Art of the Obscure!

Perhaps filmmaker Guy Maddin’s name is more symbolic of the verb he offers his audiences. In some ways his work is thrilling – a sort of cineaste’s Christmas stocking filled with all manner of treats and delights – but in others, watching any of his films is a maddening exercise.

For example, any attempt to follow the plot or even keep track of the dramatis personae in his new film, The Forbidden Room, would be a fool’s challenge: impossible, especially with only one viewing. Repeat viewings are practically required if one is not ultimately compelled to do so, despite the eyestrain-inducing strangeness of what transpires on the silver screen. It’s a bewildering delight.

In fact, it’s nigh impossible to truly describe what The Forbidden Room, Maddin’s newest epic, is really about without having one present during the film. Think of it as a fever dream, complete with submarines, volcanoes, forest bandits, vampires, flapjacks, strange talking Cronenbergian lump creatures, blind blimp flyers, insomniacs, and an instructional video on how to take a bath. All that and more. Seriously.

That, and it’s all crammed into a style that beats you over the head with its reminiscence of the silent movies with their screen titles and orchestral accompaniment. The jittery cuts might make it tough for your eyes to focus or keep track of who’s doing what and where but the cinematography is so gorgeous that you can’t look away.

It goes without saying that this Guy is a genius, the sort of madman auteur who probably never did a Hollywood pitch in his life, nor should he have to. This is his art, and it’s something else.

The Forbidden Room, as it turns out, is much easier to digest when one realizes that it was kind of a cinematic experience. Maddin, along with co-director Evan Johnson, created the final piece as a series of smaller films, each a kind of re-enactment of another film from cinema’s early days but lost over the years due to the disintegration of the film stock or other causes. Maddin is well known for his penchant to bring the 1920s back into modern cinema and he never fails to disappoint.

Four-and-a-half years in the making, it started as an art installation wherein the filmmakers shot a movie a day in a public venue. The films were then compiled or cobbled together into this one long rambling nonsensical narrative. Take it as you will but it’s not likely to be like anything you’ve seen before. That is, unless, you are familiar with Maddin, of course.

Still, there’s a lot of pleasure to be derived in the visuals. It might be advisable to simply let it flow over your eyeballs and brain as best as you can. Any attempt to follow the characters or the storyline might result in premature insanity.

It probably goes without saying that Maddin’s work – his entire body of work actually – is visually rich and steeped in cinematic culture as anything that ever came out of Winnipeg, Man., or pretty much anywhere else in these here Canadian provinces and territories.

Thankfully, University of Alberta film studies professor Bill Beard is going to be on hand to introduce the film and prepare the audience in advance of the first screening at the Metro Cinema on Friday.

Beard literally wrote the book on Guy Maddin. It’s called Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin and is pretty much essential reading if you’re going to attempt to dive right into The Forbidden Room without another coach.