The fourth day of festival’s personal highlight was Guy Maddin, fresh from leaving London audiences in awe with the IMAX screening of his latest feature ‘The Forbidden Room’ (review here), in conversation with festival director Clare Stewart as part of LFF Connect, the new events strand dedicated to explore the relationships between film and other creative areas. The ever entertaining Canadian auteur came to talk about how his work in installation art has influenced his filmmaking. The beginning of his installation projects happened mainly due to financial reasons, channeling an ongoing obsession for rescuing lost, unmade or incomplete films. Early projects such as ‘Hauntings’(from which we saw ‘Bing & Bela’, dedicated to Bing Crosby & Bela Lugosi) have grown in scope and ambition through the years up to his current one,‘Seances’.
Filming in public at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Montreal’s Phi Centre, ‘Seances’ was born to challenge the idea that art cannot be made on the Internet with a goal to showcase the paranormal, magic element of the medium. Maddin and his collaborators aimed to reclaim for history 100 lost films as a 10 minutes short each, whose fascinating research took him to explore cinematographies around the world in an almost archaeological mission. A treasure trove of lost works, from the early days of cinema, in which many people bought cameras from the Lumieres but didn’t know how to preserve their creations, to unfinished ones by iconic directors such as Fritz Lang; Leni Riefenstahl or blacklisted American screenwriters, forming a multicultural cauldron of influences.
A second phase of the project will involve to lose those films again by dropping them online and let the viewers manipulate them, creating endless narratives at random. Financing issues reduced its ambitious multiple location goal (the parts aimed to be completed at NY’s MoMa and London’s BFI never came to fruition), and from that money shortage ‘The Forbidden Room’ was born, as it became easier for the director to get funding for a feature. Respecting the philosophy behind ‘Seances’, but this time filming new stories, Maddin and his co-director Evan Johnson managed to put together an incredible cast and gave every story in the film its own personality, colour and texture. A whole catalogue of manipulating techniques and effects were used to create an exhilarating audio-visual experience. He also explained the way he got his palette by naming every colour as seen in old Technicolor movies and using the ones he thought suitable for each film’s individual mood.
Talking about the future, he told us ‘Seances’ will be ready online by the first months of 2016. Next project will be a fake documentary done as a ‘making of’ another feature, ‘Hyena Road’; a rather more mainstream war movie whose Jordanian set was used to create ‘Bring Me The Head Of Tim Horton’, to the dismay of his helmer Paul Gross. The talk ended on a humourous note when the Canadian made a public appeal to Christopher Nolan to be in the set of his next movie, making some parallel creation around it.
Guy Maddin wasn’t the only visual artist presenting his latest work in the festival. Israeli video creator Omer Fast premiered ‘Remainder’, his competent adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s first novel. A London-set thriller that begins with a man being hit by a collapsing rooftop, suffering from amnesia afterwards. Tom Sturridge is the confused victim who, after being granted a multi-million pound compensation, uses it reconstructing in extravagant detail every fragmented piece of thought he can recall, in hope it will help rebuild his memories. The thematic similarity with superior films like ‘Memento’ sometimes cast a shadow over this notable debut, likely to gain an enthusiast following among lovers of the genre ★★★. Another video artist, AKIZ, also debuted with a horror movie without the shocks. Set against the backdrop of Berlin’s drug-fuelled hardcore techno scene, ‘Der Nachtmahr’ manages to encompass teenage anxieties through the story of a girl who begins dreaming with an alien creature which materializes in real life. Featuring a cameo by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon as an English teacher, its soundtrack is also an integral part of the narrative. ★★★
Better still was “Aferim!”, which translates as ‘Bravo!’ and could lazily be described as the Romanian version of ‘Django Unchained’, replacing African-Americans by Romani gypsies and Tarantino’s clever pyrotechnics for the erudite study of an era, its customs and peculiar language. This little-known chapter in the history of the Eastern country lasted up to the middle of the 19th century. It is told through the story of a constable and his son, embarking on a horseback riding mission to bring back a runaway gipsy slave, accused of stealing money from his noble lord. On their Quixotic quest they will encounter a gallery of clergymen; travellers and soldier exposing the myths, superstitions and xenophobia that shaped the mentality of those times. All of it shot in elegant black and white, showing the director’s keen eye for striking natural landscapes. Radu Jude won the Silver Bear for best director at this year’s Berlinale and visited the festival for a Q&A session. ★★★★
And last, but not least, if we were to bet on the official competition winner, our money would be on ‘Son Of Saul’, the extraordinarily harrowing and immersive debut by Hungarian László Nemes, where a scarce use of dialogues; an extraordinary sound design and a continuous use close-up frame following a German prisoner in Auschwitz, takes us directly inside his mind when desperately search for a rabbi that can properly bury his son, whose corpse he’s just found before being cremated. Nemes and his lead actor, Géza Röhrig, came for an interesting Q&A in which the director expressed his intention to avoid the imagery that’s standard for Holocaust movies, reducing their impact. He also joined the industry’s ongoing debate about formats, complaing about his film being shown in digital, instead of 35mm, which he called a shadow of what it should be. Our full review is coming up shortly of this, the second five star film we’ve seen so far. ★★★★★
