Brand Upon the Brain!

[MacGuffin]

FEATURE - Guy Maddin's Silent Cinema
Buttressed by a symphonic premiere, Brand Upon the Brain! is - by Maddin's own admission - yet another funhouse mirror reflection of muddled memories.
By Pam Grady, FilmStew.com

"He is a Canadian national treasure," a publicist replies in answer to a query. Why is there a SWAT officer - or maybe a regular cop in full regalia of Kevlar vest and automatic rifle - standing guard in a hallway in one of Toronto's four-star hotels?

Another is tucked inside the suite where filmmaker Guy Maddin is receiving the press to discuss his glorious silent melodrama in 12 chapters, Brand Upon the Brain! He is a Canadian national treasure, but one guesses the extra security has something to do with the location, the luxe Chanel media suite. Perhaps there is some holy relic of Coco Chanel hidden in the building.

There were many big stars in town for the Toronto International Film Festival: Brad Pitt, Heath Ledger, and Penelope Cruz are just a few on a very long list. But for certain of us among those gathered here, those gilded personalities come in a distant second to the real star of this festival, Winnipeg's favorite son, Maddin.

Not that every journalist or movie buff at TIFF this week is even aware of exactly who he is. At a screening of the much hyped Borat: Cultural Leaning of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, two 20-something guys were sitting together, making plans for their Friday night screenings when one asked the other, "The Guy Maddin film? What's that? Is there anything special about it?"

"I don't know. It's black and white. It's silent," the other replied. Boys, for future reference, that description could be a clue, don't you think?

Black and white. Silent. Screened only once during the festival, on Friday, September 8th, appropriately enough at Toronto's lovely vintage movie palace, the Elgin, with Brand Upon the Brain! score composer Jason Staczek on hand to conduct members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, a contingent of Foley artists, a singer, and narrator Louis Negin in bringing Maddin's latest extravaganza of mad passion and nefarious deeds to full cinematic life of the pre-talkie era. For some here in Toronto, it was the hottest ticket in the festival and certainly a special evening.

Though Brand Upon the Brain! will surely screen for other audiences, this world premiere was a once-in-life time event. "The evening had to be the closest thing to sort of a Flo Ziegfeld production that the TIFF is ever likely to put on," laughs Maddin, still basking in the afterglow of the big event when he sat down withFilmStew.

On the island of Black Notch, at the remote lighthouse orphanage run by young Guy's (Sullivan Brown) parents, mysterious wounds have begun appearing on the necks and heads of the orphans. The Lightbulb Detectives - teen gumshoes Wendy and Chance Hale (Katherine E. Scharhon) - arrive to investigate and their allure soon captivates Guy and his adolescent Sis (Maya Lawson). Meanwhile, their mother (Gretchen Krich) obsesses over aging and uses a telescope and special aerophone to keep her children close (and make sure that Sis remains chaste), while Father (nearly as remote as the island) shuts himself away with his science projects in the basement.

Like his 10-chapter peep show Cowards Bend the Knee,Brand Upon the Brain! is vaguely autobiographical, an orgy of unreliable memory. He likens it to seeing his reflection through a funhouse mirror, and he admits of the autobiographical form, "I could see people starting to go, 'OK, wait a minute. That's enough.'"

"I had been warned not to do it, but I just really." he continues. "I wrestled with it a bit, and I just went, 'No, no, no I have to do it.' It just takes a normal story and it turns it into an act of masochism or an act of love or an act of self-pity. This one is a real orgy of self-pity. I just thought, 'Why not be ludicrously frank about it already? Guy Maddin! That's who it is."

A United State-Canada co-production shot in Seattle, this technically represents Maddin's first "foreign" film, although he chuckles, "[It's] kind of funny, just the idea of it. I've just been to so many video stores in Canada over the years, where Canadian films are in the foreign section, so I've been doing foreign films all along evidently."

It also extends Maddin's love affair with the form most other filmmakers deem as long dead, the silent movie. He delights in the visual, noting that even when actors have to merely cross the frame in a scene, "They have to walk with some sort of musicality, with some sort of purpose, some sort of meaning, anything, rather than just walking, because that's where the jump cut is. It gets hauled out every time when an actor just needs to get from point A to B, and they're not doing anything interesting with the character, without anything going on, without any beauty. Jump cut! Out you go!"

Silent films make a different kind of demand on actors, he acknowledges. With no dialogue to express their emotions, it is all about what they can convey through expression. He is delighted at what he was able to get out of this cast. "These people all had something to say with their faces. Some of them even shouted with their faces," he says.

Brand Upon the Brain!'s premiere lived up to its promises, as the film unreeled in a whirl of images and heated melodramatic emotion, punctuated by Stazcek's mesmerizing score. It was not an evening without technical glitches. The projectionist had to restart the film when it began to missed cues. Negin had some miking difficulties early on and eventually his teleprompter froze, leading Maddin to make a visit to the balcony to cue the narration.

In introducing the movie, Maddin admitted to a case of the jitters and the technical issues justified his nerves, but those minor mishaps could not dampen his spirits. "It felt kind of mischievous, at my own expense even," he chuckles. "Because when technical things started to fall apart, as I knew, I guess, deep down that they would. I had to just laugh at the jackpot I'd gotten myself into."

"There was a lot of mischief at my own expense in the air, so I felt good. And I felt like a showman, for once in my life," he asserts. "There's a tendency among Canadian directors to forget that they're supposed to be entertainers, as well as artists, so it actually felt like I'd become one to a degree."

