Sole Criterion: Brand Upon the Brain!
By Brett Ballard-Beach
September 6, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Canadian writer-director (and often cinematographer and editor as well) Guy Maddin has a filmography of about 30 short films and nearly a dozen feature length features from over the last quarter-century and before 2012, I had seen precisely one piece of that impressive output. Granted, it was a signature achievement: 2000’s Heart of the World, a six-minute “fake” trailer that serves up a love quadrangle, capitalist critique and a declaration of the power of cinema to save the world, done up in the cross styles of Soviet montage and German Expressionism of the 1920s and ‘30s. Playful and romantic and satirical and silly and edited (by Maddin) to possibly induce epileptic seizures even among those weaned on Simpson/Bruckheimer productions, it is exhilarating and exhausting in roughly equal measures.
Along with this week’s featured film, Brand Upon the Brain!, from 2006, I viewed two of his earliest films, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1989) and Careful (1992), and several short films from that era, including his first effort The Dead Father (1986). From the most recent decade I caught 2003’s The Saddest Music in the World (the most mainstream of his features, relatively speaking) as well as his documentary-fantasy mash-up My Winnipeg (2007) and several short films that accompanied the DVDs of each of those, some shot particularly to accompany the discs themselves.
Maddin strikes me as an artist wholly unto himself, as much a self-taught film geek as a Tarantino but one with completely apposite references and an affinity for earlier film eras (and with a very important caveat: a consistent partnership with George Toles, a film professor and mentor-turned-collaborator who has written or co-written with Maddin the stories and/or screenplays on the lion’s share of Maddin’s feature-length efforts.) In his recurring predilections paired with his faithful recreations/homages of silent film era cinematic vernacular, he calls to mind aspects of the nurtured obsessions of Bunuel, the unleashed unconscious of Lynch, and the carefully (almost suffocatingly) realized genre exercises of Todd Haynes.
These are reference points, however, not borrowed or stolen ideas. Maddin is unlike any filmmaker I have encountered before. In the interviews with him on the DVDs (or in Waiting for Twilight, an hour-long documentary/promotional piece from 1997 that almost overkills on hipster-courting self-congratulation thanks to narration by Tom Waits), Maddin seems pleasant, down to earth, even a little bland, well read with an unquenchable scholarly, literary and celluloid thirst, and an artistic bent that he uses to sketch out color storyboards of his projects. Making movies is his everything, but in person he comports with none of the rapid-fire patois of Tarantino or Scorsese.
Repression and isolation (both of which come into play from his Great White North background) and the bubbling over that can result from that is at the heart of a lot of his films. Amnesia is shared by most of the major characters in Archangel (1990) The mountain villagers who must speak softly (or risk triggering avalanches) in Careful instead transfer their energies into barely concealed Oedipal conflicts and would-be incestuous relationships. The broken family unit at the center of The Saddest Music in the World contains both an amnesiac, sibling rivalry and father/son competition for the same woman.
My Winnipeg is both a retaliation against cultural amnesia (as Maddin crafts a loving tone poem of sorts for his hometown, one of the coldest cities on the planet) and a revelation of the functionally dysfunctional Maddin family clan, which Maddin recreates with actors - including 1940s and 1950s B movie/noir star Ann Savage in her final role, as his mother - the better to understand and revisit classic Maddin family arguments. My Winnipeg is the third and final installment in Maddin’s autobiographical trilogy. The first film, Cowards Bend the Knee, remains unseen by me, but consists of 10 six-minute installments that were originally presented as an art installation and meant to be viewed through peepholes, the better to draw out the voyeuristic aspects of its sleazy noir tale (peppered with details and incidents drawn from Maddin’s own life). Brand Upon the Brain! (with the subtitle A Remembrance in 12 Chapters) was the middle child in this progression and would seem to straddle the line between Cowards and Winnipeg, mixing elements of the generic interplay from the former with an undercurrent of loss that is more overt and “sentimental” in the latter as its hero, Guy Maddin attempts to escape from the Winnipeg of his childhood dreams and his adult nightmares on a train that seems to endlessly chug through the night on tracks leading nowhere.
The title suggests a lost, lurid 1950s sci-fi tale that might have gotten bottom billed on a pairing with a William Castle effort like The Tingler. The story plays like the fevered (wet) dream of a sexually awakening adolescent boy, replete with toiling orphans, dark family secrets, midnight black magic ceremonies, fictitious childhood crushes come to life, and gender bending, homosexual, and/or nearly incestuous romantic couplings , triangles, even (I think) quadrangles. The conceit behind Brand Upon the Brain! is that it is a silent film with musical accompaniment, a choir, a skilled 10 person foley (sound effects) team and a narrator.
