"Brand Upon the Brain!"
Guy Maddin´s cinema is all about the exclamation point. His whirligig movies spin about in the ether, only coming to rest to punctuate moments of sheer ecstasy or terror. These punctuation are often literal I the form of silent film intertitles: "Secrets! Secrets! Secrets!" Guy Maddin may also be the only avant-garde director whose films get (limited) commercial release in North America. The term avant-garde seems inappropriate for a director who strip-mines the techniques of cinemas past but how else to describe the editing in Maddin´s films, a series of lightning-fast stabs in the dark clearly not designed to tell a story but, after Werner Herzog´s description of a good film, to "agitate the mind." Shots are looped, action within a scene is skidded right over, flash frame phantom images flit in and out of sight, and screen geography is merely a matter of opinion.
Maddin´s style is usually compared to that of the silent cinema, and there are plenty of resemblances. For one, many of his films are in black and white, use intertitles and some have little or no synch dialogue or, in the case of "Brand Upon the Brain!," no dialogue at all. But he´s making silent films through the filter of 80+ years of interpolation by filmmakers from Hollywood to Russia to the experimental. Maddin´s "silent films" could never have been made in the 1920s; they are silent films updated for the late 20th and early 21st century. Thank God Hollywood studios don´t see this as a lucrative market for remakes. The field is wide open and Maddin fills the void quite admirably.
"Brand Upon the Brain!" finds Maddin borrowing not just from the production style of silent cinema but the distribution end as well. As anyone who has ever taken a film course can tell you, the silent cinema was never silent. Theaters hired musicians to provide live scores and sometimes even used narrators to interpret events. This latter tradition was even stronger in Japan where benshis provided running commentary on the film (was this the earliest version of the DVD commentary track?) and sometimes became stars in their own right.
I was fortunate enough to see this film when it debuted at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. It was quite a show. The film arrived with no soundtrack whatsoever: no sound effects, no music, no dialogue. Instead, Maddin used a live narrator who he termed an "interlocutor," a live singer (billed as a castrato from Manitoba), and even live foley effects. The film continued to tour the country with a similar supporting cast, though different interlocutors were used at various stops. When the film was finally released in theaters, it arrived with a sound mix and narration (interlocution) by Isabella Rossellini.
A plot summary is pointless. I´ll just provide the setting. Guy Maddin (the fictional protagonist played by Erik Steffen Maahs as an adult, and Sullivan Brown as a child) returns to the lighthouse island where his parents ran a "mom and pop orphanage." He has returned to paint the lighthouse at his mother´s request. While painting, he reminisces about his youth. For further illumination regarding the story I will simply provide you with a sampling of intertitles used in the film (note those exclamation points!):
"A Remembrance in 12 Chapters"
"A coven in the marsh!"
"You look like you just got out of the bed of a seducer!"
"Dirt is wrong!"
"The harp playing teen detectives."
"Oh, Rumania! How I love Rumania!"
"Boy crush!"
"The Trance of the Foghorn."
"The Kissing Gloves!"
"Mother´s turpentine bath."
"Nectar Harvest!"
Isn´t it all crystal clear now?
"Brand Upon the Brain!" is the middle film of Guy Maddin´s autobiographical trilogy beginning with "Cowards Bend the Knee" (2003) and ending with "My Winnipeg" (2007). The main character in each film is named Guy Maddin and as bizarre and semi-coherent as each movie is, they all draw on the director´s memories.
Memory is the central theme in Maddin´s oeuvre. His films are filled with amnesiacs, sleepwalkers, and people who can´t forget and can´t help but forget. It is impossible to misremember anything in the Guy Maddin microverse because memory is such a fluid and corrosive thing. It changes as we remember it and as we forget it. But you can never cover it up no matter how many coats of paint you slather on it.
"Brand Upon the Brain!"
Guy Maddin´s cinema is all about the exclamation point. His whirligig movies spin about in the ether, only coming to rest to punctuate moments of sheer ecstasy or terror. These punctuation are often literal I the form of silent film intertitles: "Secrets! Secrets! Secrets!" Guy Maddin may also be the only avant-garde director whose films get (limited) commercial release in North America. The term avant-garde seems inappropriate for a director who strip-mines the techniques of cinemas past but how else to describe the editing in Maddin´s films, a series of lightning-fast stabs in the dark clearly not designed to tell a story but, after Werner Herzog´s description of a good film, to "agitate the mind." Shots are looped, action within a scene is skidded right over, flash frame phantom images flit in and out of sight, and screen geography is merely a matter of opinion.
Maddin´s style is usually compared to that of the silent cinema, and there are plenty of resemblances. For one, many of his films are in black and white, use intertitles and some have little or no synch dialogue or, in the case of "Brand Upon the Brain!," no dialogue at all. But he´s making silent films through the filter of 80+ years of interpolation by filmmakers from Hollywood to Russia to the experimental. Maddin´s "silent films" could never have been made in the 1920s; they are silent films updated for the late 20th and early 21st century. Thank God Hollywood studios don´t see this as a lucrative market for remakes. The field is wide open and Maddin fills the void quite admirably.
"Brand Upon the Brain!" finds Maddin borrowing not just from the production style of silent cinema but the distribution end as well. As anyone who has ever taken a film course can tell you, the silent cinema was never silent. Theaters hired musicians to provide live scores and sometimes even used narrators to interpret events. This latter tradition was even stronger in Japan where benshis provided running commentary on the film (was this the earliest version of the DVD commentary track?) and sometimes became stars in their own right.
I was fortunate enough to see this film when it debuted at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. It was quite a show. The film arrived with no soundtrack whatsoever: no sound effects, no music, no dialogue. Instead, Maddin used a live narrator who he termed an "interlocutor," a live singer (billed as a castrato from Manitoba), and even live foley effects. The film continued to tour the country with a similar supporting cast, though different interlocutors were used at various stops. When the film was finally released in theaters, it arrived with a sound mix and narration (interlocution) by Isabella Rossellini.
A plot summary is pointless. I´ll just provide the setting. Guy Maddin (the fictional protagonist played by Erik Steffen Maahs as an adult, and Sullivan Brown as a child) returns to the lighthouse island where his parents ran a "mom and pop orphanage." He has returned to paint the lighthouse at his mother´s request. While painting, he reminisces about his youth. For further illumination regarding the story I will simply provide you with a sampling of intertitles used in the film (note those exclamation points!):
"A Remembrance in 12 Chapters"
"A coven in the marsh!"
"You look like you just got out of the bed of a seducer!"
"Dirt is wrong!"
"The harp playing teen detectives."
"Oh, Rumania! How I love Rumania!"
"Boy crush!"
"The Trance of the Foghorn."
"The Kissing Gloves!"
"Mother´s turpentine bath."
"Nectar Harvest!"
Isn´t it all crystal clear now?
"Brand Upon the Brain!" is the middle film of Guy Maddin´s autobiographical trilogy beginning with "Cowards Bend the Knee" (2003) and ending with "My Winnipeg" (2007). The main character in each film is named Guy Maddin and as bizarre and semi-coherent as each movie is, they all draw on the director´s memories.
Memory is the central theme in Maddin´s oeuvre. His films are filled with amnesiacs, sleepwalkers, and people who can´t forget and can´t help but forget. It is impossible to misremember anything in the Guy Maddin microverse because memory is such a fluid and corrosive thing. It changes as we remember it and as we forget it. But you can never cover it up no matter how many coats of paint you slather on it.
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