[MacGuffin]

Guy Maddin Has Brand Upon the Brain!
Source: ComingSoon

The official closing night film of the 44th New York Film Festival was Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, but right down the block at the Walter Reade Theatre, the festival's annual "Views from the Avant Grade" program was providing an alternative finale in the form of the New York debut of Guy Maddin's latest "mad-sterpiece" Brand Upon the Brain!.

Film Comment writer Gavin Smith introduced Maddin, who briefed the rapt sold-out audience on the origins of the work as the second movie produced by the Seattle based The Film Company, who approaches select filmmakers to finance their movies. (They recently opened a New York office who plans to do a movie with Joie Lee.)

Anyone who saw The Saddest Music in the World might agree that Guy Maddin is an acquired taste, but he's also a true artist, having experimented with alternative ways of showing his films like with his previous "autobiographical" project Cowards Bend the Knee, which was originally shown in ten sections, each one viewed on silent matinee peep show machines.

Brand Upon the Brain! promised to reveal more of Maddin's dark past as a fictionalized autobiography in 12 parts. It was conceived as a silent film, mostly shot in black and white on Super 8 cameras, to be accompanied by a live 11-piece orchestra, three live Foley artists providing sound effects, a castrata (a man who sings falsetto) and narration by "interlocutor" Isabella Rossellini. The score was written by The Film Company's house composer Jason Staczek, who also conducted the entire live affair.

Filmed in Seattle, Brand Upon the Brain! is another bizarre piece of the author's history, as he returns to his childhood home on an island lighthouse and starts having flashbacks to his youth growing up in a dysfunctional family with a domineering mother and a scientist father who used the orphanage they ran to provide him with plenty of fodder for his bizarre experiments. Young Guy Maddin is obsessed with a novelist named Wendy Hale, who in turns becomes so charmed by Guy's sister that she dresses up like a boy detective named Chance to woo her. If that sounds perfectly normal, then you're probably ready to experience the clever craziness that Guy Maddin's wacky imagination brings to all his films. Oddly, as the movie progressed and the audience got more absorbed into the bizarre story, it was easy to forget that all of the sounds were being provided by the live orchestra and the three Foley artists, all decked out in lab coats at the side of the stage. Regular Maddin collaborator Isabella Rosellini ended up being the perfect actress to bring voice to his characters.

After the movie concluded with hearty applause, Maddin came out for the obligatory Q 'n' A with the audience where he admitted that he came up with the seemingly unrelated title for the movie before even writing it and that he conceived the idea in order to trick more people into watching silent films while sharing his love for the fine art of Foley sound effects creation. So far, the film may be unable to cater to normal arthouse distribution methods, but one can hope that Maddin takes this show on the road soon, because it's an amazing live cinema experience unlike any other.

[MacGuffin]

Rossellini to give voice to 'Brain'
Maddin silent film to be performed in Berlin
Source: Variety

Isabella Rossellini will provide a live narration of an experimental silent film as part of the Berlinale's Forum section.

Guy Maddin's "Brand Upon the Brain!," making its European premiere, will be performed as a live spectacle with the Deutsche Oper Berlin's orchestra, a castrato's voice as well as foley artists bringing sound effects alive.

Rossellini, who appeared in Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World," will lead the audience through the film as a narrator in the one-time performance at 9.30 p.m. on Feb. 15.

Pic is a family drama about childhood memories with the protagonist returning to his childhood stomping ground, a mysterious lighthouse island.

[MacGuffin]

Newfangled Silent Movie With a Bit of Old Barnum
Source: New York Times

For the Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, who has lately been testing the limits of both autobiography and movie nostalgia, his latest feature represents a double apotheosis.

"Brand Upon the Brain!" is his most nakedly personal film, chronicling a flurry of traumas that befall a youngster named Guy Maddin. Conceived as a live spectacle without a pre-recorded soundtrack, it is also the closest he has come to a pure silent feature, not that purity is a pertinent concept in the case of the magpielike Mr. Maddin and his dense, crossbred melodramas.

With "Brand Upon the Brain!" he tries to reinvent the silent movie as theatrical event. The film had its premiere in September at the Toronto International Film Festival with an orchestra, a singer (billed as a castrato), an interlocutor (a tradition derived from the Japanese art of benshi) and sound effects by Foley artists in lab coats.

After a few successful stagings — "Brand" was also presented at festivals in New York and Berlin and named one of the best films of 2006 by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times — Mr. Maddin is now taking his show on the road across America.

For the New York run, Wednesday through May 15 at the Village East Cinemas, a lineup of celebrity narrators has been assembled: the actress Isabella Rossellini, the poet John Ashbery, the character actor Eli Wallach, the cabaret performer Justin Bond (of Kiki and Herb), the performance artist Laurie Anderson and the singers Lou Reed and Tunde Adebimpe (of the band TV on the Radio). Following the New York engagement it will play as a conventional film, with a soundtrack featuring Jason Staczek's score and Ms. Rossellini's narration. (A "Brand" event is set for today at the San Francisco International Film Festival, with Joan Chen narrating. Full-scale productions will also take place in Chicago and Los Angeles.)

"I think of the live elements as boredom insurance," Mr. Maddin said in a recent telephone interview. "It's like we're putting on something that's competing not with other movies but with the Blue Man Group. I now know what it might have been like to be P. T. Barnum."

