Tears will cause thy wheels to rust
THOU: "Lo, yon SoulReaper! Yea and verily, I have missed thee greatly. Where hast thou been skulking, ye handsome cretin?"
All over the freaking place, is where. Since I last rapped at ya, I:
-Skipped seeing Watain at the Empty Bottle as previously announced
-Marveled at a sobering little docudrama called "The Road to Guantanamo" (from the director of "Jude")
-Spilled a froo-froo martini on myself
-Enjoyed the comic grotesqueries of Joe Coleman's "The Mystery of Woolverine Woo-Bait"
-Worked several loooong days
-Visited a few of you
-Had my cable shut off and turned on again due a billing snafu
-Thrilled to the twisty first season of "Alias" and delighted at the Ropers-heavy third season of "Three's Company," courtesy of the Queen and the Big Man
-Spoke with Guy Maddin on the phone for more than half an hour (my review of "Brand Upon the Brain!" and full interview transcript here)
-Took the family out for a combined Mother's Day/Father's Day brunch
-Worked a little bit on both of my screenplays
-Missed the Porcupine Tree show for which I had a ticket, because by the time I completed my two-hour drive to the damn Park West, there was nowhere to park
-Bowled at a tiny alley above a hardware shop
-Stayed up talking all night with a charming lady
-Ate a ton of frozen fruit
-Et cetera
The main purpose of this post is to tell you about one of the most amazing vintage films I've seen in a while. Once again, props to the Wiz for finding another obscure crapterpiece.
"Roller Blade"
(1986)
It is, of course, the future - the "Second Dark Age," to be exact. A gang of warrior nuns traverses the bleak, purple-skied landscape (which appears to consist primarily of disused aqueducts and factories) on trusty old four-wheeled roller skates, using their kung fu, butterfly knives and huge 1980s hair to keep themselves alive. Over black spandex, the Cosmic Order of Roller Blade often sports gaudy blue-and-white vestments that evoke chaste cheerleader outfits, capped with pointy red hoods and Iron Crosses that make the ladies resemble esoteric Klanspeople. The sisters' dog even has his own cute little red outfit. They have a stilted alliance with the local marshall, as well as a secret chamber adorned with psychedelic stained glass where they worship smiley faces and engage in rituals which involve girls getting buck naked and cuddling with each other in a magical Jacuzzi. Their leader, Mother Speed, sounds like Cloris Leachman in "Young Frankenstein" and is in a wheelchair, yet like most people in this particular dystopia, wears roller skates all the time.
Welcome to the wonderful world of "Roller Blade," which thankfully does not actually contain any inline skates. Its director, Donald G. Jackson, was apparently some sort of minor icon of the cult film universe (get in line, Don). He's also responsible for the "Rowdy" Roddy Piper classic "Hell Comes to Frogtown," several sequels to both "Blade" and "Frogtown" and other fascinating direct-to-video titles including "Ghost Taxi" and "Lingerie Kickboxer." For some reason, Jackson did all the sound for this movie in post-production with different actors providing the voices, which along with his frequent camera zooms had me convinced this was an Italian production until I recognized scream queen Michelle Bauer as one of the nuns. Most of the time, the recorded voices are way out of sync with the actors' lips, and during a few action sequences you can hear dialogue when an actor is clearly not speaking at all. Then there's the fact that the heroic characters all replace their pronouns with "thee" and "thou," when the actors are visibly mouthing "you" and "your." The old-timey speech enables dead-serious readings of great lines such as:
-"On thy skates!"
-"Yea and verily, it has been hard."
-"The longer thou skate, the less thou fall. Now thou learneth."
-"I see in thine eyes great passion. Yea, verily, we all need such passion."
-"Ho! Skate not from this place!"
The sisters' chief nemesis, Dr. Saticoy, sports what appears to be an S&M mask painted silver over a lavender ski hat. He doesn't move his mouth at all, but his silly vocal distortion makes him hard to understand anyway. At least he's not as incomprehensible as the "comic relief" beastie who assists him by giggling and shrieking obnoxious catchphrases. This little thing looks like the Imp from "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama" with the head of the Freddy snake from the climax of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," and is not as funny as either of them. It's obviously a puppet, a crappy one at that, but the most confounding thing about the little creature is I can't tell whether it's supposed to be part of Saticoy's body - and I've sat through this twice now. It only runs around on its own once Saticoy's hand gets cut off near the end. Anyway, these two are only a sample of the morons who bother the nuns. There's a trio of archetypal skater punks and the "samurai" gang on the video box, which kidnaps several nuns and makes them fight each other naked (on roller skates). Saticoy also has henchmen, one of whom looks exactly like Bernie (as in "Weekend at...") and is easily the most '80s-looking person in the flick. Not only does he sport one of those braided cords on his sunglasses, he's got a checkered painter's cap with the flaps on the back. Christ, how I wanted one of those when I was about nine... and they are still rad.
