A season arranged by ideas
London's BFI has announced David Cronenberg: Mind, Body, Reality, a season of more than 20 films running at BFI Southbank from January 1 to March 16, 2027. Curator Mike Muncer groups the films thematically. The announcement turns a career retrospective into an invitation to compare films that were made decades apart, rather than simply follow the order in which they appeared.
The arrangement matters because Cronenberg is often reduced to a single image: a body changed in some alarming way. That image can be an entry point, but it is an incomplete map. Put Dead Ringers beside Shivers and questions of identity and control become harder to separate from the physical shocks. Put Videodrome beside eXistenZ and the machinery changes while the anxiety about mediated experience persists. The programme's thematic route encourages viewers to notice these connections without pretending that the films offer one tidy answer.
The screens change the argument
An IMAX showing of Videodrome has a different promise from finding it in a streaming collection. The BFI describes the 1983 film as the story of television producer Max Renn, whose pursuit of an illicit broadcast destabilises his sense of reality. Criterion's edition foregrounds the film's practical makeup and video effects. On a very large screen, the abrasive textures of those effects can become more conspicuous. At home, a viewer can pause, rewind and reconsider how the film manipulates the boundary between a broadcast and the person watching it. Neither experience is automatically superior; each makes a different aspect easier to examine.
That difference is especially productive for a filmmaker whose stories repeatedly ask whether a medium merely carries experience or changes it. A cinema audience shares one uninterrupted duration. Streaming lets individuals interrupt and replay a scene. Treating those as two ways to encounter the same work makes the programme more than a list of available titles. That does not guarantee worldwide access to the films on BFI Player. Readers outside the UK should check the service's regional catalogue before planning around it.
Beyond the familiar body horror label
A History of Violence offers a useful test of that comparison. The BFI lists the 2005 film among Cronenberg's work, but its small-town setting and crime story look far from the overt mutations of The Fly. That apparent distance is exactly why pairing them can be revealing. Both stories turn a bodily event into a problem of identity. In one, change appears as a transformation that cannot be hidden. In the other, violence exposes a history that a peaceful surface had concealed. The contrast opens an argument about how violence shapes identity without forcing the two films into the same moral position.
eXistenZ offers another comparison. Its game designer and simulated worlds give the uncertainty a technological frame; Videodrome attaches it to television. Watching the two close together could show how a fear of losing a stable point of view survives a change of devices and decades. Videodrome tests trust in television images; eXistenZ shifts that uncertainty into a designed game world. Their difference matters because viewing an image and making a choice inside a simulation put pressure on identity in different ways. A thematic programme is strongest when its categories help viewers form questions, not when they prescribe conclusions.
The announcement is therefore interesting beyond a chance to see celebrated titles again. A chronological survey might suggest an orderly move from early horror to later respectability. This selection instead asks audiences to look for the recurring friction among bodies, images and social roles. Its strongest test will be whether a visitor leaves an unfamiliar title with a fresh reason to watch it, or returns to a familiar one with a different question. The range of work leaves room to follow a less familiar path through Cronenberg's questions. Starting with a less familiar film may also change which recurring question a viewer notices first.