Brand Upon the Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters

Make no mistake about it, Canada's Guy Maddin is an enigma. We're talking about somebody who's main inspiration seems to be old Soviet newsreels (the Kino Pravda series,to be exact,by Dziga Vertov,the father of the newsreel). Watching 'Brand Upon The Brain' was very much like watching an old Kino Pravda (Cinema Truth,by the way,for those who don't speak Russian)newsreel while running a temperature about 110 degrees,while on a mixture of psychedelic mushrooms washed down with codeine based cough syrup (and I wouldn't want it any other way!). The plot (but who needs a plot in a film like this?) concerns a middle aged man who is by some strange twist of fate, named Guy Maddin, returns to the island he grew up as a young boy, and hasn't been back in over 30 years,to try & clean up the old lighthouse/orphanage he grew up in. All I can say is....man!....if I had as screwed up a childhood as Maddin had, I guess I would turn out making films as bizarre as Maddin's are (not that I'm saying that's bad,mind you---check out his short film 'Heart Of The World',which won an award some years back as the best experimental short at some film festival who's name I forget). Although the film features a cast of unknowns (on these shores at any rate),it benefits from a narrative by Isabella Rossilini (daughter of Ingrid Bergman & Roberto Rossilini),who is unfortunately never seen on screen. Honestly, you can do a lot worse than not seeing 'Brand Upon The Brain', but why would you want to?

I caught this yesterday at the NYFF and have to say that I think its Maddin's best since The Heart of the World. According to the Q&A he did after the screening and other info I read about the film in other places, he was given about five weeks to write the film (along with George Toles) and shot it in a little over a week. The breakneck speed of production time really shows in the imaginative and exuberant pace of the film. I won't mention too much of the plot -- any fan of other Guy Maddin films will know this would be futile to attempt -- but the character Guy revisits his island home, with its looming lighthouse, which was the site of a twisted orphanage run by his parents. Add a little remembrance of things past and Guy is overcome by an onslaught of memories of the crime, terror, lost loves, strange secrets, and cultish perversions of his youth involving his pan-optic raging mother and mad scientist father, as well as the strange and calamitous history of his childhood friend Neddie and his mysterious tics and spasms! And this is just the beginning. As with most of his work since Careful and Archangel (probably Maddin's twin masterpieces), Maddin employs a fast micro-edit style that dissolves any stable notion of continuity or classical narrative perspective. The result is a continually refreshing mix of a montage kino aesthetic (without the high theory) and an avant-gardist imagistic abstraction. This exhilarating style coupled with ever shifting melodramatic gusts gives an excellent picture of Maddin's recent work. And while the film admittedly cannot quite sustain the impact of its first twenty or twenty-five minutes, you cannot exactly find fault with a film as adventurous as this, which is attempting more (and doing it with less resources) almost any other film you will ever see. I can't imagine that anything could top the format it was presented in last night (live orchestra, foley artists, and Isabella Rosellini as the narrator) but I would urge anyone to go see it, in any circumstance, as soon as they can.

'Brand Upon the Brain' is the perfect example of the kind of intriguing art-film still taking place in remote sects around the world. The kind of film that will go unnoticed by the majority of the film-making and film-going world. The film is heavily stylized and all the more engaging for it. The cinematography is washed out, hazy, even intentionally blurred at times, but consistently breath taking and beautiful. The starched white's bleed into the blacks establishing a nostalgic, dream-like quality. Overall the film is consistent in looks with Guy Maddin's 2003 silent film 'Cowards Bend the Knee,' it is myriadly more comprehensible than 'Cowards,' while by no means stepping into any mainstream consciousness. The film, for all practical purposes, is silent, but is lead, throughout, by an animated Isabella Rossellini, who often narrates the action, at other times is the voice of the characters or the voice of their subconscious. The film also heavily relies on naturalistic noises, artificially produced as sound effects to sporadic events taking place. This treatment of sound, so well executed that Maddin's crew deserves an Oscar for best sound editing, contributes to the overall sense of a hazy dream state. Which is precisely where we join the main character of the film, Guy Maddin, as the film opens. He is traveling by canoe back to the island that he grew up on. His family and a host of orphans inhabited a large lighthouse on an ambiguous island. His mother is dying and needs him to repaint the lighthouse, with two coats, so that she may visit it before she dies and remember it how it was. As he paints he realizes he is painting over the past and becomes lost in memories of abandonment, sexual promiscuity and confusion, an over- bearing mother, a treacherous and loving sister, immoral scientific experimentation, and the hi-jinx of a child brother/sister detective team, among other acts of sexual experimentation, near incestuous contact, voodoo curses and paganism. To say the least the film is sprawling, but it is pulled together nicely through cyclical imagery and themes (though this film is out there, the cyclical nature of themes in films about families is pretty standard), but it works nonetheless. The editing of the film is up to par for Maddin. Jarring, painfully emotional and crass. Another aspect of this film that will likely be overlooked by the advertising teams whom decide what films people are going to go and see. The film is short, only clocking in at around an hour and a half, but it is fast paced and the kind of film that you walk out of knowing, whether you felt it was brilliant or not, that it was worth how ever much you had to pay for it, a unique experience that Hollywood will never be able to offer an audience and that the assimilating forces of independent film don't offer audiences often enough.

