Tag Archives: Guy Maddin

WEIRD LOVE: THE WORLD’S TOP 10 ART-HOUSE INCEST MOVIES

Eugene Vasiliev provides 366 Weird Movies with his own translation/adaptation of his original article, which appeared in Russian here.

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10. Murderous Maids [Les blessures assassines] (2000) (France)

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Pierre Denis

PLOT: Two lustful maids (and sisters) turn tricks in the attic, until caught red-handed by their housemistress. They ignore her remonstrances and calls to virtue. In fact, the two “guilty” servants thrash their mistress and her daughter to death after gouging out their eyes.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Domestic workers’ struggle for equal rights is sometimes an uphill battle.

Scores of movies about incest feature absent fathers, mothers, delinquent daughters, and criminal sons. Religious families, orphaned children, widowed mothers, and the underclass form fertile ground for weird love. (A rare exception is a case of upper-class incest in Louis Malle‘s Murmur of the Heart, discussed below.)

Still from Murderous Maids (2000)

Murderous Maids is based on a real case that shocked France in 1933, when the Papin sisters brutally murdered their employers. The film shows us how things went so bad in a very long and tedious way up until the denouement. The ruthless exploitation of the poor orphans, fated to live their lives at someone’s beck and call in a noble house, stirs up indignation in the viewer’s heart. Throughout the movie the unfortunate “feminists” are forced to iron clothes or scrub toilets.

Amazingly, the unholy acts that “the midnight maidens” do look innocent at first. They just relax for a moment in a bizarre position after vacuuming. Then something goes wrong. What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. They wish for the ground to swallow them up, but it doesn’t. The sisters then try to wipe out reality,  press the “DELETE” button, by gouging out the eyes of their mistress.

There was a trial, a society scandal, and a dungeon. In 1941 the younger sister–Lea Papin—was set free. She died at the age of 89, outliving her employers by almost 70 years.

9. A Woman’s Way [Strella] (2009) (Greece)

DIRECTED BY: Panos H. Koutras

PLOT: After serving 14 years behind bars for the murder of a promiscuous woman, a Greek man suddenly realizes that he was deeply wrong. He comes to believe true virtue isn’t found in fasting and praying, but in incest, sodomy, and other types of taboo love.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Cinema is an art of illusion.

The great French film theorist Jean Epstein noted in his book “Bonjour, Cinema” back in 1921: “The close-up alters drama through the impression of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I extend my arm, I touch your intimacy… I count the eyelashes of this suffering.”[efn_note](Epstein, “Bonjour Cinema,” p. 104).[/efn_note].

Still from A Woman's Way (2009)

Extreme close-ups, zoom-ins and creepy music transform your perception of reality. Art can justify any sin, make black into white and Continue reading WEIRD LOVE: THE WORLD’S TOP 10 ART-HOUSE INCEST MOVIES

315. BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (2006)

AKA Brand Upon  the Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters

“[Children are] constantly constructing, and then reconstructing and amending and annexing a model of their cosmos, their universe. The real joyous intoxications and wonderment come from building faulty models, and then tearing them down and rebuilding. But you never completely tear down your model, I think you just keep adding on to your faulty model of the way the world works. All if us, by the time we’re grown-ups, have built this really elaborate model, which we feel is right now finally. But at its very foundation, at the very bottom, its very earliest days, there are these errors that run like a motherlode through the ensuing years.”–Guy Maddin, “97 Percent True”

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sullivan Brown, Gretchen Krich, Katherine E. Scharhon, Maya Lawson, Erik Steffen Maahs, (narration)

PLOT: “Guy Maddin,” who has not been home in thirty years, returns to Black Notch, the island on which he spent his childhood, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish: to give the family lighthouse/orphanage two good coats of paint. The trip sparks Guy’s memory; he recalls when celebrity teen detective Wendy Hale arrived on the island to investigate the strange holes found on the back of orphan’s heads. Guy develops a crush on the detective, but Hale goes undercover as her own brother, Chance, and seduces Guy’s sister, all while investigating his dictatorial mother and mad scientist father on her way to uncovering secrets that will tear the family apart.

