Spring 2005 - Uncanny Bodies of Darkness and Light: Guy Maddin, Andrew Noren, Pat O’Neill

Cinema is a shadowy place haunted by people and events of the past that come alive through this medium’s multi-dimensional realities.  Part memory, empirical impression, critical engagement, and dream, every movie brings luminous presences back to life through heightened sensory experiences involving cognitive, emotional and reflective processes of mind and body.  Cinema is a place of return that is never the same, capable of extending human perception beyond normal sensory limits.  Although these aspects are often repressed, the works by the artists in Uncanny Bodies of Darkness and Light exceed narrative determinism and generate new forms of dynamic visual-spatial experiences.  Each of these artists is recognized as a major innovator who has evolved unique cinematic mise en scenes and personal uses of imaging technologies that have transformed the medium of film and cinematic perception in fundamental organic ways. 

Dracula, the creature of darkness par excellence, invades the cinematic atmosphere of Guy Maddin's contemporary synthesis of spirit photography and phantasmagorias.  His choice of actors, use of lighting and fabricated sets resonate with a weird nostalgia while his film emulsion records the visceral trace of the haunted scenes of his cinematic inscription.  Andrew Noren's ghost poems are fantastic permutations of energy and desire that explore interstitial dimensions of figure, surface, reflection and transmission.  His alchemy of sunlight and shadow immerse us in a dynamic camera of nature where bodies of darkness and light are revealed as more substantial than their real world referents.  Noren's close observation of natural phenomena and everyday lived experiences are metaphors for both perception and cinema that are the basis of abstract experiences underlying his personal form of graphic visionary work.  The fabricated collage architectures of Pat O'Neill's materialist, poetic films construct a complex layered sense of scale, place and physical traces of human presence.  His films map a visually dynamic spatial-temporal flow of the passage of historical time modulated by the rhythms of nature.  Through his extraordinary use of found footage, intervolometer sequences and extended optical printer matte shots, he calls up ghosts from the past as collaborative agents who navigate the psyche and unconscious potential of historical, real world places and events. –Patrick Clancy 

March 30, 2005  

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, Guy Maddin (Canada),
2002, 75 min., 35mm film shown on DVD
Transposing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s interpretation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire yarn from stage to screen, Maddin has forged a sumptuous, erotically charged feast of dance, drama and shadow.  Maddin’s films are as beautiful as they are confounding and delirious, incorporating the language of past cinema with which he is most intimately familiar. – Zeitgeist Films

April 6, 2005  

Time Being, Part VII ofThe Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse (AKA Magical Thinking), Andrew Noren (USA), 2001, 62 min., digital video shown on DVD
“We blink.  This intermittence creates our dubious dream of ‘time’… belief in sequence of scene becomes ‘before’ and ‘after.’  Sequence requires duration… the rest is history!

“The eye you see ‘it’ with is the eye ‘it’ sees you with.
Refinement in this area is possible… and desirable.
This can be understood magically.” –Andrew Noren

Free To Go (interlude), Part VIII ofThe Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse (AKA Magical Thinking), Andrew Noren (USA), 2003, 61 min., digital video shown on DVD
“Energy pictures!… Mindful kinesis. Molecular anarchy ‘behind the scenes.’ Invisible light and blind shadow… irascible brats!… vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space in time. Fool’s paradise of illusory ‘window’… (‘flutter of phantoms, trick of the light’), savored and shattered and seen for what it is.” –Andrew Noren

April 13, 2005  

The Decay of Fiction, Pat O’Neill (USA), 2002, 74 min., 35mm film
“The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel in Hollywood.  The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Coconut Grove.  The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked.   A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise.  Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean.  The sun sets and rises again.  Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue.  In the kitchens and behind the scenes, daily routines continue, individuality melts and workers fuse with the outlines of their activity.  Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball that claims the life of Rhonda, the evasive soprano.  And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and stucco, and fact finally becomes fiction, once again.” –Pat O’Neill