Stereo is my favorite unwatchable movie. Whenever I come home really, really late and I’ve had a few drinks and Ann is already asleep I reach for Stereo. Five minutes later, I join her aslumber. This film is painfully boring and pretentious, but, as my recent interview with David Cronenberg proves, he is, indeed, kinda kidding.
Here’s what I’ve written about Stereo (or, in its even-heavier-than-Lucas full name Stereo: Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosiac) in the past:
Cast: Ronald Mlodzik, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, Clara Mayer.
The Deal: After some short films that only a true and dedicated completist should see (when the best one is all set in a bathtub that’s sayin’ somethin’) David Cronenberg wrote and directed an hour-long, black & white, non-synchronous sound meditation on consciousness and identity. If it sounds heavy, it’s cause it is heavy. Very ’60s heavy. Experiment subjects move into the “Canadian Academy of Erotic Inquiry” (which looks like well-funded planetarium) and submit to observation (and telepathic tinkering) by the unseen Dr. Luther Stringfellow. Romantic encounters of every polygon ensue. It is a hybrid of clinical science and flower-power freakout. Things end badly with much cavorting amidst the inhuman, futuristic and angular architecture.
Most Cronenbergian scene: I gotta be frank, this movie is a tough one to sit through. I love it in the abstract, but it is way slow and very dense. One scene that strikes me is when three people are making out and things are lit in such a way that you can’t differentiate who is what gender. That’s heavy. But the badge of Cronenberg is felt throughout this piece in the voice over – it is all narrated with laughingly obtuse scientific psychobabble. Yeah, it is meant to be taken seriously, but then again, he knows he’s pushing his luck. This tactic will be repeated many times throughout Cronenberg’s career.
Stereo is nearly all-silent, so if you wanna see how a noise-core band uses it at background, see below:
