David Cronenberg’s masterpiece is brought back to cinemas by the Cineteca di Bologna with its Il Cinema Ritrovato project. Al cinema, dedicated to the distribution of the great classics of the history of cinema.
It’s one of those films where the use of the word “masterpiece” is neither exaggerated nor wasted. It is a film that marked its era in a very profound way and which is still today of an engaging and burning modernity. Perhaps more than certain very recent films by its own author, David Cronenberg. The film is, of course, Videodromedirected by Canadian in 1983 and starring James Woods.
Which, to the delight of those who missed it Cronenberg review which was in theaters at the end of August, is being released in theaters from 19 September from the Cinematheque of Bologna through his project The Rediscovered Cinema. At Cinemawhich brings the great classics of cinema history back to the screen in a restored version.
Here you can read the complete list of cinemas that will show David Cronenberg’s Videodrome from 19 September and in the following days.
The idea came from the many night hours I had spent in front of the television as a child, when I suddenly saw signals caused by interference. […] It was that experience that led me to imagine a man who accidentally picks up a bizarre, extreme, violent and very dangerous signal. Because of its contents he becomes obsessed with it, tries to track it down and gets entangled in a tangled mystery. […] As I began to write, the story suddenly began to alter. Max had hallucinations and impossible physical things happened to him, they went even beyond those contained in the film. At some point he realized that his life wasn’t what he thought it was: he himself wasn’t what he thought he was. I finally decided to stop, because the story was so overblown that it was too much for one film. What I had written really amazed me. If you intend to make art, you have to explore some aspects of your life without reference to political issues or positions. With Videodrome I wanted to suggest the possibility that a man subjected to violent images begins to have hallucinations. I wanted to experience what would happen if what the censors claim really happened. How would it be? Where would it lead?
(David Croneberg)
Videodrome is to all intents and purposes the ‘manifesto’ of Cronenberg’s cinema: a paradigmatic, multi-layered and shocking film. Shocking like a hallucination, lucid and dense like a theoretical essay on the mass-media world in which we are given to live. Rarely has cinema brought so deep a reflection on itself, on its meaning, on its relationship with other media and with the body of the spectators. […] Cronenberg reflects on the iconic intoxication deriving from the consumption of television images and on the physical and anthropological modifications that the diffusion of TV is bringing to the human perceptive apparatus. In other words, Videodrome has the disturbing form of a problematic interrogation on the reproductive nature of images and on the relationship of ambivalent fascination and repulsion that the human eye feels in front of its own dreams and nightmares reified and incessantly reproduced on the TV screen”.
(Gianni Canova)