Violet Lucca is the author of David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials (Abrams). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Criterion’s The Current, Art in America, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, Harper’s Magazine online, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. Read some of her work.
Praise for David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials
“With her lavishly illustrated book, Lucca has given us the most rigorous critical analysis of the director’s work to date, reframing Cronenberg’s career as something more than the work of a master of “body horror,” a term that she regards as reductive and dismissive. Instead of a facile thrill-seeker, Lucca locates in Cronenberg’s work the mind of a moralist and social critic with a taste for blood, writing that his films can be approached through various critical entry points: as cautionary tales about demagoguery in the age of scientific progress, or the dissolution of the self when confronted by a world thrown out of whack by money and desire.”—Mark Weingarten, Los Angeles Times
“In David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, Violet Lucca shakes up auteur studies with the same passion, originality and creative verve that the subject of her book has applied to his remarkable body of work for over fifty years. Clinical Trials necessarily reframes and resituates Cronenberg’s oeuvre as demanding we look inwards, to our own stories and experiences, which makes Lucca herself as much a key character in this book as Cronenberg himself. Part art object, part biocrit, part analytical filmography, Clinical Trials is the most exciting and authentic work of Cronenberg scholarship to date.”—Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
“Lucca writes with the perceptive skill of an academic but the engaging verbal style of a millennial journalist, and this is a visually arresting debut, filled with illustrations…A remarkable book, as intriguing and unique as its subject.” —Peter Thornell, Library Journal.
“Taking the traditional contents of a filmography book and filtering them through the ideologies of an innovative psychologist provides fans an alternative experience to the glossy, straightforward coffee table book we’ve come to expect.”—Ahlissa Eichhorn, Fangoria