CineFile Video

It was quite a big deal to me and all the other film geeks I know that in 2004, the American DVD label Blue Underground released a special edition version of Cronenberg’s “Fast Company” that also included on a separate disc his first two feature films, “Stereo” and “Crimes of the Future”, which up until had never been available on DVD or VHS (”Crimes” actually had been included on the Criterion Collection laserdisc of “Dead Ringers”, but how many people could actually afford the ridiculous prices those players and discs cost way back when?). The two films, while at times boring and slow, both bear the unmistakable Cronenberg stylistic stamp: body horror, vaguely “official” ficitional clinics, and horrendous narrative logic. Don’t get me wrong; I like these two a lot — in fact, “Stereo” just might be my favorite film in the Cronenberg canon altogether.

Both films have no spoken dialogue from the characters; “Stereo”; features just voiceovers from severeal different omniscient narrators, while “Crimes” intersperses short narration snippets with some electronic knob-twiddling and ambient sound effects. In each case, the narration is filled to the brim with pseudo-scientific jargon and detached delivery. Recently, I was able to grab the audio tracks from the two films and make MP3s out of them. While the films both run about 65 minutes each, I’ve condensed the audio tracks to about half that length, because both film feature extended periods of silence in-between the narration as a stylistic choice.

David Cronenberg - “Stereo” (1969, audio track)
David Cronenberg - “Crimes Of The Future” (1970, audio track)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Movie Music Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.