Mr. Maddin tends to work quickly, but even by his standards "Brand" was a rushed production. Two years ago Gregg Lachow, founder of the Film Company, a quixotic Seattle production outfit, invited him to make a film — any film — with the condition that he use a Seattle cast and crew. Mr. Maddin and his writing partner George Toles dashed off a screenplay. The shoot lasted nine days. Within six weeks of the initial phone call he had a feature in the can.

This is the first time Mr. Maddin, 51, has made a movie away from his native Winnipeg, Manitoba. "My first foreign film," he said.

The movie's content had much to do with its hasty gestation. "I knew I could never boil down any fiction in such a short period," Mr. Maddin said, "so I cut off huge slabs of my childhood and planted them into a fictional context — although it's not all that fictional. I've settled on the movie being 96 percent literal autobiography."

That estimate might be a bit high since "Brand Upon the Brain!" is set in a lighthouse that doubles as a "mom and pop orphanage" where the senior Maddins engage in the vampiric harvesting of "orphan nectar." While a prepubescent Guy and his older sister become infatuated with a pair of androgynous sibling teenage detectives, their scientist father toils away on sinister experiments, and their fearsome mother surveys the island with a lighthouse beam, cracking down on unseemly behavior.

"I didn't grow up in a lighthouse," Mr. Maddin said, "but a lot of the Grand Guignol stuff actually happened: My mother was on the alert to everything. She could see into your underwear with her searchlight."

As in most of Mr. Maddin's films there is a comical surfeit of incident and Oedipal horror, hence the recurring title card "Too much for Guy!!" But the melancholy is more pronounced than ever. "I wanted it to be clear there's an undying love there," he said.

Ms. Rossellini, who starred in Mr. Maddin's "Saddest Music in the World" (2003) and collaborated with him on "My Dad Is 100 Years Old" — her recent tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini — has come to know Mr. Maddin as a friend and has met his mother, Herdis. "His films have all these monstrous mothers, so I was worried about meeting her," Ms. Rossellini said. "But she's so incredibly loving, full of admiration for Guy. And she's a very good sport."

The experience of repeatedly staging the show has been an emotional one for Mr. Maddin. He admits to feeling guilty about "ratting out my family" every time he watches a dress rehearsal. "But when the theater's packed and the audience is applauding, it becomes show business and I love it. It's like I'm the one drinking the blood of some family member. I need that euphoria at night to get high, and then by day I feel terrible."

He is now finishing a documentary about Winnipeg, the final installment of a personal trilogy that began with "Cowards Bend the Knee" (a 2003 film that also featured a hapless hero named Guy Maddin). Needless to say it won't be a literal documentary. He lured the B-movie femme fatale Ann Savage out of retirement to portray his mother but kept them from meeting. "I thought maybe the universe would rip in half if those two forces came together," he said.

With his next film nearly complete Mr. Maddin is eager to move beyond what he called "my 'me' trilogy." He's working on one project with the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who provided the original story for "Saddest Music," and another with Mr. Ashbery: a conceptual piece, influenced by the experimental writer Raymond Roussel, that might take the form of an interactive online video.

"With every movie I've used up an obsession," Mr. Maddin said. "Archangel" (1990) got his fascination with World War I out of his system. "Careful" (1992), an Alpine melodrama complete with papier-mâché mountains, sated his passion for "extreme artifice." He suspects that the Winnipeg film will resolve a love-hate relationship with a city he immortalized in "Saddest Music" as the "world capital of sorrow."

Despite his misgivings about its confessional aspect, "Brand" has helped him confront some family demons. "Childhood no longer holds the same enchantment for me," he said. "When you're filming, you turn the material of obsessions into just so much footage that needs to be edited. It turns into stuff that needs to be dealt with, and by the time you're done you're sick of it. It's a form of aversion therapy."

[Ghostboy]

I can't wait to see this! I already have tickets to the first LA show, but I'm thinking about getting more, just in case...

[MacGuffin]

EXCL: Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!
Source: ComingSoon

For most people, a summer movie-going experience entails piling into a megaplex with all their friends to see the latest blockbuster, but leave it to Winnipeg filmmaker and auteur Guy Maddin to come up with a summer film experience unlike any other. Brand Upon the Brain! is his latest black and white silent movie which will play in three major cities with an accompanying orchestra, narration by guest "interlocutors," live Foley sound effects and even a male castrato. Like many of Maddin's previous films, the movie offers up a pseudo-autobiographical tale from Maddin's past, this one involving a remote island orphanage/lighthouse where Guy's parents conduct experiments on the orphans in order to find the secret to eternal youth.

Maddin's bizarre live film experience has been the toast of the film festival circuit for the last year, starting with its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and culminating with its recent performance at the San Francisco International Film Festival earlier this week.

For most filmmakers, talking to the press must be a bit of a chore, but for Guy Maddin, it must come across as some strange form of therapy... much like his movies.

