Stereo

This strange gem fits suitably in the creche of Cronenberg bit it's not for everyone that loves Cronenberg....Just the ones that are insanely in need of everything he has ever created. Its not because it's a bad film, on the contrary it is very intriguing. Its just incredibly slow and the sparse environment lack of color and mostly silent audio makes for a surreal but not very compelling film. There is no soundtrack...At all. There is no real dialog just moments of narration, which of course paints the picture moreso than the acting and mise en scene. Set in the Future, we are treated to a pseudo-documentary based on the scientific workings of a parapsychologist named Luther Stringfellow a famed member of the fictitious Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry. His thesis; It is hoped that telepathic groups, bonded in polymorphous sexual relationships, will form a socially stabilizing replacement for the "obsolescent family unit". The subjects will be seven young volunteers who will submit to experimental brain surgery to endow them with telepathic abilities and quench their ability to speak and be recorded daily. The film serves as a record of said experiment. This is where the film kinda falls down. The film gives us some interesting characters to watch, but their silence doesn't allow us to really know sympathize with them. Its like watching an acting class exercise in "emoting" or "mugging". A pantomime this complex needs some form of interpretive audio. While it is interesting to watch the actors go about their "telepathic" play, the drama comes off as stilted due to the highly scientific nature of the narration. Some long sequences that involve little or no narration do not pass quickly and create a kind of dream logic between film and audience. Are we getting what he is showing us? I dunno, as some of the action is so interpretive that we could be on a completely different plane of reasoning than what Cronenberg could be trying to describe. Heady, perhaps, but I think that Cronenberg was not trying to be pretentious, I think he was doing what a lot of first time film students do. Get in over their heads with grand ideas. I can forgive as I have done that myself, which is why I gave it 7 stars. Its not bad its just not for everybody.

Although he is better known for his 'body horror' work and scenes of squirm-inducing gore, the most prominent theme that runs throughout the career of David Cronenberg is the idea of finding an extra stream of consciousness through sexual release. From his serial-raping zombies in Shivers (1975), to his portrayal of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Sabrina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method (2011), he has adopted a psychoanalytical aesthetic between scenes of exploding heads and killer tots. His début, Stereo, is his student film that is an early reflection of his fascination with psychology, made on an obviously shoe-stringed budget, shot in one location.

The film begins with the arrival at what looks like a research facility of a man wearing a black coat. As the narration begins to explain, the man is a telepath, a product of a social experiment to observe behavioural patterns between three telepaths in a closed environment. Having had their ability to speak removed, they must communicate only via telepathy, and through this telepathic bonding, begin sexual experimentation. The experiment is being carried out by the unseen Dr. Luther Stringfellow, who hopes that the powerful relationships which are forged through the telepaths - that evolve to deem such things as sex or physical attraction irrelevant - will come to replace and stabilise the traditional family unit.

If you could label Stereo as anything, it would have to be ambitious. Although the subject is purely psychoanalytical, the approach is very sci-fi. The film is black-and-white, featuring no sound at all apart from the near-constant narration, which is spoken in the same dreary tone as you would expect from a student vocalising an essay. It's quite clear than Cronenberg was held back by budget constraints and equipment, and although you could forgive the film's narrative flaws, the lack of visual appeal combined with the monotonous, jargon-heavy, quasi- intellectual narration, make the film a struggle to get through, even at only 62 minutes. It would be harsh to say Stereo is for Cronenberg die- hard's only as it is often intriguing, but the film ultimately feels like struggling to stay awake during a University lecture.

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Cronenberg's first feature is a bizarre, distended thing, whose real star is the location. I'm guessing we're looking at York University campus; regardless, every obscure tableau he stages is self-consciously dwarfed by the forbidding institutional architecture that houses it. The sporadic voice-over that occasionally rises from the silence suggests that we're watching a narrative about a sexual telepathy clinic whose mandate goes seriously awry. If you concentrate, you can see how this relates to the on screen shenanigans in a linear and probably even preplanned way - it's not just precious mannerisms, although it is that as well. The film makes the most of its visual material with a special thing for fisheye pans, and it runs free love through a dystopian sci-fi wringer in a way that will be familiar to fans of his later work, even including a giveaway throw to "Scanners". But after a while it does get tedious, and while Cronenberg's iconoclasm remains enjoyable and felt, minimalist sci-fi on no budget was always easier to pull off in print than on screen.

