Des trous dans la tête !

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?

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.

With the exception of a few brief seemingly random shots, Brand Upon the Brain! is shot (or made to appear in post-production to be shot) in grainy black and white. The look is reminiscent of David Lynch's Eraserhead, a classic that may have been an influence, though the style is quite different. Maddin's film uses much more frenetic editing techniques, particularly frequent cutting to create an abrasive subliminal effect from which the title appears to be derived.

I use the term 'abrasive' and for some people that might be a negative, but I found it effective. The film uses captions and along with a neo-silent-era visual design, it has the effect of a coherent experimental film with a bizarre horror narrative. A man, Guy, returns to the island orphanage of his parents after a thirty year absence, on the request of his dying mother. It turns out the parents were subjecting the orphans to some peculiar activities from which Guy escaped.

I found the design, high-contrast lighting and editing techniques effective in conveying a bizarre nightmare-type of story, a horror film that is not entirely original in narrative nor design, yet original in its presentation. I liked the voice-over narration by Isabelle Rosellini.

There are some very attractive characterisations and depictions of inoffensive perversity. Definitely worth a look.

Here's the problem: Maddin is an impressive filmmaker. He is important and has made at least two films that are important to me.

But he is not a very interesting person. So when he applies his mastery to making a personal film - a film essentially about his dreams and demons, it turns into something of a tragedy for the opportunity misspent.

This really is a wonderful film in the way it is put together. The whole team seems be closely attuned, with a central role played by the editor. The sound effects are astonishing - and this is a silent film. The references, duly abstracted, from past masterworks are copious and respectful.

The narrative structure is suitably complex with manifold overlapping metaphors. The problem is that what we actually get directly from him is boring. Sex and mothers matter; dreams are real; nothing recedes. But we knew that better and more deeply than he shows.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin's ecstatically perverse jaunt into childhood's protracted gestation period is a hypnotic murk-fest filled to the brim with Sturm und Drang neo-psychedelia. Guy (Erik Steffen Maahs) returns to his childhood homestead, a lighthouse to restore it with two coats of paint for an ailing mother. Outsized delirium takes over: ghoulish rituals, surreptitious experiments, demented ghosts, social vampires and other phantasms of psychosis of an overextended memory is underpinned by distinctly Freudian impulses turned into artistic statements. The miscegenation of silent-era aesthetics, a mosaic of encoded visual cues and Maddin's continued fascination with high theatricality punctuated with trippy pop iconography delivers a Gothic fever dream that remains etched in your mind, whether you like it or not.