LIGHT GLYPHS 1: GUY
MADDIN
To
be able to begin the ‘Light Glyph’ series of interviews with Canadian filmmaker
Guy Maddin is a real privilege. There exists no better inauguration than to
dive into the ideas and perambulations of one of modern cinema’s most
inventive, entertaining and consistently original practitioners. His films itch
and explode with the busy extravagance of Von Sternberg, yearn with the aching
melodramas of Douglas Sirk and libidinously exhume the spirit of early Buñuel.
Adopting the orphaned and outmoded in cinema’s history, as digested by his own
humour and obsessions, Maddin quarries a lovingly warped archaeology of film with
which to ferment and reinvent personal mythologies. The near-occult dynamics of
family and the primacy of childhood become points of ritual, never far from
troubled or vulnerable desire and, as all else in Maddin’s foggy cartography, encountered
most frequently in and as memory.
Though his filmography demonstrates
recurrent themes and visual preferences, he has nevertheless accumulated a
diverse body of work: from the midnight-movie, cult success of Tales from Gimli Hospital (1988), a film
that had critics equivocating between allusions to Eraserhead, Man Ray and John Waters, to the labyrinthine ambition
of his latest feature The Forbidden Room
(2015). The Forbidden Room is a
propulsive, vast and hallucinatory feat of of narrative contortion; like a
Russian-doll raconteur evoking the writing of Raymond Roussel, it features an
‘outer-onion’ framing device scripted by the American poet John Ashbery. Ashbery
has often cited Maddin’s The Saddest
Music in the World (2003) as a favourite film, and, in addition to admiring
each others work, they also shared a recent collage exhibition (2015) at the
Tibor de Nagy gallery, New York.
In this interview I wanted to ask Maddin
about aspects of this poetic collaboration and to hear more about his own
relationship with poetry. It was also a chance to consider the visual
manipulation, newly explored with co-director Evan Johnson, in digital form;
outside of its own innovation in digital film, The Forbidden Room was also accompanied by a pioneering online
incarnation, Séances (2015). Séances is an interactive project based
on a method of ‘algorithmic storytelling’, allowing viewers to ‘conjure’ filmic
episodes (some of which appear in The
Forbidden Room) whereby each viewing witnesses a uniquely sequenced and
un-repeatable composition. An emphasis on cinema as the medium for ghostly collision suggests Maddin’s often innately
poetic interest in movements between presence and absence in film, each constantly
haunted by the other. It is also through exploring the unexpected, in
combinations of chance, that Séances reveals
an impulse to collage. For Maddin, a poetics of collage becomes central not only
to film but to the articulation and experience of everyday perception.
David Spittle: I know Michael Silverblatt introduced you to
John Ashbery but I wondered whether there were ever any other poetic
discoveries that have become comparably important for you? In the tradition of
George Toles and Michael’s chaperoned book guides (and like the loving and
solemn ritual of a mixtape between friends) if you were to compose a list of
poetry recommendations, what might be on it?
Guy Maddin: Well, I like the prose
poetry, if that’s what it is, of De Chirico’s Hebdomeros. And I like Jules Laforgue’s Moralités légendaires (1887), which contains prose poetry
biographies of Hamlet, Salome, Perseus and Andromeda, and Lohengrin. I love the prose too of Osip Mandelstam – his
Egyptian Stamp is the best. Maybe it’s just prose, not even prose poetry -- who
can tell, because now I’m thinking of how much I love Pasternak’s Safe Conduct, which is just prose,
though redolent of poesy! Gimme the prose of
Nerval and Mallarmé, -- did Mallarmé even write any prose? -- and, um,
Frederick Seidel. He’s a poet! I guess I love prose that yanks the rug out from
under my feet and leaves me floating somewhere. For that reason, I also love
Ezra Pound’s apparent complete rewrite-within-a-translation of Paul Morand’s Open All Night. I know these don’t all
add up to Ashbery, but I love them all and Ashbery too. Silverblatt and Toles
both guided me through the first decades of my reading. The stories Michael
recommended that most affected me were the Beckett novels and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds. I love this latter
book so much it hurts. I can’t believe it took me thirty years to read
O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which
might be one of my top five favourite books of all time. Or top fifty, now that
I think of it, but top, way up there – so dreamy-dream-dreamy!