The plot, what little there is, revolves around the kind-hearted Sister Sharon (Suzanne Solari, who looks kind of hot in the habit, but not so much once she reveals her scraggly 'do). She takes an injured blonde drifter under her wing and trains her in the way of the Order, unaware that the lady is a mercenary under orders from Saticoy to infiltrate the sisters and steal their mystical crystal. This plastic gem is the source of the sisters' power, demonstrated when one nun heals another's slashed throat by holding her knife over it, and later when the convent's dog raises a hobo from the dead to help them. (The same hobo earlier kidnapped the marshall's son, a mewling little nitwit with a red Member's Only jacket and a trucker's hat.) Each time the gem does its thing, an astoundingly primitive '80s computer graphic of a big pink smiley face appears. When the blonde, dubbed Sister Fortune, runs off with the crystal, Sharon vows to get it back.
Fortune has a tender scene walking on the beach, wherein she reminisces about skating and hugging with Sharon. She has a change of heart, but dies delivering the crystal to Sharon, who then enlists the undead hobo to beat up the punk dudes. He tells one, "I'm gonna break your hair!" The marshall gets in a fierce fistfight with the Bernie henchman, and after Bernie lands one that makes the marshall slip on his skates and crash to the ground (this stunt does not look staged), the marshall tosses Bernie into a vat of acid. Meanwhile, while fighting Saticoy, Sharon gets acid spilled on her spandex and is forced to strip down to her panties and skates. Saticoy's plan all along was to use the pilfered crystal to power his "acid-fueled" rocket sled and leap over a canyon, where a supply of weapons awaits in some sort of factory. Sharon throws her knife at Saticoy when he's in mid-air and he tumbles off into the abyss, in yet another shoddy computer-assisted visual. The crystal goes into the canyon with the villain, but Sharon shrugs off the loss since she's discovered that the power was inside her all along. What!? Well, the Cosmic Order of Roller Blade skates on to their other adventures, and that's that. Hey, at least people still listen to G.B.H. and Bad Brains in the future.
All over the freaking place, is where. Since I last rapped at ya, I:
-Skipped seeing Watain at the Empty Bottle as previously announced
-Marveled at a sobering little docudrama called "The Road to Guantanamo" (from the director of "Jude")
-Spilled a froo-froo martini on myself
-Enjoyed the comic grotesqueries of Joe Coleman's "The Mystery of Woolverine Woo-Bait"
-Worked several loooong days
-Visited a few of you
-Had my cable shut off and turned on again due a billing snafu
-Thrilled to the twisty first season of "Alias" and delighted at the Ropers-heavy third season of "Three's Company," courtesy of the Queen and the Big Man
-Spoke with Guy Maddin on the phone for more than half an hour (my review of "Brand Upon the Brain!" and full interview transcript here)
-Took the family out for a combined Mother's Day/Father's Day brunch
-Worked a little bit on both of my screenplays
-Missed the Porcupine Tree show for which I had a ticket, because by the time I completed my two-hour drive to the damn Park West, there was nowhere to park
-Bowled at a tiny alley above a hardware shop
-Stayed up talking all night with a charming lady
-Ate a ton of frozen fruit
-Et cetera
The main purpose of this post is to tell you about one of the most amazing vintage films I've seen in a while. Once again, props to the Wiz for finding another obscure crapterpiece.
"Roller Blade"(1986)
It is, of course, the future - the "Second Dark Age," to be exact. A gang of warrior nuns traverses the bleak, purple-skied landscape (which appears to consist primarily of disused aqueducts and factories) on trusty old four-wheeled roller skates, using their kung fu, butterfly knives and huge 1980s hair to keep themselves alive. Over black spandex, the Cosmic Order of Roller Blade often sports gaudy blue-and-white vestments that evoke chaste cheerleader outfits, capped with pointy red hoods and Iron Crosses that make the ladies resemble esoteric Klanspeople. The sisters' dog even has his own cute little red outfit. They have a stilted alliance with the local marshall, as well as a secret chamber adorned with psychedelic stained glass where they worship smiley faces and engage in rituals which involve girls getting buck naked and cuddling with each other in a magical Jacuzzi. Their leader, Mother Speed, sounds like Cloris Leachman in "Young Frankenstein" and is in a wheelchair, yet like most people in this particular dystopia, wears roller skates all the time.
