Six years in the making, Guy Maddin’s “Seances” project, created in collaboration with the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, premiered last week as an installation at the Tribeca Film Festival, as part of its interactive Storyscapes program. The project is housed in a dark room, and a small audience is directed to enter and ushered to the front, standing above what resembles a digital Ouija Board. Images appear and disappear, and the viewers are instructed to use their fingers to choose different images and move them toward the center of the screen in any order they wish. Through this process, participants decide which film they’ll see, a film that, by creation, nobody else will ever see again.“Guy came to us expressly wanting to collide and mix narratives to create new narratives,” said National Film Board of Canada producer Alicia Smith. “We quickly figured out there would be near-infinite permutations, that it would be this living thing.”“Seances” was born out of films that don’t even exist. “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,” Maddin said in an interview with ARTINFO last year. “[I]f I ever wanted to see them, I would have to make them myself.” The pieces that would make up the various iterations of “Seances,” and which were also used for Maddin’s previous feature film, “The Forbidden Room” (2015), were shot at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2012 and at the Phi Centre in Montreal in 2013, live in front of viewers.At Tribeca, Maddin seemed pleased with how the project has turned out. “I was [initially] scared to look because I’ve just been thinking about it for so long,” he said. “I was scared it would be just a bunch of stuff, a bunch of images dealt randomly like a deck of cards. But they work in a way — maybe not for everyone, but there is a nice, dreamy, weird, fluid, at times gloopy and other times jagged poetry to it.”The version of the film I saw as part of the installation was transfixing, despite noise issues (there are too many interactive projects jammed into one small space, creating a loud hum that was often distracting). Thankfully, the project also exists as a comprehensive website, and it almost works better alone, with headphones. You get a more clear sense of the sound design, created by Galen Johnson, and the jarring transitions are more affecting.“Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” Maddin said. “But I like that there is the opportunity for people to get something they’re not likely to get anywhere else, that’s for sure.” I ask if the project’s success will cause him to move away from his previous film practice. “Heaven’s no!” he said, laughing.“Just a simple movie!” Evan Johnson added in mock horror.“It would be nice to write a script with one story in it instead of five hundred billion,” Maddin said. “It’s been a real thrill, after decades of being a faux-film pioneer, to be a genuine Internet pioneer,” he said jokingly. “Although the Internet is strewn with the carcasses of forgotten pioneers. There are doubtful to be many cairns to be erected in their memory.”
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