Long before he was finally accepted by Hollywood, even before he became the “king of venereal horror,” David Cronenberg was flexing his film-making muscles with a brace of amateur films and a pair of experimental features that saw him taking his first tentative steps into the territory that he would make his own over the coming decades. Fascinated and inspired by fellow University of Toronto student David Secter’s romantic drama Winter Kept Us Warm (1966), Cronenberg was prompted to pick up a camera and start making films of his own.
Armed with a pile of American Cinematographer magazines, a rented 16mm camera and the help of his fiancee Margaret and a few friends, he set to work making his first film, Transfer. Today, the film is notable for being Cronenberg’s first exploration of psychiatry, a theme that would run throughout his work, though the rest of the film is a rather dull experiment. In a desolate, windswept, snowy landscape, a psychiatrist (Mort Ritts) meets a particularly obsessive patient, Ralph (Rafe McPherson), for dinner. The two men talk about Ralph’s obsession.
Alienation, madness and the plight of the outsider all feature heavily in Cronenberg’s work and all debut in this technically crude film that doesn’t really amount to very much. Cronenberg managed to get the film shown at the Cinethon, a two-day festival of underground films held in Toronto in the summer of 1967 where it was soundly panned by the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s Urjo Kareda who called it “a pathetic effort… Horribly acted and scarcely directed, it didn’t have the decency to be original: it was stolen from a Nichols and May sketch,” a reference to the popular America improv comedy duo. Obviously it’s the work of an enthusiastic amateur rather than the more polished artist to come and Cronenberg clearly had so much to learn about the technicalities of film-making (the sound is dreadful and there are some awkward zooms that don’t quite hit their mark). Anyone approaching Transfer looking for clues as to the formal and thematic roots of Cronenberg’s career will be disappointed by what is essentially an unofficial student film, one that’s pretentious, ragged and incomprehensible. It’s an interesting curio for Cronenberg devotees but hardly essential.
From the Drain (1967) is a technically much better film than Transfer and a more interesting one. This absurd twelve minute vignette features two strange young men (Mort Ritts and Styephen Nosko) sitting in a bathtub, veterans of some sort of war that may have profoundly twisted their minds and damaged their bodies. One of the men is paranoid that something is about to emerge from the drain to attack them, a concern that actually turns out to be well founded. And that really is all there is to this one. We never leave the cramped, claustrophobic bathroom, never find out anything about either of the men whose bizarre conversation we eavesdrop on and never really know if the thing from the drain is real or not. Like Transfer, there’s very little here to hint at the wayward genius that Cronenberg would bring to his films over the next couple of decades.
Cronenberg has been understandably dismissive of these early experiments; speaking of From the Drain he called it “another early rambling of an adolescent film-maker. It’s clumsy, awkward and technically not very good” and he’s not wrong. Though these early pieces may hint at some the concerns of the later films, they give no indication of the considerable technical skills that Cronenberg would develop. But they’re just vignettes, sketches, the first steps on the road to becoming one of the most distinctive, interesting and provocative filmmakers of his generation so to expect too much from them – or anything at all really – is churlish.
Far more interesting and important are the brace of experimental features that are far more ambitious and which provide more concrete clues as to what’s to come. Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic) (1969), to give it it’s full, unwieldy title, sets itself up as a scientific report on the work of the Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry and particularly the experiments of the never seen Dr Luther Stringfellow. An unnamed young man (Ronald Mlodzik) arrives at the the Academy to join a group of young volunteers who possess powerful telepathic abilities. Stringfellow is in encouraging his test subjects to develop their powers through sexual experimentation, hoping in the end to create a new form of polymorphous sexual relationship to replace “the obsolescent family unit”. But inevitably, things don’t go to plan – one woman develops a second personality that threatens to entirely subsume the original, two test subjects commit suicide when separated and the visitor to the facility disappears to be replaced by the personality challenged young woman.
The film’s style is cool and detached, a parody of impenetrable scientific and academic jargon, Cronenberg observing like a dispassionate scientific observer. The frigidity of the film only adds to its sense of detachment, as if it’s taking place in a world very similar to our own but at the same time entirely different. We become passive observers, emotionally distanced from the events playing out before us making for a disorientating yet strangely compelling experience. The film introduces some of the key themes that would come to dominate Cronenberg’s best work – the use, or more accurately the inability to use effectively, psychic powers; sinister scientific establishments whose motives are at best shady, at worst completely incomprehensible; sex and sexuality being weaponized; the fragile body turning against the mind. It’s all there in Stereo, under-developed and crude but there nonetheless. None of would quite come to fruition until his first over-ground film, Shivers (1975), but the foundations are being laid here and would be developed in the Cronenberg’s follow-up film, Crimes of the Future (1970).
In a post-apocalyptic near future, Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), director of dermatological clinic The House of Skin, is searching for his mentor. dermatologist Antoine Rouge who has gone insane and disappeared. A plague, apparently caused by cosmetic products, possibly developed by Rouge, has wiped out every sexually mature women in the world and various strange groups, including Metaphysical Import-Export and The Oceanic Podiatry Group are trying to find ways for the human race to continue to survive in a world devoid of women. In his travels, Tripod meets a man who grows strange new organs and falls in with a group of paedophiles who want him to have sex with a 5-year-old girl…
Like Stereo, Crimes of the Future is a surrealist nightmare, one that’s more interesting conceptually than for what it actually achieves. Again like the earlier film, it’s still more experimental than Cronenberg’s later films, shot through with that detached coldness that was to become an early trademark and filmed in long takes and no direct sound (Cronenberg’s 16mm Bolex camera was too loud for that). Even more so than Stereo, Crimes of the Future is a film about marginalised people engaged in odd, often inexplicable sometimes shocking behaviours (victims of Rouge’s Malady foam at the mouth, that foam being highly addictive to others who can’t help eating it), all commentated on by Tripod in a dreary, deadpan narration. The narration is deliberately pompous, deliberately obscure, often seeming as though Tripod is talking gibberish merely for the sake of saying something, anything, to help him make sense of this strange new world he finds himself in.
The two experimental features (though they’re barely that – Stereo runs just 65 minutes, Crimes is even shorter at 63) proved to have a lasting impact on Cronenberg and his subsequent career. The talk of a disease that is “possibly a form of creative cancer,” will resonate with anyone who saw The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981) or Videodrome (1983) in particular while the moment in Stereo when it’s revealed that one of the patients at the Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry has drilled a hole in his forehead to relieve the pressure is directly echoed in Scanners. Both films explore the development of a new kind of sexuality for a new breed of human, one that seems alien, even disgusting to us, but which ill become the norm in the new world order and this was very much a theme that Cronenberg developed in later films.
In his book The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron to Blood to Cultural Hero, Ernest Mathijs notes that reviews of these early experiments, whether positive or negative and they attracted more than their fair share of of both, don’t mention or compare Cronenberg’s films to any others. They exist apart from anything else, even his own body of work. They’re hard work and even the most devoted of Cronenberg’s fans will find it hard to justify them as entertainment but they’re fascinating relics from an abandoned timeline in which Cronenberg continued to make art films and never stuck his head above the parapets and went professional, if not entirely respectable, with Shivers. Crude, provocative and historically fascinating, Stereo and Crimes of the Future won’t be most people’s first port of call when it comes to watching a Cronenberg film – and neither should be used to introduced neophytes to his work – but they’re beguiling and significant entries in one of cinema’s most engrossing filmographies.
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