STEREO (1969)
David Cronenberg began his career as a film-maker In
Canada without any formal film school training. There was no such schooling
available in his home country. His background was in science, having spent a
year at university studying organic chemistry. He had a particular fascination
for entemology – the study of insect life – and this scientific aspect influenced
much of his work.
Clinics dealing with human scientific potential, the
body-horror infestation of insectoid/parasitic attack, all are recurring themes
and one can see the seeds of a lot of this in STEREO, his first film of length.
At just over one hour, it’s a film record of the behaviour of eight young students
under observation at the fictional CAEE (the Canadian Academy for Erotic
Enquiry) by the unseen Dr Stringfellow. They are being studied as part of an
experiment whereby they are given telepathic abilities and then observed in
social and private behaviours on a day-t-day basis. The scenes are all in black
and white and silent, overlaid with voice-overs from august-sounding experts recounting
the intended theories and results over the course of three months. We are
introduced to them via one participant (Ronald Mlodzik), grandly dressed in an
opera cloak and bearing a cane, who gains entry into the sterile, barren and
vaguely sinisterly architecture institute. Gradually, we see all the students
at play with each other, flirting, having sex, eating and enjoying other
sensory pleasures, all presumably being recorded elsewhere.
As the film progresses, the narration discusses various
tested phenomena such as the understanding that in order for telepathy to be
strong, the subjects must form meaningful relationships with each other; also
they are administered drug capsules that are hoped to induce a capacity for
‘omnisexuality’ to ‘demolish the walls’ of conventional sexual constraint.
Eventually, we are told that two unexpected
consequences have occurred: that a number of the participants committed
suicide, one by piercing his skull with an electric drill – and that Dr
Stringfellow himself became highly agitated as a result of his separation from
the students after the experiment had concluded, concluding that the telepathic
relationships established were two-way in nature.
By being presented as a scientific observation of
subjects, the tone of STEREO is cool and removed, but as the events unfold in
an episodic way without any connecting thread, it’s very disjointed and
uninvolving. The detached style invites the same in reaction especially as most
of the interesting information is merely told not shown. It is however
interesting to spot the themes and obsessions that will crop up in his future
films: SCANNERS and THE BROOD will deal directly with parapsychological human
talents harnessed by professionally-run private clinics – and the study of
human sexuality in all its taboos, kinks etc will occur often, most obviously
in A DANGEROUS METHOD. Cronenberg deserves credit as well for making his own
films at this stage where, before the Cinepix funding for SHIVERS, he was
having to do all of his own filming and editing, learning as he went ‘on the
job’.
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970)
This follow-on film again deals with the goings-on
within experimental clinics, in this case the House of Skin whose director
Adrian Tripod (Ron Mlodzik again)goes on a rambling search to find his mentor
Antoine Rouge whose experiments have killed off all the planet’s women. Tripod
meets a succession of peculiar obsessives who we are told are involved with organisations
such as the Oceanic Podiatry Group, (whose member teaches Tripod to manipulate
people’s feet to induce a quasi-orgasmic state of consciousness). He also
encounters a man with a fondness for collecting women’s underwear and also,
once inside the building, a secret group of paedophiles.
All this may sound promising on paper, but like STEREO what
could be potentially intriguing is only given verbally as if in a radio play
rather than in cinematic terms - here as
a lisping, effete voice-over by Mlodzik (over silent footage throughout) that
seriously gets on your nerves after a while. The interminable mentioning of
Antoine Rouge grates terribly, as does the loose chain of encounter scenes shot
outside in what looks like a university’s grounds. It has the rough alienating
feel of a pretentiously surreal student film that makes no real sense and has
no clear narrative.
Where CRIMES OF THE FUTURE does have curiosity value is
partly in its odd soundtrack of seemingly home-made aural FX and what sound like
bird calls – and again the burgeoning themes of human potential under
professional observation; body-horror (in the manifesting here of external
bodily organs by victims) and investigations into the range of sexual
perversity that fascinate Cronenberg’s focus.
It would be four years before David Cronenberg would
finally have the means to develop his themes across the canvas of a feature
film. Prepare for SHIVERS…
