فيد كروننبرغ
大卫·柯南伯格
데이비드 크로넨버그
דיוויד קרוננברג
デビッド·クローネンバーグ
ДЭВИД КРОНЕНБЕРГ
eXistenZ
cinema

source:revistamoviementnet
Como em vários outros filmes de David Cronenberg, as relações entre homens e máquinas estão no centro de eXistenZ. A ideia de fusão do orgânico com o tecnológico fascina o diretor, que a partir dela produz imagens grotescas, repulsivas: são esses os casos dos epílogos de A Mosca (1986), no qual o corpo do protagonista (Jeff Goldblum) se mistura à máquina que já o havia tornado um monstro, e Videodrome — A Síndrome do Vídeo (1983), em que a barriga de James Woods é transformada, simultaneamente, em esconderijo para sua arma e player de fitas VHS malditas. Mesmo filmes menos fantasiosos, alicerçados em alguma medida no realismo, como Crash — Estranhos Prazeres (1996) e Marcas da Violência (2005), têm tais relações como tema. O prazer sexual associado a carros destruídos em acidentes no primeiro, os efeitos devastadores de armas de fogo sobre o corpo humano no segundo.
eXistenZ repete esse interesse, introduzindo em seu cinema a dimensão da realidade virtual. Lançado no mesmo ano que Matrix (1999), e em boa medida ofuscado por ele, o filme de Cronenberg segue caminhos bem mais arriscados que o dos irmãos (hoje irmãs) Wachowski. Visualmente, sobretudo. Enquanto Matrix, mas também outros exemplares do gênero, tratam a ideia de mundo virtual como possibilitadora de exuberâncias imagéticas, eXistenZ aposta numa representação suja, física, corpórea da realidade construída no computador. Bem ao gosto de seu diretor. As bugigangas (armas, consoles para games etc.), feitas de ossos e carne, e as criaturas mutantes remetem a outros filmes de Cronenberg, notadamente Mistérios e Paixões (1991) e suas máquinas de escrever metamorfoseadas em insetos.
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source:fnacpt
Allegra Geller, the leading game designer in the world, is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZ with a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee, Ted Pikul, who is suddenly assigned as her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the eXistenZ game program, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her. The events leading up to this, and the resulting game lead the pair on a strange adventure where reality and their actions are impossible to determine from either their own or the game’s perspective.
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source:franceculturefr
Pour jouer à eXistenZ, c’est simple : il suffit de brancher un cordon dans le bas du dos et la réalité s’adapte d’elle-même. En 1999, le film eXistenZ nous mène dans un monde où un jeu sans début ni fin trouble les limites du réel et du virtuel : quand pénètre-t-on vraiment dans un autre monde ?

“L’un des thèmes du film est la relativité de la morale et à un certain niveau, ce film est de la propagande existentialiste ! Il dit que nous créons notre propre morale, il n’y a pas de morale absolue qui viendrait de Dieu ou des extraterrestres, c’est nous qui l’inventons et la réinventons sans cesse au fur et à mesure que la culture, la technologie et notre compréhension de la nature humaine change. Nos valeurs évoluent en même temps et en tant que cinéaste je suis aussi un relativiste moral, je ne peux pas juger de ce qui est bien ou mal mais seulement sentir les choses et vous les montrer…”
David Cronenberg

Contemporain du film Matrix des sœurs Wachowski, eXistenZ sort en 1999 et questionne lui aussi les limites du réel, Cronenberg y interroge le lien entre technologie et existence et opère une véritable mise en abyme du jeu, du cinéma et de sa propre œuvre cinématographique.
Inspiré par la philosophie existentialiste, il mène une réflexion incarnée dans les personnages sur la différence entre le réalisme et le fantastique…
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source:theguardiancom
David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is a creepily downbeat near-future techie thriller, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Allegra Geller, the super-cool games designer, who has just unveiled “eXistenZ”, a game you plug directly into your neuro-system and play in the infinite cyberspace of your mind.
This is achieved with a “pod” – a kind of sweaty organic Playstation adapted from real animal bodies. It is linked via an “umby cord” to a “bio-port” in the small of your back, which you can get installed in places like shopping malls as easily as ear-piercing or tattoos – a routine business, but one which, if carried out incorrectly, can leave you paralysed from the waist down.

A fatwa is served on Arabella by “reality extremists” who object to her insidious devaluing of real experience, and she goes on the run with her exquisite PR assistant – and games virgin – Jude Law. Despite having narrowly escaped violent death, her priority is to protect and refine eXistenZ, and to this end she orders the terrified Jude to play, and so procures for him an illegal, unregistered bio-port, to be fired into the base of his virgin spine late at night by a gas station attendant and grinning games freak, Willem Dafoe.

Law plays this superbly, gibbering plaintively at the sight of the bio-port gun as big as a bazooka: “I have this phobia about having my body penetrated.” But the resulting hole turns out to be an outrageous unofficial sex orifice, an alternative belly-button: exploratory insertion of the finger turns out to be foreplay for the post-modern techno-erotic experience of plugging in. And the bio-port often has to be lubricated with licking.

So far, so groovy. But then we come to the game itself, and this is where I was sitting up. Everything about eXistenZ had been so deliciously funny and freaky that surely the game itself would make the graphics for Robocop and the Terminators look like Galaxian Invaders: now we were in for a real ride with mind-screwingly spiffy FX. Weren’t we?

No. It really was a strangely dull affair, set completely realistically first in a dull games store, then a dull trout farm, then a dull Chinese restaurant, the proceedings partly enlivened by the reality fundamentalists infiltrating the game so that – guess what? – no one knows what’s real and what’s the game any more. When he gets magicked seamlessly into eXistenZ, Jude asks wonderingly if it is always this smooth, and Jennifer says no, not always, you can get games with “brutal cuts” and “slow fades”. Heavens, I thought, they sound interesting; can we see them? Ultimately, I think I’d rather see Jennifer and Jude insinuate themselves into one of those little “blip… blip…” tennis games you used to get in service stations, and cruise back and forth on the four-inch baseline, blip-blipping for all eternity.

Jude Law is a very bright young actor who is always watchable, and I loved his “We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto” expression, as he gets deeper into the game. But there is something so ungenerous about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance: like Parker Posey and Bridget Fonda, she has one of those indie faces, closed, blank, unresponsive, often speaking as if through lockjaw.

I give two big thumbs up to the first half-hour of eXistenZ, and in fact there is so much that is distinctive and arresting about the whole thing. Cronenberg is truly an original film-maker; nothing about his baroque and revolting fantasies speaks of the focus group and the test screening.

Only in a Cronenberg could we see a man and a woman playing a game together which involved them curled up foetally on a motel bed caressing something that looks like a quivering prolapsed uterus. Only in a Cronenberg could one character flaunt a gun made out of gristle and bone that fires human teeth, a weapon somehow futuristic and at the same time regressive. Ultimately, it is alienating and disorienting, but in a way that Cronenberg fans and perhaps others too will find exciting.

What I eventually tired of was the nerd-cool infatuation with “games”. For goodness sakes, everyone, “games” is what you get in school on rainy Tuesday afternoons, “games” is what intelligent and attractive people strain every sinew to avoid.