Beyond the Multiplex

"Brand Upon the Brain!": Childhood seen as horror, depravity and magic (that is, as most of us see it)

Guy Maddin leans over the cafe table and says, "I know that even though we're speaking in New York right now, my mother is watching us from the top of a lighthouse in Winnipeg with a very high-powered telescope and a searchlight. She can read my thoughts. She can send me messages."

It's never easy to tell when Maddin, who looks like a bank manager or a high school teacher, but has made some of the strangest movies of recent decades, is pulling your leg. I don't know that he exactly is here (even though, as he admits, his hometown of Winnipeg is landlocked and bereft of lighthouses). His new film "Brand Upon the Brain!" is a fantastical, sometimes farcical, rendering of his own childhood as a horror movie, a detective story and a debauched melodrama, but in some sense he really means it.

Like most of Maddin's numerous films (the best-known might include "The Saddest Music in the World," "Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary" and "Tales From the Gimli Hospital"), "Brand Upon the Brain!" is a bizarre hybrid of 1920s silent film and experimental or avant-garde film. Shot in bleached-out, archaic-looking black-and-white (with occasional unexplained flashes of color), it features cornball intertitles, hambone acting and intentionally fake-sounding sound effects. Some of its images, however, are spliced together in a super-fast, post-MTV blur that Maddin says was driven by contemporary technology, and that he hopes will echo the processes of memory itself.

"I was tickled by this notion that I could present memory as a more neurological phenomenon," he tells me over coffee in New York. "When you fast-forward in Final Cut Pro, things just don't go faster, they skip like a stone over your footage. They touch down on an image for a few frames, and then skip a whole bunch of frames. When you're searching for something, you go past the image you want and you have to go back. You go past it again but not so far and then you have to go forward again. You end up scratching back and forth like a DJ, going back over your favorite images just the way you might recollect your favorite romantic or sexual or sports triumph. You go back and forth, fetishizing, slowing, stopping, freeze-framing, going in slow motion, doing an instant replay. I really found in this neurological skittishness, all this skipping and jumping, some analogy for the way we remember." (Click here to listen to a podcast of my interview with Maddin.)

Despite the overtly melodramatic plot of "Brand Upon the Brain!" Maddin insists that its origins lie in his real childhood. "Anyone who's remembering his or her childhood is at that moment a poet," he says. "They're launching themselves into something lyrical. They're making erroneous but metaphorical leaps into explaining things, re-creating what they've been through. I try to re-create the act of remembering in this movie. My childhood was full of terror and titillation, as proper childhoods are. There were incredibly horny periods. There were confusing periods, adventurous periods, mildewy periods."

Maddin claims that "96 percent" of the film accurately reflects his childhood experiences. When I suggest that he was not raised in a lighthouse (one that was also an orphanage) and that his father was not a mad scientist conducting nefarious midnight experiments, he replies, "OK, so you nailed the 4 percent that isn't true." Under pressure, he further admits that (unlike the character named Guy Maddin in the film) he was never friends with an intrepid brother-sister duo of harp-playing teen detectives. But the sinister sexual warfare between Guy's mother and sister in the film, he says, is drawn from life, including a mysterious incident when a pound of butter ends up stuck to the kitchen wall.

Despite the evident jokiness of some elements -- most notably the exclamation-mark-laden intertitles, which spoof the explanatory mode of silent film -- "Brand Upon the Brain!" is a surprisingly frightening and affecting film, launching itself from vertiginous peaks into shadowy hollows. To heighten what Maddin calls the "melodramatic hysteria" of the picture, he'll screen it in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago with an 11-piece live orchestra and a troupe of live sound-effects artists, along with a series of live narrators (to include Isabella Rossellini, Lou Reed, Crispin Glover and others). The result is giddy, exciting and hilarious, not quite like any artistic experience you've ever had.

"I have a sense of showmanship that I never suspected I had," Maddin says. "I've been a filmmaker for so long, and there's something in that word that makes it sound like I don't care if I entertain you. I haven't turned into P.T. Barnum -- I'm not going to do Odorama or Sensurround next -- but I enjoy feeling that I'm engaging the audience."

Maddin's rejection of nearly all the cinematic grammar of the last 70 years does not, he says, come from highfalutin aesthetic notions, but rather from delight. "You know, you're shocked at how modern expressionism feels when you first encounter it," he says. "Or how cool the fashions of the '20s look if you've never really seen them before. They just feel so modern! This stuff just never smells like mothballs to me. When I look back on the early days of cinema, it's like looking back at my own childhood. I just see the wonderment that all its pioneers must have created and felt.

Besides, Maddin continues, there are lots of other filmmakers content to display the vocabulary units of mainstream film. "I don't know, I'm not exactly a polished technician," he says. "I'm not the best at any one thing. I'm not necessarily good at any one thing. I've somehow managed to carve out a niche where I can operate pretty well. I'm happy there, and I still have plenty to say. As a filmmaker it didn't always matter if people were listening. But as a showman, dammit, those suckers are going to come in and I'm gonna take their money!"

"Brand Upon the Brain!" is playing through May 15 at the Village East Cinema in New York, with live narrators, Foley artists and orchestra. It will play May 18-20 at the Music Box in Chicago and June 8-10 at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. (Normal theatrical release, without accompaniment, will follow.)

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