ComingSoon.net: Can you talk about the origins of the movie? I know you're a big fan of silent, black and white films, but what was the impetus of doing something like this, where you add all of the sound live?
Guy Maddin: I was approached by my producers, who come from this really odd, quixotic, utopian visionary not-for-profit film studio, The Film Company. They're out of Seattle. They don't accept scripts. They just approach filmmakers with a greenlight already illuminated and say, "We want to invite you to make a film. We'll pay for everything. You just have to come to Seattle and use our all-Seattle cast and crew. We have set designers, wardrobe, make-up, hair, editors, composers, everything. You just come. Like the old Hollywood system except it's not-for-profit, and you can't use an old preexisting script that's got other producers' breath all over the title page. You have to write something new and you have to start in a month." I knew that I had to do something in a hurry and I didn't have time to make-up a lot of stuff, so I took some episodes from my childhood, one key sort of pivotal coming-of-age moment. I knew I didn't have time to write dialogue, but I knew I had time to wing a film poem together, especially if I left out the dialogue and started writing it later in the editing process, using title cards or narration. A lot of it was in the nature of the invitation to make the movie. As the movie was coming together, I was really shocked at how pleased I was with it. Normally, I'm quite cynical and pessimistic about my projects, but maybe because I made it in such a hurry and couldn't afford to make-up anything, that it had to come out in one big autobiographical slab. Whenever I tried to put some sort of fictional construct on it, it would almost always fall away. It came out in one big whole, and I'm really proud of the picture. I thought what a shame that no one really wants to watch silent films, but I do know that when there's live music, it certainly buys a lot more good will in the room.

Then I was reminded of Foley artists, because the way I was shooting it, I could hear things and I thought I wanted sound effects as well, and the only way you can have those in a live performance is by having Foley artists. They're really delightful artists to watch at work, but they always just work in dimly lit basement studios and they're not used to any attention. They developed social problems and things like that. I love them dearly, my Foley artists, Goro, Caoimhe and Andy, and they really like performing it turns out. I invited them to come out and expected them to say that the cost would be too high, but no, they embraced it and sacrificed a lot of pay to come out and perform. When it became apparent I needed a narrator, I remember the Benchi narrators of Japan and the early interlocutors of film that helped cinema's first viewers understand what an edit was. They sort of explained, "She is going to the window now. Don't worry, her face is big because the camera's closer," things like that. I read of those in Louis Bunuel's autobiography, then I loved the part talkies where silent films were reinvigorated with small talking or singing sections shot a full year after they'd been shelved and then re-released as part talkies. So I went back a year after the film had been shot and shot a little song and that needed to be performed live, too. Then I found the Manitoba Meadowlark in a steam bath in Winnipeg and realized that the song sung by my sister in the movie has to be sung by this castrator. It basically was everything but the kitchen sink.

CS: So "interlocutor" is a real word and not something you made up for the role of the narrator?
Maddin: It's a word they used to use in minstrel shows and Vaudeville. It just means anyone who converses with someone else, like to "inter-locute" between two people, but it usually meant the host of the show, an emcee basically.

CS: What was the timeframe from when they contacted you to when you started filming?
Maddin: It was less than a month to finish the script, not that that's an amazing story—I actually think the script is pretty good...for me anyway (chuckles). Yeah, it had to be less than a month, because the art department needed the script to start building sets and to start assembling wardrobe and props in a week or so, The script really didn't exist much as a script. It was kind of a big outline that I showed up on set with and a list of props and sets I thought we might need. I was lucky enough that all the cast were ready for all the days, and we just showed up on set with all the actors, and I would put them in front of my camera, and basically, I'd just start shooting. I was emboldened 'cause I read that that's the way Fassbender made so many movies. He would just assemble everybody to do a blocking first, then just attack them with the camera. It was kind of the reverse of doing spoken word rehearsals first, and then figuring out the blocking last. I would just block and then shoot the rehearsal and then move on.

CS: What was it like shooting in Seattle after shooting most of your work in Winnipeg over the years?
Maddin: Yeah, this was my first foreign film. I liked it. I just landed in an airplane, met all the actors, they took all their clothes off to show me what they would look like in their costumes. That was a great way to get to know them instantly, seeing them all naked. I didn't order them to strip or anything, but they just sort of did. It's sort of like in Europe, you kiss on the cheek, and in Seattle, you just strip buck naked. I'm making more and more trips to Seattle I find. Then the next morning I was just shooting. I visited the sets right after landing as well, make sure they worked like they did in the JPEGs sent to me, and they did, and away we went.

CS: You've done so many autobiographical movies, so do you have a pretty good line-up of young actors to play you in the movies you do?
Maddin: I'm kind of glad I was forced to switch it up a bit because I didn't want to give Darcy [Fehr], who first played me in "Cowards Bend the Knee" too much bargaining leverage, but also the idea that I can be interchangeable. Obviously, every movie director, every author, is putting so much of him or herself into their own work, so I just thought, "Why not be honest about it and say it's me?" In that way, it actually felt better being honest, more confessional, more self-damning. The masochism felt better, and I can make more of a humiliated spectacle of myself. I feel better about it.

CS: Can you tell me about the childhood moment that influenced this movie?
Maddin: The episode that I remember was when my older sister hit puberty, and it really troubled my mother. She just didn't like the idea of the kind of thoughts that were whirling around in her head. I think she just tried to will every last pubic development back into her body. It reminded me of the way the vampire hunters in "Dracula" hate it when the women start sleepwalking because it means they're restless in their self-conscious. My mother just disapproved of my sister growing up, so it led to big confrontation, an all-out war with a lot of collateral damage. Then entering the picture was this romantic figure who was really charismatic and wonderful, and whose gender later turned out to be a big surprise to everybody. It was really an odd interlude in our life, so there was this spectacularly internetian war followed by some sort of Shakespearean plot twist. I've been really lucky that my childhood has been incredibly melodramatic, so I've barely had to leave that trough when thinking of... most filmmakers only have one childhood movie in them and then they use it up, but I feel like I can keep going back to that thing.

