Stereo and Crimes of the Future
"Jomkin suggests that there must evolve a novel sexuality for a new species of man." — Crimes of the Future
Before he became the cinematic master of body horror, David Cronenberg was an experimental student filmmaker who turned out works very much in line with the same sort of fixations explored almost exclusively by J.G. Ballard, whose Crash he later adapted into a film, in 1997. His early films, his first two, Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), explore film technique in documenting the huge, yawning architectural environment of an unspecified hospital or research facility, relegating the performers of the film to almost being secondary actors in a drama defined by geometrical shape—relegating them to the roles of insectile life, pursuing strange, even inscrutable actions, ostensibly being filmed by the watchful, clinical, and coldly detached robotic eye of the viewer, who becomes the de facto research assistant to the director, who seems to have made this film by asking his performers to improvise within the framework of derangement. What was he exploring? one wonders. The environment itself dwarfs the humanity of the filmic subjects, overpowering them in its specter of geometrical dominance and dimension.
