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Adam Lowenstein: "Exploding Heads: David Cronenberg's Cinema of Therapeutic Disintegration"

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Monday, April 03, 2017
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Adam Lowenstein

What is to be done with David Cronenberg? Although widely considered one of world cinema's most original and significant contemporary directors (and perhaps Canada's most famous), many critics have a difficult time describing just what sort of filmmaker he actually is. This talk argues that Cronenberg's cinema is a philosophical reflection on and cinematic enactment of the desire for a therapy that works - both its necessity and its inevitable failure. My exploration of this discourse of "therapeutic disintegration" in Cronenberg's films will touch on psychoanalysis (his A Dangerous Method [2011] deals with Freud and Jung explicitly), but will also address a recent "Jewish turn" in Cronenberg's cinema.

Prof. Adam Lowenstein is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He works on issues relating to the cinema as a mode of historical, cultural, and aesthetic confrontation. His teaching and research link these issues to the relays between genre films and art films, the construction of national cinemas, and the politics of spectatorship, with particular attention to American, British, Canadian, French, and Japanese cases.

Contact: Serena Elliott