CS: When you see this movie after it's been assembled, is there anything that surprises you, like "Where on earth did that idea come from?"
Maddin: As stylized as it is and as unreal as a silent movie by definition is—it's in black and white with no audible speech—there are moments that are so uncannily spot-on that I feel terrible watching it, especially in rehearsal, when there's no one in the audience and it's just me and the orchestra and the narrators and the Foley artists. I just feel like I've betray my family and broken a commandment by dishonoring my mother and father.

CS: Have they actually seen the movie or been in the audience?
Maddin: No, no, no, luckily not. My mum's going blind, and I love her dearly and I always will. The movie is a Grand Guignol teen detective child reminiscence horror movie, as well as being 96% true, so it's kind of odd. But I can't really show it to any of them, but that's okay. They've figured out sort of that I'm going to hell anyway.

CS: Was Jason Staczek already familiar with the music of those old time movies or did you have to get him up to speed on them?
Maddin: What a stroke of luck running into that guy, because he had to write 100 minutes of music for the thing. Music is everything to me. Of all the artforms, music takes the shortest route to the heart, and as a filmmaker, you hope that you have some good music, so you can bumper ride all the way on that shortcut. He just has such a flexible temperament, and he was even volunteering to degrade the music in early exchanges of MP3 files that we were sending back and forth. He just really understands that the music had to embrace the images properly. So many collaborators have hidden agendas and say they want to do what's best for you, but they really just want something good on their demo reel, but this guy is so sweet and really hard-working and really gets it. The temp music that my editor John Gurdebeke and I were using was really big and bold and dynamic and I really felt the movie needed that and then Jason Staczek had the courage to replace that with stuff that doesn't try to overpower the movie a lot of the time. I was really scared when I first heard it and then the more I listened, the more I realized it serves the movie so much better and that he's a genius.

CS: I got to see this at the New York Film Festival, but you've got it to the point where you can take it on the road?
Maddin: That's right, starting with 14 live shows over seven days in New York, then over to Chicago and L.A. I just sort of take [the theatre] over for awhile. The most expensive part of the show is shipping the Foley equipment and people, but musicians you can pick up in each town because they can read music. There's no way of writing Foley cues that people in various cities can just look at and read, so you have to take these people that know the movie really well wherever you go.

CS: Will you be attending all of these doing Q 'n' As?
Maddin: I'm going to go to all the ones in New York for sure, because there's a different narrator at each show. People like Eli Wallach doing one, and his wife Anne Jackson, and then Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Isabelle Rosellini is doing another one, the poet John Ashbury, this guy Tunde from TV on the Radio. It's a really odd mixture of people. I think it's on the website and it'll be announced in the schedule, which will be locked down very shortly. I guess cause it's partially theatre, it's subject to change I suppose, if someone gets laryngitis, but that's the kind of terror I've learned to love. I never suspected I had a theatre person in me, but I don't think I can ever go back to normal movie-making again where I just worry about getting the projection and the volume right. Now, there's just so many balls in the air.

CS: How have the Foley artists been acclimating to the live thing, because obviously they're used to doing a lot of rewinding, getting the right take, etc?
Maddin: They're loving it, because also Foley artists don't do ambient noise. They don't do like wind or distant traffic noises or rain sounds. They do specific sounds: door closings, foot steps, punches and things like that, so they had to broaden their vocabulary and construct a wind machine and sheets of thunder. They immediately started thinking visually—that was thrilling—because the best thing to make the sound for tapping into a young child's brain for nectar apparently is hard past wrapped in a wet shammy, but when viewed from the cheap seats or from any seat in the house, you can't tell what that is, so they switched over to celery which sounds almost as good, but is so vibrantly green and instantly recognizable as celery... except in Mexico where noone eats celery, and then you can't buy it. They were going to have celery imported but I thought, "Maybe you should try and find a Mexican equivalent." It's kind of like the Foley money shot when the celery comes out, that's the moment where the audience really sort of orgasms over the Foley artists.

CS: I've never heard the term "Foley money shot" used and I don't think I'll ever hear that again.
Maddin: Maybe that one doesn't get used often enough in the industry. The Foley artists are real boredom insurance, because you get to look back and forth between the movie screen and the Foley artist and you see this Grand Guignol thing happening on the screen and then you look down and see the Foley Captain chewing on celery and twisting it around. It's kind of fun.

CS: Did you think about having a camera on them as an inset on the big screen or a separate display?
Maddin: I think we've recorded them at least during some rehearsals for some sort of DVD bonus. I don't know how that can be incorporated in an interesting way. Another example of them really getting into the spirit of live performance: one Foley effect they have to supply is of 12-year-old me urinating into a pot, so I think they're planning some kind of ruse, the kind that Olympic athletes use to try to switch someone else's urine for their own, and I think they're planning on spraying some warm water into those nice seats right next to the Foley artists to see what kind of commotion they can start.

CS: After the live shows are done, you're also going to release a version of the movie with prerecorded music and narration. Did you try to record that live at one of the performances?
Maddin: I did a studio version and it does sound different, just like any album you get from your favorite pop performances, the live vs. the studio performance. It does sound different, and I'm really tempted to pirate our live performance somehow. I hired a pirate in Toronto actually, because it's a really strict union house and we weren't allowed to record anything, but through a third party, I hired a pirate to record it, then the pirate never came back to me. You just can't trust pirates anymore!

