DIVA (1981)

File Under: French New Wave Revival, Neon Noir, High Style, Operatic Thriller.

Jean Jacques Beinex delivers a feast for the eyes (and ears) in his first feature length “DIVA”, a genre bending cyberpunk thriller, love story, and testament to the power of music. In “Diva” Beinex explodes conventional narrative structure to pursue a new style of filmmaking that would be coined by French critic Raphael Bassan as “cinema du look”. 

When an opera recording is pirated by an obsessive fan, the forces of the criminal underbelly of Paris are awakened, events are triggered, characters weave through the futuristic industrial wastelands + subways of the city, storylines combine, an epic chase scene ensues, the clash between high and low brow society  forms before our eyes; all moving the visual, thematic and stylistic elements to the fore, further enhanced by a modern remaster of the original 35mm.

"Diva", Jean-Jacques Beineix. 1981, France.
Running Time: 117 Minutes. French.
Available for rent on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.

VIDEODROME

David Cronenberg’s 1983 psychotronic, psychotropic fringe film starring James Woods as a sleazy TV station manager and Debby Harry as his sadomasochistic girlfriend, explores Marshall McClaren’s maxim “The Medium is the Message” in a frightening (albeit low tech) vision of television as a drug that blends into and transforms reality - an erotic pilot program turns out to be a snuff production; and so goes the film, ... caustic energy and bizarre sequences, frenzied sardonic sci-fi, a critique of our relationship with media prophesizing future dilemmas of the technological media age. 

“The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an existence totally different from the one you are living… if you accept at least on some level the Freudian dictum that civilization is repression, than imagination and unrepressed creativity is very dangerous to civilization.” - David Cronenberg