BACKGROUND:

  • Brand Upon the Brain! was funded (for a reported $40,000) by a Seattle-based nonprofit organization on the condition that Maddin use a local Seattle cast and crew. The film was shot in nine days.
  • This is the middle entry in Maddin’s unofficial autobiographical trilogy, in which each film has a (different) protagonist named Guy Maddin. (The first was 2003’s Cowards Bend the Knee and the last was 2007’s My Winnipeg).
  • The script was written with Maddin’s frequent collaborator Geroge Toles, but Maddin regular (who usually appears as an actor) wrote the narration.
  • The idea of narration for a silent film was inspired by “explicators,” people who would be hired by theaters to explain visual and narrative concepts the audience might not get on their own during live screenings of silent films.
  • Originally staged as a live event with a small orchestra (including a “castrato”) and foley artists, different performances featured different guest narrators, including Isabella Rossellini (who does the definitive reading), Laurie Anderson, John Ashberry, , , Louis Negin, , Eli Wallach, and Maddin himself.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The lighthouse lamp, an all-seeing orb, sort of a rotating papier-mâché rendition of the Eye of Sauron. Several of Guy’s family members come to bad ends before it.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Rumanian womb birthmark; holes in orphan’s heads; the undressing gloves

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s another mad Maddin false autobiography! This time, the director imagines himself as the offspring of a mad scientist and yet another iteration of his domineering mother archetype, raised in a lighthouse among a band of orphans. Absurd but emotionally true memories are jumbled up, with a melange of archaic obsessions each taking their turn in the subconscious spotlight: teenage detectives, confused genders leading to confusing crushes, family members transfigured into zombies and vampires, with all of this lurid melodrama shot on blurry Super 8 and edited by a drunken, psychotic subconscious. Pure madness.


Original trailer for Brand Upon the Brain!

COMMENTS: “The past… into the past!” Memory is the theme of Continue reading 315. BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (2006)

234. THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

“When they were filled, he said unto his disciples, gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.”–John 6:12

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY:  Guy Maddin,

FEATURING: , Clara Furey, Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles, Caroline Dhavernas, Paul Ahmarani, Noel Burton, , , , Roy Dupuis

PLOT: A lumberjack inexplicably appears inside a doomed submarine. While searching for their captain one of the crew shares the wayward lumberjack’s story and several more strange tales. Before and after the main narrative (such as it is), a man lectures on how to take a bath.

the_forbidden_room_1

BACKGROUND:

  • While researching Hollywood’s lost films, Guy Maddin learned that approximately 80% of silent films made have been lost; many are preserved in title only. Maddin became obsessed with the idea that there were all these films he would never be able to see. This obsession turned into an ongoing four year long project producing re-imagined versions of these forgotten treasures. It began as an installation where Maddin and Johnson shot a movie a day in public. Some of what was shot became The Forbidden Room; the rest will become an interactive project that the NFB (National Film Board) will host called “Seances.”
  • The title The Forbidden Room is itself taken from a lost film from 1914.
  • Co-director Evan Johnson was a former student of Maddin’s who was originally hired simply to do research, but his contributions to the project became so significant that Maddin felt he deserved a co-director credit.
  • The opening and closing segments are based on the title of a lost film called “How to Take a Bath,” made by none other than Maniac‘s .
  • The Forbidden Room won 366 Weird Movies’ readers poll for Weirdest Movie and Weirdest Scene of 2015.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: An indelible image in The Forbidden Room? The entire film is a collage of indelible images. Candidates include lumberjack suddenly appearing in a submarine, a sauntering lobotomized Udo Kier ogling ladies’ derrieres, insurance-defrauding female skeletons in poisonous leotards.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Offal piling contest; talking blackened bananas; squid thief

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Forbidden Room is a collection of strange stories about bizarre characters weaved through a central plot involving a lumberjack attempting to rescue a kidnapped woman. The catalyst for this storytelling begins when the lumberjack suddenly appears on a submarine. Add a healthy dose of surreal, humorous imagery and some creative editing and shake well for a truly one-of-a-kind cocktail of weirdness.


Original trailer for The Forbidden Room

COMMENTS: The Forbidden Room opens with Louis Negin in a satin Continue reading 234. THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

GUY MADDIN’S TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988)

Guy Maddin’s first feature film, Tales From The Gimli Hospital (1988), had nearly as much impact for him as Eraserhead (1977) had for . Of course, Maddin is often compared to Lynch, which is as ridiculous as comparing Paul Klee to Max Ernst, ultimately failing to give due credit to either artist.  Make no mistake, Maddin and Lynch are indeed two of the most potent artists in the medium of film from the last fifty years. Late in life Arnold Schoenberg, the boogeyman of the first half of twentieth century music, was asked by an interviewer, “Are you aware that young composers are now utilizing your twelve-tone method?” The reply was pure Schoenberg: “But are they making music with it?” Lynch and Maddin succeed where others fail because they make music.

