SELECTED SHORTS VI - CRITERION CHANNEL

With Filmstruck shutting down, I thought I’d squeeze in one last shorts column. If there is a way to resurrect it at a later date, naturally, I will, but without the Criterion Channel, the label doesn’t really have any other venue to showcase random short films--I guess unless I just watch ones that are bonus features on their discs, reviewing them separately from the main feature. I’m sad to see Filmstruck go. It was fun while it lasted. While I imagine that the Criterion Channel will get resurrected again, hopefully with the same level of curation, I doubt we will get another one-two punch of also having the added bonus of the Turner Classics library.

You can read the previous columns here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

My Josephine (2003; USA; 7 minutes): Moonlight-director Barry Jenkins creates a collage-like narrative about two Arab immigrants running a laundromat. The man is in love with the woman, whom he compares to Napoleon’s first wife, and he ponders the nature of devotion, longing, and assimilation. It all works on a symbolic level, expressing their joint--and disjointed--experience through suggestion and metaphor, and yet is also effective as simple drama.

Bath House (2014; Sweden 15 minutes): I’ve reviewed a couple of films by Niki Lindroth von Bahr in previous installments, but this is by far the one with the most coherent plot. Featuring the director’s usual stop-motion style, it portrays a public pool where several animal characters intersect: the horse who is working at the bath house, a gay feline couple who go their to swim, and a trio of bunnies looking to rob the place. Things go wrong for each outing, leaving all six critters stranded on the street, unable to swim, as the pool itself starts to disintegrate.

Less surreal and abstract than Tord and Tord or The Burden, Bath House manages a quiet humanity, finding intrigue in everyday life, suggesting individual conflict through tiny actions. It’s also charming to look at.

Incident By A Bank (2010; Sweden; 13 minutes): This short by Ruben Olstund, the director of Force Majeure and The Square, is an impressive piece of film choreography. Shot in one continuous take, it captures two inept bank robbers trying to pull a heist, but from the vantage of a non-participatory observer. Remaining outside the bank, the camera probes the street, looking for action and reaction, as bystanders comment on the events, jump into the fray, or even move through the scene oblivious to what is really going on. It’s all rather fascinating both in execution and in drama, putting us in the position to judge the voyeurs who do nothing--while literally doing nothing ourselves.

The Horse in Focus (1956; Sweden; 17 minutes): Staying in Sweden to dip into the Criterion 100 Years of Olympic Films collection, this colorful documentary is both quaint and erudite, kind of exactly the sort of thing you imagined a couple of years back when Mitt Romney was made fun of for participating in “dressage.”

The star here is the commentator rather than the performers, with his clear bias for his home country and flashes of dry wit, tossing zingers at riders when they make errors. There is little suspense in the proceedings, particularly as much is left on the cutting room floor and often the commentary jumps ahead to tell us what happens next. But what makes The Horse in Focus interesting is how it approaches the athletes, with neither the horse nor the rider really given any prime attention. Rather, they are a unit, rising and falling, quite literally, together.

An Act of Love (2018; Australia; 11 minutes): Writer/director Lucy Knox packs a lot into a very short time. A pair of identical twin black girls has their afternoon out at the mall swerve from light-hearted fun to a deep interpersonal drama, testing their sibling bond. When a capricious older boy decides to separate them by turning his flirtatious attention on one sister, leaving the other behind, it stirs up a variety of conflicting emotions in both girls, ultimately requiring a drastic measure of solidarity to repair the damage. In all of this lingers questions of identity and an outcry against the extensive damage of casual racism and misogyny. Knox’s narrative is minimal, but her meaning complex.

Night Mayor (2009; Canada; 14 minutes): The auteur Guy Maddin is up to his usual visual tricks in this black-and-white film evoking 1930s sci-fi and horror. A Croatian immigrant sets out to convert the aurora borealis into music, but his efforts succeed far beyond his imagination, going beyond simple melody and instead broadcasting evocative images across Canada’s phone lines. Though he believes he has tapped into something that shows his fellow Canadians glimpses of themselves and their own national character, there is an underlying menace to his invention, particularly in how he exploits his family.

