Here’s part 1:

…and part 2:

When I was in grad school, this guy put Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass on my reading list, which led me to Street of Crocodiles, which is of course the source material for the Quays’ film. Years later I was delighted to find myself on the faculty of Goddard’s MFA program with Victoria Nelson, a Schulzian whose superb and heady The Secret Life of Puppets has this to say about the adaptation presented above:

“…Street of Crocodiles draws on the central images of the stories to re-represent the magical, industrialized Gothic universe of Schulz’s Drohobycz. With nothing whatever in it identifiably “American,” this nonlinear narrative is a virtually perfect re-creation of eastern European style and mood.

The Brothers Quay

I agree with Vicki that this adaptation is all about capturing mood, so after I screened the film I asked the class to write an adaptation that captured the feeling of what they’d just seen. Then I read a bit of the source material. Reading Schulz I’m always astounded by the translation. I can’t read Polish, and I have no idea how faithfully this adheres to the original language, but goddamn if Celina Wieniewska’s translation doesn’t knock me out every time. Here’s an excerpt of what I shared with the class:

“While in the old city a nightly semi-clandestine trade prevailed, marked by ceremonious solemnity, in the new district modern, sober forms of commercial endeavour had flourished at once. The pseudo-Americanism, grafted on the old, crumbling core of the city, shot up here in a rich but empty and colourless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity. One could see there cheap jerry-built houses with grotesque facades, covered with a monstrous stucco of cracked plaster. The old, shaky suburban houses had large hastily constructed portals grafted on to them which only on close inspection revealed themselves as miserable imitations of metropolitan splendour. Dull, dirty and faulty glass panes in which the dark pictures of the street were wavily reflected, the badly planed wood of the doors, the grey atmosphere of those sterile interiors where the high shelves were cracked and the crumbling walls were covered with cobwebs and thick dust, gave these shops the stigma of some wild Klondike.”

Now that I’m in the position to do so, I assign the hell out of Bruno Schulz. One of my students, Jennifer Babson, a talented writer based in Germany, traveled to Poland recently and mentioned Schulz to anyone who’d listen.

Jan Svankmajer

From American twins consumed by Eastern European moods we moved to a film by an actual Eastern European, the Czech director Jan Svankmajer. While the Brothers Quay’s stop-motion adaptation of Schulz exists within the shadows of a boxed-in world, Svankmajer’s “Picnic with Weismann” takes place in a spacious, tree-ringed field, where a number of inanimate objects pursue an afternoon of leisure. Take a look.

The film elicited some laughs, particularly during the plum-eating routine. Unlike “Street of Crocodiles,” this short adheres to something of an easily recognizable structure. It’s basically a long joke with a punchline. Not all of Svankmajer’s films are quite this whimsical, though even Lunacy, which is based on de Sade and Poe, has its knee-slapping moments. After screening this short I asked the class to again write an adaptation of what they’d just seen.

Our third and final film was Norman McLaren’s “Neighbours,” for which the Canadian won an Oscar in 1952. Take a gander:

My least favorite of the three shorts I screened, I’m always a bit put off by the heavy-handedness of the capital-M Message of this short.

Norman McLaren

McLaren worked under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, that great purveyor of classroom films (and namesake of ambient music fixture Boards of Canada), which nowadays makes its entire archive available on the web. McLaren’s work is also collected in a hefty 6-disc boxed set that I have just begun to dig into.

Our triptych of films began with two Americans enraptured by Eastern European melancholy, on to a visual joke by a Czech animator, and finally to a sincere Canadian who urged us to all get along. I still feel like I’m figuring out how to teach a film class. Next week, for our final session, I’m going to hit the class with a little Maddin and Deren. I’m considering making popcorn.

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE
• The Eyeball: What I Watched this Weekend – Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #37: Kenneth Anger
• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball: What I Watched this Weekend – Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #41: Talking with Aimee Bender About The 400 Blows
• The Eyeball #40: Unreal Fiction and Film, Part 1

Get a load of the trailer:

I was pleased to see that a passing acquaintance named Annette Toutonghi appears in the cast as one of the two murderous sisters. In another life, I sat next to Annette as we answered phones for an online retailer, calmly explaining to customers that their shipments would eventually arrive. What I remember most about Annette was her remarkable voice, a sweet trill made for narrating fairy tales. Alas! Brand Upon the Brain! is an ostensibly silent film, and Maddin had no use for Annette’s pipes.

