David Cronenberg
From Videodrome's new flesh to Crash and A History of Violence, Cronenberg treats the body as the place where technology and desire collide, and films it with a surgeon's calm.
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A History of Violence
An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.
Defining films
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Both obsessed with the body as a site of control and corruption, clinical precision applied to transgression, beauty found in violation.
Both explore violence as intimate, corporeal, psychological, the body as a register of political and personal trauma.
Both breach genre boundaries to expose the obscene lurking beneath surfaces, social horror made visceral and inescapable.
Both treat the human body as landscape, slow, estranged, watching decay and desire unfold in real time with unflinching precision.
In their own words
Ingmar Bergman's *The Seventh Seal* (1957) and *Persona* (1966) struck me powerfully.
It's a ghost story but without ghosts. I was thinking of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and the ambiguity of the two women... Those things are not direct influences, but they're in the air.
The European tradition of cinema is much more literary, much more psychologically intense. That's a tradition that goes back to Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini.
I certainly thought about Bergman's films, like *Scenes from a Marriage*, and how he could make talky scenes dramatic and intense without resort to sensationalism.
Films by decade