CS: Do you have any idea what you're going to do after finishing up this tour?
Maddin: I gotta do a bit of this, then I gotta finish up a feature-length "docu-fantasia" on the city of Winnipeg. It's not a mockumentary, it's a real documentary, but it's kind of a W.G. Sebald peregrination through my hometown for network television in Canada and hopefully, that will play the film festival circuit as well. I'm also working on a collaboration with the poet John Ashbury on an internet-interactive narrative labyrinth movie, and I'm in the early stages on a feature-length bigger budget collaboration with Kazuo Ishiguro, who worked with me on "The Saddest Music in the World."

Brand upon the Brain! kicks off its New York City run tonight (May 9) at the Village East with two performances narrated by Crispin Glover, followed by 12 more performances in the next week, before heading to Chicago's Music Box Theatre on May 18 (all narrated by Glover) then Los Angeles' Egyptian Theatre from June 8 – 10.

[MacGuffin]

indieWIRE INTERVIEW | "Brand Upon the Brain!" Director Guy Maddin

Canadian director Guy Maddin has had an illustrious career in not only directing but also writing, cinematography, editing and even acting. 2003's "The Saddest Music in the World" won a slew of festival recognitions as did "The Heart of the World" (2000). His latest release, "Brand Upon the Brain!" follows the story of a mother who "tracks her son's every move, bellowing for him to come home over the 'Aerophone' just as something interesting is about to happen. The intrigue continues as deranged mother, hellbent on restoring her youth and sinister scientist-father who is sequestered night and day in his basement laboratory, engage in diabolical, secret experimentation. When new parents of recently adopted children from the orphanage notice strange wounds on the youngsters' necks, a pair of teen sleuths, Wendy and her brother Chance, known as 'The Lightbulb Kids,' appear on the island to investigate--and in the process, inspire Guy's first crush and Sis' first love affair. The lurid family secrets that unfold are positively shocking." Vitagraph opens the film in limited release beginning Wednesday, May 9.

What initially attracted you to filmmaking, and how has that interest evolved during your career?

I guess I always had a youthful off-the-rack desire to express myself artistically, but no art with which to do so. In my early twenties I thought I might write, but was a good enough reader to know I would only be a mediocre writer. I liked Lo-fi arts partly because it always seemed like I, trained in nothing, might be able to work in them myself. I loved basement bands, but was too timid to pick up a guitar; thought outsider art was cool but wasn't outsider enough. That left low-budget experimental film. I saw no reason why primitive cinema couldn't be as exciting and as respected as primitive painting, as beloved as the Ramones. I thought I would take all the Nabokov and Kafka effects I would have loved to accomplish as a writer and try to translate them into filmic effects. I thought bright young hipsters would embrace this cinematic analog to the basement band, but when I started I was no Ramone.

My films were slow-moving--dreamy, perhaps, and primitive to be sure, but not as accessible as three-chord pop. I kept trying, though, and found I could do other things way better than I ever suspected. Never thought I could use a camera, but I'm hooked on photography now. I recruited help from close friends and soon, in the ego-boiler that is indie film, made enemies out of almost all of them, but not before draining every last drop of inspiration from them and tossing them aside. Soon I had a style of my own, one based on loneliness, something to hang onto with a terror of losing it. My long-time screenwriting partner George Toles was essential to my getting past the daydreaming stage of my career. He started out as my sounding board and advisor, and evolved into a full collaborative partner. We must both have the stubbornness of barnacles, we've only had one major fight over the years, so we continue to play in this toy-store medium, whereas all the other original partners and muses that inspired me during my I Vitellone years have succumbed to hatred or adult jobs.

Anyway, audiences when I started, even the audiences that loved basement bands, didn't love Lo-fi filmmaking. But that's all changed now. I'm happy to report that audiences and I have found each other at last, at least enough that I can feel the connection, the thrilling connection with an audience base. I feel a bit like a musician must.

Are there other aspects of filmmaking that you would still like to explore?

The industry side doesn't stoke my day dreams. I still have trouble getting a producer to return my phone calls. I give up on all that stuff. Maybe the spirit of the times will shift even more and I'll be refusing to return their calls some day. Maybe that power reversal will happen after my death. Maybe that will even happen because of my death, if I die wisely. I have to remember to be careful.

On the creative side, I really want to make a movie that works like music. Of all the art forms, music takes the shortest route to the heart. I've known that a long time now and for the last few years have tried welding my images to good music so that everything in my films will be allowed that same shortcut the score gets to take. But now I realize I have to write stories that possess the logic of music. If the very essence of a story is to take that same shortcut, it must feel like music--instantly feel-able, no rationalizing necessary. So I would like to make a dreamy, trancelike movie which barrels along and sweeps people up like a dance craze, but also makes compelling narrative and emotional sense. It must also be a bit mad, for rational music would be horrible. To be really great, music must have at least some if not a lot of the irrational, but poetically true, in it. So it is with movies, at least the ones I'm going to make.

Please talk about how the initial idea for "Brand Upon the Brain!" came about.

