If a filmmaker could believably be called a magician, only one name would come to mind: Guy Maddin. The Canadian artist, who for almost three decades has been conjuring images from the depths of both his personal and the cinematic past — in his corpus, perhaps, one and the same — has been working on his most ambitious project to date: the live-film installation “Séances.” Derived from Maddin’s and collaborator Evan Johnson’s desire to bring films back from the dead, or give life to some that were never actually born, it is composed of footage, shot at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2012 and at the Phi Centre in Montreal in 2013, that re-creates lost movies from the silent era. The resulting short films will eventually come together on the Internet, where viewers will be able to switch from one to another at will, in any order, constructing their own cinematic séance.While waiting, we have “The Forbidden Room.” The work, which screens at the New York Film Festival on September 28 and opens at Film Forum in New York on October 7, is related to “Séances,” without the new-media interactivity. Maddin and Johnson used footage shot for that project but constructed and manipulated the various pieces to produce a whole new experience, a whole new work.Maddin spoke to ARTINFO about the genesis of “Séances,” its evolution into “The Forbidden Room,” and his relationship with the poet John Ashbury, who makes a vital, and very hilarious, contribution to Maddin’s latest work.How did the “Séances” project come about?It came from, I think, a flippant remark I made a couple of decades ago when I became obsessed with seeing hard-to-get movies and movies that turned out to be lost. There were some Abel Gance movies I wanted to see, and I wanted to see Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Mountain Eagle,” his first film. And I realized that they were not just unavailable on DVD or video but had been lost decades ago. I made a remark that, if I ever wanted to see them, I would have to make them myself. Now, that sounds like a really arrogant thing to say, because I’m no Murnau, I’m no Hitchcock. I’m not even Ed Wood, who had a few lost movies that I really wanted to see.Can you talk about the title, “Séances”?There is something about the word “séance,” which is used in French movie listings to indicate the time [of a showing]— you know, if you look up a movie time in France it will say séance: nineteen hundred hours. I was really struck by the fact that the French use the word “séance” for a movie screening and we in North America use the word “séance” for a paranormal visitation. I realized that the two things are the same. The word “séance,” it turns out, means “a seating.” In both cases, there is seating in the dark; in both cases a bunch of people gather together to see something that isn’t really there, a projection of something that once was. And in both cases, they really want to like, they want to be enchanted, they want to believe, they want to be taken away, they want to be taken in. Then the lights go on, and the people get up out of their seats and discuss among themselves how enchanted they were. And in both cases, there’s some sort of fraud or charlatan behind the whole thing, either a fake mystic or a director who is pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Even documentarians are frauds in so many ways. So it occurred to me to make contact with the spirits of lost films, these films of no known final resting place, these unhappy souls doomed to wander the landscape of film history unable to project themselves. I thought I could put a bunch of actors into trances and invite the spirit of a lost film to possess, compel them to act out a long forgotten plot and shoot them as a spirit photographer and make my own versions of these lost movies.Why bring the project to a museum initially instead of a movie theater?Well, I thought it up at around the time that I had started to make a few installations in museums and galleries, and just for practical motivation, I wanted to get my foot in the door there, get it in more. So I thought of shooting these things in public spaces, and the Centre Georges Pompidou accepted my suggestion to do so, the Phi Centre in Montreal the same thing. Now we’re just finishing editing them all, and they’re going to be uploaded into an NFB-hosted website that will enable anyone online to hold his own séances of lost films, his own spirit-confused movies from the afterlife.Are you planning to do anything else in a museum or gallery with the project?At one time we had discussed —because the NFB’s mandate is to do all kinds of pioneering work in interactivity and we were trying to figure out ways to make this really interactive —presenting the films as séances in galleries. It could still be done, but we’re finding that our favorite interactivity is binary: a film gets shown and somebody sits and watches it. There was talk at one point of me holding séances to project movies — feature-length movies even — as a kind of a mystic VJ or something. I think we’ve scrapped most of those plans. The project was ludicrously overambitious and included hundreds more shooting days. I’m glad in a way. It was disappointing when funding never fully materialized in the way I had hoped, but I’m also relieved to have my life back soon.How did the “Séances” project lead to “The Forbidden Room”?So many of my movies, no matter how good or bad, took unbelievable labor on the part of my distributors in various countries —really beating the bushes, kissing a lot of babies —to finally get them to people who might like them. It occurred to me that in the Internet age, which I suddenly found myself in the middle of, it might be interesting to do some Internet work. I really wanted to see how many people I could reach in a hurry on the Internet. I like making