Crimes of the Future (1970)

Part of the David Cronenberg

7:30 p.m. Wednesday 29 July 2009

Director:	David Cronenberg
Certificate:	Unknown
Length:	70
Format:	16mm
Language:	English
Country:

We’ll be ending the season with the master’s first two feature films.

Cronenberg’s icy first featurettes show a young director already sure of his fecund thematic territory, investigating the convergence of fringe medicine and outlaw sexuality in Stereo (1969), wherein subjects at a sex-research institute undergo brain surgery to acquire telepathic powers, and Crimes Of The Future (1970), which arranges a bizarre interface of dermatology and paedophilia.

Other films in the David Cronenberg:

15 Film: The Brood (Dir. David Cronenberg) (1979)

15 Jul 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Oliver Reed (!!) stars as an unconventional therapist who encourages Samantha Eggar to undergo “psychoplasmic” therapy – whereby mental and emotional trauma takes physical form – and produces scores of deformed, murderous children who prey upon her young (human) daughter. Made after a difficult custody battle between Cronenberg and his former wife, The Brood is perhaps the director’s most cathartic and autobiographical film.

19 Film: Existenz (1999)

19 Jul 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Cronenberg returns to original-screenplay work with the crafty virtual-reality adventure eXistenZ (1999), which glistened with spinal bioports and sticky-icky “game pods”. Released around the same time as The Matrix, the movie appeared as the smarter, scrappier arthouse cousin to the self-important blockbuster.