A man loses his skin and limbs and turns into a giant fly. Another individual’s hand becomes a clever biomechanical weapon. A woman licks her newborn baby’s blood. A young man mates with one leg through a vulva-shaped wound. Someone pulls a gun from his stomach. A human head is cut into a thousand pieces in a tight close-up. A filmography full of footage like this has spun David Cronenberg turning into one of the most extreme and disturbing filmmakers out there. “The civilizational process has allowed us to suppress our most immoral impulses, and that’s why we can meet without killing each other, but As an artist, I try to explore the destructive side of man.and it fascinates me”, explains the Canadian filmmaker, Donostia Award in honor of his career That the San Sebastian Festival bestowed him this Wednesday.
Cronenberg has made horror movies for the better part of his five-decade career, but his cinema has no haunted houses, vampires or zombies, ghosts or demons. The monsters he designs are always overtly human.. It is the epicenter of a subgenre known as the Works. ‘body fear’ or bodily terrorBased on the disintegration or transformation of the organism clinically and in dialogue with sexuality: ‘They came from within…’ (1975), a doctor introduces a parasite into a group of people, which gives them an insatiable sexual and murderous instinct; inside ‘angry’ (1977), a dying woman undergoes experimental surgery that turns her into a vampire with phallic appendages under her armpits and her victims into deadly monsters; inside ‘Inseparable’ (1988), a gynecologist designs and attempts to use abnormal surgical instruments on women whom he believes have mutated reproductive systems. Drawing on premises like this one, he explored existential questions that almost no other artist has dared to raise. “I’m not trying to provoke the audience,” she said at the San Sebastian event today. “I’m trying to push myself to the limitsand I invite the public to join me. I’m not like Hitchcock, who sees the audience as puppets to be manipulated. I try to find some truth about myself through my cinema.”
‘Future crimes’
Premiering at the Cannes festival in May and showing today in San Sebastián, Cronenberg’s new feature film arrives in Spanish cinemas next Friday. ‘Crimes of the future’ dream of a tomorrow where infections and physical pain are eradicatedand in some people’s bodies new organs sprout, considered by some to be an art form, and generally works as a compilation of themes and visual motifs throughout his cinema. In one of the first scenes of the movie, a pair of cartilaginous mechanical arms cut the woman’s chest up and down. Viggo MortensenLying in a sarcophagus with a texture similar to that of the monster in ‘Alien: the eighth traveler’ (1979) and starting to poke the inside of his body while licking his lips with pleasure; in another we see how the dancer’s mouth is sewn up. Someone says at another point “Surgery is the new sex”.
Meanwhile, Big corporations, by the author of ‘Crimes of the Future’, climate change and other obstacles to the sustainability of the planet. “I worry that we won’t be able to repair the damage we’ve done to the world,” he complains. In other words, he thinks there is no reason to be optimistic and promises that he will continue to show up on the big screen, judging by what he said in San Sebastian today. “I thought they wanted you to stop making movies when they gave you the honor,” he said today. “Now I understand that, on the contrary, they are encouraging you to keep doing them.”