Night Mayor is an evocative mood piece, with Jason Staczek’s avant-garde music doing a lot of heavy lifting to make the titular pun a cinematic reality. (Say it out loud a couple of times, you’ll get it.)

Home (2016; England; 20 minutes): Is there more going on here than I am seeing? From what I can surmise, Daniel Mulloy is executing a simple reversal technique, showing us the struggle of European refugees by making the focus a middle-class British family trying to get through a war zone. Or is it that they are getting into one, rather than escaping to safety? No matter, the approach is so straightforward, Home is wholly ineffective. It only succeeds in shining a light on the actuality of white privilege: if you need to recognize the skin and accent as similar to your own in order to empathize with such tragic situations, then you’re as shallow as this film.

Swallowed (2016; USA; 17 minutes): Lily Baldwin pulls triple duty here as writer, director, and star, creating for herself a trippy yet ultimately baffling horror film. Centering on a young mother who begins to have bizarre hallucinations while breastfeeding her child, this short quickly descends into a lot of surreal nonsense, a couple of special effects away from being body horror, but never quite settling into any clear realm of meaning. My guess was that this had something to do with food anxieties, particularly that of women, who are expected to not just give of their bodies, but in more traditional (read: outdated) scenarios, to also cook for everyone. In that, Swallowed finds little victory. Baldwin’s perception of reactions others have to her food--dancing, writhing, convulsing--look like parodies of cliché acting exercises. “Pick an animal and pretend to be that animal vomiting.” Swallowed is like someone saw the last reels of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and failed to realize he spent a good 45 minutes setting everything up.

Reading the official description of the film, though, it appears that Swallowed is not about any of that, but more about the feelings its main character tamps down, Marge Simpson-style, in order to maintain a brave face. More telling than even that, however, is the fact that the screenplay was based on someone’s dream, proving once again that dreams are boring when they aren’t (a) either contrived to fit into some narrative and thus don’t reflect real dreams at all (see 99% of all movies with dream sequences) or (b) lacking the personal interest that allows one to either be fascinated by what they don’t understand or somehow decode it. Thinking about it, though, the only thing that might be worse than watching Swallowed would be listening to the dreamer/director try to explain it. Whatever the code, continue to keep it to yourself.

MY WINNIPEG (Blu-ray) - #741

Guy Maddin has always been a filmmaker torn between his nostalgia for old cinema and his forward-thinking filmmaking techniques. His appropriation of antiquated styles in movies like Brand Upon the Brain! [review] and The Saddest Music in the World were clever allusions, throwbacks clearly made using current technology with a progressive and irreverent approach to narrative. Something has always driven the Canadian director to reach back and pull the past into the here and now.

In My Winnipeg, his 2007 film, a self-described "docu-fantasia," the past Maddin digs into is his own. As the name might suggest, My Winnipeg is a tribute to the city, his city, his hometown--the Canadian burg that is said to be the geographical center of North America. It is also a tribute to his mother, whom he brings alive via re-enactments of events from his childhood. He considers her influence, and re-examines difficult moments, and, as his narration tells us, even drags her into the experiment, eager to see what she will learn through this trip down memory lane.

Except, of course, he doesn't really, because that's not his actual mom on the screen, but instead an actress named Ann Savage--a fact he cheekily withholds even as he informs us that all the versions we see of him and his brothers and sister as kids are just stand-ins. It's all part of the dreamscape he creates from the get-go, establishing a surreal version of history that he inserts himself into, teasing the audience with the strange lore of the place where he grew up. Horses frozen in an ice storm, Russian hockey players, labor strikes, trees growing in the middle of the street--these are all meant to be a part of the myth and legends of Winnipeg. But how much of it is true? Does it matter?

Of course not. We are told right there in the title. This is Guy Maddin's Winnipeg, his fanciful recreation of the places that informed who he is. There is never any question that he is an unreliable narrator--the movie is framed by his flight from the city, his attempt to get away, but we know he has no intention of leaving, he loves it all--and it's the lies he chooses to tell that inform our true opinion of the man and his origins. These fictions he creates, these myths he makes, they are a tribute to all the things he says they are, but they are also a tribute to his real love: storytelling. The kind of storytelling that goes on in a small community, the kind of fibs a child imagines to make the world around him seem more interesting, and the kind of daydreams that really do break the Guy Maddins of the world out of their humble beginnings and turns them into internationally renowned motion picture directors.