By ostensibly, I mean that there’s music, sound effects provided by the aforementioned foley artists, and narration in the form of an “explicator.” The DVD allows you to choose your own explicator, among them Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover, and John Ashbery. Jesus, people, what cinematic heaven is this?

Watching the making-of feature, I began to appreciate Maddin’s mastery of cinema’s vocabulary even more. The man draws from 100+ years of film history in the form and content of his films. Flashes of color in this otherwise black and white film come inspired by similar techniques in Nosferatu. The role of explicator emerged as a result of something Buñuel said about the narrated films of his childhood. Maddin shot the film with hand-held 8mm cameras, then edited it in Final Cut Pro. While editing his previous film, Cowards Bend the Knee, he became fascinated by how the software fast-forwarded and rewinded—not more or less fluidly sped-up, as with VHS, but choppily, bypassing segments, touching down occasionally on an image. With Brand, Maddin incorporated this movement in the final product. The result is something that looks like a dream.

A live perfomance of Brand Upon the Brain!

Pause to consider what Maddin has achieved here. It’s easy to think of him as a purveyor of images inspired by the films of the 1930s. But he is also resolutely a citizen of his own era, getting the most out of the more-or-less cheap and current technology his budgets dictate. In Maddin’s films we see a collision of both the extremely antiquated (art direction, score, melodramatic acting) and the tools and sensibilities of the YouTube generation. I would LOVE to see what he could do with a typical multi-million dollar small film budget.

This weekend I also re-watched one of Maddin’s earlier films, 1992′s Careful, recently re-released by Zeitgeist Video. Imagine a Leni Reifenstahl mountain movie as viewed through a Mark Rothko painting. The same sexual agony that makes Brand so compelling is here in spades, as Maddin and his screenwriting partner George Toles dish out a primordial tale of incest set in a town that embodies repression of the most extreme variety. The film so resolutely belongs in its own genre. Here’s a clip.

So on one hand, you’ve got Maddin’s methodology, his blend of old cinematic forms and new, of necessary cheapness and global distribution, of cinema as experienced through an 8mm lens and cinema as live spectacle. With these tools, Maddin has chosen to shape experiences most personal and shameful, each film getting closer to autobiographical purity while he embraces the freeing release of melodrama. It’s in these contradictions and forces that seemingly should be at odds, but which Maddin lovingly stitches together like a mad tailor, that his great art finds the screen.

Now I need to find the right time and place to experience My Winnipeg.

Related Posts:

• Docu-fantasia
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• THE EYEBALL: Nude Caboose
• THE EYEBALL: Fake Out
• The Eyeball: What I Watched this Weekend – Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

George Melies’s Voyage to the Moon

Why do we laugh at some special effects because they are so blatantly fraudulent, yet delight at the same level of effects when employed in a different context? Why is it that Tarantino can have a model airplane fly over a model of Tokyo and this is accepted as evidence of his mastery over the medium, while a similar model plane flying over Tokyo in a C-grade Japanese monster movie elicits snorts?

I think it boils down to three interconnected questions. One, how comfortable is the film’s creator with the fundamental falseness of the medium? Two, how much is the creator trying to “fool” the audience into thinking what they’re seeing is real? Three, how strong is the story?

The effects-driven films we tend to think of as shitty are those, I think, that either try too hard to trick us into thinking what we’re watching is real at the expense of storytelling. Filmmakers who pay inordinate attention to whether the fur on their CGI gorilla looks like “real” fur while putting this gorilla in a lame story bring attention to the falseness of the effects, and our distaste for the CGI is really a transferred distaste for the story.

Ray Harryhausen with some of his creations

We’re more forgiving of films with crappy effects that serve a well-told story. We’re willing to give the creator a little slack, particularly when it comes to older films. I recently re-watched Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts with my son and re-loved every minute of it. You can’t help but notice the seams and rivets of this 1963 film, with its stop-motion skeleton army and abundance of reaction shots. Even though the filmmaking tricks are so easy to discern, the movie holds up by virtue of the sincerity with which it was made. Harryhausen, like George Melies before him and Peter Jackson today, was working with the state-of-the-art movie magic of his day and took seriously the task of entertaining an audience.

