eXistenZ (1999) – Free Screening & Guest Lecture

Join the Cinema Society of Kingston for a special celebration of National Canadian Film Day with a free screening of David Cronenberg’s eXistenz (1999 – 25th Anniversary).

FREE ADMISSION: GET YOUR ADVANCE TICKETS ONLINE!

This one-night-only screening shall feature a short introductory lecture by Queen’s Film & Media PhD student William Jennings, who will examine the pervasive influence of Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan on Cronenberg’s filmography.

Pursued by assassins, game designer Allegra Geller must navigate the labyrinthine virtual reality of her own creation to unravel a deep and hyperreal mystery. The film’s cast is stacked with the talents of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, and Don McKellar. For Cronenberg, the film itself was born out of a conversation the filmmaker shared with writer Salman Rushdie, in which they questioned whether or not “a game designer could be an artist”; in many ways, the film represents the culmination of many strands of thoughts and influences present in Cronenberg’s filmography up until that point. eXistenz is a film that echoes his past work such as Videodrome, and is deeply indebted to the theories and philosophies coming out of film and media studies in the late-twentieth century.

William Jennings holds a BA in Art History and an MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies; his doctoral research focuses on philosophies of time and memory in digital culture.

It’s striking that eXistenZ, a send-up of computer games that parodied The Matrix avant la lettre, and one of the great underappreciated movies of the late 1990s, yields the richest trove of relics.

New York Review of Books

At last, with his ecstatic, spellbinding, madly original eXistenZ, Cronenberg suppresses his yen for being a mere provocateur and makes an inspired, ingenious film that wants to be more than the stuff bad dreams are made of.

San Francisco Chronicle