a valentine to movie matinees
by
Douglas Messerli
Evan
Johnson, Robert Kotyk Guy Maddin, writers; with additional material by John
Ashbery) Guy Maddin (director) The
Forbidden Room / 2015
Guy Maddin’s
2015 film, The Forbidden Room, is an art-house film on grade B and C
movies from the silent era through the 1950s. With sly references to
cliff-hangers like The Adventures Pauline,
submarine adventure tales such 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea and Voyage to
the Bottom of the Sea, exciting Tarzan-like stories—only in the Canadian
Maddin’s case, played out in the cold Northwest with wolf-people and
trappers—films influenced by the Janus-myth such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and even more ridiculous tales including a
slightly incestuous relationship between a blind widow and her recently
mustachioed son, and a hilarious mystery, replete with Expressionist-like sets,
about a government attaché who suddenly finds himself murdering his double, who
is delayed in his murder by a former ostler, who tells yet another story
wherein, in memory of D. H. Lawrence, he recalls murdering his lover with his
mother’s laudanum. At moments, Maddin’s film seems like the hallucinated movie
described by the character Dinah, in Leonard Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti.
Maddin tells these tall tales, with a
large score of actors (Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Udo Kier, Mathieu
Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlotte Rampling, and Noel Burton among many
others, many of them playing several roles) with beautiful music such as
Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, while imitating
the intertitles of silent films, and presenting his images as brittle scenes on
decaying film stock which might at any moment ignite into flames—and sometimes
does!
Indeed, as the stories within stories
within still further stories progresses forward and backward, we finally end
up, once again with the early submarine tale, where the men, missing oxygen,
are forced to eat flapjacks (pancakes are a returning motif in Maddin’s work,
as are bathtubs, women with necklaces, and virgins in distress) so that they
might find oxygen in their “air pockets.” The Captain’s room, meanwhile, is the
“forbidden room” of the title, but as the men begin to fear for their lives,
they rush into his domain only to find him dying within his bubble bath; the
lone survivor discovers, in a book hidden within another book—much like the
structure of the movie itself—where he encounters briefs of the best
“climaxes.”
For Maddin, of course, the “climaxes” are
not only sexual—which symbolizes his relationship with the medium—but a literal
listing of adventure movie “climaxes,” the best of the cliffhangers that ended
films with visions of romantic love and salvation. Film is clearly here not
only a sexual force but an emotionally saving force, akin almost to a kind of
religious experience.
The several bathtub images which with
the movie strangely begins and ends represent, accordingly, not only a kind of
spiritual washing of the soul, but the complete immersion in a world of
“dreams, visions” and imagination.
If often Maddin appears to be laughing
at all of these absurd cinematic sequences, he is simultaneously, in re-representing
them, celebrating their curative powers. For each of these stories feature
characters compelled by their fixations and their inability to move ahead into
a more normative world; the only solution for their problems, so the director
suggests, is through the imagination that art, in particular cinema, can offer.
Ultimately, Maddin’s work is a heavily collaged valentine to all those films in
which so many of us of a certain generation let ourselves be bathed by just
such images on those dozens of Saturday and Sunday matinees. Through them, I
grew to love theater and later fiction—and through fiction, eventually, poetry.
Without them…well, maybe I would no choice but to believe in god. Thank god for
the choice.
Los Angeles, November
4, 2016
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