Maddin and Lynch belong to a small (unlike painting and music, film has never had a large school of revolutionaries) school of innovative avant-garde (or Surrealist, if one prefers sub-labels) filmmakers who are astutely aware of their aesthetic tradition.  No matter how elastic, their films maintain a sense of control, never veering into a slipshod experimentation for the sake of experimentation mode. After Schoenberg died, Pierre Boulez took up that mantle. Now, with Boulez gone, we really have seen the last of the avant-garde titans that remembered to continue “making music with it.” One can only hope that we will not soon be saying the same of Lynch, Maddin, , , or (yes, De Palma), but it is likely that we will. Innovation has been largely silenced in favor of the mainstream’s imitation diet. De Palma and Waters have unofficially retired. Jodorowsky, never a prolific artist, is finishing his first film in three years. Lynch has resurfaced after nearly a ten-year hibernation (although he did produce largely unseen shorts during that period). Alas, this is only to rehash “Twin Peaks” for television. After INLAND EMPIRE, this seems a step backward.

Maddin has been (and remains) the only active filmmaker of the listed lot. It is tempting to say that we cannot, or should not limit ourselves to a single work in Maddin’s oeuvre. Rather, we are rightly invited, or tempted, to absorb his entire body of work. Perhaps the best place to start is in the beginning, with Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988).

From the outset, Maddin establishes his obsessions: silent film, radio melodrama,  Mary Pickford’s Sparrows (1926), indigenous documentaries, , the s, and . Maddin also finds a kinship with the earliest, scratchy films of John Waters (i.e. 1969’s Mondo Trasho and 1970’s Multiple Maniacs 1970).

Still from Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988)Above all, Tales is lit and narrated like a visualization of an “Inner Sanctum” radio episode. It opens on the coastal village of Gimli, which is faced with a smallpox epidemic. An emergency makeshift hospital, inside of a barn, deals with the crisis. The film primarily focuses on the relationship between Einar the lonely () and Gunnar (Michael Gottli).

A boy and girl, dressed in their Sunday best, are ushered into the hospital to visit their ailing mother. Nurse Amma (Margaret-Anne MacLeod) tells the children to “let your mother listen to her music,” which sounds like 1940s big band playing on a 78 record with a stuck needle. The nurse distracts the children with a tale of “Einar the lonely and Snjofridur, a beautiful young girl who was dying. It all happened in a Gimli we no longer know.”

Oddly, it is awhile before we are introduced to either Einar or Snjofridur (Angela Heck). Rather we are treated to homoerotic images of shirtless men shaving each others’ nose, frolicking nymphs (who look as if they were yanked from ‘s Sunnyside), and flapper girls sleeping on the beach ( and seem to be the references here) while men wrestle. No doubt, the children will surely be relieved that it is a Gimli no longer known.

Iris into Einar, Gunnar, and the tale: Einar lives in a hut with hanging fish. With no explanation, he grabs one of the fish, squeezes its guts onto his skull, and combs his hair. Einar and Gunnar were also infected with small pox, which leaves them looking like a low budget, black and white version of ‘s Frankenstein monster.

Having cut his finger, Einar is admitted into the Gimli Hospital. There is a bit of business with an Al Jolson-like blackface and a puppet show entertaining Einar. He is next entertained by the hemorrhaging of a dying man. Like January snowflakes, feathers float through the ward. Einar is introduced to the amorous Gunnar, the rotund, bespectacled patient next to him who carves fish out of bark. Next up, a nurse (who looks like an anorexic Theda Bara) engages in sex with Gunnar. It’s another show for Einar, who watches their silhouettes through a bed sheet. Sexually frustrated, Einar eats the nurse’s hat.

Back in his bed, Einar spins the tale of he and Snjofridur and how he infected her with the mysterious epidemic. Shamefully, Einar rejected Snjofridur, which caused her to die of a broken heart. Gunnar also has a tale of the same maiden, revealing how he came upon her  grave, stole her burial tokens, and engaged in a bit of necrophilia with her corpse.

Foreshadowing the fate of the children’s mother, we are introduced to a pink sepia-hued, Busby Berkely-like heaven with singing, swimming, flapper mermaids.

Naturally, Einar is a tad upset with Gunnar’s confession and the two men wrestle it out to the gruesome finish. Cue bagpipes and an angelic mother ascending to a Wagnerian heaven.

Like most, if not all of Maddin’s films, Tales is a List Contender.

Next week, the sole remaining David Lynch feature film to be covered here: The Elephant Man (1980).