Welcome to the wonderful world of "Roller Blade," which thankfully does not actually contain any inline skates. Its director, Donald G. Jackson, was apparently some sort of minor icon of the cult film universe (get in line, Don). He's also responsible for the "Rowdy" Roddy Piper classic "Hell Comes to Frogtown," several sequels to both "Blade" and "Frogtown" and other fascinating direct-to-video titles including "Ghost Taxi" and "Lingerie Kickboxer." For some reason, Jackson did all the sound for this movie in post-production with different actors providing the voices, which along with his frequent camera zooms had me convinced this was an Italian production until I recognized scream queen Michelle Bauer as one of the nuns. Most of the time, the recorded voices are way out of sync with the actors' lips, and during a few action sequences you can hear dialogue when an actor is clearly not speaking at all. Then there's the fact that the heroic characters all replace their pronouns with "thee" and "thou," when the actors are visibly mouthing "you" and "your." The old-timey speech enables dead-serious readings of great lines such as:
-"On thy skates!"
-"Yea and verily, it has been hard."
-"The longer thou skate, the less thou fall. Now thou learneth."
-"I see in thine eyes great passion. Yea, verily, we all need such passion."
-"Ho! Skate not from this place!"
The sisters' chief nemesis, Dr. Saticoy, sports what appears to be an S&M mask painted silver over a lavender ski hat. He doesn't move his mouth at all, but his silly vocal distortion makes him hard to understand anyway. At least he's not as incomprehensible as the "comic relief" beastie who assists him by giggling and shrieking obnoxious catchphrases. This little thing looks like the Imp from "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama" with the head of the Freddy snake from the climax of "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors," and is not as funny as either of them. It's obviously a puppet, a crappy one at that, but the most confounding thing about the little creature is I can't tell whether it's supposed to be part of Saticoy's body - and I've sat through this twice now. It only runs around on its own once Saticoy's hand gets cut off near the end. Anyway, these two are only a sample of the morons who bother the nuns. There's a trio of archetypal skater punks and the "samurai" gang on the video box, which kidnaps several nuns and makes them fight each other naked (on roller skates). Saticoy also has henchmen, one of whom looks exactly like Bernie (as in "Weekend at...") and is easily the most '80s-looking person in the flick. Not only does he sport one of those braided cords on his sunglasses, he's got a checkered painter's cap with the flaps on the back. Christ, how I wanted one of those when I was about nine... and they are still rad.
The plot, what little there is, revolves around the kind-hearted Sister Sharon (Suzanne Solari, who looks kind of hot in the habit, but not so much once she reveals her scraggly 'do). She takes an injured blonde drifter under her wing and trains her in the way of the Order, unaware that the lady is a mercenary under orders from Saticoy to infiltrate the sisters and steal their mystical crystal. This plastic gem is the source of the sisters' power, demonstrated when one nun heals another's slashed throat by holding her knife over it, and later when the convent's dog raises a hobo from the dead to help them. (The same hobo earlier kidnapped the marshall's son, a mewling little nitwit with a red Member's Only jacket and a trucker's hat.) Each time the gem does its thing, an astoundingly primitive '80s computer graphic of a big pink smiley face appears. When the blonde, dubbed Sister Fortune, runs off with the crystal, Sharon vows to get it back.
Fortune has a tender scene walking on the beach, wherein she reminisces about skating and hugging with Sharon. She has a change of heart, but dies delivering the crystal to Sharon, who then enlists the undead hobo to beat up the punk dudes. He tells one, "I'm gonna break your hair!" The marshall gets in a fierce fistfight with the Bernie henchman, and after Bernie lands one that makes the marshall slip on his skates and crash to the ground (this stunt does not look staged), the marshall tosses Bernie into a vat of acid. Meanwhile, while fighting Saticoy, Sharon gets acid spilled on her spandex and is forced to strip down to her panties and skates. Saticoy's plan all along was to use the pilfered crystal to power his "acid-fueled" rocket sled and leap over a canyon, where a supply of weapons awaits in some sort of factory. Sharon throws her knife at Saticoy when he's in mid-air and he tumbles off into the abyss, in yet another shoddy computer-assisted visual. The crystal goes into the canyon with the villain, but Sharon shrugs off the loss since she's discovered that the power was inside her all along. What!? Well, the Cosmic Order of Roller Blade skates on to their other adventures, and that's that. Hey, at least people still listen to G.B.H. and Bad Brains in the future.
