What came first, the hen or the egg? It’s not like I ponder over this extremely annoying question everyday. But for me, there has always been something fascinating about beginnings. How does life evolve, how do people build up a business and how does an artist start a new painting? When it comes to film, it is always interesting to look back at a director’s first – often shaky – steps with a camera on her/his shoulders. In this feature, I will look back at a certain director’s first film every month.
I will not pretend that I am a fan of David Cronenberg. I haven’t actually seen many of his films – but you probably guessed that because I write this sentence almost every month. I did not pretend to like something like Cosmopolis either; I liked it. For real. Although it could seem a little pretentious, the movie I mean. But what’s really pretentious is Stereo, David Cronenberg’s first feature film ever.
The year in which a director releases his/ her first film is always a revelation; some directors have been around for a longer (or shorter) period of time than you thought! Personally, I don’t think of Cronenberg as a director of classic movies… yet he is! More than 40 years ago, Cronenberg released a sci-fi film called Stereo – plot-wise, it couldn’t be more surreal: In the near future, the “Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry” initiates an experiment about telepathy. Seven subjects undergo brain surgery and lose their power of speech in order to be able to communicate telepathically.
“What the fuck” is almost an understatement when it comes to this film. I didn’t even quite grasp what it was about before I read its wikipedia page. The film is underscored by a commentary, narrated by someone who sounds pretty much exactly like HAL9000. It took me a while to understand that a lot of this commentary was actually mocking scientific commentaries – as is the movie. The movie doesn’t have any dialogue apart from that commentary, which makes it pretty inaccessible. You are literally put outside of the movie, observing the characters and their actions instead of experiencing them.
The content is so intellectual and complicated that it is not universally comedic. If you don’t get the point of a joke, it isn’t funny to you – so it isn’t even a joke for you at all. Perhaps the humor of it will grow on me on multiple rewatches but so far, I have to admit that I’m not getting it.
Stereo is really just a movie that is pretending to be pretentious… but it couldn’t be more pretentious about doing that.
