The Heart of the World

The first time I saw this movie end, I knew I had to immediately watch it again. It moves so fast that you only get tantalizing hints of what actually happens with the first viewing, so you want to watch it again and again. The cinematography is nothing short of amazing, with homages to film greats and displaying visionary originality that earned it a top spot in so many critic's Top 10's.

Everything about this film, from the grainy textures to the the set and costumes, reflects Maddin's unstoppable freight train of weird and cool. Strong casting choices also made the movie much more than your average short, proving that five and a half minutes is plenty of time to tell an intricate and beautiful story. This will be a hard one to knock out of MY Top 5. Watch, rinse, repeat.

Fans of Guy Maddin should check out this new short film. If you thought his previous short film Odilon Redon was an excellent film, The Heart Of The World tops it.

The pacing is frantic, the storyline is the classic love triangle that Guy loves working with, the setting is heavily influenced by Soviet imagery. Even the editing style is very similar to that of Eisenstein.

What also makes this film work very well is the accompanying Soviet music entitled Time, Forward.

Whereas Guy's recent longer narratives have failed (The Hands of Ida, and Twilight Of The Ice Nymphs), his shorts films just keep getting better and better.

Few weeks ago I wrote about the last year's biggest and "quietest" black and white silent movie-surprise "The Artist" - "the most charming, original and unexpected" movie of 2011. It is true about the last year but for me, The most original, joyful, and truly unexpected film-homage to the silent era since few days ago has become the six minutes long stunner "the Heart of the World" (2000) from the Canadian auteur, Guy Maddin, which he wrote and made for 2000 Toronto Film Festival. "The Heart of the World" has been named by many critics the best Canadian short film. Watching it for the first time, it was the experience that I can only compare to watching few years ago for the first time Dali's -Buñuel's' "Un Chien Andalou"/"The Andalusian Dog" and Chris Marker's La Jetee/The Pier. All three short films left the long lasting impression and became my favorites.

Since the first time, I've already watched "the Heart of the World", perhaps dozens of times. Each time the beating of its "Kino"-heart made my heart pump the blood faster. I am not exaggerating. The energy and rhythm of the images changing rapidly and creatively to the innovative, magnificent score by the Soviet composer Georgiy Sviridov "Time Forward", have some hypnotizing power of physical and emotional impacts.

This film which took only five days to finish is a wonderful homage, dedication to, summation, and the parody of many kinds of early filmmaking. First, should be mentioned the French visionary, and the "alchemist of light" Georges Méliès whose legendary "A Trip to the Moon" (1902) made Gay Maddin forever fell in love with the old movies from the youth of the cinema. Maddin also found deeply symbolic that his and Méliès ' initials (GM) are the same, and it was one of the reasons for Maddin to have chosen his way in creating uniquely complex yet entertaining and deliciously weird films using the old techniques thus bringing together the past and presence of film medium.

Maddin's interest to the early Russian silent filmmaking, specifically, the propaganda films from the early twenties, the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Yakov Protazanov, and Dzega Vertov is also on the full display in "The Heart of the World". I recognized the shots reminding me of Battleship Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, and Aelita. But there is more; for example, the German expressionism - Metropolis by Fritz Lang and without doubt Luis Bunuel whom Maddin names as his prime inspiration, especially the early surrealistic gem, Golden Age. The final of "The Heart... is pure Ingmar Bergman's Persona, with the shot of the cameraman behind the camera and then the sound of camera running while the film is over and the screen turns black.

Only six minutes long, the little film pays tribute to the very popular in the past science fiction genre with a brilliant if slightly mad scientist as the main character. It also tells the complete story of love, passion, lust, greed, making the wrong choices and willingness to self-sacrifice for the benefits of the humankind. Yes, it is all here, and it ends with the fascinating statement from its creator that "Kino" (cinema) is the new better heart of the world. This is the message from the true film lover-director to the film lovers everywhere in the world.

And you know what? I am going to watch it again right now.

There aren't many artists who are also filmmakers. I suppose part of the problem is that there just aren't that many true artists, never were. I'm talking about people who know the limits of the world, have the tools and commitment to go there and gather magical shards, then come back and use them to cut my tethers.

I'm talking about neither skillful entertainment nor novel decorators of ordinary ideas.

And there are vastly fewer artists making films. Real artists, real films. I have three living that I particularly value: Medem, Wong, Greenaway. But Greenaway is off experimenting in other media at the moment and may be lost, his two greatest collaborators gone and interest in the drugs of narrative waning. I may replace him with Maddin.

It isn't just that the man has an incredible facility with a broader cinematic vocabulary than others. Its that he is able to connect that intuitively to deeper adventures in being and the internal stays that keep our emotional skin from collapsing.

Now to my mind, there's a world of difference between mastering the short form in film — which this is — and the long form. The long form is required for soulchange. It just takes that long for our minds to encircle themselves to strangle the unwanted. But holy cow, what a short form project this is. Since this, I know only two Maddin projects: "Saddest" and "Dracula," and each of them are something I would get my best friend out of bed and travel across the state to see.

This probably won't stick because it is so brief. But it is such rush! Every element in it has either no floor or sits on poles so high you can't see down. His stories are all similar, but no matter because they are irrational, overloaded with contradiction, self-destructive and yet cartoonish. They are — like his images — apparently borrowed from the past and simply pasted, like a child's assembly of magazine photos.

But nothing is borrowed, really. All his ethers are wholly called from his own dreams and merely and loosely wear somewhat familiar costumes.

The main deal here is conflict between a man who is a mortician/military politician (with a penis-cannon) and his brother, an actor who plays Christ deeply enough to convince himself. The two vie for sex with the planet — there's an amazing segment you won't forget where the woman-world in question impregnates herself, and bears... guess.

Cinema! Usually I comment on how clever the folding in a film is. In this case, the folding of the Christ-play is a weapon that is used against the woman in the name of wooing her. Just that one, that one notion is enough to advise you not to miss this.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Pure fantasia, a race to save the world from a fatal heart attack, juxtaposed against a love rivalry between two brothers - a mortician and an actor playing Christ - for the heart of a scientist studying the earth's core. Whether or not there's any kind of deeper interpretation is hard to tell, with the film racing along in an almost stream-of-consciousness approach, as expressionist cinema conventions are cast against elements of Soviet propaganda films in Maddin's typically exciting and an anachronistic style. Although vague and enigmatic, there is a definite story here; one that is relatively easy to follow if we pay close attention to the incredibly quick cuts and barrage of on-screen information, as references to Metropolis (1927) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) are combined with the director's intuitive sense of visual abstraction, humour and satire, whilst also featuring an almost heartfelt approach to its characters, even in such an exceedingly short-form.

At this point in time, I'm still something of novice to the films of Guy Maddin, though I have seen the vast majority of his short films and would rate them from good to excellent. Like the rest, The Heart of the World (2000) is worth watching more than once in order to pick up all of the information being offered to us in the continual bombardment of overwhelming and fascinating imagery and fragments of captivating narrative, whilst also standing as a simply astounding piece of film-making in the most basic sense. A masterful combination of wit, imagination, style, content and pure cinematic ability, in which the saviour of the world turns out to be none other than cinema itself.