WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Brand Upon the Brain

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast September 22, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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The great film historian Kevin Brownlow once said that everything that was ever to be achieved in film was done during the silent era.

Those words certainly resonated in what was by far the most creative and imaginative film shown at the Toronto Film Festival—the world premiere of Guy Maddin’s Brand Uopn the Brain. Shot in Super 8mm, the film is silent, and was presented with live orchestral accompaniment by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It is described as “equal parts childhood reminiscence, expressionist horror film, teen detective serial, and Grand Guignol reverie” and it is, in fact, all of those things.

Maddin has this in common with Fellini: he is not afraid to plumb his own psychologically maladjusted childhood, however fictionalized his representation of it might be. The protagonist of Brand Uopn the Brain is a young boy named Guy. His family runs an orphanage in a lighthouse which is on a remote island.

This family has a lot of psychological baggage. Mother is always checking on little guy, spying on him from the lighthouse with binoculars, and communicating with him with a strange device which Maddin dubs “the aerophone.” One of the brilliant things about Brand Uopn the Brain is how well Maddin sets up this Freudian-laden atmosphere, pregnant with phallic symbols, full of archaic devices, an atmosphere that’s almost physical, that you can smell.

Guy’s problems are compounded by his mother’s obsession with staying young, and by his own increasingly raging hormones.

All this, of course, is fodder for instant-analysis of Maddin’s own childhood. Born in Winnipeg, he grew up between his mother’s beauty shop and the Winnipeg arena, where his father managed the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team. His teenage brother Cameron killed himself on the grave of his recently deceased girlfriend, and Maddin’s father died suddenly a few years later.

We can well imagine these traumas are reflected in Maddin’s work. But what distinguishes Brand Uopn the Brain as well as Maddin’s films like Archangel, Saddest Music in the World, Careful and Tales from the Gimli Hospital is that despite his solid grounding in experimental cinema, he is also a consummate entertainer, an artist with a considerable sense of humor.

This is present in the very conceit of Brand Uopn the Brain. The film unspools in twelve scenes, like a silent serial. It is, of course, in black and white, and Maddin makes good use of silent film devices like iris shots. Even the acting is not naturalistic, but more visually demonstrative.

The Toronto Film Festival screening took place in the huge Elgin theatre. The wonderful musical score, written by Jason Staczek, was accompanied by live foley artists. Intertitles were accented by a live commentary spoken by Maddin actor Louis Negin, almost like a benshi in Japanese silent cinema. Toward the end of the film, a short chubby man in a cape stood up and sang in an impossibly beautiful soprano voice—he was a castrato.

The live performance in Toronto is to be repeated, with a different orchestra and staging, at the upcoming New York Film Festival.

Maddin said that he wanted to do a silent film with live music for a long time. He says he wanted to “really give the people what they used to get all the time in tne twenties, the real Grauman’s Chinese Theater experience! A lavish spectacle for the masses, only more lyrical than what we’re used to now.”

Interestingly, what emerges from this once-in-a-lifetime experience, is just how radical and subversive Maddin’s work can be. The rapid montage, the cluttered, decaying set design, the enhanced artifices have their foundations in experimental cinema, yet here they function to create a highly engaging dreamscape.

When all the elements of film are separated into image, music, narration, a conscious narrative arc, each becomes more visceral, revelatory. They re-inforce the magic that film can be.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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