The shared Tibor de Nagy exhibition of
your collages with Ashbery’s seemed like such a natural and exciting match, at
what point did you start sharing your collages with Ashbery?
I can’t remember if I ever showed him any. I was a longtime
fan of his, and I must have show him something because he suggested I approach
the Tibor with my stuff – but I never did! Wait, no, I did! I ran some of my
stuff in the Sienese Shredder, a
fantastic arts annual put out by Ashbery friends Brice Brown and Trevor
Winkfield. I was so proud to be included among the artists who peopled its pages.
There was stuff by Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Jasper Johns – and me!
Ridiculous! Then one day I just got an
invitation from the director of Tibor asking me – no, telling me – I had a
joint show with Ashbery at the gallery if I wished. Just send in some collage,
Guy! I didn’t have any left, so I had to host a few collage parties to get some
made. I know Ashbery always works on his scissoring and gluing alone, but I
always do it in social situations. I get lonely easily and nothing comes! So I
bought some wine and cheese, and some new LPs, and soon I was happily crafting
the crap out of some old magazines until I had my share for the show done.
Your collages from around the period of
Keyhole, like the film itself, seemed darker and more psychosexual than your
later collages in the Tibor exhibition. How much was the change in style a
reaction to the different tone of The Forbidden Room and Séances, and how much
was influenced by Ashbery’s collages and the nature of your collaboration?
Ashbery had a huge influence on me. I love how his collage
work is often the result of just one move, just one image combined with another
to form a new visual meaning or some kind of delight. He made me simplify my
collage. Also, with Keyhole in the
past, my mood brightened considerably. In recent months my collages are almost
exclusively in colour. I hate to supply reductive reasons but my life seems
happier and more stable now, plus I decided to challenge myself with the formidable
task of contriving palettes for the work. I went to the paint store and asked
for one of their “colour complement” wheels and made the new work with that
wheel by my side all the time, for handy complement double-checking.
I’m now hooked on colour, and making things pretty, and
putting one thing on top of another. The whole world is a collage, or so it
seems now, and everyone in it is Ashberian, or everyone is a part of speech in
Ashbery’s singular vernacular! Now I see everything that delights me in terms
of the component parts of a collage, the unlikely collision of two things,
sounds, events, flavours. I’m especially into the titles randomly generated by
the program running Séances – at
the end of each viewing experience a film cemetery of titles created and lost
by this site is listed. If you sit through a movie and take
screen-captures you’ll find a fairly high batting average of near-Ashberian
charm. It’s up to the reader to impose his own Ashberian qualities onto these
things, but I swear they’re there! Also, I love what-if collages involving one
musician, a long-dead one, doing a cover of a song written since their death. I
can go on forever with this one. I really want to hear Leadbelly covering
ScHoolboy Q’s “Big Body.” I want Nat King Cole to sing “King Kunta”! You know,
it can’t happen, it never will, but it MUST!
Could you say a bit about Ashbery’s
script for his collage-play, The Inn of the Guardian Angel (according to the
questionable omnipotence of Wikipidea, this was given to you by Ashbery, and is
collaged from New York Times obituaries and Hollywood fanzines…it sounds
amazing!)
The play is an incredible piece of writing. Not to mention
typewriting! It’s 83-pages long, typed, single-spaced, and it’s all Ashbery. I
think wiki got it as right as I did. I think I’m even the source for that wiki
entry – how often do you find someone willing to admit he’s the source for a
wiki entry? From what I recall John told me he collaged the play together from obituaries
and fanzines, but my memory is terrible, and who knows how much he was
spoon-feeding me with his explanation – I’m only a filmmaker, I spend all my
time stressing to John how much of an outsider I am when it comes to poetry.