It's fun and intriguing and just generally delightful to watch. My Winnipeg is an autobiography unburdened by reality or truth, and thus far more emotionally honest and revealing than most tracts that try to tell it like it "really is."

For technical specs and special features, see the full article at DVDTalk.com.

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! - #440

Guy Maddin's distinctive, stylized riffs on antiquated film processes are an acquired taste that I was unable to fully acquire in my earlier samplings of his work. I found the Canadian director's films to be more interesting ideologically than they were as viewing. His style of stressing his film and shooting through edge-warping irises felt to me like pretentious shortcuts rather than legitimate tools of his craft, the flashy pictures put out in front of empty stories to keep us from noticing the man behind the curtain had no clothes. (Such mixed metaphors would not be out of place in Maddin's Cuisinart world, either.) This has all changed now that I've seen Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), newly released by Criterion.

Whether Brand Upon the Brain! is merely the entry point I have been waiting for to grant me access to the Guy Maddin aesthetic or whether it's the long-awaited blossoming of a filmmaker struggling to establish his own style is something I cannot address until I eventually backtrack and pick up the pieces I missed. Regardless, it definitely appears to be a career high, an artistic effort where the artist has found the vehicle he has always longed for and the perfect means by which to execute it. Shot like a silent film, Brand Upon the Brain! is an exercise in pseudo-autobiography, its fractured editing style meant to reflect the fractured memory that is emerging from Maddin's subconscious. Broken into twelve chapters (plus one interlude) and featuring intertitles that appear in choppy fragments, Brand Upon the Brain! plays like it's being beamed in from a distant communications tower, the signal stretched thin, only being picked up in pieces. It's both disjointed and totally linear, like a dream. Or a tale recounted by a sporadic amnesiac.

The story begins with Guy Maddin (played by Erik Steffen Maahs) returning to the island of his childhood, sent on an errand by his long-estranged Mother to fix the place up in anticipation of her return. The Maddin family lived in a lighthouse that also served as an orphanage where young Guy (Sullivan Brown) and his Sis (Maya Lawson) grew up with the children in their Mother's care while their Father (Todd Jefferson Moore) conducted strange experiments in his lab. Once there, Guy begins to paint the lighthouse white, as if whitewashing his own troubled past, and with each brushstroke, he falls deeper into memory until the audience becomes privy to everything that happened there.

Maddin is clearly an unreliable narrator of his own life, sprucing up his remembrances by refracting them through a prism of old movies and a bygone pop culture of child detectives and Hal Roach comedies. As artistic reference points, one can spot Peter Pan's lost boys, classic Hollywood horror movies, and European erotica. The Maddin island is eventually invaded by the Lighthouse Kids, a world famous investigative brother and sister team that suspects foul play in the unexplained deaths of several orphans from the island. Each child was found with a mysterious mark on the back of his or her head, like someone was burrowing into their brain. Except, even the Lighthouse Kids are not what they seem, as only one of them (played by Katherine E. Scharhon) has come to the island. First she appears in her true guise as Wendy, whom Guy becomes smitten with, but then Wendy dresses up as her brother Chance and begins to have an affair with Sis. Guy is still attracted to Chance/Wendy, but he doesn't know why.

There is much that Guy doesn't understand about the island beyond his budding sexuality. Much of the thematic thrust of Brand Upon the Brain! is uncovering how the child became aware of awful truths. Throughout the film, Guy often faints, unable to process everything he is witnessing, like a victim of abuse blocking out that which is too painful to remember. Metaphorically, we are seeing a mad scientist father who ignores all else in pursuit of his work, a rebellious sister, and a mother who envies the youth she sees in her daughter and yearns to take it from her. Mother is played by four actresses, all representing different ages--Gretchen Krich as the properly aged woman, Clara Grace Svenson and Cathleen O'Malley as de-aged incarnations, and Susan Corzatte as the “present” day older woman. In the horror/sci-fi tropes, Mother and Father are quite literally feeding on these children, and there are also signs of incest, of Mother molesting the young Guy and maybe even Sis. Likewise, Mother does not approve of her children embracing sexuality beyond her, and part of the grown-up Guy's growth in the modern day framing sequence is dealing with what that sexuality may be. The “brand” upon the brain is not just referring to the leaching holes, but the psychological damage left by one's upbringing.

