![]() ![]() There are long sections that are completely soundless for several minutes at a time – no dialogue, not even any sound effects or musical score. To make things even stranger, Cronenberg shoots the entire film without any location sound. The experimenters in their laboratory (Ronalld Mlodzik third from left) – amid the unique brutalist architecture of the University of Scarborough It certainly makes for a film that is slow going – even though Stereo only has a 65-minute running time. It seems that Cronenberg is more interested in the dry parody of academia than he is in the actuality of the powers. ![]() Oddly – and certainly in diametric contrast to Scanners – there is not even any demonstrations of psychic powers in action or evidence of communication between the experimental subjects. It just consists of various scenes of people wandering around the institute. By contrast to the modernism that permeates the rest of the film, Cronenberg outfits Mlodzik as though he had just stepped out of a Hammer Frankenstein film – in cape, 19th century formal wear, cane, and later a tunic, and working in an office/dormitory that is festooned with religious icons. Ron Mlodzik was the very first of these scientists. In his earlier genre works at least, Cronenberg has a love of mad science and the monsters produced by it but constantly treats the scientists with sympathy, showing them welcoming the process of infection and transformation into the monstrous. It is filmed in a way that the place looks exactly like the cool detached scientific laboratory that Cronenberg claims it is rather than a regular university. Stereo was shot at the University of Scarborough – one of the satellite campuses at the University of Toronto where Cronenberg had graduated with a degree in English Literature in 1967 – which is all glass architecture, jutting exposed concrete buttresses in the hallways, expansive lecture theatres and dining halls. Cronenberg regular Ronald Mlodzik as Dr Lucas Stringfellow (r) There is the fascination with ultra-modern architecture that occupies Cronenberg’s early films – Crimes of the Future, Shivers – of people living inside alienating modern high rises of glass and concrete. (Lord knows what audiences watching the film back in the day would have made of it – it is such a bizarre deadpan effort lacking in any easy handholds to clue one in as to what is going on). Stereo is interesting to watch in the hindsight of Cronenberg’s subsequent forty plus years as a filmmaker. In reality, the two films could not be further apart in terms of approach – Stereo is arty, experimental, comes couched in the dry tones of a mock scientific enquiry whereas Scanners by contrast is a dramatic film, commercially focused and centred around some then cutting edge makeup effects. Many genre historians have contrasted it to the similar experiments in psychic powers that take place in Scanners, although one suspects that these comments were written by people who had never seen and only read about Stereo, which remained extremely obscure and largely unseen until its dvd release in 2005. A steady theme through much of Cronenberg’s work is with strange and perverse means of sexual expression. In more recent years, Cronenberg has abandoned genre territory and experimentalism altogether with more mainstream works like A History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007) and A Dangerous Method (2011). His works of the 1990s returned to this experimentalism in the likes of Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996) and Spider (2002), although these were greeted with far more widespread acclaim than his earliest works. From about Dead Ringers (1988) onwards, Cronenberg began to leave easy genre confines behind. Cronenberg started out making very abstract experimental films with Stereo here and the subsequent Crimes of the Future (1970) but soon found more commercial expression in the horror genre with works such as Shivers/They Came from Within (1975), Rabid (1976), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981), among others. Stereo was the very first film of Canadian director David Cronenberg who of course went onto become an internationally celebrated director.
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