Vogue spoke with the renowned Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg about his new short film, the fantasy of living dissection, and the arduous process of filming 200-year-old actresses.
. These films trade on the theme of the mortification of the flesh, where the extremes of scientific practice and religious desire unite around the erotic veneration of “the cut,” an action exposing the body to sacrifice and death. At such limits, Cronenberg’s images of carnal transgression often verge on a strange jouissance, not unlike the Baroque depictions of martyred saints suffering an inner ecstasy as their bodies are pierced, burned, or crucified.
Looking at the faces of these women, they are less realistic than the insides of their bodies. I thought there was a kind of ecstasy there, on the faces. Of course, the people who made the figures were probably all men—but I have no proof of that. They didn’t want the figures to be expressing fear or pain. They weren’t supposed to be tortured by this dissection. In doing that, they gave the faces a kind of beatific expression. It’s almost passively ecstatic—it’s quite strange.
It’s a wonderful idea. I don’t feel it to be there, really, I must say. It comes so much from the work itself and my own particular observations of the human condition. It seems to be a much more direct, one-to-one relationship between the narratives and imagery that I’ve created. And I should say that I’m a passionate atheist. The lives of the saints to me are kind of like horrible fables. So, it’s not something I would be attracted to, I don’t think.
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