“All I had to do was write something, direct it and show up,” Maddin remembers.
“So I thought, I could try to write something completely original or I could take this ready-made story that I’ve been brooding about for so many years, an inventory I’ve been holding against my family, and shape it into form.”
Now that so-called inventory, Brand Upon the Brain!, is having its European premiere at this week’s Berlin International Film Festival. And Maddin, who half-jokingly aspires to be “the Dostoevsky of cinema,” says it’s neither a surprise nor a concern that his relatives are outraged by some of the “honest portraits” he drew of them from his childhood.
“It felt great to go on a spree of self loathing and self pity – a little bit of both, which alternate nicely,” said Maddin from Winnipeg, where he was set to move into a new home this week. “My family and I will work it out later. Maybe at graveside or something like that.”
Coming off popular festival screenings in New York and Toronto, Brand takes Maddin back to the Berlinale for his second year in a row – and in the company of the same actress and friend, Isabella Rossellini, who starred in last year’s My Dad is 100 Years Old and who narrates this grainy, experimental black-and-white production about the “murk and chaos” of the director’s youth.
Blending traditional silent film techniques with theatrical elements, a live orchestra and a modern score, Brand was shot in just nine days. It feels that way, due to what Maddin calls “kinetic camera movement.”
“I was in a hurry. Everyone was. There’s much to be said for moving quickly, for (taking) the Jackson Pollock approach, and I think the energy level is there on the screen,” he said.
Indeed, a lot of things had to happen right for Maddin to pull this flick off. He commends the composer Jason Staczek, who he says essentially abandoned his family and “went into nocturnal fever, composing all night” for more than a month to write 100 minutes of music for the film.
Maddin saves his greatest praise, however, for the team of Toronto-based Foley artists, or sound effects people, whom he refers to as his “boredom insurance,” and without whom the project could not exist.
“The real delight,” Maddin says, “is seeing the Foley artists at work with their sound-making implements, bathtubs, celery, all sorts of crunchy, snappy things. Those guys are really mischievous and strange and they’ve been doing this for years: thinking of things that make sounds like things.Both the chemicals are quite affective on human problems because of which they are used by ED patients to treat Erectile Dysfunction in male. purchase of levitra The excessive work targets have become capable on line cialis in creating the disorders in the proportional measures of man’s body hormone. Among such natural substances are Saw Palmetto (an environment friendly natural DHT blocker), zinc and extract of pumpkin seeds (which prevents conversion of testosterone into estrogen in order cialis males, which plays the responsibility of preserving bone solidity. This herbal pill stimulates your pituitary gland and releases this hormone into our bloodstream viagra in dechechland when we sleep.
“The sound of rigor mortis (for example), of stiffened limbs being straightened out – it would probably sound best as dried pasta wrapped in a wet shammy and twisted. But they chose celery.”
So is this Freudian anti-memoir about a director’s puritanical mother and his mad-scientist father something the rest of us should care about watching? Or is it just “a little too self-obsessed… (featuring) a protagonist who everyone rotates around like planets,” as Maddin himself admits? Both, it seems.
“I think everybody’s life is interesting if observed properly,” Maddin reflects. “I keep thinking of Flannery O’Conner, the house-bound, chronically ill writer from the (American) South who, when asked if she felt handicapped as a writer who hadn’t travelled, said, `Anyone who has travelled through childhood has travelled enough to be a writer.’ I was emboldened by her.”
Translating that into Maddin’s own search for the “myths unfolding out of the murk and chaos” of his childhood, he adds:
“I’m just using myself as a self-flagellating narrative tool, holding up the more humiliating, ridiculous characteristics to show people that they’re just as ridiculous at times. I’m hoping people will recognize more of themselves in me.”
Brand Upon the Brain! will have a performance in the German capital, featuring a live orchestra, next Thursday at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
After that, Maddin will keep showing his “live film hybrid,” as the movie that he laughs “actually costs more to show than my first movie cost to make” will then travel to New York and later to Mexico City.
In the meantime Maddin has big plans for his week in Germany.
“I’m looking to marry a beautiful Berliner, or Swiss…. I just want to set up a rivalry between the Swiss and the Germans.”