THE MOST AMBITIOUS EXHIBITION EVER MOUNTED IN NORTH AMERICA DEVOTED TO THE WORK OF ICONIC CANADIAN FILM MAKER

DAVID CRONENBERG.

DECEMBER 1415, 2015

THE MOST AMBITIOUS EXHIBITION EVER MOUNTED IN NORTH AMERICA DEVOTED TO THE WORK OF ICONIC CANADIAN FILM MAKER DAVID CRONENBERG.

David Cronenberg is joined by a number of esteemed guests, as well as several of his closest collaborators past and present, to introduce numerous screenings for our complete retrospective of his vastly inuential oeuvre, featuring several new prints and restorations commissioned especially for this programme.

DECEMBER 1415, 2015

HSBC GALLERY AT

DECEMBER 1415, 2015

HSBC GALLERY AT
TIFF Bell Lightbox is located at Reitman Square on the north-west corner of King and John Streets (350 King Street West), TIFF Bell Lightbox occupies an entire city block in the heart of Torontos media and entertainment district. All spaces, including the cinemas, are wheelchair accessible to the public. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14

18:0020:00 OPENING PARTY 20:0022:00 NAKED LUNCH (1991) 22:0024:00 EASTERN PROMISES (2007)
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15

8:30 9:30 9:30 11:00 11:0012:00 13:0015:00 15:0017:00 20:0022:00

DAVID CRONENBERG THE FLY (1986) LUNCH INTERMISSION DEAD RINGERS (1988) VIDEODROME (1982) CLOSING CEREMONY

DECEMBER 1415, 2015

THE

BARON

OF

BLOOD

DAY
FRI. DEC. 14

OPENING PARTY
FRI. DEC. 14 18:0020:00 LOCATION:

BELL TIFF LIGHTBOX LOBBY

Join us for drinks, delicious hour duvres and conversation with festival attendants as well as with the esteemed guests. The opening party is
FREE

but space is lim-

ited. First come, rst serve.

INTRODUCED BY DAVID CRONENBERG

NAKED LUNCH
FRI. DEC. 14 20:0022:00

1991

STARRING:

Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm

After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in a port town in North Africa. INTRODUCED BY PETER WELLER

EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT.

William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch has been rattling literary cages since it was published at the end of the repressive Fifties. Though nothing in David Cronenbergs free-form is as jolting as the poetically eroticized violence of the book. Theres plenty to scare off the uninitiated, including a giant centipede that rapes and devours a gay boy in a bird cage. Cronenberg, whose screenplay for the lm won the 1991 New York Film Critics Award, has turned Burroughss densely fragmented novel into a pungently comic and inventive spellbinder about the act of writing, incorporating Burroughss life in the mix. William Lee, Burroughs stand-in, is hollow-eyed and full of intensity. At his exterminator job, Lee kills insects with the same yellow powder that his druggie wife, Joan (a vividly decadent Judy Davis the new dark lady of cinema), injects into her breast. When Lee accidentally shoots Joan in a William Tell stunt (Burroughss wife died under similar circumstances), he escapes to Interzone, modeled on Tangier, where Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch. Interzone is a drug-induced-nightmare world of spies and junkies that shapes Lees fantasies as he tries to write himself out of his guilt. You can debate the lms shower of symbols representing everything from Lees blocked creativity to his repressed homosexuality. But theres no debating the lms hallucinatory brilliance.

THAT IS THE CONCLUSION I HAVE COME TO.

EASTERN PROMISES
FRI. DEC. 14 22:0024:00

2007

STARRING:

Viggo Mortensen, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Naomi Watts

A Russian teenager living in London who dies during childbirth leaves clues to a midwife in her journal that could tie her child to a rape involving a violent Russian mob family.

INTRODUCED BY NAOMI WATTS

FORGET ANY OF THIS HAPPENED.

STAY AWAY FROM PEOPLE LIKE ME.

A man meets his end, yammering, then not. A teenage mother dies in an ER delivery room. A child is born. Death and birth ignite the slow burn of Eastern Promises. Eastern Promises is another late-period Cronenberg masterpiece, grounded by a brilliant use of Mortensens physical sturdiness and moral shadows. Impeccably suited with shades pinned to his massive square head, his Nikolai is a Siberian Alain Delon, faultlessly contained where Kirill the underworld libertine is fatally raucous. What toll comes with such coolness? I am already dead. I died when I was 15, he says to a group of Russian capos assembled to approve the tattoos that will be engraved on his body as signs of power. The scene is one of three to evocatively put the male body on display. Kirill forces Nikolai to pick a hooker and watches as he doggies her in bed, and later on, in an astounding set-piece on the prowess and vulnerability of human esh, a bathhouse skirmish comes to suggest all sorts of penetration. The fairy-tale element isnt lost on Cronenberg as he traces the emergence of a monstrous paterfamilias and the kidnapping of the child who threatens his kingdom. Nikolai is a creature in limbo, both between crime and law (as a late twist reveals, in the lms only clunky bit) and between Annas normalcy and Semyons unsavory realm. Accepting our darkness is what makes us, wholly, human.

DAY
SAT. DEC. 15

DAVID CRONENBERG

SAT. DEC. 15 8:309:30

David Cronenberg discusses and reects on his early short lms Stereo and Crimes of the Future and how his work has nally come full-circle.

INTRODUCED BY VIGGO MORTENSEN

THE FLY
SAT. DEC. 15 9:3011:00

1986

STARRING:

Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz

A brilliant but eccentric scientist begins to transform into a giant man-y hybrid after an experiments goes horribly wrong.

