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.
The Forbidden Room bursts with vivid colour and sensuous digital artistry. Early in the film, brief images of magma appear, illustrating the turmoil within the volcano, its molten, glowing texture continuing to bubble under the image’s surface throughout the film. Its manically loop-ing editing, startling camera angles and constantly flickering light fragment our intake of meaning, creating a spasmodic rhythm in tune with a hazardous dream logic. Previous ventures into “colour mischief” as Maddin likes to call it, include the lusty and acidic fairytale romance Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), and the lurid replication of 1920s hand-tinted binary colour systems in Careful (1992). As in most of his films, Maddin frequently uses silent-film techniques of superimposition for oneiric effect, fashioning the frame as a fluid and nebulous space, where the movements of bodies and dreams coexist. But here faces and gestures suddenly burst apart, crumbling and disintegrating like decaying celluloid. Maddin has a special love for the physical materiality of film though, having mostly worked with grainy 16mm and 35 mm, has gradually veered to-wards digital and the new possibilities it affords. Whether working with film or digital formats, Maddin degrades his image to the fullest, lending a personal, handcrafted quality to his work (scratched negatives, Vaseline-smeared lenses, visible cuts and sprocketholes) while visualizing his archivist’s fetishism of cinematic relics. Maddin not only mimics silent era conventions, he renovates them to resuscitate an aesthetic that propelled ecstatic experimentation toward the surreal and materializing dream states. Desire always verges on the edge of despair in Maddin’s work, foregrounding these human passions as the essence of dreams. In ways comparable to films by Alejandro Jodorowsky or David Lynch, The Forbidden Room succeeds in translating to audiovisual dimensions the insanity born out of those emotional extremes. When Mathieu Amalric, playing a psychotic taxidermist, mur-ders his servant (Udo Kier) to trade places with his corpse, when a woman on a train shoots her own inner child or when a fake moustache bewitches a widow (Maria de Medeiros) into a dance with her dead husband’s ghost, dazzling colour is used to dramatize their spellbound psychic states. As inspiration for the film’s flamboyant colour palettes, Maddin cites the glossy Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk, where mise-enscène and luscious colour act as re-flections of the characters’ emotions.The sensationalist, tragicomic tone so typical of Maddin’s jet-black humour pervades the onslaught of surreally-disconnected narratives,
all dealing with themes of lust, shame and fetishism. The flickering, exclamatory inter-titles either jitter with devilish mockery or extravagant pathos at the fates of tormented characters. In contrast, Mad-din satirizes German Expressionism in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hydelike segment, about a man whose obsession with a bust of the double-faced Greek god Janus causes him to be haunted by his own doppelgänger. The stark black and white contrasts of light and shadow reflect internal division. Through stark double exposures, total colour saturation, veils, tinted smoke and surrealistic lighting, the image submerges perception in a pulsating, expressionistic mirage. Along with score snippets by Brahms, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky, hypnotic and otherworldly sonic treatments enhance the images’ strangeness. Although a bold, risk-taking experiment in perception, some viewers might find its excess gim-micky and its convoluted digressions tedious to take in for two hours. Maddin enthusiasts might resent the film as an overindulgent flaunting of the auteur’s mannerisms, lacking the humorous consistency and emotional depth of My Winnipeg or Tales from the Gimli Hospital. The recog-nizable all-star cast might disturb the usual otherworldly, anonymous distance felt in other films. But if apprehended for its experimental and aesthetic value, it is an exceptional film, its amorphous proportions inhabiting a strictly interior, irrational world. Maddin orchestrates a tumultuous welter of fragmented narratives exploring personal delusion, fears and secret pas-sions in favour of what Germaine Dulac defined as the avant-garde in the 1930s “the expression of things magnificently accomplishing the visual poem made up of human life instincts, playing with matter and the imponderable” (Dulac, The Avant Garde Cinema, 1932). In the film’s last moments Cesare and Margot open ‘The Book of Climaxes’ unleashing a swelling wave of flashing vignettes, knowingly flaunting the cinematic conventions and clichés that shape our fantasies. What emerges at last is the image of a massive brain floating on the ocean’s surface in the distance while a couple embraces, situating the mind as that omniscient force from which all creation proceeds. The Forbidden Room is a formal tour de force that plunges us down the rabbit hole of a hypothetical cinematic past and transports its visions to atemporal dimensions of folly and trance, via digital crafting. Trailer: http://theforbiddenroom-film.com