The Shrouds
-
Conspiracy of the Dead: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds
“Long live the new flesh.” The most famous line in any Cronenberg picture, uttered by Videodrome’s Max Renn (James Woods), is also something of a mission statement for much of the Canadian master’s work. The technological and corporeal fuse across his filmography, resulting in new sensations, desires and ways of being in the world. In Videodrome, unusual orifices form, as stomachs become insertion points for violent VHS tapes. Real and virtual worlds blur in eXistenZ as videogame controllers jack directly into spinal cords; more recently, in Crimes of the Future, the surgical removal of surreal organs is the latest form […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2025 -
Cannes 2024: Oh, Canada and The Shrouds
For decades, Paul Schrader’s taste in cinema has been widely known, particularly the Bressonian proclivities he’s repeatedly worked over—and, especially since becoming a Facebook poster, he’s provided an open invitation to make his problems ours as well. Watching Oh, Canada knowing of his recent health scares, my guess was that the topical draw of Russell Banks’s source novel Foregone was death; indeed, after several hospitalizations for long COVID, Schrader told himself, “If I’m going to make a film about death, I’d better hurry up.” Thus Oh, Canada, which reteams Schrader with his American Gigolo star Richard Gere (the writer-director jokes […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 24, 2024