I'd wanted to make a childhood recollection film since I first picked up a camera. To me, anyone who recollects his or her own childhood is a poet for the duration of those nostalgic musings. One must think of childhood in terms of the faulty models of the universe one constructs while trying to make sense of the world. At the dawn of memory, one makes some wildly incorrect models of the world--these result in the almost narcotic magic of every new sensation being received incorrectly. Cause and effect are often flipped; new phenomena loom up hyperbolically and misleadingly; mysteries deepen instead of clearing up; everything is dreamy and wondrous! Truths are made more emotionally truthful by the mistakes and untruths. Childhood! Some of my favorite films capture this narcotic in a celluloid bottle--"Forbidden Games," "Zero De Conduit," "Faces of Children," "Pather Panchali." So I wanted to try my hand at this genre as well, wanted to intoxicate viewers with a forced revi sit to earlier years. To the childhood of cinema itself. Gretchen Krich and Sullivan Brown in a scene from Guy Maddin's "Brand Upon the Brain!" Photo credit: Adam L. Weintraub.

Now there are some things that silent film still does far better than these talking pictures. One thing the silent does automatically is take a big aggressive and obvious step toward the artificial, away from the literal-mindedness that stupefies us when we are watching synchsound films. Everything in the silent seems more timeless, more universal, more lyrical. The silent film is closer to the fairy tale than the talkie. These are all strengths you want when tackling a childhood recollection film. Once I decided I was finally ready to tackle this genre I knew the film had to be silent. I also knew that I might not ever get a another chance to shoot a silent feature, and that the times having passed the silent by I had better indulge myself now and throw a complete live music, sound effects, interlocutor and castrato spectacular at the viewers.

So this is what we decided about half way through shooting, that the film had to go big, as big as the world seems to a sensitive child, if it were to go anywhere at all. So the film is touring with an orchestra, a team of Foley artists, Dov Houle my unearthly singer, and a platoon of dulcet-voiced vocal interpreters who pipe up with some expository spice now and then. I can't believe we've tricked Lou Reed, Eli Wallach, Geraldine Chaplin--what a genetic connection with the first wave of silents she is!--Tunde Adebimpe, John Ashbery, etc. into stepping behind my lectern to perform during the screenings!

Please elaborate a bit on your approach to making the film, including your influences as well as your overall goals for the project.

My goals for any film are always the same: be as good as possible, reach people and reach them in the right way, tell them something about themselves they don't want to admit and make it intoxicating.

My approach to making film has evolved however. I've learned to trust my instincts, learned to assume we'll find the images we need to put everything across. I've learned to shoot the hell out of everything, to treat the camera like an ever-burping machine gun, to leave much to chance and then exploit what chance gives me. I've learned to shatter an image to find out what's inside it, kind of cubistically splinter a face or gesture with the confidence that through editing it can be remade into an even greater whole than the original subject. With my editor John Gurdebeke I've figured out a deranged theory of neurological editing, which is responsible for a new feel in my films, a new filmic facsimile for memory.

My biggest influences in recent years have been Martin Arnold and Matthias Muller, two experimental Austrians who have really messed with my head through editing tropes that make Eisenstein seem lazy. My most enduring influences have been Vigo and Bunuel. I shouldn't have to discuss how great those guys are.

Are there still other genres or stories would like to explore as a filmmaker, and what is your next project?

Well, aside from trying to create the ultimately music-driven, musically constructed and emotionally musical film, I have plans for an interactive internet film labyrinth. This is in its development stages and financing is not yet secured, but it WILL happen if I have to pay for it myself. The script is in great shape. It's called "Keyhole." I'm working on it with my new friend John Ashbery, and my usual collaborators.

It's inspired by the structure invented by the singular Raymond Roussel in his New Impressions of Africa. I wanted to see how many stories within sotries a movie could sustain. I decided to try for a preposterous amount. Then it changed into a honeycomb of stories, each cell within the honeycomb a self-contained short film, but the whole story cluster being something which can be navigated through by the viewer, who must choose among narrative options and in so doing determine the shape, tone and temperature of the longer, interconnected entirety. It'll be fun-packed and full of mad-love sexiness.

I once had a man offer to pay me $700 to act in one of my films. It occurs to me that if there were ever a project which could be financed by people paying me to be in it, then "Keyhole" is the one. Please line up in an orderly fashion, aspiring actors.

What is your definition of "independent film," and has that changed at all since you first started working?

I like what Bunuel said at the end of his life, that he never in his long career included or removed a shot against his will. That's a good working definition for independence in filmmaking, to have the same freedom we're used to seeing from other artists, from authors. Now film has always been as much a business as an art form, but to be able to keep an eye cocked towards both halves of the concern without compromising seems an ideal toward which all indie filmmakers should aspire, no? I've always thought so, and that's not likely to change as long as I'm making movies.

What general advice would you impart to emerging filmmakers?

Just do it. That seems too simple, I know, but there's something in that copyrighted chestnut which reminds one to quit daydreaming after a while and get down to realizing the dream.

Please share an achievement from your career so far that you are most proud of...

It's "Brand upon the Brain!" It all came together for me on this one. I got very lucky. You kind of need to know what you want out of a film, but it's very important to be lucky, too. I got a windfall of luck this time round. Sheepishly, I must beat my chest a little here, because I'm very pleased with how it all came together.

[w/o horse]

I'll be there June 8 with a surprisingly large group of friends charged and ready for Guy Maddin.  High level of anticipation.

[cine]

is there no thread for Brand Upon the Brain? didn't pop up in the Search.. 


will be seeing it this weekend..

[MacGuffin]

The silent treatment
Guy Maddin outdoes himself with 'Brand Upon the Brain!'
Source: Los Angeles Times

GUY MADDIN'S "Brand Upon the Brain!" is arriving in Los Angeles this weekend, but don't imagine that just another film is showing up. It's more like the circus is coming to town. And a very weird circus at that.