John generously included the rights to film The Inn of the Guardian Angel along with
our legal document giving me the right to shoot his adaptation of the lost
Dwain Esper film How to Take a Bath,
which we shot way back in the summer of 2010 and then later included as the
framing structure that held , sort of held, together our 2015 feature film The Forbidden Room. Esper was a
sexploitationist who also shot Reefer
Madness and How to Undress in Front
of Your Husband. He also took over the distribution of Tod Browning’s Freaks when the film was banned. So in
1937 he made a film with the titillating tile How to take a Bath. It apparently compared how married and
unmarried women bathed – that’s when the word spinster was still used on
driver’s licenses to describe the unmarried. Anyway, I think the married bathed
with much more lubricity, while the spinsters’ soapsuds lacked the nacre. I picture the whole thing in split screen, a
great excuse for Esper’s art department to pile suds just so high on the chest
of an actress. John’s adaption is a total rewrite. I love it so, and I’m so
proud to have his words in our feature. Wow. I wish John wrote screenplays more
often. I love his plays, which are hard to get – what’s that one of his adapted
from a Rin-Tin-Tin movie, but with humans playing and speaking the roles of the
digs? So dreamy! I have it somewhere in my apartment, or one of my subletters
took it. Things are always disappearing around here! I begged John,
shamelessly, to write more screenplays for me, but to get rid of me he sent me
this Inn of the Guardian Angel. Every
day during the 2010 production of my feature Keyhole I had actors read aloud from the Inn while I video-recorded them. It was so difficult for the actors
to understand the play, to give the lines any welcoming sense they were
understood. Mind you, some of these actors were having trouble with their
normal lines, and most of them enjoyed it far too much whenever I read the
morning paper out loud to them during hair and make-up.
Starting with Keyhole and certainly
continuing in The Forbidden Room and in the Seances project, it seems like more
horror inflected elements are entering the Maddin universe…would you agree?
Obviously we’re not talking unequivocal ‘genre’ horror, but I feel with some of
the new visual techniques you’re exploring and alongside a constant interest in
hauntings, and altered, delirious, trance-like or frenzied states, more eerie
moments are appearing…
I
wish I were working in genres. I’d be doing myself a favour, from the funding
point of view anyway. Man, I was always so proud of being described as sui
generis, genre-free, but I was proud of something that was screwing me over
completely. I might as well have been proud of being the most financially
unsuccessful, or the most impossible to sell, filmmaker of them all. What a
maroon! But I am delirious, always delirious, obsessed with my own amnesias. I connected with amnesia plots in melodrama and soap
operas even in childhood, and believe me I wasn’t thinking in analytic terms
back then. They just hit me. I guess I’ve always had the kind of dreams while
sleeping that stayed with me long into the day, the feelings they produced
anyway, and for as long as I can remember I’ve dreamt about things I missed the
most. I’d dream about my dead brother come alive, my dead Chihuahua come alive,
my dead grandmother, dad and Aunt Lil. All of them got regularly restored to me
in my sleep. The cottage at the lake, which I was only taken to in the summer
would be restored to me all winter long, and the happy feelings they produced
in me would stay with me well into the day, past lunchtime sometimes. I saw
these dreams as a forgetting. I’d forgotten all the funerals, the deaths. I’d
forgotten it was no longer summer, at least while I was sleeping. I’d forgotten
people were dead, and the feelings of seeing them again, that’s what I
remembered. In a way, forgetting is not just the flip side of remembering, but
an important part of remembering. I’d forget one thing, the absence, and that
would permit me dream access the memories of things long removed from me. It
was like getting handed a telescope in my sleep, so I could see and feel things
up close I would never be able to conjure up as simple daytime memories, not
without the vividness of dreams. Conversely, by day I’ve always been a
stupefied cotton-headed groper through waking life, always forgetting the most
serious problems pressing, really pressing, for real, in on me. I’d forget to
do homework, forget to do chores around the house, forget the time as it passed
in front of the TV. I’d forget as a
young man I was a father, and fall short in my duties there. As a young father
I’d frequently forget my wedding vows, forget to file taxes, forget my manners.