Amidst this swirling narrative--told through voiceover and music, as well as the silent-film intertitles--Maddin creates a deliriously creative world. Father cooks up many amazing gadgets in his lab, including bizarre, almost steampunk-style communicators that carry distorted messages between the family members, including haunting instructions from times past. The top of the lighthouse is like the bridge of the spaceship in a 1950s B-grade sci-fi picture, and Mother watches from on-high like a Disney villainess, her guidance leading her children astray rather than bringing them safely home. Maddin and director of photography Benjamin Kasulke use black-and-white for all of its nostalgic purposes, to invoke the happy and the sad, the good ol' days and the not-so-good today.

Brand Upon the Brain! is demented and demanding, but as an expression of one man trying to uncover the imprint of past experience on his psyche, it's positively exhilarating.

Viewers of Brand Upon the Brain! have a choice of seven different stereo soundtracks to choose from. Three of these are studio recordings, and four of them are live recordings captured during the national tour Guy Maddin took the film on, performing the audio live with an orchestra, Foley artists, a castrato, and using different narrators in different cities. The choice you make will mainly change the narrator, though there are some noticeable differences in the soundtrack with the live performances, most obviously in a different quality to the Foley sound effects and the replacement of the prerecorded boys choir with the solo castrato (the songs are in chapters 11 and 13 on the DVD and worth toggling over to hear the live singing). The possible narrators are Louis Negin (a regular Maddin collaborator and the actor who played Truman Capote in 54) and Guy Maddin himself in the studio; professional weirdo Crispin Glover, poet John Ashbery, musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and legendary actor Eli Wallach live; and showing up twice, the traditional and preferred narrator, Isabella Rossellini, doing double duty in the studio and in the live arena.

If I had to choose, I'd choose one of the female narrators over the males, as the gender switch not only fits some of the thematic concerns of Brand Upon the Brain!, but it also creates an interesting disconnect, particularly in the first-person passages. I changed the narrator with each chapter break when I watched the movie, and it made for a rather fascinating experience. Of all the tracks, the only one I didn't really care for was John Ashbery's, whose speaking style was too stilted and distracting, not fitting with the flow of the film itself.

In addition to the sound options, there are multiple bonus features on the DVD itself, including a theatrical trailer and one deleted scene. The deleted scene runs approximately six minutes and it details a climactic showdown between Sis and the character Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska), her very masculine teenage counterpart.

97 Percent True is a new 50-minute documentary examining the unique production. It charts the evolution of Maddin's art and what has influenced him before transitioning into the unique nature of how this film came about, including a rushed development and shooting process, the post-production period, and decoding some of the autobiographical aspects of the movie. Of interest are the color photographs and behind-the-scenes footage of the Brand sets, as well as other narrators from the tour, like Udo Kier and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Interviewed for the movie are Maddin, Kasulke, co-writer George Toles, editor John Gurdebeke, and composer Jason Staczek, among others.

The last of the extras are two new short films made by Guy Maddin exclusively for this DVD and which spotlight certain members of the production team in Maddin's inimitable way. It's My Mother's Birthday Today is a surreal, five-minute portrait of Dov Houle, a.k.a. the Manitoba Meadowlark, the castrato who performed the songs on the live tour. The nine-minute Footsteps shows the Foley team at work, with some humorous embellishments.

Even if you've been suspicious of Guy Maddin's bizarre point of view before, toss out any worry when it comes to Brand Upon the Brain! - Criterion Collection. It's a delicious malformation of an autobiography, playing with movie iconography and childhood nostalgia in order to examine the seminal experiences that indelibly changed the auteur's psyche. Shot like a silent movie, with multiple versions of the score and narrators to choose from, this crazy hybrid of melodrama, sci-fi, and horror excites more than it confounds, but even the confounding is exciting in Maddin's delirious world. Complete with new short films and a decoder-ring documentary, mark another in the win category for Criterion.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.