Transfer

Transfer (1966)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This six minute short was the first work of director David Cronenberg. The story is quite simple as a doctor is in the middle of nowhere when a patient shows up. The doctor explains that he put his office in the middle of the wilderness because he wanted to be left alone.

While there's nothing ground-breaking about this short and there's certainly nothing here to show that Cronenberg would go onto achieve what he did, the film still manages to be slightly entertaining just due to how it's set up. I really liked the visuals of the film and I thought the director did a good job at showing off the loneliness of the environment. The film has a few neat ideas and the director certainly keeps the film entertaining.

Canadian director David Cronenberg went on to put together a legendary body of work. His vision was so original, his movies so strong. This short film was his first effort and, well...it's a start I suppose! It basically has a man having an animated discussion with his psychiatrist in a field in the middle of the Canadian winter. Its technically raw, with clunky camerawork, hard to make-out sound and actors who must be friends. Quite what the overall point of it was, I am not entirely sure. In fairness, it is a student film and it is so short that it hasn't got time to truly try your patience. Interesting to see, yet very limited. At best it does display a certain surreal quality but its slim pickings in this one from Dave.

David Cronenberg's first film short already has the themes of alienation and psychiatry that will continue to show up for years to come.The Brood and Scanners are the most obvious examples of this. Images of a therapy session in a deserted snow filled vacant lot are striking. I saw this at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astora Queens with Stereo and Crimes of the future. Cronenberg has created thoughtful and unique films from the beginning. Transfer, a reference to the term for the feelings a client has for a therapist, is an interesting footnote for students of auteur theory and Cronenberg's strange body of work.

David Cronenberg's very first short film feels less like a Cronenberg movie and more like something akin to the early works of John Waters, but only in terms of the acting and visual style. Unfortunately, the writing and general tone of a Waters film matches the acting and visual style of 'Transfer' much better than the writing and general tone of 'Transfer' does. Plus, the sound is godawful. However, the short has some merits. There are visual ideas here that are interesting, the editing is decently done, and it definitely has a quirky sense of humour that got a few genuine smirks out of me, it certainly shows promise, though the amount of promise it shows doesn't come close to stacking up the later career of Cronenberg, which is unfortunate for this film but very fortunate for a vast majority of the films Cronenberg made afterwards.

Cronenberg first short-movie. It is pretty enjoyable, only seven minutes, and looks like an exercise, a simple one, but good enough I dare to say.

You could say the whole movie has a pretty good atmosphere, by the chosen location, the sound recording seems noisy, but for the seven minutes, it gives some layer to the surroundings, although most likely the movie just had bad sound recording.

The story it is about a psychoanalyst that leaves all his patients and hides himself into a open, snowy, dreary field. One of his patients goes after him, when all the others found other doctors.

The encounter and their conversation feels more like a Monty Python sketch, and it feels more like it was an exercise of dialogue and a way to discuss the ideas Cronenberg was trying to think about at the time, which totally relate to his later body of work.

He sets two important ideas, the first one, is related with communication, the title of the movie reinforces that, the conflict it is on that movement, of trying to relate with others, and to try to speak out, to express yourself.

But this desire has consequences, which the psychoanalyst is not prepared to go through anymore, he says, an analyst has to dip his finger into the murky, forbidding, scrummy aquarium of the sick mind, Ralph!

In the end, Ralph and the Doctor talk about their definition about time in the subconscious, reinforcing even more the antagonism of the two characters, and showing that in his first work he was already exploring and trying to understand the unconscious and the human mind.

When he goes back to Jung and Freud in Dangerous Method, he is back where he is started in 1966.