Mix all that up with my bumper crop of dream amnesias and I was one confused
person, I don’t know how I got across the street, so befuddled was I, and
remain to this day, so frequently getting my feet tangled up in memories,
always flipping back and forth between past and present, never involving the
future in my intoxicated reveries. Yes, I was drunk on such reveries,
obsessions with the past, almost a sublime connoisseur of the past’s flavours
as they mingle with the present’s. I learned later Falkner believed the past
and the present exist simultaneously, “the past ain’t even past” or something
like that he said. I was chilled and giddy when I read his words on the
subject. In short, amnesia, the forgetting of the past and the present to bring
me closer to one and remove me more from the other, has been my constant state
for emotions my whole life. I can remember thinking that way back to my
earliest memories. Not sure why, I’ve often mentioned I was brought home from
the hospital the same day the family got its first TV, which had only started
broadcasting in Winnipeg 2 years before my birth. Reception was all rabbit ears
and very snowy. Together we, the TV and I, learned to communicate with each
other. And there were only two channels. But on some mornings, before the
Winnipeg channels went on the air, I could see distant snowy transmissions from
North Dakota or Minnesota come and go in blizzards of evanescent images, the
sound roaring up into an unstable clarity for a few seconds, sometimes a few
minutes even, before being suddenly yanked from me, as suddenly as waking from
a dream, or as sudden as a death. The experience of watching TV was every bit
as dream-addled, every bit as intoxicating as the amnesias in which I accepted
myself as immersed. These broadcast interventions alloyed themselves to the
melodramas of the soaps, sitcoms and night-time dramas I watched obsessively,
and like the leopards in Kafka’s famous parable, the leopards that interrupted
a sacred ceremony so often they were finally just incorporated into the
ceremony, these broadcast interruptions, and my memory interruptions, just
became an accepted part of every TV story and my reactions to it. I feel lucky,
I got an enriched version of all the programming that probably just bored
everyone else. So when as an adult I started to watch noir – and I think it was
film writer Lee Server who once called amnesia noir’s version of the common
cold, I had no trouble as seeing – I didn’t even need to “interpret it” –
amnesia as the natural state of mind for these post-war PTSD protagonists. The
old trope gave me a swift understanding of these doomed chumps. In “women’s
pictures” I understood better than the average normal kid the tortures and
sublimities of Joan Crawford or Ronald Coleman when forgetfulness descended on
them. When it came time to make my own movies I turned to trusty old amnesia to
help me figure out the human condition. In my earliest most primitive days as
screenwriter and director I knew I could never create rich characters, more
like the types Buñuel used in Un Chien
andalou and L’Age d’Or, but if I
spritzed everyone with amnesia I felt I
could give them something like the real human condition, cheaply and quickly.
Little did I realize I was giving them my own human condition, which is sold
only in novelty shops, not the condition Renoir or Flaubert peddled in their
work. Anyway, I think it’s an especially cinematic because one is already
almost completely forgetting the real world when settling into seats inside a
dark movie theatre, or in front of a TV screen.
Like the Brothers Quay you have often
cited the novels of Robert Walser and the stories of Bruno Shulz as an
influence, your films are very different but often speak to comparable
concepts. Is there any further literary common ground between you? Is it interesting
to see how differently your films seem to digest and communicate these
influences? Arguably this link (with the Quays) could be interesting in light
of considering the darker or ‘horror-inflected’ elements in your films.
Yes I adore Walser, and I had been reading his
butler fiction – Tobold and Jakob von Gunten, just as we were
writing the script for Careful (1992).
Walser is so gentle, so delicate, so crazy, it seemed butlering was the perfect
profession for Careful because
butlers had to be careful always, and quiet, and gentle and small and almost
non-existent, a quiet existence of near zero presence. The voice of Walser got
into my head and I thought I could profit from such a possession, so I borrowed
his tone a lot. Bruno Schulz gets the way I think. I can’t think like him, but
he knows how I go about the process of feeling something and then reporting
that feeling to myself. He does that reporting for me because I’m no good at
it, and since I discovered him I don’t need to worry about the job of feeling.
I just read him. That sounds glib, I know, but it sounds honest to me because
I’ve never fallen so hard nor so fast for a writer’s voice and methods as when
I first encountered Schulz. So powerful was the effect that I am now
misremembering my first encounter with Schulz as contemporaneous with my
earliest childhood memory, and I know that can’t be true.