Coming soon: this month's recipe, a deadly new batch of songs in the player and the long-promised Chicago Powerfest 2007 overview. Until then, take 'er sleazy.
posted by SoulReaper at 11:08 AM
3 Comments:
"Brand" will stick in your brain
The title "Brand Upon the Brain!" suggests an indelible mark upon one's consciousness. It fits the movie perfectly, as any viewer won't forget the experience soon.
The main character in "Brand" is named Guy Maddin, which also happens to be the name of the film's writer and director. We meet Guy as he arduously maneuvers a rowboat across a huge, lonely body of water, on his way to his old family home - an island where his parents ran an orphanage. His aged mother asked him to paint the old lighthouse so that it will look good before she passes away, and as dutiful Guy slathers on coat after coat, the familiar surroundings evoke memories.
That is as close as "Brand" gets to a typical arthouse biopic. Maddin's patented cinematic style revels in the primitive yet striking techniques and brazen emotion of the silent and Expressionist eras, so the fuzzy, rapidly cut black and white images, emphatic intertitles and vivid narration by Isabella Rossellini instantly set it apart. Anyone who's seen Maddin's previous features such as "The Saddest Music in the World" and "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" (or any of his dozens of short films) would recognize "Brand" as the work of the Winnipeg-bred cult icon.
Yet, here he uses his own name and memories to spin a tale just as folkloric, weird, frightening and enchanting as those stories about legless beer baronesses and battling fishermen. As he obviously inflates events and people that might be real at their core, he plays with the very idea of memory itself.
In his island memories, Guy's inventor father works in a basement lab all day. His manipulative mother threatens suicide to keep him in line. She forces the orphans in her care to clean and she has a device built by her husband that allows her to speak directly at her children whenever she wants to, wherever they are - usually to tell them to come home. This naturally doesn't jibe with his free-spirited teenaged sister.
A famous brother and sister detective team, Chance and Wendy Hale, comes to the island to investigate why the orphans leave with strange holes in the back of their skulls. Guy develops a crush on Wendy. Wendy in turn falls for Sister, but must disguise herself as Chance to successfully woo her.
The investigation, the love triangle and the Mother/Sister fights allow Maddin to explore heightened emotion in images. Often, the non-literal approach is simply beguiling. When Guy thinks of his beloved Wendy, she's depicted in a flurry of images, including one briefly in color. While this may sound excessively abstract on paper, in the midst of the film, the dreamlike flashes allows us to see Wendy as young Guy did.
At other times, the hyperbolic emotion on screen can seem comical. Maddin's devilish sense of humor never truly reveals when we're supposed to laugh, but "Brand" packs a hearty helping of intentional humor alongside the roiling pathos and eye-popping visual poetry. How much of the far-fetched story actually happened is irrelevant. The fun is in the way the story is told, and Maddin cleverly, confidently mesmerizes.
*******
Method to Madness: A Conversation with Guy Maddin
Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman wrote in 2003 that Guy Maddin is "the most eccentric of mainstream filmmakers (or the most accessible of avant-gardists)."
The movies of the Winnipeg native can appeal to mainstream audiences looking for something smarter as well as to arthouse crowds seeking something more fun. Maddin revels in the primitive yet striking techniques and brazen emotion of the silent and Expressionist eras, but his films' wry humor and restless energy root them in the here and now.
His latest - "Brand Upon the Brain!" - opened on May 18 at Chicago's Music Box Theatre. As if "Brand" were not unique enough, opening weekend audiences saw it with an 11-piece orchestra, five foley artists creating sound effects, a castrato and live narration by eccentric actor Crispin Glover. A recorded soundtrack accompied the rest of the run.
Following is an edited conversation with Guy Maddin.
Q: Since the main character in "Brand Upon the Brain!" is named Guy Maddin, the audience may expect some autobiographical content. When they see the film, they will wonder about what actually happened and how much is embellished.
A: I've been asked about that a handful of times now, and I'm wrestling with what to say because a filmmaker's under no obligation to tell the truth onscreen and I hate to spoil a mystery, but I'm honored that anyone's curious. I've settled on saying it's about 96% true. Whenever I see "based on a true story" in a trailer, I say, "Who gives a shit whether it's true or not?" It's got to be good, that's all.
