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A new short from horror and genre titan David Cronenberg (The Fly, Scanners, The Brood, Videodrome, Crimes of the Future… need we go on?) is now streaming following its festival run last year.
The snappily titled Four Unloved Women, Adrift On A Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection runs at just 4 minutes, and is now showing as part of MUBI’s Short Films, Big Names collection, which also features works from Bong Joon-ho, David Lynch and Sofia Coppola.
MUBI describes the short as follows:
No stranger to the sensual and medical contours of the body, horror icon David Cronenberg turns to 18th-century wax cadavers as his new muses for this poetic short. Sonically caressed by a chorus of pleasurable sighs, these anatomical Venuses are both alluring and uncanny in their voluptuousness.
Yes, you read that right – 18th-century wax cadavers. The life-sized figures belong to the Museum of Zoology and Natural History in Florence, Italy, and were created to allow medical students of the 1700s to conduct autopsies without breaking strict religious taboos.
The ever-eloquent Cronenberg expanded on the figures and their meaning to him:
“The wax figures of La Specola were created primarily as teaching tools that unlocked the mysteries of the human body for those who could never access the relatively rare corpse dissection sessions of universities and teaching hospitals. But in their effort to create certain partially dissected full figures whose body language and facial expressions did not display pain or agony, did not suggest they were undergoing torture or punishment or even surgery, they happened to produce living characters who seemed to be in the throes of ecstasy.
It was this startling choice on the part of the sculptors of these figures that captured my imagination: what if it was the dissection itself that induced that ecstasy, that almost religious rapture?”
Death and morbidity play a prominent role in much of Cronenberg’s filmography, including his upcoming feature The Shrouds, which stars Vincent Cassel as a widowed businessman who creates a brand new technology that allows the living to monitor their deceased loved ones via a digital shroud.
Head over to MUBI to start your free trial if you’re not already subscribed (it’s well worth it) and watch Four Unloved Women, Adrift On A Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection.
