Videodrome (1983)
Country: CAN
Technical: col 89m
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: James Woods, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry
Synopsis:
A cable TV programmer is sent material pirated from a new channel called Videodrome. His appetite whetted he investigates further and soon finds himself unable to distinguish fact from fantasy, as he falls victim to a brain tumour caused by a deliberate side-effect of the transmission signal.
Review:
The first film to say something intelligent about the new medium of video, it rings all the truer in the digital/cyber age where the LCD screen is pervasive. At the time it seemed paranoid and sensationalist but it remains among the director's most typical and prescient works. As ever, organic mutation is a metaphor, in this case for pathological dependence on viewed material. The idea of 'the image made flesh' is a wonderfully subversive doctrinal echo from Christianity, and an example of the internal logic of Cronenberg's closed systems.
Country: CAN
Technical: col 89m
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: James Woods, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry
Synopsis:
A cable TV programmer is sent material pirated from a new channel called Videodrome. His appetite whetted he investigates further and soon finds himself unable to distinguish fact from fantasy, as he falls victim to a brain tumour caused by a deliberate side-effect of the transmission signal.
Review:
The first film to say something intelligent about the new medium of video, it rings all the truer in the digital/cyber age where the LCD screen is pervasive. At the time it seemed paranoid and sensationalist but it remains among the director's most typical and prescient works. As ever, organic mutation is a metaphor, in this case for pathological dependence on viewed material. The idea of 'the image made flesh' is a wonderfully subversive doctrinal echo from Christianity, and an example of the internal logic of Cronenberg's closed systems.
Country: CAN
Technical: col 89m
Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: James Woods, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry
Synopsis:
A cable TV programmer is sent material pirated from a new channel called Videodrome. His appetite whetted he investigates further and soon finds himself unable to distinguish fact from fantasy, as he falls victim to a brain tumour caused by a deliberate side-effect of the transmission signal.
Review:
The first film to say something intelligent about the new medium of video, it rings all the truer in the digital/cyber age where the LCD screen is pervasive. At the time it seemed paranoid and sensationalist but it remains among the director's most typical and prescient works. As ever, organic mutation is a metaphor, in this case for pathological dependence on viewed material. The idea of 'the image made flesh' is a wonderfully subversive doctrinal echo from Christianity, and an example of the internal logic of Cronenberg's closed systems.