A full house at the Ontario Cinematheque got to see a scratchy but vibrant print of David Cronenberg’s 1983 body/mind/technology mind-fuck Videodrome. Two things I learned before during my first celluloid viewing of the film: First is the amusing and interesting connection to local Toronto TV station, CityTV which sounds a lot like the fictional CivicTV in the film (and one of the execs is named Moses); how I missed this connection in the past is quite baffling, considering CityTV was such an upstart and ‘dangerous’ in their programming with uncensored swearing and soft core pornography (The ‘Baby Blue’ Movies) on the occasional late night programming slot. Second is that the film has not so much as ‘aged well’ as ‘aged strangely.’ An unconventional (and considering the amount of critical ink spilled in the past 25 years, prophetic and affecting) film by having Toronto play itself (Note despite prominent TTC buses and subways, 1980s Scanners has the title card “Los Angeles”), it remains an interesting visual artifact of the city in the early 1980s. Yet the strange editing rhythm (intentional, or simply a lucky artifact of a still finding-his-way filmmaker, his real coming out party was to come three years later with The Fly) is vague and confusing in the second half. Sure, Max Renn (James Woods) is in full brain tumour slash video hallucination mode at this point, but the film still throws in some non-sequitur locations like a rusty grounded lakeboat for no apparent reason. Yet the very non-connected nature of scene to scene storytelling gives a dangerous edge the the narrative that plays in the films favour.

The director himself was on hand to intro the film, and I happened to have my voice-recorder there to get an audio feed of the two local entertainment rag critics, Eye Weekly’s Adam Nayman and Now’s Norman Wilner talk a bit about their own personal experience with the film and its context towards the city of Toronto (the film was the last of the Ontario Cinematheque’s Toronto on Film series) before bringing Cronenberg onto the stage to talk about the production, the actors, the city and how he feels about his own cult masterpiece today.

Video is tucked under the seat. (watch or listen at your own risk, Long Live the New Flesh!)

Audio is a bit dodgy (strain to make out the details in the spirit of Videodromes pirate broadcast). The Timecodes by speaker are below:

Nayman – 1:15
Wilner – 3:53
Cronenberg – 7:45

**Updated 10/26** with much higher quality and VIDEO!