(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Forbidden Room
Directed by: Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, photo: Benjamin Kasulke and Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron, Screenplay: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Robert Kotyk
If you go to see a Maddin movie unprepared, the likelihood is that you will either be completely seduced by his peculiar film language or annoy you. If you watch his narrative and slower movies like My Winnipeg (2000), you'll probably be fascinated. This is an inventive depth drilling in a myth of a place with fiction as a tool. But you are equally likely to find Maddin's world a pretentious scent – a soup of movie historical quotes and style exercises – if you watch other films of him. Perhaps especially his last, The Forbidden Room. The truth lies somewhere in between, but his latest film is neither easily digestible nor coherent in the traditional sense.
What is it about? Well, the action is pretty loose. First, there are several story lines, and secondly, the flow between scenes and single images Maddin is concerned with, not a "compelling story". But it is about a gang trapped in a submarine that cannot go to the surface due to explosives that will go into the air due to the changing air pressure. The submarine crew is then suddenly visited by a forest worker who enters a hatch, without further explanation. The newly arrived man, who was apparently just in the deepest forest in Schleswig-Holstein, is filtered into another story about a bunch of gentlemen trying to save a woman (Margot) from some creepy cave dwellers by the name the red wolves.
In another sequence we meet a guy, played by Udo Kier, who is obsessed with women's rumps, and who for that reason (?) Constantly wants to have parts of his brain removed (to get rid of the occupation?). And this is just the first half hour. There are, to put it mildly, many other threads to follow.
Fascinations. In other words, some "good story" is almost irrelevant here. Maddin's films – especially the last one – spring from the heart of film history and are nurtured, at times in a rather unstructured form, by the fantasies of film history. In particular, silent films and German expressionism are close to Maddin's cinematic soul, but we can also trace many strange sources of fascination such as aswan films – a type of Indonesian vampire drama – and all sorts of b- and c-films. Use of intermediate titles, but also the 30s / 40s / 50s infatuation with dramatic statements in the advertising for films – or the trailer, as we call it today. "You have never seen anything more horrifying!", "You will never sleep again!". That kind of thing.
Intermediate titles are also used actively, but more creatively than just as a substitute for speech: it becomes part of the director's narrative technique and an integral part of the film's form expression and scenography. Maddin's interest in this type of paratex is also expressed through the use of music, which is inspired by everything from old horror films to Bernard Herrmann – like film music (Herrmann made the music for Hitchcock, among others). Vertigo og Psycho). He also constantly adds various forms of wear and sonic patina to the soundscape, to give the image further resonance with the past.
Absurd. Some have called the film a parody – something it is partly in its absurd exaggerations and dream logic – but I would probably rather call it surreal on the verge of the hallucinatory, although some scenes are festive in their twists and turns. You can not help but laugh when the film's female protagonist Margot suddenly discovers that her lover has been transformed into two talking vampire bananas (!).
The quirks seem to have no end. For example, it is all framed by a kind of quasi-enlightenment film, which is in fact a delayed realization of a sexploitation short film by Dwain Esper, which is rewritten here – at Maddin's request – by the poet John Ashbury. Asbury, for its part, is inspired by the OULIPO poet Raymond Roussel in the rewriting process.
Haunted story. In many ways it is for mild to say that Maddin is inspired of film history. It is probably more correct to say that Maddin is possessed of it. Maybe we could say that he connects to the film history unconscious, for both thematically and stylistically, it is usually the logic of the dream, and not the regular (and thus recognizable) quote that shapes and controls his creations. This is true, more than ever, The Forbidden Room – a ravenous recycling or assembly of historical residual material.
I can not help but think that this is a film that becomes a cinematic haunted house or room for the return of something repressed or lost that existing film history has deliberately covered over or overlooked. To think of Maddin's latest film as a kind return of the repressed, a haunted tale, is not so stupid approach, it should turn out. For the film is part of a multi-faceted project by name Sessions, who are just trying to (re) create lost films or unrealized film projects.
Lost movies. "The most interesting films are those that either no longer exist or have not been made," says Maddin in an interview on stage after a screening of The Forbidden Room at the British Film Institute earlier this year. "To see them, I almost have to make them myself."
In many ways, it is too mild to say that Maddin is inspired by film history. It is probably more correct to say that Maddin is obsessed with it.
It's not the canon masterpiece's lost masterpiece, but the obscure gaps in film history Maddin dreams of: an unrealized film by Leni Riefenstahl based on a play by Heinrich von Kleist, Cambodian films destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, prose films and anti-Nazi films, films for and against Stalin, Jewish movies – and movies of people who never could make movies like the Indians of Canada and the United States.
In the same interview, Maddin compares his film history loss project with Austerlitz by WG Sebald. Like him, Maddin does not try to recover the object completely, but by walking around it, he claims. By circling the hole in the story, so to speak, he tries to circle the shape of the wallpaper.
Feverish ghost. The comparison with Sebald is interesting, but also makes us aware of the huge difference between the two. For where Sebald enters a film essayistic journey, where we can slowly participate in the return of the past that gradually allows us to sense the hole in the story he is slowly grinding around, Maddin is frantic in his circulation around the blind spots of history.
Sebald takes us on a mindful and thoughtful walk in the lost, is meditative and takes the time to build a space of fascination. Maddin dreams his feverish dreams with an intensity that turns the past into a feverish ghost that manically haunts us and creates a world of images that irritates as much as it fascinates.
Comparison. That said, is The Forbidden Room a completely unique experience, unlike anything else. I can not help but (to a certain extent) appreciate a director and a film that so to the degree allows itself eccentric inventions like here. After all, there is a huge love for the living image in question.
Maybe that's why we should take Maddin at his word and read Sebald in twos with his latest film? I think that would make us clearer about Maddin – and whether he annoys us or fascinates us. Or if it is both.
