Part of Science on Screen®
Cable TV programmer Max Renn (James Woods) has found the next thing in edgy television. It’s Videodrome — raw, sleazy sensation picked up via satellite from where life is cheap. It’s Videodrome — a new means of controlling and culling the populace. It’s Videodrome — and once you’ve seen it, the next step in human evolution has already started…inside you. Long live the new flesh!
“Of course, it is no coincidence that VIDEODROME now appears scarily prophetic in the way it depicts the intersection of sex, violence, media and technology. Cronenberg is a master at intuitively tapping into our collective subconscious. He knows how people are wired, so even though VIDEODROME operates on the level of its central character’s deranged dream logic, the director is able to reflect our innate fears and desires back at us with sobering clarity and precision.” —Adam Woodward, Little White Lies “Its dense mysteries remain more tantalizing than distancing: No other director integrates the creepy with the cerebral quite like Cronenberg.” —Scott Tobias, A.V. Club
Topic:
“Videodrome is Real”
Presentation:
A brief journey through the bizarre and wild history of the psychiatrists, artists and utopian dreamers who tried to transform the mind with early videotape.
About the Speaker:
Carmine Grimaldi is a filmmaker, historian and teacher at Vanderbilt University. In both his creative and academic work, he is interested in the ways that aesthetic experience inflect everyday life. His films have screened at venues such as True/False, Visions du Reel, the Museum of the Moving Image, Maryland Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM (Montreal International Documentary Festival), Chicago International Film Festival, Camden International Film Fest, and DokuFest (where he received the prize for best short film). In 2017, he was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine — and has been a fellow at the Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard’s Film Study Center, and the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Center for the Humanities. In addition to his filmmaking, he researches and writes about the history of early video technology, focusing on the period before video became a mainstay in the world of art and documentary, when various researchers experimented with the technology in places like classrooms and psychiatric clinics. His article on the subject, “Televising Psyche: Feedback, Style, and the Seductiveness of Video,” was published in Representations. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Intercept, Millennium Film Journal, MUBI Notebook and Filmmaker Magazine.
He is currently making a feature film based on the ½” videotape archive of a psychiatrist who sought to radically transform his patients’ consciousness through video feedback and electroconvulsive therapy.