I made the film in a hurry. I wanted the film to have a kind of a primitive energy to it, and the conditions under which I was approached to make the film by this utopian, crazy, not-for-profit film company required that I make it in a hurry anyway, so I knew I didn't have time to make up much. I'd been thinking for a long time about making a childhood recollection movie because my childhood was pretty strange, and thought maybe now is the best time to do it. So, I just transplanted huge chunks of my childhood into the script. Usually when I write a script, there are lots of loose ends to be tied up through all sorts of artificial means. But it was really strange and pleasing to me to see how since I basically tweaked the hyperbolic inhibitions of the movie slightly in places that everything came out in one big honest piece with no loose ends. I guess that's what happens when you're kind of telling the truth.
While I grew up in Winnipeg, which is often called a "miniature Chicago" (it's definitely a Midwestern town), and I didn't grow up in a lighthouse, nor an orphanage, everything else is spiritually or psychologically or poetically completely true, and in most cases literally true. For instance, my mother and my sister had a super internecine war when my sister hit puberty. My mom was trying to hammer the new pubertal developments back into her body and was very melodramatically manipulative. It left me wondering to this day what everyone was thinking when they were going to the lengths they went to, to exert their wills upon each other within this family. I had a father that was largely working with his back to the family the entire time, and specific incidents literally happened - the butter on the wall, the adventures we'd have around the campfire, the always-vigilant mom calling me back home.
The burial at high tide, that was transplanted. I fudged reality slightly there. That happened not to my father but to my mother's father in the forties. During flood season back home on the farm in the lowlands, my mother's father died and it took her a few days to get out there - she had to ride on a horse to get to the family farm because the roads were flooded and automobiles couldn't handle the roads. She found her father lying in the coolness of the shed, all twisted up from rigor mortis, so she and her mother had to strip the clothes off of him, tie him straight and then sew a burial suit back onto the nude body, the body of this kind of sketchy grandfather of mine who had victimized his children quite a bit. So, while my mom was doing this, her brothers dug a grave which filled with water because the ground was saturated with the spring flood. Then all six children had to stand on the coffin that the sons built themselves and sink it, then sort of claw soggy earth back on top of it. These are stories that were told me as I was growing up.
When I was six, my brother took his own life on his girlfriend's grave, and it was explained to me that he was going up to heaven to be with the person he loved, and that they would be married there. Everything in my childhood had kind of Brothers Grimm fairy tale qualities, and everything was explained in these mythic terms. I realized that almost anyone remembering his or her childhood becomes a poet for the duration of that reminiscence because they're remembering a time when they built false models of the way the universe works, those little narcotic-inducing states when you confusedly mix up cause and effect. A friend of mine once told me that when his mother hung laundry out in the springtime that he thought the laundry on the lines outside was what brought the warm weather, but it was actually the warm weather of spring that enabled his mother to hang the laundry outside rather than the basement.
It's this kind of mixed cause and effect that all children and some politicians feel when they're constructing their own model of the universe. The more mistakes you make when you're constructing this model, the more dreamy and poetic the world seems. I always kind of like childhood recollection movies (and books, for that matter) because it seems to be something I can do.
The way I work when I make a movie is to sort of attack a feeling and try to capture it with my camera, and as primitively as possible - sometimes not even looking through the camera, just sort of vacuuming up images the way someone holding a DustBuster would try to vacuum up lint or something. I aim it and know that these images will be primitive, but maybe some of them will be beautiful. I can cut out the ugly ones and cobble them together. So I just staged tableaux of early childhood recollections, sucked up as much imagery as possible and pasted them together in this kind of mythic, slightly confused way, just being as honest as possible about my own recollections of the incidents.
So, my answer is I guess it's almost all true. I always wanted to set a movie in a lighthouse and we didn't really have "aerophones"... there are little additions like that. But I think everybody has an aerophone. Everybody can hear their mother or father calling them, even after they're dead. It will come when you least expect it, or at the worst moment. You know, I used to use the sound of my father's voice when he was dying as a way to delay orgasm when I was young, but that just ended up eroticizing my father's death, so that blew that.
Q: How does "Brand Upon the Brain!" relate to your previous film, "Cowards Bend the Knee," which is also semi-autobiographical? I have unfortunately not seen that one.
