A Vision of the Future: On David Cronenberg’s Videodrome | Features
Cronenberg’s film is turning 40 this year, and New York’s Metrograph theater is presenting a new 4K restoration of the “director’s cut” of “Videodrome,” so-called for the three minutes restored to it by Cronenberg for all of its home video releases following its disappointing theatrical run. This is, in other words, the way most people have seen the film and the edit that garnered it its much-deserved cult status.
Cronenberg had it all figured out at the dawn of home video: How a la carte programming would cater to and thus embolden niche communities; how consumer-grade video products would permanently alter content; how pornography is a progressive addiction not in the sense of social progress, but in the way a cancer progresses through a body, hungrier and stranger, deadlier to...