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

THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS

Shuji Terayama’s avant-garde film critiques American & Japanese materialism through the narrative of a poor young man trying to make himself a life in a capitalist society with a dysfunctional family. The imagery is psychedelic/ surreal, soundtrack is punk singalong, the cinematography experimental, a script chock full of symbolism and social commentary. Teryama in 1971, a master at work.