A: Oh, that's okay. That one was more over a romantic episode gone bad from about ten years ago. The movie wasn't done ten years ago, but the romantic episode was a spectacular disaster. I'd been reading some Euripides, I'd read his "Medea" and "Elektra," and I realized there were elements of those durable, wonderful, hysterical stories that endured and somehow reconfigured themselves in this episode, in my recent past. So, I thought I would remake "Elektra" as my own autobiography there. So it kind of feels the same as "Brand Upon the Brain!" It's shot and edited in the same kind of neurologically skittish fashion, and is autobiographical in the same way. It's psychologically true with some surface details dialed up, or with their inhibitions dialed away, put it that way.
Q: It's structured episodically as well?
A: It is. It was originally designed to be an installation viewed through peepholes, but the peepholes just hurt everybody's eyes, so I scrapped them.
Q: Is "Brand Upon the Brain!" the first film you did not make in Winnipeg?
A: It is, it's my first foreign film.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about The Film company? I read a little online…
A: Yeah, I think they've been too busy to get their Web site set up because it's not a big operation. They're very utopian, very quixotic. They really want to change the way movies are made. They're a not-for-profit organization and they approach filmmakers, they don't accept unsolicited scripts. They approach filmmakers they think would be interesting to work with and invite them with a green light already turned on to make a film. They don't want a script that's already in existence, they want an original script written, and they don't care what the script is, they say they'll make it. So you have complete artistic freedom, and they supply the all-Seattle cast and crew.
They're opening up a New York version of themselves as well, and I know Joie Lee, the screenwriter and actress, the sister of Spike Lee, is making their first New York film shortly. She's also narrating "Brand Upon the Brain!" for me in New York. There's a little Web site for it, branduponthebrain.com, which has a lineup of all the narrators in New York. Crispin Glover's doing a few there, I know he's doing them in Chicago.
Q: I was going to ask if you had anything to do with selecting the narrators?
A: Yeah, everybody sort of chipped in and tried to get through back doors and sneak past agents. I don't know how, one of the producers got Crispin. I got John Ashbery, the poet, and Isabella Rossellini and this Peter Scarlet guy, who's the director of the Tribeca Film Festival. He was the first silent film narrator I ever heard, back when he was the director of the San Francisco Film Festival, and he did a really good job, so I always wanted to have him. I think Laurie Anderson is doing one, Eli Wallach is doing one, his wife, Kate Jackson... uh, Anne Jackson, I mean, not the former Charlie's Angel.
It's kind of interesting, each time it's a little bit different. When Geraldine Chaplin does it, you really feel what she has, and in Spanish you feel a really strange and eerie immediate connection to the silent movie era. When Isabella Rossellini does it, things are pretty fast and loose. Her voice is the most musical of all the narrators, but she also finds English to be full of speed bumps, so she goes off the road sometimes. It's pretty great (laughs), but it's just so musical that everyone loves it. I think in many ways, she's everyone's favorite. The best narrator may be this Peter Scarlet guy, even though he's the least known. Eli Wallach is an immense thrill for me. Crispin Glover is an immense thrill, I can hardly wait for him, that's for sure.
Q: I'm really looking forward to seeing the live presentation.
A: It's pretty strange. I don't know how it's going to be set up at the Music Box, but ideally you're almost forced to watch a little bit of each element. Ideally, the bows of the violins go up into the image a little bit and you can see the silhouette of the conductor. Your eyes will dash back and forth between the movie and the foley artists.
Foley artists are really intriguing to watch, I've always loved watching them work. I've been working with Andy Malcolm, the original foley artist we had on this thing, for years. When I met my first foley artist, it was Andy, and he conducted a full high-speed car chase on his wrist with his thumb and a hot water bottle, just making all the tires squealing and crashing noises. They're real showmen, they think visually as well.
You know, when I was a house painter, the whole world was filled with houses that did or didn't need painting. The foley artists walk around looking at the world as things that might make sounds that might sound like other sounds (laughs). They have filled their studios with odd gadgets that make unlikely sounds, and they have hauled many of them on stage for the 600 sound cues they have. It's really fun to watch them. I really see them as boredom insurance (laughs), if the movie's dull you can always just watch the foley artists.
Then there's this castrato that just sits there in a chair for about an hour until his song comes on, and then he sings. Then there's the narrator, off behind a lectern somewhere. Like I say, I'm not sure how the Music Box is set up. We try to make it as eye-pleasing as possible, we try to get all the elements up there.