I can't say that I'm a Cronenberg fan since I haven't seen many of his movies and those that I have seen consists largely of his later works. I also can't say that stereo was the kind of movie I was expecting, since the topic hasn't been the most popular subject in those movies that can be considered to contain any individuality. I wasn't badly disappointed or gladly surprised because this movie was indeed a bit rough. Still the subject and Cronenbergs approach to it feels quite fresh. Filming takes place in an architecturally interesting building complex. The building is filmed from inside and outside, but in any shots no other buildings can be seen. This gives a nice enigmatic touch on the setting.

I found it surprising how this movie tried to combine sexual behavior and pseudo scientific telepathy by using scientific biological and psychological approaches. The film doesn't try in any point to explain how telepathy is actually achieved, but instead feeds the viewer with supposedly scientific data that is related to telepathy (for example. functions on how strength of telepathic linkage is correlated on the distance of two telepathic persons, how emotions affect telepathy etc.). Things told by the narrator are related to the images on the screen. He explains how emotions, such as love, are manipulated in an scientific experiment, as a method on gathering information about telepathy. There is no soundtrack, dialog or SFX, only the narrators voice. The fact that all that is happening on the screen is explained in scientific terms/reasoning, without any scientific justification, might make the "story" a little tough piece to swallow.

Time to time the movie doesn't seem to progress very rapidly: There are some long scenes where expressions are extensively filmed and some of them are almost funny (for example when one subject very slowly raises his hand to his mouth while looking straight forward and one scene where man is eating a chocolate bar, seem to last for an eternity). As the movie is carried forward by the narrator, the scenes where he is silent are completely quiet. I don't consider this helpful while trying to keep audience interested on the subject. Since visual part of this movie can't by itself tell much to audience and is better left on the background to be explained by the narrator. This sure isn't a mainstream movie and it is also a rare piece in it's subject and style. I certainly don't regret watching this, but as a word of warning, it might not be too easy to watch. However this movie wasn't made just to entertain audience, as later works by Cronenberg and despite low entertainment value, it is one of the most interesting movies I have seen from him. If this one feels too heavy to watch, check out 'The Fly' (as you probably already have), though I liked 'Naked Lunch' the best.

At an Canadian Academy a group of people volunteer to be used as test subjects in an experiment to gain telepathic powers to communicate with after their ability to communicate through speech was removed. Then we slowly watch how the results turn out with sudden changes and obstacles put into motion to see how they adapt to it. While, throughout the observers constantly update us with their progress.

Was it a big mistake that I decided to watch this early Cronenberg art-flick before I went to bed. Maybe so, maybe not? I was fighting to keep my eyes open towards the end, but I can see why people were derailed by this experience. This oddity is real hard to get into and it only goes for about hour, but it does seem longer. Way longer! I wasn't entirely bored from this outing, but I did become rather restless in the final twenty minutes. The film is shot in black & white and there's real no sound, other than a voice-over that crops up every now again. This exhausting narration is bluntly monotonous with it's thick technical jargon that sometimes doesn't always tie in to what's happening on screen and you really have to concentrate to have a clue about what's going. At times I fell in and out of the context, but I still had some sort of an idea to what was happening. It goes on to relate telepathic power with sexual awaking, while looking into the behavioural patterns of these erotic and ESP activities and signals. Most of the time it feels like the film is meandering about aimlessly with a bunch of method actors who are just performing for a live crowd. Like a fellow has user has already mention it does feel like a documentary. While, the intellectual study might be a clever idea, but you can't help but feel disconnected from this lifeless exploration. The look of the film showcases the professional eye that Cronenberg would go on to incorporate into his latter flicks and this was his first 35mm shot project. The atmosphere has a lonely, out-of-this world feel with it's abstract backdrop that lingers on screen. The finesse and execution of such transfixed images is what kept me watching, really. This was the cold and distant style Cronenberg would go one to make his own and the sub-text of the plot shows up again in some way in the film "Scanners".

If you want to be entertained, look elsewhere because you'll mostly be frustrated. But if you want to see where it all began for Cronenberg look no further than here.