly healthy minds, the Cartesian divide. Timeless themes.

As for acting and dialogue. I think he coaxed unarguable career-best performances from Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Peter Weller. Arguably Jeremy Irons and Ralph Fiennes too. There is one instance that springs to mind when you speak of 'clunky' dialogue, and it's in Crash, when Koteas recites verbatim a passage about the sexual potential of car crashes from The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard's prose is remote and clinical, and though it reads beautifully, it doesn't translate very well to the spoken word. Cronenberg doesn't ever write naturalistic dialogue, it's always a stylised part of the grand allegory, and I think in general it's witty and sharp, a personal favourite line being, "The centipedes are getting downright... arrogant."

Anyway, long live the new flesh and exterminate all rational thought.

What a lengthy post...

[Michael]

I actually read the entire post, wetdog. I very rarely read long posts. Thanks for the insight.

[Capo]

I don't find much of his work especially 'cinematic'. His themes and ideas (I've said before he strikes me more as an "ideas man") aren't specific to Cinema (apart from Videodrome, so far); he doesn't need a camera to get that across.

What I meant by that is that, for now, to me, Cronenberg makes films without being particularly cinematic. It's not that his films have to be about cinema or seeing to be including in that notion, it's that his shots, and edits, it's just he doesn't exploit the fact he's using a camera or the way images are edited together.

Funnily enough, I watched Tarr's interview on the Werckmeister DVD yesterday, and he said, "most movies are made where you have a little bit of information, then cut, little bit of information, then cut." Sometimes this is done incredibly well by Cronenberg, such as the opening line of The Fly (everything in that film just seems to wizz by, and seem indispensable), but others, he seems to... well, I don't know. I feel like I'm going to dig myself into a hole I don't necessarily want to or need to:

As you probably are aware, I wrote that post before viewing The Fly and revisiting Videodrome. I loved both, and can't wait to revisit the other work I own, especially Crash, which I have a feeling is his best, from what I've seen.

Thank you for taking the time to post what you did; as the resident aficianado and a clear fan, your argument is a persuasive one. I especially liked you defence of Spider, and look forward to watching it.

[RNL]

admin said:

I don't find much of his work especially 'cinematic'. His themes and ideas (I've said before he strikes me more as an "ideas man") aren't specific to Cinema (apart from Videodrome, so far); he doesn't need a camera to get that across.

What I meant by that is that, for now, to me, Cronenberg makes films without being particularly cinematic. It's not that his films have to be about cinema or seeing to be including in that notion, it's that his shots, and edits, it's just he doesn't exploit the fact he's using a camera or the way images are edited together.

In what way? By not calling attention to them?

Isn't that, the sort of thing both Godard and Tarr do, in a sense, like 'over-writing'? Laying on the prose so thick that that's all the reader sees. It might be gorgeous writing, but it's no longer a window to a created world, it's more like a stained-glass window...

Arguably it's not even fiction, or drama, if the fourth wall is constantly under siege.

It might help to consider that Cronenberg's biggest cinematic influence is Bergman.

Funnily enough, I watched Tarr's interview on the Werckmeister DVD yesterday, and he said, "most movies are made where you have a little bit of information, then cut, little bit of information, then cut." Sometimes this is done incredibly well by Cronenberg, such as the opening line of The Fly (everything in that film just seems to wizz by, and seem indispensable), but others, he seems to... well, I don't know.

Tarr's talking about cinematic storytelling, and, generally, he's right. It's debatable whether images always defer to words, but in most cinema (and the more 'prestigious', 'down to earth' stuff is guiltier than the blockbusters), it's a case of the 'illustrated text' that Greenaway's always moaning about: serial images in place of sentences providing nothing but essential narrative information. That's never true of Cronenberg.

You can hardly say he's simply presenting you with essential narrative information and hurrying you along a story arc in the likes of Crash, Spider, Videodrome or eXistenZ. The Fly opens in such a way, but it's to set up the rest of the film, which plays out far more visually.

[Capo]

Having just watched Crash for the second time, on the big screen, my rating hasn't changed. It's a great film, and I'll happily admit there's a masterpiece in it somewhere, but have no hesitation in saying it remains hidden, deep in its core, and I can't wait to extract it on further viewings. For now, though, I find the whole thing difficult to soak up. When Elias Koteas isn't onscreen, it isn't half as interesting ... the scene you often refer to, Wet Dog, with him quoting directly from Ballard's novel, is acted brilliantly. Our first real introduction to him, at the re-enactment of the Jimmy Dean car crash, is electric.

[RNL]

David Cronenberg and the Cinema of the Extreme (BBC, 1997, 22min)

The program contains spoiler footage from Shivers, Videodrome, Crash and Dawn of the Dead.