M. Butterfly (35mm) – David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials Book Launch

Opens on May 4

Director: David Cronenberg Run Time: 101 min. Format: 35mm Release Year: 1993

Starring: Annabel Leventon, Barbara Sukowa, Ian Richardson, Jeremy Irons, John Lone

Celebrate the release of Violet Lucca’s acclaimed new book David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials with a book launch featuring a rare 35mm screening of M. Butterfly. Presented by Hollywood Entertainment and Skylight Books, Lucca will be in person to introduce the film and sign books! First LA screening since 2022!

Based on the true story of Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu, René Gallimard (Jeremy Irons) an accountant at the French embassy in 1960s China, falls in love with a Peking opera performer and government spy, Song Liling (John Lone). Their passionate romance lasts for many years until an espionage trial calls into question Gallimand’s awareness of his lover’s allegiances and gender identity.

One of Cronenberg’s least-seen and most straightforwardly political films, M. Butterfly is a beautifully rendered adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award–winning play. Situated between literary adaptations Naked Lunch (’91) and Crash (’96) this period of adaptation yielded incredibly provocative works of love, sex, and obsession.

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

“Lucca’s psychoanalytic approach fits a filmmaker whose own concerns traverse the porous boundary between the body and the mind, and treating the work itself as the patient is even more generative, considering the rather obvious maturation in Cronenberg’s movies and thought.”—John Semley, The Nation

“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 re-situates 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

Violet Lucca is the author of David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials. Her 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.

M. Butterfly (35mm) – David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials Book Launch

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