Q: Sound is very important in your movies. They often look like silent films, but the sound design is often very complex. Did you design "Brand Upon the Brain!" to highlight that?
A: I remember while shooting it, you realize how important it is for the plot to capture a certain image, and when you realize that you didn't quite get it, you're kind of thinking on the fly and you have a lot of shooting to do in one day and you just go, "Well, sound design will have to get that." You just move on. If you didn't get it visually, you just say you'll get it with the sound. The only thing sound can't do is nudity, so I was maybe working a little harder on those scenes with the camera. But it is really important to me.
When I was in my twenties, the most conspicuously great soundscaper was David Lynch, or Alan Splett, his sound designer, and it hit me hard how great an impact sound design could make. I think Splett and Lynch influenced everybody from that point forward after "Eraserhead." It's always felt like my images are just sort of half there until there's been sound added. Sometimes it just takes the sound of an air conditioner humming or something like that to make the image legitimate.
Every now and then, completely silent images are unbelievably haunting. I was just sharing the stage with Bill Morrison at this experimental film festival in Toronto, and he showed - completely silent - some portraits of passengers on old ocean liners from the '20s who stood in front of movie cameras. He played some of these moving picture portraits of indeterminate length, sort of like early Robert Wilson portraits, and the silence was pretty haunting, I have to admit. But I think by definition of silence, you need to at least have the threat of sound.
Q: At the same time, your visual style is very idiosyncratic. It feels like you're doing your own homemade versions of old films.
A: Yeah. I've never tried to imitate them. To imitate something perfectly, to take it to its logical extreme, you've got the Borges story of Menard and Don Quixote, you basically recreate something that already exists and there's no point in doing that. I'm definitely fired up by disused vocabulary, and I've incorporated it into my own vocabulary. It's become inseparable from me now. I'm just speaking the language I speak when I make this movie.
Q: For people who are unfamiliar with your work, can you tell me a little bit about your attraction to those things?
A: I don't even know what it is. I've been a nostalgiaphile for a long time, but I think more importantly I've never been a perfectionist. I've never been a really good artist, I've never been really good at any one thing. I kind of just like getting things out there. I've always liked basement bands. I guess I get more of a vicarious thrill from musicians who create energizing and exciting music even though they apparently don't know how to play their instruments. I guess it makes me feel that it's that much more plausible that I too could do something like that, even though I never got up off my ass and bothered to play any music.
I like primitive art, I like things that feel like I could have done it, so when I actually set out to make movies, I wanted to get some images out, I had some ideas. I knew I could never be a great writer, but I thought maybe if I got some half-baked written things and then filmed them that I could confuse everybody. I could make the writing seem better by filming it primitively or something. I guess I'm just trying to make the movie analog to the Ramones, something high-energy, primitive, simple but atmospheric.
Jim Hoberman, the Village Voice writer, once put it rather tidily. I'm kind of comfortable with him saying once that he didn't know which, but I was either the most mainstream experimental filmmaker or the most experimental mainstream filmmaker. I was pleased with that, because I really do love a lot of real pop culture success stories, and I also like the thrill of descending into the underground. I like straddling both worlds the way Hoberman described me.
Q: I can definitely see that. "Brand Upon the Brain!" is a very impressionistic, artistic series of images, but there's also a lot of very funny stuff in it.
A: Yeah, thanks.
Q: I think that if the average audience goes into the film expecting a rarified art film, they might be surprised at how much they laugh, or how moved they are by all the emotions on display. I've seen most of your films, so that's actually kind of what I expect from your work.
A: Oh, good. That's sort of what I've been trying to get out there, and you might actually be the first person I've ever heard say they expect that from me (laughs), but it's great to hear.
Q: And I've always though of your work as... the word I came up with was "spectacular," both in the sense that I like them a lot and that there's so much to look at. It's all very stylized and visually appealing - it's a spectacle. What do you feel "Brand Upon the Brain!" has that a spectacle like, say, "Spider-Man 3," would not offer an audience?
A: I'm curious about "Spider-Man 3," it sounds like it's got some cool things in it. I guess I would imagine "Spider-Man 3" would be the industry at its biggest, with everything that entails, the best state-of-the-art special effects. But it might also have some sort of wallowing inattention to story that big budget movies of that sort always end up being bogged down in, whereas I had complete artistic freedom and I can fix storytelling problems without adhering to the rules ordained by big box office concerns. If I screwed up somewhere, I can fix it by just slapping an intertitle up or jump cutting or going into slow motion and adding some narration. I just have recourse to so many more repair strategies, so I'm not really slowed up by any problems that big, cumbersome projects are.
