*FINISHED?*
Films
Item 1: Videodrome (1983)
-Videodrome is a body horror film with elements of surrealism involving the physical & psychological transformation of man to machine-hybrid. The film contains heavy sexual elements that illustrate a bizarre, twisted sexuality being absorbed visually by the mass audience & more literally by the protagonist, Max Renn, as he spirals deeper & deeper into the dark & terrifying world of Videodrome. Rick Baker's body horror effects in Videodrome were way ahead of their time, utilising latex & mechanical parts to covey the warped sexuality & disturbing venereal horror of Cronenberg's vision. The test audience (see articles section) reacted negatively, as they found the gore too shocking.
Item 2: The Fly (1986)
-The Fly is a science-fiction body horror film remake of a 1958 film based on a short story by George Langelaan. The viewer is first led to sympathy, then revulsion, as the main character makes his gruesome transformation from human to giant mutant insect. This was one of Cronenberg's most commercially successful films, almost crossing into the sphere of mainstream science-horror without compromising his grotesque vision. The special effects, though inferior to Rick Baker's in Videodrome, won an Oscar.
Item 3: eXistenZ (1999)
-This film has a very staccato & disjointed dialogue, which at first perturbed me, but then I noticed that it was used purposefully to contrast with the organic technology. The organic humans behave in a robotic manner, whereas the robotic games consoles writhe & behave like organic creatures. In a manner similar to Kubrick's '2001', where the artificially intelligent computer displays more emotion & humanity than the actual humans, Cronenberg gives a startling but familiar vision of a near future where the ghost has moved from the humans to the machines.
Documentary
Item 4: Forging the New Flesh
-This documentary tells the story of the making of Videodrome through the eyes of the special effects team. They describe their shock at reading the original draft of Videodrome & wondering how they were going to manage to help him realise his vision. David himself talks about the recurring theme in his films of decay of society, the mind & the body.
Item 5: David Cronenberg & the Cinema of the Extreme
- This documentary sees David Cronenberg, George A Romero & Alex Cox discussing disturbing cinema & how Cronenberg's work can be regarded as a pinnacle of work that is not just shocking or gory, but also psychologically disturbing. The other directors notice the recurring motifs of internal strife & transformation so prevalent in his films, which Romero compares to his own work, which is more interested in the breakdown of society rather than individuals.
Articles
Item 6: http://thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/559-the-sex-violence-and-new-flesh-of-videodrome/
Article on The Dissolve called 'The Sex, Violence & New Flesh of Videodrome'
-This article is a discussion between 4 people critiquing the special effects, acting, philosophy & psychology of Videodrome. They speak of the sexual elements & the motivations behind them & the way they affected an audience. They debate the different emotions & reactions invoked by both CGI & physical special effects, & how a CGI Videodrome would simply not be as effective. CGI does not produce a sympathetic response in the bodies of the audiences, whereas corporeal latex flesh has the power to move audiences in revulsion & terror.
Item 7://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2193-notes-from-a-videodrome-test-screening
Notes from a Videodrome test screening on the website of the Criterion Collection.
-This is extremely interesting & useful as it shows the reactions of unwitting members of the public. The consensus was that Videodrome was too violent, too sexual & too gory. None of the subjects seemed to grasp the point of the film & were disturbed by the graphic imagery. This item provides an insight into the minds of a people that had not experienced anything like Videodrome before, which is difficult for someone nowadays to truly understand, as our world has been changed & influenced by the work of Cronenberg, whereas the public in 1983 hadn't been affected the way modern audiences have.
Item 8: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/23979/looking-back-at-david-cronenbergs-the-fly
-This article explains the balance between emotional drama & science-fiction horror that made The Fly so successful.It compares the film to earlier & later films by Cronenberg, showing the thematic similarities & genre conventions used.
Item 9: Sight & Sound magazine article "Odd Man Out"
-This article begins by describing the usual conventions of a David Cronenberg film, such as gore & mutilation, as these are the elements that an audience would come to expect since he includes & explorers these elements in so many of his films. It then proceeds to explain how these elements are surprisingly absent in his film Spider. I think this shows how much of an auteur he is, as his signature stylistic elements are so well-known that any deviation from the usual gore surprises people, even though his psychological stamps are still in place.
Item 10: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/12/david-cronenberg-suicide-fantastic-exit
-This article has David Cronenberg discussing the fantastic technology in his earlier films & whether he really predicted the rise of products such as iPods & the effect of the internet. He talks about the death scenes in his films & how they reflect his own preoccupation & mixed feelings about death which shows how his films are so personal to him, rather than being made to some sort of standard to please audiences.
Item 11: http://filmschoolrejects.com/features/6-filmmaking-tips-from-david-cronenberg-lpalm.php
-This article mentions Cronenberg's reluctance to storyboard his scenes before going onto the set because he puts the importance of crafting the lighting & camera angles around individual actors instead of meticulously planning things to make it easier later. He pays attention to every single shot there & then, like an author writing a chapter of a book or an artist painting a picture or a photographer paying close attention to the composition of a still. I think this is evidence to Cronenberg's auteurism.
Books
Item 12: Cronenberg on Cronenberg
-This entire book is a testament to the auteur Cronenberg & how the thematic elements reoccurring in most of his films all come from deep down in his own psyche & they all have a great personal value to him. His own stamp is on his work because he would not be able to make a film that was intentionally pandering to the masses or copying the style of another to please crowds of fit in.
Item 13:The Directors Take Four
-This book contains a useful quote that steers me in the direction of the view that Cronenberg is an auteur, as Holly Hunter says David would never step out of his involvement in the story & would spend all his time alone at the monitors. This shows he would not settle for anything less than the true fulfillment of his artistic vision, an auteuristic quality. Cronenberg himself also talks in this book about how he sees his filmmaking as a very personal experience. He is not trying to make films to sell to people, he is making the films that he feels need to be made, as they should be made. This shows that he is not a mainstream crowd-pleaser, but an artist working for himself.
Item 14: Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers
-The section on David Cronenberg in this book starts by almost immediately explaining why David Cronenberg is an auteur, using understandable & logical arguments for this. This will be very useful as I will be able to quote this in my presentation.
Item 15: An Introduction to Film Studies
-This book explains the meaning of the auteur theory & the criteria one has to fulfil to be an auteur, which is very helpful to me as it ensures I understand the auteur theory well enough to argue for Cronenberg's status as an auteur. It explains how an auteur is someone who puts the essence of themselves & their personality into their films.
Rejected Items
The Dead Zone (1983)
-Despite
being a really excellent film & wonderful example of Cronenberg's
directing, this film does not contain the elements of body horror which I am
studying. It still deals with transformation, but this time in a psychological sense rather than a physical sense.
Scanners (1981)
-This
film seems to be highly praised but it bored me. It also does not contain
enough body horror to be a good example of Cronenberg's venereal auteurism, as it is more closely resembling a science fiction film, albeit with two body-horror effects scenes, which fir in nicely with the rest of his more venereal work, but not the rest of the film.
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jul/16/david-cronenbergs-secrets-of-body-horror-and-the-rest-of-todays-pop-culture
-Despite being one of the first results on Google when typing in 'Cronenberg body horror', this page is not useful to my project. Watching how they made the exploding head in Scanners was interesting but not relevant.