Ever since the muffled soundscapes of
Archangel (1990); the discovery of your brother Cameron’s old radio recordings;
flitting between stations and distant crackle; and the superb ambient
soundtracks of Jason Staczek – the
passage between coherent and incoherent, whether in memory, vision or sound,
seems to haunt your films. With the online nature of Séances does this have
further implications? You seem to evoke a kind of Youtube glitch effect at
times, one that suggests decay as not only the territory of celluloid, or a
cinematic past, but as a continuing and now digital possibility.
I love digital. I completely understand, after
decades of marriage to celluloid emulsions, the loyalty Quentin Tarantino and Paul
Thomas Anderson feel to film, to 70mm film at that, but they can afford it.
I’ve always been a man forced by low budgets to work the margins of the film
industry, the margins of civilization even, and what I’ve discovered over here
on the margin is there’s great freedom in low budgets, fewer people, if any, to
consult. And there is even greater freedom in the so-called “poor image.”
Through their lower resolutions lower gauge films like 16mm and super8 conceal
as much as they reveal, they can turn glaringly jerry-built worlds into
enchanted worlds, just by blurring and graining up the sets and costumes. We’re
in the middle of a great digital explosion now where the “poor image” is
precious to us all. Unstable and murky cell phone images of tragedies have
moved a nation to action, no one seems to care if these clips streaming down to
us through twitter have high resolution or not. Now everyone is a potential
Zapruder, or Arbus, and the textures of digital images are precious to us, they
are no longer undesirable simply for reasons of low resolution. There is sublime
beauty in all resolutions, and not just for news stories or evidence in a case,
but for narrative effects as well. I’ve been waiting a long time for this
moment in film history. This moment in history is nightmarish, but this moment
in film history is euphoria inducing. Never have I seen so much potential in
moviemaking – thanks to digital. Hybrid genres are proliferating,
docufantasias, docudramas, the cine-essay, the essayistic fiction film, every
possible permutation, all thanks to the democratization of cameras. I love what
digital has done for me, for the work Evan and I made. He was able to massage
each of our adapted lost films into its own world of palette and texture. The Forbidden Room is a bit like an archaeological
dig because with every narrative layer comes a different kind of emulsive loam,
a new narrative stratum. One is forced to acknowledge the medium from which the
film is fashioned. And I, who have always been inspired most by fairy tales and
bedtime stories, love it when the viewer is simultaneously inside a story and
aware of its telling. During a bedtime story I was always aware of my
grandmother, my sleepytime raconteur. Drowsily I judged her, felt her weight
pressing against my legs, compared this night’s telling with last week’s
account of the same story. I listened to her voice and through half-shut eyes
beheld her comforting features, but I was also totally inside the story too. I
was aware of the medium from which the magic came – my grandmother. I always
vowed with my movies I would show viewers the grandmother! The proliferation of
artefacts in low budget digital filmmaking allows me to show a grandmother
resplendent in raiment’s of a glorious poverty, the kind made famous by Mike
& George Kuchar, Jack Smith, James Bidgood and John Waters. There is so
much heart-breaking beauty to be produced in these little, almost secret
studios of the heart. Digital gave me the freedom to spend my money on things
other than film processing, and gave me instant feedback on performances. It
also gave me images so hideous, on account of my lack of experience with the
medium, that we were forced to extreme film decasia to make the images
interesting to the eye. But I am thrilled to report that for every tribute to
film abrasion we put in the final product, there are as many digital artefacts
too. We’re just showing the grandmother again! Finally, after being dead since
1970, my grandmother has gone digital!
Returning to the
theme of films interacting with poetry – are there any contemporary poets whose
work you enjoy? I remember you mentioning Jeremy Dobbs’ Crabwise to the Hounds,
which was a collection I also really loved. What have you been reading
recently?
I
should have read these years ago but I am now in the midst of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and -- hey, Silverblatt! --
Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive.
So great! I just finished Beckford’s Vathek,
which my filmmaking partner Evan Johnson urged me to read by describing it, way
better than I could, as “proto
Gabriele D'Annunzio, proto-Huysmans, proto-Flaubert-of-Salammbo, occasionally
Rousselian, etched in ultra-precise prose with an enormous vocabulary, but told
in a kind of high irony like Mann’s The
Holy Sinner.” Now as far as styles go, that’s my idea of a collage!
For
more on Maddin’s collages:
For
more on Maddin and Ashbery:
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