ANESTHESIA OF ART
Known as the
maestro of the Body-Horror genre, master director David Cronenberg made a meteoric entry into horror cinema with his
movie Crimes of the Future, which had its world premiere at the 75th Cannes Film Festival. In this
first feature-length he shot after eight
years, Cronenberg; biomedical offers a futuristic-thriller of transhumanism,
eco-horror and bio-organic horror subgenres. In the opening sequence, we
encounter a tragedy from Antique Greek-Rome Mythology, and It tells us about a
hedonistic era in the near future where people became desensitized to physical
pain and enjoyed the horrific surgeries on their bodies. Similary, British
philosopher and transhumanist David
Pearce; in his book The Hedonistic Imperative,
he describes a purified future in which, within the next millennium, the
biological conditions of pain will disappear and physical pain will be removed
from human life, thanks to nanotechnology and genetic engineering. On the other
hand, the director is not limited to this, and places the artists who interpret
this situation as a performance subject and art form at the center of the
story. Thus, Kafkaesque images
emerge in the light of Franz Kafka's
A Hunger Artist and In the Penal Colony, which includes
symbolic and allegorical meanings. In this arthouse production, where we
encounter Cronenberg's first original script since 1999's eXistenZ, we are faced with a structure that turns the sexist
beauty norms upside down and questions them. In this movie, we see all the horror symbols and
phenomena of again the classic Cronenberg cinema through detailed and striking
images. In addition Gilles Deleuze,
one of the leading thinkers of modern philosophy, a semiotic interpreter and
the first cinema philosopher to consider the art of cinema as a philosophical
creation, in his book "Cinema-I: The
Movement-Image", states that cinema is a creation technique that
expresses the image of thought says and indicates that this creation is also an
'Image'. In the movie, we see that director David Cronenberg
transfers the image he created in his mind to the silver screen with a
magnificent visual atmosphere. So much so that, in the story, we see that two disciplines work together
within the framework of the epistemological level and the ontological level
(philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of being). Another detail is the differentiation
and change of communication and relationship in the world of the near future
shown in the film. One
of the founders of the Ljubljana School
of Psychoanalysis dominated by Lacanian
influence Slovenian philosopher and social theorist Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex? She talks about this in her book. And philosopher Zupančič, whose work focuses
on psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy; In her book, she says that the
New Order and New Human engineering mechanism reveals the unrelationship.
TOPIC OF FILM
In the near
future dominated by the technology revolution, human beings adapt to the
synthetic world around them with their biological differentiation. Suffering
from a disease called Accelerated Evolution syndrome, performance artist Saul Tenser, with the help of his
business partner Caprice, transforms
this differentiation into avant-garde performance and showcases it publicly.
Stars; Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen
Stewart, Scott Speedman, Sozos Sotiris, Lihi Kornowski, Don McKellar, Nadia
Litz, Tanaya Beatty, Welket Bungué, Ephie Kantza, Penelope Tsilika and Denise Capezza.
DETAILS
-David
Cronenberg's first film in thirty-five years not to have his sister Denise
Cronenberg serve as costume design. Denise passed away in summer 2020.
- Kristen Stewart replaced Natalie Portman in the role of Timlin.
This film
marks David Cronenberg's return to the genres of horror and sci-fi since eXistenZ
(1999), made 23 years earlier.
- Film composer Howard Shore's eighteenth collaboration with David Cronenberg since
he worked on the 1979 film 'The Brood'.
TECHNOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY WORLD
In the technological evolutionary world of the future
depicted in the production, we see that artificial-synthetic foods are more
popular than natural foods. French anthropologist and
ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the
greatest name of structuralist anthropology, states that food is the food of
thought. This shows us that; The world of Crimes of the Future,
where plastic food is eaten, actually depicts an anti-utopian world that is
vague and open to uncertainty. In addition, the different foods
shown in the film are of great importance for the dominant layers in social
life. While the elements related to the concept of life-death
(organic-inorganic, animate-inanimate) are conveyed in the story, the death
instinct is among these elements. When we look at
psychoanalysts, it is seen that they examine the concept of death drive in
depth. Sigmund Freud, interprets it as an instinct to return to the inanimate. Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, says
it is the insistence of the organism to repeat the state of tension without
stopping. And in Jacques
Lacan, he states that every drive is essentially the death drive. In the production, this instinct is shown to the audience through the
characters. In particular, the fact that the character of Saul Tenser is
covered with a black robe brings to mind the words that Deleuze's death
instinct can be understood in relation to masks and costumes. Horror-thriller
elements and wild-bloody scenes are extremely intense in this production, so it
is worth saying that it does not appeal to every audience.
EFE TEKSOY
