Guy Maddin's Berlin Blog

Film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum once wrote that if she died and went to heaven, she hoped it would be art directed by Guy Maddin. With delirious, stunning films like Tales from Gimli Hospital, Careful and The Saddest Music in the World, the Winnipeg director has cemented his reputation as one of cinema’s great visionaries. His latest work - a silent movie spectacle called Brand Upon the Brain! - is screening at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs until Feb. 18. Maddin will be documenting his Berlin adventures in a blog for Arts Online.

Wednesday, Feb. 14

I have arrived at the 57th annual Berlin International Film Festival, here in the sprawling metropolis I had long come to think of as home to the deepest, most elongated and tortured shadows on the planet. Puddles and pools of frightful shade drowning the pavements, gales twisted darker than blood clotting the Potsdamer Platz sky, the low night air cut into neat squares of blackness by the slashing of sharp inky winds – this is the Expressionist Berlin I expected during this mid-February visit. And I have come on suitably occult business: to raise from the dead an art form most souls would prefer stayed forgotten, long forgotten. I am here to show a new feature-length silent film. It is called Brand Upon the Brain! (The exclamation mark is part of the title.)

I am to conduct my little evening of Frankenstein madness Thursday night, at the monstrous Deutsche Oper. There, 1,862 wary spectators will loom over my creation as if in a steeply raked anatomy lab, nervous, ready to flee at the first untoward sign from the cadaverous spectacle I shall unveil to them – the ghouls! I can’t let on that I am more terrified than any of them.

I hope against hope I may quell all their trepidation. Silent film is arid, they fear. Silent film is corny, they fear. Silent film is slow, stale and black & white, they fear. The possibility of a glute-deadening boredom is what preys on their minds most. So I have recruited allies for what I like to call “boredom insurance”: live orchestral accompaniment (always good for securing the audience’s goodwill) playing an original wall-to-wall score; a narrator of exquisite Scanditalian flutiness in the person of Isabella Rossellini; three Foley artists producing more than 600 live sound effects; and an authentic castrato from Winnipeg who can produce the most unearthly and unlikely warblings from within his roughly hewn, adult and completely hairless torso. All of them will be visible to the audience as silhouettes feverishly working to cast out their night sabbath spells from the stage directly in front of the unspooling images of my misbegotten film. I’m counting on a supernatural fusion of these live elements and the ghostly projections to supply the spark of life that will re-animate silent film once and for all and make believers of the skeptics. Please pray for my soul!

A scene from Brand Upon The Brain (The Film Company)

While wandering the streets thus in my brown study, I notice with surprise that Berlin is not gloomy at all. The avenues are wide, thronged with lively faces and positively coruscating with festive lights. Happy motor traffic noises silence whatever howls the soft breezes might have considered making. A purr of movie talk bristles through the populace and cinema star sightings leap like a ball of lightning from one excited cluster of fans to the next.

In the first hours alone, I encountered – or at least heard murmurs of encounters with – Sharon Stone, Antonio Banderas and Clint Eastwood. At my hotel, I saw Arsinee Khanjian sporting a great new haircut and the immortal documentarian Frederick Wiseman, sporting a Band-Aid in the middle of his forehead – ouch!

Outside the festival headquarters, obnoxiously young Canadian director Sarah Polley told me of her own strange arrival in this somewhat canted, former capital of gloom. The airport in Berlin features the most thoughtfully designed arrival lounges: passport control is a mere five metres from the passenger bridge and the baggage carousel is right beside that. Expecting to walk a great distance as she would in any other airport, Sarah passed blithely through passport control, not noticing the carousel and soon found herself between two automatic exit doors, half inside and half outside the airport’s secured arrival area. She stopped, realizing her mistake, but before she could go back to claim her luggage, the scream of a guard startled her half to death. She was forbidden to retrace the few steps she had just taken.

“But you have just seen me come from in there,” she protested. “That is beside the point. You must not go back in,” was the reply she received from the guard, who told her to make a claim at Lost and Found.

“But my bag is not lost. I can see it just there,” Sarah countered, and at that point, she must have made a move, toward her forbidden bag. “Stop!!!” screamed her adversary. “This is against... EVERYTHING!!!”

And so, good Canadian that Sarah still is, she made a claim at Lost and Found for a suitcase that was not, in fact, lost at all. Three hours later, she got it back from that dependable department. Whatever shadows there were in Berlin that night had settled upon Sarah’s brow. But now that she was finally out in the street, her suitcase safely tucked in her room, they had scattered. She was a picture of light.

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