The FFF’09 was opened with a very special film: Brand Upon the Brain!.

A remembrance in 12 chapters

Brain upon the brand

Like looking at scrupulous decorations of a Gothic cathedral, queer stone faces and shadow play – that is how one could characterize a look, fixed to everything that the leading neo-Goth of the modern cinema – Gay Maddin – has done to a film. His mind is utterly original, as releasing great surrogate movies he makes people believe in his skills of alchemy or dark magic. Being far ahead with his experiments, he is not afraid to create a psychosexual mentally deficient atmosphere by using collages of radical means of expression. To observe it in the audience means to experience an impetuous balancing between horror, laughter and feel of cinema that is almost a century old.

A film on Guy Maddin – the painter – is no exception! The impenetrable fog that embraces us, when the film starts, and the main character, lost somewhere in the sea and ending up in his childhood nightmare, serve as a frontier, behind which the audience is left in insecurity. This is where Maddin – the director – starts his intended experiment – an oedipic phantasmagoria, in which an endlessly rotating lighthouse beam spreads occultism, vampirism and the retaliation of the character’s mother on miserable orphans. This neurotic world, in which frayed 8-millimetre filming interchange with the quickness of editing, resembles a kaleidoscope of black-and-white pictures, that similar to Turn of the Screw by Henry James, makes one plunge into the mercy of hypnotic fear. Maddin’s fantasy overflows the scars on the heads of the little children and of us, too. Probably, it is no movie at all, but rather a hidden research, that observes us from the screen seeing us watch, slowly entering the darkest tunnels of our mind and encountering the open mouth of a chimera there…

Dāvis Sīmanis

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