Guy Maddin’s "Séances" at Northwest Film Forum: Oct 25 - Nov 3

The Silent Era is in the midst a rise into greater cinema culture consciousness, along the way inspiring some genuinely inquisitive forays into documentation, restoration and preservation. With some 85% of all of silent film believed to be lost, Canada's own artist-of-artifice extraordinaire, Guy Maddin has taken it upon himself to create a series of Silent Cinema revivals of quite a different sort. His proposed "Making 100 Short Films in 100 Days in Four Countries with Current Project 'Spiritismes'" led the way to the series of "Séances". Which had the first of their invocations and performance at Spiritismes at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2012 with a second set of performances "Guy Maddin’s Performance Installation 'Séances' Begins Filming" at Montreal's Phi Centre a year later. The completed project to be hosted online by the National Film Board wherein the interactive format will allow for viewers to experience the films together, arranged recombinant forms by software designed by Halifax-based Nickel Media. Generating their own unique structures, these algorithmically arranged assemblies have the potential to form hundreds of millions of unique narrative permutations in, "Guy Maddin’s Endless Cinematic Experience". Speaking with Jonathan Ball, the director details the differences involved in these concurrent projects, "Guy Maddin on The Forbidden Room and Writing Melodrama"; "While The Forbidden Room was a feature film with its own separate story and stars", says Maddin, "Séances" on the other hand is a place — a dark place! — where anyone online can hold séances with the spirits of cinema, lost and forgotten cinema. The "Séances" project has really evolved in recent months. It was going to be title-for-title remakes of specific lost films, but we found as we went that the spirits of many other lost movies, and the spirit of loss in general, haunted our sets and demanded to be represented in front of our cameras."

In an set of interviews with The Guardian's Jonathan Romney, "Guy Maddin on His Surreal Séances and Sexploitation Remakes", the director talks his recent run of collaborative work with the Johnson brothers. In films like their cannibalistic meta-construction "The Green Fog", the trio have produced a singular body utilizing both chemical and digital degradation processes, with a twinned auditory effect in Galen Johnson's deeply Hauntological soundtrack constructed from repurposed classical music and incidental film scores. Together the sound and image making for a headily over-brimming, absurd concoction of hallucinogenic digressions and narrative tips of the hat, all rendered in wildly divergent film stock, color coding, media artifacts and states of decrepitude. Their approach to both form and technique in their paradoxically original pastiche detailed in Cinema-Scope's "Lost in the Funhouse: A Conversation with Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson". Further quantified in the pages of Film Comment as "too much is just right", Romney delves deep into the movie-mad filmmaker’s collaborative feats of phantasmagorical cinema, "The Infernal, Ecstatic Desire Machine of Guy Maddin". In 2015 I encountered a previous work in this style by the trio. Their "Kino Ektoplasma" multi-screen installation was created as a resurrection of lost films of the German Expressionist era in a preternaturally gorgeous, transmutive sequence, specifically commissioned as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s. Years later, these works finally arrive in town in a seasonally appropriate stretch of days at the end of October and earliest November. Northwest Film Forum will be presenting their mini-retrospective of the director's work, the trio of theatrical films, "Archangel", "Careful", and "My Winnipeg", screening concurrently with the weeklong Seattle premier of the long anticipated "Séances" installation.