I really had no idea how I would react to this movie. I am fully aware of what Guy Maddin is capable of and that his films are anything but ordinary. My one fear coming into this movie was that the story wasn't going to be good enough to really grab hold of me. Within the first 10 or 15 minutes I was hooked. I have been very impressed with his technical skills thus far and this is no exception. The major difference here is that the story is so compelling. There are some flaws like the narration and I thought the ending could have been shorter, but overall I thought this was a fantastic production. It pays great homage to the silent era, in particular to some of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau's work. Like most Maddin films, this is certainly not for everyone. Only those who are aware of what he does or are extremely open to new cinema experiences should venture out and watch this one.

This is an undeniably powerful film, for all its unorthodoxy; but the only word I could really find to describe it, again and again, was "bizarre". Bizarre to such a degree that, in the demented world shown here, even the most impossible and incredible occurrences can be accepted and taken for granted as part of the plot -- after the first five minutes or so, with the atmosphere of mad-scientist exploitation schlock firmly established, the audience were apparently taking the film on its own terms, over-the-top intertitles, tendentious voice-over, feverish cutting and all. The laughs that followed were not for the fraught nature of the story-telling, but in response to the deliberately scripted jokes inserted in the scenario: the hamster simulating a scientist, the butter stuck on the wall, the corpse in a harp.

The picture is shot, intentionally, at extremely low quality, more akin to closed-circuit TV than Super-8 home movies, let alone the silver/midnight shimmer of the silent screen. (This indistinct resolution is perhaps just as well, since the imagery includes some material rather more explicit than I'm comfortable with.) The acting, on the other hand, is fully up to the standard of the silent era; a contemptuous turn of the head, a self-pitying look, the dawning of a sudden idea, all explicit without a word... and the director clearly understands how to tell a story without resorting to pantomime or wordy scripts. The intertitles are consciously overwrought and populated by an insane density of exclamation marks, but never unnecessary or over-long.

In fact, I felt that the picture would very probably have been better if shot entirely as a silent with synchronised effects; especially at the beginning, the voice-over becomes actively intrusive, breaking into the flow and repeating or pre-empting what is being equally and much more elegantly expressed by the use of imagery, background sound and a few economically-written title cards. The impression given is that the director was afraid of losing his audience if he started off with a purely silent-style presentation, and added a superfluous narrating track on top -- unfortunately, the voice-over is not quite redundant and cannot be omitted, since it conveys certain important pieces of information that are not otherwise apparent. The combination is awkward.

This jarring effect, however, may of course be intentional. Another recurrent 'tic' is the way that many intertitle screens are displayed twice, in a sort of visual stammer: once in an almost subliminal flash and then a second time, long enough for slow readers to take them in. I assume this is some kind of reference to the frequently reiterated theme that all things happen twice, or can be made to repeat themselves... or else is simply deployed for its disorienting effect! The visual style of the film, with its distressed footage, weird camera angles, and spasmodic cuts back to significant motifs, reminded me of experimental film I'd seen from the 1960s. The difference is that this picture engages the audience, creates meaningful characters and actually tells a coherent story with emotional content, wild and lurid or not. For all its parody and sheer weirdness it manages to succeed on a cinematic level rather than as an abstract avant-garde statement. And it manages to get us to swallow some quite incredible scenarios with a straight face. The director clearly has a gift for world-building and a feel for visual narrative: this isn't really my type of film, but if it were not a contradiction in terms I'd love to see him take on a subject in a more 'straight' silent style, with less visual damage (though I suspect this may be an aid to disguising an ultra-low budget), less heavy-breathing potential, and above all less frenetic pop-video cutting. As another reviewer has commented, Maddin can compose beautiful shots... it's just that we never get to see any of them for longer than a few seconds.

But I assume that such an ambition is unrealistic, as I imagine that it is his trademark presentation that gets the audience to swallow silent film at all these days.

"Brand Upon the Brain!" is a considerable achievement, and has already made sufficient stir in the United States for me to have picked it out by title from a strand of London Film Festival programming I wouldn't normally dream of attending (and, looking round at familiar faces in the auditorium, I may not have been the only one!) It isn't entirely to my taste, which is why I've knocked a point off the rating I would otherwise have given it, but as an experience it was otherwise definitely worth the entrance price.