For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made independent films such as Scanners and A History of Violence which aim to provoke, surprise, and challenge audiences. In his work, he has drawn themes, inspiration and source material from a number of authors (J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Patrick McGrath) whose themes connect readily with Cronenberg's. Author and film scholar Dr. Mark Browning's new work David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker?(Intellect) is a work that attempts to illuminate and unravel the connection between the great Canadian auteur and his literary influences. Dr. Browning was good enough to speak to FSW about his work and the cinema of Cronenberg.
FSW: You mention that most, if not all of Cronenberg's works are based on a literary source-Do you think this is intentional on his part and do you think this approach suits his gifts as a filmmaker?
MB: "Very much so. The scope of the book focuses on the period from Videodrome up to the response to Crash- a film, which I believe over time will come to be seen as one of the most significant for a generation. Literature forms part of Cronenberg`s life-blood- in interviews he talks fluently and in detail about the content of books, not just their titles and mentions critics knowledgeably too. Critics who formed their view of his work in the late seventies assumed that the films he was making then was all he could do but post-Videodrome it is literature, not disease which sits at the core of his aesthetic approach
"I should say here that the book had quite a troubled gestation period. There is, in some circles, as sense that there is a fair amount of Cronenberg scholarship but actually that is only partially true. There are essays and collections of essays but my book is only the second single-authored study on Cronenberg in English and if it had been piublished when I first submitted it, it might have been the first. Two publishing houses, who shall remain nameless, shelved the project on two different occasions due to entirely predictable reasons of internal politics completely unrelated to the book, which was frustrating to say the least."
FSW: Do you see Cronenberg's career divided up in a particular way?
MB: "Yes and no. As Cronenberg himself has said, his films do read like chapters in a single book but I would place Videodrome as a pivotal work. It shows him working through issues of what the film medium can do, which makes the film still resonate 25 years later."
FSW: You mention the influence (or at least acknowledgement) of the culture of pornography in Cronenberg's work (Videodrome and Crash are two of the more obvous examples you cite)-Do you think that Cronenberg's attitude toward this is consistent or mixed? Do you see this theme in his more current
MB: "I don`t think that Cronenberg is fascinated by porn per se, although as I mention in the book, it gave him a way into film-making, it´s more that he is fascinated by the apparently polar opposites of masochism and sadism, which commonly find their cultural expression in pornography. I think it`s worth noting too that in the evolution of the moving image, pornography has played a central and continuing role and anyone who wants to make films about how human sexuality might evolve (one of Cronenberg`s key concerns) cannot avoid considering this."
FSW: There is a fair amount of Cronenberg scholarship (such as The Modern Fantastic)-Besides your approach to Cronenberg's work as grounded in a literary
tradition do you think you have unearthed any other interesting themes in his work?
MB: "Unearthing themes is not really what the book`s about and I am quite adamant about that. Far too much supposed analysis of films makes generalised comment without considering specific scenes and shots in actual films themselves with the result that completely different readings can be taken from the same film without any sense that one has more validity than the other. Suffice to say, film comment that designates a representative status to character actions, bugs the hell out of me. As does psycho-analysis but that`s another question."
"The approach to Cronenberg via literature is not just one more thing he`s interested in- it permeates almost everything he does. That said, there are probably PhDs yet to be written about Cronenberg & painting, his Canadianness (especially linked to other filmmakers like Atom Egoyan)- essays have touched on this but not far really, his directorial method on set & Cronenberg and philosophy (especially Schopenhauer)."
FSW: Do you think any of Cronenberg's work has elements
of traditional Hollywood filmmaking?
MB: "All of it does. Apart from generating finance and using large studios (which he has also done on occasion). He uses stars, he markets his films as part of the conventional publicity machine, he gives countless interviews and most importantly, in terms of his technique, there is little that breaks conventional codes of filmmaking. What makes his films different is the uses to which these are put. For example in eXistenZ, you have plenty of shot-reverse/shot editing but often what a character is apparently looking at is not there, i.e. virtual reality sequences are unsignalled by a wobbly or blurry screen or helpful voiceover. Similarly, many of his films open with a forward tracking shot- plenty of films do- but his often go further. We wait for a cut that does not come and the camera appears to be wandering around looking for a subject (think of the opening of Spider or Crash or more recently A History of Violence). We are not spoonfed what part of the image to look at or what the relationship between shots could/should be- there`s no voiceover (removed from the original script of both Crash and Spider) to give us a moral compass- we`re on our own."
FSW: Do you place any significance on Croneneberg's acting career?
MB: "Not much. I did like his character in To Die For but that is a really interesting film all round. He tends to choose the sinister figures of authority that interviewers expect when they meet him so you could say he is playing with audience expectations of his persona. He`s not Hitchcock, going for a nod and a wink as part of a cinematic “Spot the Dog†game with his die-hard fans. That is closer to Stephen King, who has appeared in numerous films for that tongue-in-cheek element of self-referentiality (this is fresh in my mind as I am currently working through all 70+ films based on his work)."
FSW: Do you see the influence of certain filmmakers in Cronenberg's work?
MB: "This is one of the perennial frustrations about reading interviews with Cronenberg. Not only has he got carefully-worded repsonses to any question you care to give, he has evaded the notion of influence for years. He will admit admiring Fellini and Bergman for example but will claim that like all artists he absorbs their influences and then creates something holly original. My book suggests the reality is slightly different but its focus is literary. A superb PhD thesis suggestion would be Cronenberg and the European art film, which I think has influenced him quite strongly, most particularly in the concept of the auteur, which he seems to buy into completely without question. It was only (and finally) in interviews about Spider in 2003 that he began to accept the influence of Carol Reed on the visual look of the film but even here he would always nervously switch the conversation to Beckett or Pinter."
FSW: How do you see Cronenberg's career evolving withhis most recent work Eastern Promises? Do you detect growth? new themes? new outlooks?
MB: "Hard to answer this one as I haven`t seen Eastern Promises yet but greatly looking forward to it. It might suggest an enduring fondness for London (after the experience of Spider) and working with specific actors (Viggo Mortenson, after A History of Violence). As for the future, there is an off-on self-scripted project called Painkillers, which looks back to Videodrome but I suspect that Cronenberg`s future projects may involve Martin Amis` London Fields- with its shifting sexual identities and an author who is an avowed fan of Nabokov, I would say it´s a strong contender but I would also say that one of the great attractions of going to see a Cronenberg movie is that you never really know what you`re going to get."
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