a connection to an audience. And if there is an audience to see your stuff, it will find you on the Internet. It won’t necessarily find you in the old analog ways. But as determined I was to get things out there on the Internet in this new way rather than the old way, I suddenly began to miss the idea that I was a feature filmmaker. So it’s convenient that I was able to raise more money for a feature film than I was for new media, even though new media was what got me started on the project. So we just thought of a way of making a feature-length version of a séance, and then when we were shooting all of these paranormal revisualizations of these lost films, we just figured out a way of fitting them all together to be satisfying to our concerns.Maybe I sound desperate when I describe it that way. I just didn’t want to disappear from the feature-film thing. It definitely wasn’t an afterthought. As a matter of fact, we quit working on the Internet project for about a year to edit the feature film. We’re only now getting back to finishing the Internet project.Did you need to get into a different frame of mind to work on the feature film as opposed to the Internet project, even though they derive from the same place?No, but you’re dealing with different producers, and you’re dealing with slightly different concerns. The Internet project actually has tons of programming issues, and the movies will look slightly different as well. We could really play with the séance metaphor [in the Internet project] with the weakening of signals from the afterlife; there can be all sorts of strange interferences that really make you think of all movies as having nothing but the most fragile existences. We keep perfecting our work guidelines, the way we think of metaphors. We’re just stumbling across more and more happy accidents. The happy accident has always been my most reliable collaborator. So suddenly we’re switching from a conventional film — as conventional as “The Forbidden Room” is — to Internet program design. We’re running into more happy accidents of the kind I could have never anticipated. I’ve just got crazy collaborators, in other words, more crazy happy accidents than ever before. But other than that it is still movie making.Evan Johnson was a collaborator on both “Séances” and “The Forbidden Room.” Can you talk about his role in both projects?He was once a student of mine at the University of Manitoba, back when he was 18. He’s 32 now. I hired him five years ago as a researcher on this project, and we just sat in the same room discovering and discussing things. Pretty soon he elevated himself above mere research into a full creative partner. We’re co-creators of the whole project, the Internet project. We formed ourselves into one creative entity. We were finishing each other’s sentences. He’s far more philosophically savvy and conceptual than I am. I’m more eccentric. But we have so much in common and really complement each other in many ways. While I might be the person yelling “action” and “cut” and looking through the camera, he’s still a director. He’s a creator and a screenwriter with me I’s like the old Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger thing. We just decided that we’re both directors.How did you meet John Ashbury? He wrote the piece that bookends “The Forbidden Room,” and you exhibited collages with him at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.I love having my name associated with his. But at least we are forever entwined on IMDb. I met him about 10 years ago through a mutual friend named Craig Burnett, who’s a curator in England, but a Canadian. I had heard reports of John Asbury sightings at various screenings of mine, and in one of his books of poetry he quoted a line from one of my movies. So I was really hot and bothered about this long-distance flirtation between the two of us. I began mentioning him as my favorite poet in interviews and things. Pretty soon in the grand marshland mating ritual, we got close enough where Craig e-introduced us, and we hit it off. We started writing lovely emails. I was already daydreaming about this project and asked him if he wanted to write for it. I gave him a big list of lost movies, and he promptly wrote the monologue from the lost Duane Esper film “How to Take a Bath,” from 1937. It was originally supposed to compare how a married women bathed with how an unmarried woman bathed — that was in the Esper original. But John took it in his own direction, thank God. I love it. It would have been nice to get him to do more, but he never charged for it. It was a free script. He told me at the time his two favorite actors are [The Amazing] Criswell and, maybe my own Criswell, Louis Negan. So it was no-brainer to get Louis to perform Ashbury’s “How to Take a Bath.”John Ashbury, when talking about his poem “The Studio,” encouraged the audience to enter and exit at their will. Do you encourage a similar viewing experience with “The Forbidden Room”?I don’t read my reviews that much, but Evan pointed out that a few people in favorable reviews have mentioned that if you find yourself lost or bored during the movie, don’t worry, something will change soon and you can pick it right back up. You can re-dilate your pupils or whatever and get back into it. Because on first exposure to the film, I don’t expect everyone to understand the structure. But, yeah, I would be thrilled if people were as open-minded as John asks his readers to be, for people to let movies just wash over them and take from them what they can. Of course, sometimes my movies infuriate people. But that’s a chance I’m willing to take to try to go someplace else. We’ll see. I hope my gamble pays off. A version of this interview appears in the October 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
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