The bathtub from The Science of Sleep

Now that we have a century’s worth of filmmaking trickery behind us, today’s auteurs, working without the budgets of the Finchers and Jacksons of the world, can embrace an equally legit cinematic orientation by flatly accepting fakeness. I’m thinking of Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep in which crinkled cellophane plays the part of water in a bathtub. Or the antique shop decay of the Bros. Quay or my fave Guy Maddin’s super-saturated Careful, coming soon in a remastered and “repressed” (I assume in many senses of the word) version from Zeitgeist Video. I plan to devote a future post to nothing but Maddin.

So the question of whether the effects of a particular film still hold up isn’t the same question as whether those effects are comfortable in their falseness, whether the strength of the story allows us to reserve our judgment of obviously fake effects, and whether the filmmaker is trying to replace reality or create a reality of his own.

Related Posts:

• Nobody Tell Gollum About This
• REELINGS #1: MOONRISE KINGDOM
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #34: The Thorn in My Heart
• Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach Sit in Chairs

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Suck it.

Hey tweens who enjoy a little abstinence-only subtext thrown in with your vampire movies: go out and get a load of the non-virginal variety in Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. This was one of the Maddin movies I’ve been saving. It’s the Canadian director’s collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Which means that in addition to bared fangs there is DANCING. I have to say this wasn’t one of my favorite Maddin films. While the art direction made its nods to German Expressionism, Maddin’s presence only really became obvious in the editing–the droll title cards, a sequence of blood spreading across a map of Europe, some tongue-in-cheek sound effects (A character named “The Texan” appears to the sound of pounding equestrian hooves). I found myself missing the so-fake-it’s-great dialogue of Maddin’s frequent screenwriter George Toles. And already knowing what the story was about and how it would end removed a lot of the reasons why I pop in a Maddin DVD to begin with, to court surprise and bewilderment.

It seems the most common filter through which we view Dracula is sexuality. In the short featurette included on the DVD Maddin acknowledges this traditional interpretation of the story, citing the assumption that the story is really about Western Europe’s fear that dark foreigners from Eastern Europe will descend upon the homeland to seduce the womenfolk. But while watching this version of the done-to-death tale of the undead, I started to wonder if Dracula is really about economics.

Nobody ever really mentions Dracula’s wealth. Or that “blood-sucking” is an adjective often leveled at the more zealous capitalists among us. If an abstinence-only vampire story like Twilight is possible, perhaps our perennial obsession with vampires has less to do with anxieties about losing those we love to a sexual force and more to do with some other form of powerlessness. To put it another way, maybe our sense of economic powerlessness right now makes us yearn for the economic power of immortality, the ultimate capitalist high–a state of limitless growth.

I always felt that the popularity of Titanic was really about pre-Y2K anxiety, when we worried that the wondrous technological vessels of the late 20th century would crumble thanks to an iceberg hidden in the source code. Maybe it’s the same with vampires nowadays. Maybe we’re all wishing we were undead.

Related Posts:

• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• The Eyeball #42: Talking to Tom Nissley About The Most Dangerous Game
• The Eyeball #38: HOUSE
• The Eyeball #37: Kenneth Anger
• The Eyeball #35: Un Chien Andalou

From a New York Magazine interview:

You’ve described My Winnipeg as a “docu-fantasia.” Can you explain?
That’s just a label I threw on because I wanted to avoid arguments over whether it’s a documentary or not. But it’s a useful starting point. Rather than having to research facts, I just conducted all my research in my memory and in my heart. I got to rant, I got to squirt some bile.

And here’s the trailer for My Winnipeg:

Related Posts:

• THE EYEBALL: Guy Maddin
• The Eyeball #39: Bros. Quay, Svankmajer, and McLaren
• THE EYEBALL: Nude Caboose
• THE EYEBALL: Fake Out
• The Eyeball: What I Watched this Weekend – Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary