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Directors' Cuts
The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero
David Cronenberg as moved from the depths of low-budget exploitation horror to become one of North America's most respected movie directors. Since the early 1970s, the soft-spoken 'Baron of Blood' has attracted widespread controversies with a steady stream of shocks - sec-crazed parasites in Shivers (1975), exploding heads in Scanners (1981), revolutionary flesh technology in Videodrome (1983), mutating bugs in The Fly (1986), car crash scars in Crash (1996), and psychopathic bursts of gunfire in A History of Violence (2005). This new study provides an overview of Cronenberg's films in the light of their international reception, placing them firmly in the cultures they influenced. It also highlights often-ignored works, such as the race movie Fast Company (1979), and includes a chapter on the latest film Eastern Promises (2007). Amidst bans and boos, Cronenberg has developed a consistent cult following for his chronicles of humankind's struggle with its ever-changing environment, bugged by technology and changing social roles - becoming a hero of contemporary culture.
- GenresFilm
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2008
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June 22, 2009Read the STOP SMILING interview with filmmaker David Cronenburg
OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: DAVID CRONENBURG
By Nicolas Rapold
(This interview originally appeared in STOP SMILING The Documentary Issue)
he strangest thing about David Cronenberg’s films is not the exploding heads, or the car-crash sex, or the VCR in James Woods’s stomach. No, the shivers come when you realize they’re all about us — about how our bodies determine our identities, and vice versa. The Canadian master of creep-out has long attracted audiences with a taste for body freakery, but his shocks are also among the most cerebral around. Cronenberg’s filmography chronicles an ambitious search for new, visceral ways of expressing basic anxieties about the facts of being flesh and blood: maternity in The Brood (1979), aging in The Fly (1986) and desire in Crash (1996), to name but a few. And when that sensibility rubs up against the issues of the day, you get films like Videodrome (1983), eXistenZ (1999) and, most recently, A History of Violence — one of the top-rated films of 2005. The film’s centerpiece is a transformation, a man whose past comes alive — and it’s perhaps no surprise that Cronenberg has rather a porous sense of his fictions and our reality.
Stop Smiling: Have you ever considered shooting a documentary?
David Cronenberg: Weirdly enough, I think the way I direct is like documentary. I was at a symposium in Telluride about documentary, and one of the main topics of discussion was how objective you can ever really be. A lot of guys there considered themselves to be fiction filmmakers. I think of myself as a documentary filmmaker, because I have the actors block the scene, and then while they’re doing it I’m figuring out how to shoot. The way I work is very spontaneous. I don’t try to control everything. I don’t come to the set with a preconceived idea of how the scene should be played. It makes my assistant directors nervous because I don’t have a shot ready the night before.
When people ask if I watch my movies I say that I can’t, really, because they’re literally like documentaries of what I was doing that day. Every shot is like a minidocumentary: I can remember what was going on in the shot, what was in my head, and I can’t really see it as a movie. During A History of Violence, my wife was shooting a behind-the-scenes making-of, which will be on the DVD. So, while I was directing, I was thinking of this documentary being made. The two blurred together. I think documentary is great. When I was beginning filmmaking there were a lot of very strong documentaries, in the early Sixties. Then documentary disappeared for a while under economic and other pressures, but for various reasons it’s been making a comeback.
Read the complete interview...
OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: DAVID CRONENBURG
By Nicolas Rapold
(This interview originally appeared in STOP SMILING The Documentary Issue)
he strangest thing about David Cronenberg’s films is not the exploding heads, or the car-crash sex, or the VCR in James Woods’s stomach. No, the shivers come when you realize they’re all about us — about how our bodies determine our identities, and vice versa. The Canadian master of creep-out has long attracted audiences with a taste for body freakery, but his shocks are also among the most cerebral around. Cronenberg’s filmography chronicles an ambitious search for new, visceral ways of expressing basic anxieties about the facts of being flesh and blood: maternity in The Brood (1979), aging in The Fly (1986) and desire in Crash (1996), to name but a few. And when that sensibility rubs up against the issues of the day, you get films like Videodrome (1983), eXistenZ (1999) and, most recently, A History of Violence — one of the top-rated films of 2005. The film’s centerpiece is a transformation, a man whose past comes alive — and it’s perhaps no surprise that Cronenberg has rather a porous sense of his fictions and our reality.
Stop Smiling: Have you ever considered shooting a documentary?
David Cronenberg: Weirdly enough, I think the way I direct is like documentary. I was at a symposium in Telluride about documentary, and one of the main topics of discussion was how objective you can ever really be. A lot of guys there considered themselves to be fiction filmmakers. I think of myself as a documentary filmmaker, because I have the actors block the scene, and then while they’re doing it I’m figuring out how to shoot. The way I work is very spontaneous. I don’t try to control everything. I don’t come to the set with a preconceived idea of how the scene should be played. It makes my assistant directors nervous because I don’t have a shot ready the night before.
When people ask if I watch my movies I say that I can’t, really, because they’re literally like documentaries of what I was doing that day. Every shot is like a minidocumentary: I can remember what was going on in the shot, what was in my head, and I can’t really see it as a movie. During A History of Violence, my wife was shooting a behind-the-scenes making-of, which will be on the DVD. So, while I was directing, I was thinking of this documentary being made. The two blurred together. I think documentary is great. When I was beginning filmmaking there were a lot of very strong documentaries, in the early Sixties. Then documentary disappeared for a while under economic and other pressures, but for various reasons it’s been making a comeback.
Read the complete interview...
Displaying 1 of 1 review