"A one-of-a-kind cinematic spectacle!" scream the heroically retro print ads for the live-action-and-film extravaganza at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood from Friday to Monday night, adding, as if it were necessary, "You'll never see anything like it again!"

In some ways, that description fits the entirety of Maddin's outré oeuvre. A one-of-a-kind filmmaker based in the one-of-a-kind city of Winnipeg, Canada, Maddin is known for his evocatively titled films such as "The Saddest Music in the World," "Cowards Bend the Knee" and "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs."

A backward-looking visionary, Maddin filters a fascination with film history, especially the silent era, and the joys of Grade Z exploitation cinema through his own singular sensibility and comes up with films that never are mistaken for anyone else's.

Because "Brand Upon the Brain!" is as much spectacle as screening, it has already played in festivals in New York, Toronto, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Berlin and other cities. "For the longest time," Maddin said at the film's San Francisco Film Festival screening in early May, "I wanted to trick people into seeing a silent film." Which, in a sense, is what he's accomplished.

Maddin has made that happen by using what he characterizes as "boredom insurance" to turn his silent film into a kind of multi-ring circus. The ultimate for vintage silents these days, a live musical accompaniment, is just the beginning for "Brand Upon the Brain!"

In addition to an 11-piece orchestra led by composer Jason Staczek, the film builds on early silent tradition and utilizes a celebrity narrator to read the intertitles, a task that has been taken up by actor Crispin Glover, poet John Ashbery and others. (The Los Angeles narrators will include actress Barbara Steele and writer Daniel Handler.)

There is also a high-pitched male singer — Maddin alternately refers to him as an "onstage castrato" and "the Manitoba Meadowlark" — and, most dramatic of all, a trio of foley artists, dressed in white lab coats like mad scientists, using everything from whirling wheels to sheets of tin to create the sound effects for the film.

More than this, the form of "Brand Upon the Brain!" is classically silent as well. The credits tell us this is "A Remembrance in 12 Chapters" and, just like the silent serials, each episode closes with an "End of Chapter" title card. And Maddin has made sure that his film stock looks as distressed as it would if this were a vintage silent suddenly come to light after years of decay.

(While the live performances of "Brand" will take place this weekend, the film will also screen with prerecorded narration by Isabella Rossellini next week.)

The content of "Brand Upon the Brain!" is far from traditional. For perhaps the first time, Maddin has combined his fondness for genre excesses with autobiographical elements, though his typically droll insistence that the film is "96% literally true" should probably be taken as a form of kidding on the square.

"Brand" begins in the present, with a professional house painter named Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs) rowing out to isolated Black Notch Island to fulfill his dying mother's last request.

For when Guy was a boy, his parents ran a peculiar orphanage out of a lighthouse on this island, and his mother's request, an especially convenient one for a house painter, is that he give the old lighthouse a few new coats of paint.

But the adult Guy does more than paint and paint, he sinks into deep reveries, binding himself in a "chain of memories" that leads him to brood and brood again on things that happen to him when he was a boy of 12 (played by Sullivan Brown).

Guy's parents, it turns out, were quite a pair. His father (Todd Jefferson Moore) was rather the mad scientist, working feverishly in the lighthouse basement on the devil knows what. Meanwhile, his overbearing mother (Gretchen Krich) used a massive searchlight and an amplification device known as an aerophone to make life a living hell for Guy and his older sister Sis (Maya Lawson).

Into this island hothouse comes celebrity sleuth Wendy (Katherine E. Scharhon), who along with her brother Chance are known as "The Lightbulb Kids." Wendy is investigating why orphans adopted off Black Notch Island all have suspicious-looking holes in their heads, holes that one might describe, if one were into cinematic hyperbole, as "brands upon the brain."

Wendy's presence on the island soon leads to brain fever, sexual hysteria across multiple genders and all manner of magnified Maddinian emotions.

The director's form of genial cinematic dementia is guaranteed not to be to all tastes at all times, but those who are looking for something strange and different will feel right at home.

[Ghostboy]

This movie is outstanding! One of Guy's finest works to date  - in fact, I'd call it his masterpiece, although my judgement may be clouded by the magic of seeing it with the live score, foley and narration. If your city is graced by the live show, don't miss it.

[w/o horse]

I got to see the movie with Leonard Maltin.  He actually smiles like that all the fucking time.  Very pleasant.

The movie was amazing but I too was quite distracted and impressed upon by celery eating happening up front.  And both times the castrator sang I was locked into compulsive, estatic effusion.  In fact, the castrator was my favorite thing about the whole night.

[matt35mm]

I got to see the movie with Leonard Maltin.  He actually smiles like that all the fucking time.  Very pleasant.

The movie was amazing but I too was quite distracted and impressed upon by celery eating happening up front.  And both times the castrator sang I was locked into compulsive, estatic effusion.  In fact, the castrator was my favorite thing about the whole night.

Castrator?

Man, this movie must be more nuts (or is it less nuts?) than I thought!

[Pubrick]

castrator or castrato?

cos i don't think there's any real castrati around anymore, unless they're natural born freaks or some kind of botched transexual.

[w/o horse]

I'm sorry, castrato, yes.  This is what he was called in the program.  He did in fact sing like a man without balls, twice, for probably a total of one minute, two minutes tops, and the rest of the time he sat in a chair next to Barbara Steele with his hands in his laps.  But when he sang it was beautiful and sad and Maddin clearly put thought into when he would use him because what was happening on screen was also beautiful and sad.