Written and directed by the great Canadian director David Cronenberg in 1983, the body horror Videodrome back to theaters. The film was restored in 4K in 2022 by Arrow Films under the supervision of James White and James Pearcey at the Silver Salt lab, from the original 35mm camera negative and intermediate elements preserved by NBC Universal.
Restoration approved by David Cronenberg himself (The Demon Under the Skin, Brood, Scanners).
Videodrome is in theaters starting Sept. 19 thanks to the Cineteca di Bologna and its The Cinema Rediscovered, a project that brings the great classics of film history back to the screen in restored versions.
Here there is a complete list of Italian theaters that have scheduled Videodrome Sept. 19 onward.
Played by James Woods (Once Upon a Time in America, Vampires), Videodrome deals with the theme of the mutation of flesh and the fusion of technology and man. The film falls under body horror (which explores man's terror in the face of contamination and infection of the flesh), a subgenre of horror of which David Cronenberg is considered the pioneer.
Plot of Videodrome: Max Renn (James Woods), the owner of the television station Civic TV, participates as a guest on a talk show where he meets radio speaker Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) and the mysterious Brian O Blivion (Jack Creley), a man who communicates exclusively through video recordings, through which he talks about the dangers of television.
One day Max is made aware of the existence of a program called Videodrome, a brutal show showing scenes of torture and sexual violence. Interested in wanting to add Videodrome to Civic Tv's programming, the man sets out to find the show's producers but ends up in a maelstrom of hallucinations, murders and government conspiracies...
“Videodrome is in effect the 'manifesto' of Cronenberg's cinema: a paradigmatic, multi-layered and shocking film. Unsettling as a hallucination, lucid and dense as a theoretical essay on the mass-media world in which we are given to live. Rarely has cinema taken so deep a reflection on itself, on its own meaning, on its relationship to other media and to the bodies of its viewers. [...] Cronenberg reflects on the iconic intoxication derived from the consumption of television images and on the physical and anthropological modifications that the spread of TV is bringing to the human perceptual apparatus.
Videodrome that is, it has the disturbing form of a problematic interrogation of the reproductive nature of images and the relationship of ambivalent fascination and repulsion that the human eye feels when confronted with its own reified and incessantly reproduced dreams and nightmares on the TV screen".
(Gianni Canova, film critic)
