On DVD: Guy Maddin 101: Brand Upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin is the best director working today that you've never heard of. Maybe it's because he's Canadian, or because his films are surreal, dreamlike contemplations that don't fall into any of the usual cinematic categories. But if you love movies, you have to give Maddin's work a look.

The folks at the Criterion Collection, always with an eye toward the meatier side of cinema, recently released Maddin's 2006 film Brand Upon the Brain! on DVD, and it's a fine introduction to the Maddin aesthetic. Using seriously old-school (as in, silent era) film techniques, Maddin reinvents his own biography with a tale about a character named Guy Maddin (played by Erik Steffen Maahs) who's called by his mother (Gretchen Krich) to the island where he grew up, and asked to repaint the island's lighthouse. As he restores the lighthouse, he recalls the events of his childhood in flashback, when the lighthouse served as an orphanage run by Maddin's overbearing mother and his father (Todd Jefferson Moore), a crazy inventor.

Maddin has been compared to early David Lynch because of his preference for deliberately aged black-and-white photography and his surrealist bent. But the similarities end there. Whereas Lynch traffics heavily in the baffling and blatantly shocking, Maddin's more interested in telling stories that incorporate the subconscious of his characters into the narrative and making sly jokes that involve Freudian imagery. Okay, so there's an element of the disturbing here, too, but it's usually presented with a large dose of dark humor. The foundation of Maddin's work is an in-your-face declaration that all visual storytelling is artifice, and he takes it several steps further to embrace techniques from silent and German Expressionist filmmaking to bring it back to its inception, using old-fashioned tools to tell stories that are full of symbolism, psychology, melodrama, and wry comedy.

All of which is a high-falutin' way of saying that Maddin's movies are pretty weird, and take a bit of work to watch. But once you "get" Maddin, it's worth the effort -- his movies are fascinating mash-ups of his personal obsessions and sexual quirks, blatant falsehoods, and symbolic buffoonery. All done with a bizarre, meta elegance that uses long-disused film language to tell tales that artfully meld the inner and the outer world.

Brand Upon the Brain! isn't a bad place to start if you're new to Maddin. The silent film premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival with an orchestra, sound-effects technicians to do live Foley effects, a narrator and a castrato singer. After that, it was presented on a national tour with a revolving cast of guest narrators, including Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Crispin Glover, and Eli Wallach. The eventual theatrical release incorporated music and sound effects into the film with voiceover narration by Isabella Rossellini.

The film itself is complex and compelling. Young Guy (Sullivan Brown) and his older sister, Sis (Maya Lawson) live with the orphans under the oppressive eye of their mother, who watches their every move from atop the lighthouse and barks orders via "aerophone" -- an invention of their father's, which can communicate between any two people who love each other. The older Guy's memories recall Sis's romance with boy detective Chance Hale (who is really Chance's sister Wendy (Katherine E. Scharhon) in disguise), and Chance/Wendy's discovery that all of the island's children, including Sis, have mysterious wounds on their necks.

So Brand Upon the Brain! is a movie about unraveling riddles: older Guy's examination of his repressed memories, the kids' weird neck wounds -- and one riddle that's not-too-subtly about the way that parents "brand" their children indelibly. Told in 12 chapters, Maddin uses classic silent-film title cards to put an exclamation point on salient plot points ("Secrets! Secrets! Secrets!" reads one), telling his story in murky, shallow-focus 8mm with deft use of subtle colorings, old-style fades, and iris shots. It's bizarre, funny, and -- if you have the patience for it -- deeply satisfying.

This new DVD release from the Criterion Collection is up to their fine standards, offering a superb 1.85:1 transfer of the black-and-white film. There are several soundtrack choices with different narrators, four from live performances during the national tour. Narrators are Maddin, Crispin Glover, actor Louis Negin, poet John Ashbery, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, and Isabella Rossellini (either recorded in-studio or from her live perfomance).

Extras on the disc include the 50-minute featurette, 97 Percent True, about Maddin's influences, the filming and post-production process, and the meaning behind some of the more obscure imagery, plus footage of other narrators on the tour and interesting talking-head interviews.

There are two new short films by Maddin never seen before: It's My Mother's Birthday Today, a strange and wonderful five-minute look at the castrato who performed on the film's tour (and who, typical for Maddin, is not what he appears), and Footsteps, a nine-minute contemplation on the work of Foley artists.

There's also the theatrical trailer, one deleted scene, and a 14-page booklet with an essay on Maddin by film critic Dennis Lim.

Should you want to delve further into Maddin's films, try the following:

Introductory Maddin: The Saddest Music in the World (2003), about a Depression-era music contest concocted by a legless Winnipeg beer heiress (Rossellini). Among those who come to Winnipeg for the contest are the heiress's brash American ex-lover (Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney) who manages an amnesiac singer (Maria De Madeiros, and the man who severed the heiress' legs in a car accident. (MGM Home Video)

Intermediate Maddin: Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), a precursor of sorts to Brand Upon the Brain!, in which Guy (Maddin regular Darcy Fehr) is a star hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons who abandons his pregnant girlfriend mid-abortion -- but his new flame won't make love to him until Guy agrees to have his hands amputated and replaced with her dead father's, which she keeps in a jar. Then she demands that he use the hands to avenge her father's murder. (Zeitgeist Films)

Advanced Maddin: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002), a ballet adaptation of Bram Stoker's vampire classic, presented as a silent melodrama in the Expressionist style, beautifully choreographed with Maddin-style title cards ("Death! It is only the beginning!"), occasional tints of color, and deliciously creepy sound effects. (Zeitgest Films)

Ph.D. Maddin: Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), about a man named Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch), who lives in the small town of Gimli, originally founded by Icelandic immigrants, and seeks a treatment for an epidemic skin disease at the town hospital, which is in a loft above an old barn. Patients are anesthetized with puppet shows, and when Einar makes the acquaintance of another patient named Gunnar (Michael Gottli), the two keep themselves entertained by revealing terrible, perverse secrets about themselves. (Kino Video)

Dawn Taylor loves Guy Maddin's films, but admits that they're best taken in small doses. Otherwise, they can make your brain hurt.

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