The zombie motif is employed with perverse precision in David Cronenberg's early work Shivers, a film which titillates both intellectually and emotionally, as the filmmaker delivers a subtextual repudiation of Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, a theory in which suppression of individualistic carnal pleasures is a necessity in order for collective progress. A very economically made film, Cronenberg doesn't let financial restrictions get in the way of his unique, erotic spin of the zombie film, showing a penchant for the grotesque which he would become known for with this explicit juxtaposition between sex and violence. It has been a long time since I'd seen this film and what struck me as I revisited it is that in a sense, Cronenberg seems to be unsure if he should be hopeful or concerned about the state of humanity, subtextually exhibiting how sexual liberation, while anarchic in a sense, can also save humanity from norms of puritanical society.
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An extensive departure for Sono - a filmmaker whose oeuvre tends to exude formalist dynamism - The Whispering Star if a quiet tableau of somberness, loneliness, and longing which sees the filmmaker elicit a humanist portrait, which through a quiet aura of stillness, expresses the fundamental differences between man and machine. Relatively plotless and largely free from the tenets of narrative filmmaking, The Wandering Star aims to elicit this feeling if isolation through cold sepia aesthetics and visual constructions that elucidate how spatiality affects human consciousness. Calling the film esoteric feels misguided, as Sono's intentions feel relatively precise, The Wandering Star being more like an exercise or experiment in which Sono attempts to use the cinematic medium to encapsulate what it means to be human through a film grammar built on repetition, restriction, and stillness. Startling in the somberness and loneliness it creates largely through abstraction.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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