The Forbidden Room dir. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson BY OLIVIA FREY
COPY-EDITED BY JOSHUA WIEBE “Down the rabbit hole, into molten dreams of cinematic atemporality” The inimitable cinema of Canadian film maverick Guy Maddin, as many cinephiles are well aware, is an ecstatic and labyrinthian love letter to the art form’s distant past. Emerging from the darkened theatre after a Maddin film revives that primordial sense of enchantment one might have felt coming out of a Méliès film in the 1920s, a time when the potential of cinema as visual magic, artifice, illusion, fantasy had only just sparked. For their latest film The Forbid-den Room, Guy Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson tap into a collective cinematic uncon-scious, digitally expanding the idiosyncratic director’s fetish of dead cinematic forms with ex-plosive colour, to resuscitate a miscellany of long-forgotten cinematic dreams. The defiantly uncommercial and low-budget oriented filmmaker again opts for evermore esoteric adventures in retrofitted experimentation. The initial inspiration for the film was a pair of museum installations in Paris and Montreal, in which each day Maddin and a small crew would shoot a complete short film before an eager audience. Under the name Hauntings the experience conjured “cinematic ghosts”, projecting the mystique of an archaic past. The resulting films are to be part of a future interactive web-site project. The script for each short was based on the title of an old film that was either lost or never made and that captured the whimsical imagination of the director. The replication of a once grand now vanished visual vocabulary indulges in a fetishistic viewing pleasure, a desire to bridge the fantasies of the past to the present while adopting excessive theatrics, absurdist comedy and gorgeous artifice, impermeable to any notions of reality. Inspired by the writings of French poet Raymond Roussel, Maddin and Johnson conceived the film’s structure the way Russian dolls are contained within one another; a subliminal maze that circles upon itself at the core of which lies a mysterious, forbidden room. Each segment navi-gates us through deeper layers of dream fabric drawn from assorted and obscure cinematic genres (such as the alpine picture or the Filipino vampire sub-genre) and ingeniously interwoven by way of a sublime, mythical suggestion: that all the hallucinations materializing before us are the psychic eruptions of a dreaming volcano.
This hyperactive epic begins and ends with an eerie, faux 1960s-style educational film called “How to take a Bath”, in which an old man in a gaudy silk bathrobe explains the most effective ways of bathing, with full demonstration included. The murky bathwater in which the bather stews becomes an overarching metaphor for the psychic whirlpool into which the camera plunges us, deep within a tenebrous ocean where floats a submarine. Inside it, a frantic submarine crew is in imminent danger of disaster—the captain has lost his mind, a case of “explosive jelly” has gone bad and will blow up if the sub tries to surface, and there is only two days of ox-ygen left. Luckily, the crew is able to extend their breathing time thanks to their all-pancake diet—they are able to consume the air bubbles contained in the flapjacks. The turmoil of the crew is interrupted by the inexplicable arrival of a handsome lumberjack named Cesare with a story to tell, about his efforts to rescue the fair Margot from a lecherous gang known as the Red Wolves. To infiltrate the gang, he must endure a series of trials that includes offal piling and bladder slapping contests. The absurd digressions of the plot take us from one cavernous, steamy space to the next and from confusion to confusion, continually punctuated by lurid silent film inter-titles. For her part, Margot soon escapes into her own dream world where she becomes an amnesiac flower girl, performs an erotically charged singing number in a nightclub and lands back on the island where the wolf-men attempt to sacrifice her to the volcano, pleading to it “(d)ream your molten dream of justice!”. At the heart of an exotic, primitive jungle teeming with improbable wildlife such as squid thieves and skeleton-women clad in poisonous leotards, a majestic volca-no rules over the wilderness. The thundering mountain comes to symbolize the dormant vaults of a cultural past in which myriads of highly flammable celluloid visions swarm and mutate against the curse of amnesia that often plagues Maddin’s protagonists. This sublime allegory of cinema as linked to the natural world is echoed in other films by Maddin, notably his apocalyp-tic short film The Heart of the World, a “subliminal melodrama’ set in a dystopian future as im-agined by a 1920s Soviet filmmaker. Amid the riots and orgies of a world whose very heart is failing, a beautiful scientist invents a device allowing her to gaze directly at and dive into the Earth’s core. Championing the spirit of cinema as the cure for the world’s extinction, Maddin celebrates the mythology of cinema, powerful enough to entrance the world back to life, like magic.