A lot of those films have to live with mistakes or throw a ton more money at them to try to fix them, whereas if I make a mistake I can actually kind of turn it to my advantage. Any filmmaker working on a microscopic budget actually has far more freedom, of course, and I've sort of set my movie up to be almost mistake-proof. It's so primitive, if I shot an entire day out of focus it wouldn't matter. I get the rushes back, oh well (laughs), just make it blurry that day, I guess. Or if an actor delivered all of his or her performances way too slowly, I just speed them up. I can really do whatever I want. I like to kind of splatter the images onto the screen the way Jackson Pollock would colors on a canvas, except in my case, they're fragments of memories instead of dollops of paint.
I'm really flattered by your compare-and-contrast exercise with "Spider-Man 3" because I really like Sam Raimi and I'm always there on opening night with popcorn at big blockbusters. To even be discussed in the same sentence when we're metric and imperial systems, it is kind of fun, because I do think in my own modest way of my movies as spectaculars.
Q: Memory is a big theme in a lot of you movies. The title "Brand Upon the Brain!" suggests something indelibly marked on the consciousness, but anyone watching it knows you're not regurgitating events verbatim. I read a statement you made some time ago about Canadians being "lousy self-mythologizers." What did you mean by that, and are you trying to correct it?
A: What I probably meant, I can't remember exactly the context of that comment, but I just noticed that when I read literature from other countries, everything seems so mythic, and most artists seem to understand that some removal of inhibition is necessary to find the truth behind a piece of history. The Abe Lincoln and George Washington that Americans know never literally existed, but they exist as durable truths in their own way now. They have to be viewed through decades and centuries, through some species of binoculars that make them bigger than life.
But Canadians always look through the wrong end of the binoculars. They seem too embarrassed by making any of their characters bigger than life, they're more comfortable making them smaller than life. I think by just presenting a life-size portrait of someone, a Canadian is actually making them smaller than life because they're forgetting that they have to be viewed through time and that they keep getting smaller, they keep shrinking through time. Luckily, I never make historical documentaries or anything like that.
I think it's human instinct. When you ask someone who's witnessed a bank robbery what happened, they'll instantly start telling mythic versions of things. Police know darn well you're going to get twelve vastly different versions of a bank robbery from twelve different witnesses. People's first inclination is to strip things down to their essence, and everybody has a different idea of what an essence is, but most people dial up the most important parts and omit completely the unimportant parts. That's what mythmaking is, for a young child who's trying to make sense of the world, for the witness to a crime.
But Canadians for some reason... maybe it's because we've pitched our tent right next to the biggest, brashest nation in the world, the greatest storytellers of them all, the American tent, the P.T. Barnum tent (laughs), we're too scared to holler into a megaphone. It's kind of embarrassing when we do hear ourselves speak, how timid we are.
My screenwriting collaborator is an American, and I became his best friend when I was in my mid-twenties because he was an American and wasn't afraid to speak his mind. I was really refreshed to hear an American speak in American mythologizing ways about things. (This is a very long-winded answer, I'm sorry.) So, I get to be a Canadian, I get to remain a Canadian, but I get to use Hollywood mythmaking bravura whenever I want. I'm so comfortable with it because my film-watching milieu up in Winnipeg is 100% American.
Q: What do you want people to come away from "Brand Upon the Brain!" with?
A: You know, I always want to intoxicate them a little bit. I want to make them feel as if they've either just dreamt something or that they've just remembered something from their own childhood that was similar, or if it was completely different at least felt experientially similar. That they've dislodged something in their head a little bit, and that it's going to feel good for the next few days while it's floating around before it re-lodges itself. Not a very glib answer, but something like that. I want them to feel jangled up and intoxicated, I guess that's the simplest answer.
Q: That's all my questions. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me...
A: Oh, it's really my pleasure, and I appreciate you paying attention to the picture.
Q: It's been an incredible honor to speak with you, I hope to meet you in person one day. I know you won't be in Chicago for the screenings...
A: I don't think I can. I'm really beat from following this picture around, and I've got to finish up this documentary I'm making, so I've got to go home and work on that.
If you liked the first season of Alias, just wait for season two. That one has Lena Olin.
I'm glad you're enjoying Alias! It's been our "TV on DVDu Jour" at our house, too, all because we got rehooked after watching the pilot with you. :)
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