Peter,

Thanks for your comments on Spider.

I saw some of what you mentioned while I was watching the film. I
personally feel that your comments still confirm that Cronenberg
really knows how to tell a story visually. The fact that Spider is
alone on the streets or the fact that he is out of focus on some of
the flashbacks are observations more about "the content" of the
images.

What I usually look for in films is a formal expression that has some
kind of relation to the content of the image. An example in North by
Northwest can tell more about what I mean than hundreds of pages of
theory:
The film starts in the city with strong verticals all over the place
(skyscrapers, humans, etc.), Cary Grant character being one of them,
so you feel he is a vertical line just like any other (as opposed to
being an individual). Of course the other verticals also serve to
protect him (the scene in the terminal is a good example) because
thanks to the crowd he is "lost" both for the cops and the
audience.
This goes on for the first half of the film. When he is left alone
defenseless in the fields, it's the first time in the film there are
no verticals. There is a very dominant horizontal line and only one
vertical line, that is Cary Grant. This change in the visual rhythm
makes you "feel" the loneliness of the character.

Obviously, I'm not saying this is the only way you can express
loneliness. But it is just a great example of what I look for in
films. The compositions in Spider make me "understand" that
he is
alone. Something like North by Northwest makes me feel it.

I saw his Crash three times and in all of them I found new things
about it. In the last viewing, I realized that the green grass he
uses at the last shot is the first time in the film that he uses a
non-metallic, "non-distancing" color, which was some kind of
redemption for my eyes. The story reflected that too, in the sense
that the characters were being true to themselves and each other for
the first time.

What do you think about his other films, about Existenz (that I
hated) for example?

Yoel