BE AFRAID.

INTRODUCED BY JEFF GOLDBLUM

BE VERY AFRAID.
VERY WRONG.

Charles Edward Pogues original script was heavily rewritten by Cronenberg, who eshed out the main characters and the central love triangle and infused the whole story with his distinctive brand of pulp poetry, which is fundamentally rational yet prone to ights of romantic obsession and grandiose theatrical monologues. Since the lms original release, Pogue has been very open about Cronenbergs contributions. They give the lm much of its avor. The Fly is lled with quotable lines and phrases, including the poetry of steak and insect politics. When Goldblum sheds his geeky facade and embraces what he thinks is his Super Fly destiny, he becomes even more attractive because hes so dangerously condent. Ronnie goes from cynical opportunism to deep and true love, but without ever losing her rationality. Every stage of Ronnies emotional journey rings true. Extricating yourself from a failing relationship while pregnant is a predicament that countless women have experienced; ditto the pain of being in love with a man whos dying and/or losing his mind, and becoming ever more frightening and repulsive, instilling his survivor with feelings of guilt and shame that shell never shake, only learn to manage. Mainstream movies rarely dare to depict such fraught situations in all their messy realness. The Fly does so in a science-ction setting, with telepods and freaky prostheses and an operatic Howard Shore score that could be the music Franz Waxman heard in his head as he lay SOMETHING WENT WRONG IN THE LAB TODAY. dying. Its all quite astonishing.

DEAD RINGERS
FRI. NOV. 6 13:0015:00

1988

STARRING:

Jeremy Irons, Genevive Bujold, Heidi von Palleske

Twin gynecologists take full advantage of the fact that nobody can tell them apart, until their relationship begins to deteriorate over a woman.

INTRODUCED BY JEREMY IRONS

ITS THE BODY.

THE WOMANS BODY IS ALL WRONG!

Cronenbergs emotionally devastating study of the perverse relationship between identical twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle, is an intense psychological drama which confronts his familiar preoccupations - fear of physical and mental disintegration, mortality, the power struggle between the sexes - without the paradoxical protection of visceral disgust. Instead, the abstract, expressionist imagery synthesises the physical and the mental. Courtesy of clever, unobtrusive trick camera work, Irons gives a superlative performance as both twins. The delicate symbiotic balance between the brothers is suddenly upset by the eruption into their lives of hedonistic actress Claire (Bujold). As always, they share everything, including Claire, until Beverly realises that he has at last found something he does not want to share, and he is plunged into a whirlpool of emotional confusion; when Elliot tries to help, he too is sucked into the vortex of pain and despair. Likewise, Cronenberg pulls us deeper and deeper into his harrowing tale of separation and loss, the disturbing, cathartic power of which leaves one drained but exhilarated.

VIDEODROME
SAT. DEC. 15 15:0017:00

1983

STARRING:

James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smit

A sleazy cable-TV programmer begins to see his life and the future of media spin out of control in a very unusual fashion when he acquires a new kind of programming for his station.

INTRODUCED BY JEFF GOLDBLUM DEATH TO VIDEODROME!

LONG LIVE

THE NEW FLESH!

Just a few years into the 21st century, Cronenbergs Videodrome is the most important lm of this generation. Time has only reinforced its audacity. You can trace David Cronenbergs meditations on technology, disease, addiction, and mutation in the body human all the way back to his earliest shorts (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) and features (Shivers and Rabid). He makes his ideas physical and visceral, in a way that you can see and almost feel. It only becomes sharper and more resonant with his remake of The Fly, where he charts the transformation in gooey detail that looks like some diseased attack on the human body, where the line between fantasy and reality doesnt so much blur as dissolve and overpowering articial stimulus comes back to effect physical reality. Even his most recent lms explore the same ideas, only instead of some outside agent, he focuses on the way violence and emotion play upon our minds and our bodies. An essential part of Cronenbergs genius is making his concepts physical, visceral, alive. Its what makes his ideas so powerful. Videodrome is an evolutionary leap in Cronenbergs lmmaking and conceptual ideas. Videodrome takes concepts of disease and mutation as evolution, and of the bodys physical and biochemical response to progress and technology changing too fast to really absorb and conquer, to a whole new level, and twists it in a plot that wraps around itself while it irts with the fascination with and the fear of sex.

CLOSING CEREMONIES

SAT. DEC. 15 20:0022:00

In a casual setting, to close Voyeur: The Eyes of Cronenberg, David Cronenberg will show some of his favorite clips and explain them in context. There will also be an open bar.

INTRODUCED BY DAVID CRONENBERG

ABOUT TIFF
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (TIFF) A key initiative of TIFF is to mentor and advocate for post-secondary students, faculty and emerging practitioners. Higher learning is a free ongoing programme that provides Canadian collage and university students and faculty a forum in which to examine lm, television, video, new media and gaming from a wide range of cultural, social, historical, political and technological approaches and disciplines. Go online to view a collection of past events, as well as information about how to participate.

TIFF.NET/HIGHERLEARNING

Film Write Up Sources: THE FLY http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/beyondthe-veil-of-the-flesh-david-cronenbergs-thefly-1986-on-blu-ray DEAD RINGERS http://www.timeout.com/london/film/ dead-ringers VIDEODROME http://www.seanax.com/2008/10/29/videodrome-long-live-the-new-flesh/ NAKED LUNCH http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/ naked-lunch-20110210 Eastern Promices http://www.cinepassion.org/Archives/EasternElahResident.html