Around the time of the film’s release, a series of shows were staged nationwide featuring all of those elements live as well as one of a far-flung group of personages assuming the role of the narrator: Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover, Eli Wallach, and others, even Maddin himself. On the DVD, several of these live performances can be excerpted on the soundtrack and there are three studio-recorded narrations/accompaniments to choose from. I chose Maddin’s own based on my enjoyment of his My Winnipeg voiceover (particularly his attempt to maintain composure while relating a particularly dark anecdote involving his mother and an ill-fated pet bird of some family friends). His tones resonate with a little bit of the radio announcer imploring listeners to tune in next week for the electrifying conclusion (an advantage with the mini-cliffhangers for each part of Brand Upon the Brain!, and a little dash of Garrison Keillor whimsy for the quirks of one’s small-town home life.
“Guy Maddin . . . house painter” is the protagonist of this particular childhood reverie. Returning to the family island after 30 years absence to slap a couple of coats of paint on the lighthouse that housed his father’s untoward medical experiments, the family business (an orphanage), and his mother, father and older sister “Sis”, Guy soon finds himself lost in a cascade of unfolding memories, confronting some long-buried truths about his family and himself in the process. (When the nature of Guy’s father’s work is revealed, I was reminded tangentially of the aims of the antagonist in Jeunet’s City of Lost Children, another grown-up fairy tale.) Each “chapter” runs about eight minutes calling to mind movie serials and “penny dreadful” publishing endeavors alike. Brand Upon the Brain! doesn’t so much build to a climax as it serves to reveal the ever-shifting moods of Guy, accented by Maddin’s purple-prosed voiceover musings, which are mirrored in some hilariously choice intertitles (“Dirt is Wrong!”, attributed to Guy’s mother as she taskmasters the orphans and smashes plates about simply for good measure.)
In a bonus feature discussing the film’s production, Maddin relates how the film’s jerky visual rhythms came about quite accidentally in the process of reviewing daily footage and attempting to zero in on particular frames. Because of the older film stock being used, the process for Guy and his editor became akin to rocking a car back and forth to ease out of a ditch or to my mind, like a scratchin’ DJ with a bad case of the hiccups as he lords over the turntables. The images unspool with a stutter kick that becomes as effective a representation of the power of the conjured past as anything that Maddin and Toles might have imagined on their own.
For me, this serves to recall an anecdote from Waiting for Twilight, in which Maddin related listening to the radio as a sole source of entertainment during the foreboding Winnipeg winters and how the signals would often waver in and out, leaving voices and songs broadcast through a deep layer of static and noise, always slightly detuned and humming. Brand Upon the Brain! evokes that directly in the device through which Guy and Sis’s mother talks to them, a fantastical gramophone with some faintly telepathic properties. The images of the past themselves are seen through a similar kind of haze, never quite in focus, always requiring some kind of adjustment.
I think Brand Upon the Brain! may have been best experienced in the live format where the entirety of the theatrical staging could be taken in along with the film itself. Maddin attempts a minor remedy of this with the ten-minute short Footsteps, which charts some of the steps the foley group of the same name took in order to create all the necessary sound effects for the live performance. In effect creating their own parallel movie, with a physicality and attention to ambient detail that is startling, their performance is “lost” in the home viewing experience. The key element missing for me from Brand Upon the Brain! that is contained within My Winnipeg and why I would consider that the more successful film is its more direct approach in establishing one’s childhood home (the place and the state of mind both) as something alien and foreign and ultimately lost, when viewed from the perspective of adulthood. Both films consider the flip side of the old maxim “You can’t go home again” which might be expressed as “You may only think that you were able to leave, in the first place.”
As fantastical a marvel of set production as the Maddin lighthouse is in Brand Upon the Brain!, it can’t compete with the director’s real-life locales, as discussed in My Winnipeg : the hockey arena where his father worked and where young Guy spent a large part of his childhood, building up myths about hometown and visiting players alike, and the beauty salon operated by his mother and aunt and the levels and rooms that branched out above behind and beyond the shop front encompassing all the rooms of the Maddin family home. And as erotic and steamy as are the lesbian couplings between Sis and Wendy Hale (a harp-playing crime-solving literary heroine clearly modeled on Nancy Drew), the ultimate resolution of that plotline seems slack and arbitrary.
Maddin’s films could be dismissed out of hand as oddities, curios worth a look for their style more than anything. But in his efforts to connect with cinema’s past, and with a personal past that he can best conjure up as a cinema of his soul, Maddin continues to mine a vein that almost no one else seems willing or able to stake a claim to. Some of those explorations may be more fruitful than others, but they are worthy of a pause and a glance through the peephole (or Keyhole, to reference Maddin’s most recent effort) their creator provides.