David Cronenberg: “Cinema is a cemetery”

In The Shrouds, the latest film by David Cronenberg, a prominent businessman named Karsh invents a revolutionary and controversial technology that enables the living to monitor their dearly departed in their shrouds.

Starring Vincent Cassell, Guy Pearce and Diane Kruger, the film defies easy categorization — in typical Cronenebergian fashion. With elements of body horror injected with humour and pathos, The Shrouds emerges as an ode to desire and grief. Made in the aftermath of the death of Cronenberg’s wife, Carolyn Zeifman (who died in 2017), the film expounds on the transformative nature of illness and death, and the ways in which it reshapes our relationship to love.

With a twisting and paranoid storyline, the film finds itself grounded by dreamlike memories of Karsh’s dead wife, her body slowly deteriorating. Like a spectre, she emerges at night in their bedroom, her body slowly torn apart by both disease and treatment. Despite this, her beauty remains; an intimate and poetic gesture by the filmmaker that underlines the depths of love intertwined with desire. While lifelong romantic relationships are often flightily depicted as spiritual bonds, Cronenberg unearths the erotic physicality of eternal love. As Karsh struggles with his loss, any proximity to his wife, even if it’s her corpse, brings him fleeting comfort. 

David Cronenberg spoke with us after the premiere of The Shrouds at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. 

Justine Smith: In André Bazin’s first book, he writes that if the plastic arts were psychoanalyzed, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be the final factor of their creation. And I’m wondering if that’s something that’s ever occurred to you in your filmmaking and your artistic practice.

David Cronenberg: I recently said that cinema is a cemetery. As soon as it’s been encoded and recorded, it becomes the past. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time watching old movies and I thought, “These are all dead people. Everybody who made this movie is long dead.” So, I was thinking that the history of cinema is in its own way, a cemetery. Not in a bad way, because it’s also very delightful and charming. I would say that I relate to that approach to art and film.

JS: Another thing that Bazin wrote about is this paradox that you can’t depict death or desire, even though it underlines all of cinema. Since both death and desire are so present in The Shrouds and your other work, how do you feel about this idea that you can’t hold death or desire in your hands, so to speak?

David Cronenberg: I dispute that. If you can’t depict those things in as dynamic an art form as cinema, is there any art form where you can? I think you can hold desire in your hands.If you’ve experienced sexual desire and you’re seeing it on screen, does that not ignite in you your own memories of the experience of it? It becomes a very metaphysical and abstract concept. 

JS: One of the things I love about The Shrouds — and a lot of your work, really — is the way you depict cities. Toronto has appeared in many of your films. You also live there. How do you choose how you shoot a city? 

David Cronenberg: I’m very sensitized to architecture in general. I’ve always lived in Toronto and all my marital experiences have been in Toronto, so it has a huge resonance to me. The last film I made (Crimes of the Future), I shot in Athens and I really did take advantage of what Athens had to offer. I didn’t fight the city, I went right into it in great depth and detail. The environment that the characters live in is hugely important to a movie. I shot many films here, Crash takes place in Toronto, Dead Ringers does, and EXistenZ too. It’s physically, compositionally and cinematically really important. 

For me, cinema is bodies. The thing we photograph most is the human body, as we are looking at it right now. So, bodies, where are they? What is their environment? What does the environment have on the physicality of the characters? That’s extremely important.

JS: I’ve been reading some disability studies and one of the throughlines is the idea that we think of the “default,” we think of a healthy body, when the default in actuality is that we will all inevitably become disabled. The film deals with a lot of bodies deconstructed. How do you feel about depicting disability and sickness on screen?

David Cronenberg: As you know, in this movie, there’s someone who is sick, who has undergone a lot of surgery that might involve amputations and organ removal. It’s kind of an accelerated version of what happens with aging in general, and is a precursor to the idea of what might happen after burial as a body gradually disintegrates. It’s a very potent metaphor for what is inevitable in everybody’s life and something that is so difficult to accept. How do we accept non-existence? It resonates on many levels. There’s the general social element, which is how do people survive in a world — or a culture or a city — that isn’t designed for them; sometimes designed against them. It’s a very forceful dynamic that is intriguing to explore and it’s something I’ve done in many of my movies.

JS: Many of your films deal with technology. What is the relationship between technology and conspiracy?

David Cronenberg: It’s one thing to think of, you know, the KGB and the Russian conspiracies that they might create to destabilize democratic states and so on, but what is much closer to most people is the technology that they have now that 20 years ago didn’t exist. I played with some of that in Videodrome, a film I made in 1982, in which my invented version of interactive television became the basis of conspiracy. Now the technology of the telephone, the advance of Artificial Intelligence, means that everybody can create a conspiracy and disseminate it in a way that was not possible before the internet, or before TikTok and Facebook. 

Everybody can be a conspiracy theorist now in a way that they couldn’t before. It’s one thing to talk to your friends about the government, but it’s another thing to have two million followers who believe you. It’s a way of being creative. It’s a way of pretending that you have some control and some special knowledge, as if you know what’s really going on. That gives you a lot of power.

A lot of personal neurosis is involved, but also a lot of desperation for meaning. Humans need meaning. What do you do when something happens that is meaningless, like death? Why did this person’s genetic makeup mean they die at the age of 50 instead of 90? It’s random. You might want to find a reason for that — it was a doctor secretly experimenting on their body, slipping them some drugs, for some arcane reason. Even if you’re positing that something evil and destructive is going on, it provides a sense of meaning. That’s the creative aspect of conspiracy.

There’s a bizarre competition to come up with the most outrageous theory. When it comes to Trump, the alt right and so on in the U.S., they come up with some pretty bizarre stuff. You get the feeling that, however serious that might be, behind that is a competitive attempt to come up with the most outrageous theory that is somehow sort of plausible, even though it’s ridiculous. It’s a communal boxing match. ■

The Shrouds is now playing in Montreal theatres. This article was originally published in the April issue of Cult MTL. 

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