Book Launch: David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials by Violet Lucca in conversation with Nick Pinkerton

Book Launch: David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials by Violet Lucca in conversation with Nick Pinkerton

Friday Feb 07, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY 11201

Get Tickets Here!

About the Book.

An illustrated monograph on the work of legendary writer/director David Cronenberg, master of body horror and cinematic provocateur behind films such as The Fly, Scanners, Naked Lunch, Eastern Promises, and Crimes of the Future

David Cronenberg’s films have long enjoyed a cult following, pushing the boundaries of taste, blending high art with horror, and straddling the commercial and the cutting-edge. With this handsome book, the familiar and unfamiliar aspects of iconic films such as Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Crash is explored.

Though dividing the book into two halves suggests a binary, the Jungian-inspired chapters within each emphasize that this work—and the world itself—is perpetually shifting. The reader progresses through these different stages (of Jungian individuation and therapy) and sees how the recurrent narrative, cultural, and visual themes loop back and intersect with one another.

Rather than a straightforward narrative about a filmmaker, this book is a dreamlike exploration of all that is Cronenbergian.

Featuring a foreword by Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen, it also includes interviews with composer Howard Shore, production designer Carol Spier, cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, and producer and playwright/screenwriter Jeremy Thomas.

About the Author.

Violet Lucca’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Criterion Current, Sight and Sound, the Village Voice, Bust, Reverse Shot, and elsewhere. She served as Vice President of Digital at Harper’s Magazine and Digital Producer at Film Comment, where she hosted each of their podcasts. She lives in Brooklyn, but not in an annoying way, and has a non-negligible psychic connection with her two cats.

About the Moderator. 

Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his criticism has appeared in Film CommentSight & SoundArtforumFriezeReverse Shot, The Guardian, 4 ColumnsThe Baffler, RhizomeHarper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor-in-chief of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of the print biannual The Metrograph, co-edits the Journal section of the Metrograph website, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Decadent Editions), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sean Price Williams-directed The Sweet East, from his first produced screenplay, premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival in the Quizaine des cinéastes section, and earned several international prizes, including the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation award for screenwriting at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.