Just Whoa Stories: Guy Maddin, Canadian Amnesiac: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

If you'd wondered casually where Guy Maddin's been all these weeks, months, years, then you haven't read the snootier cineaste tabloids that remind us he's traveled the world and the eighteen seas shooting weird shorts on weird soundstages with his cool (and/or literally cold) friends. Now he's slung all those shorts together in order to re-witness the allegorical birth of cinema: its slow crawl out of the silent fallopian Méliès ocular orifice, its uncooked bullet monocle pace as it crosscuts through Intolerance valleys, its slop to the dusty floor in time to find Jolson belting out "Mammy" as the heavy silence of his meshugginah papa offers naught but silent film barbed wire-rimmed be-spectacled reproach. Too late, old rabbi, wave, Harpo-like, into the collapsing iris as thou wilt, but thou shalt not not speak again! Cinema is born as howling amnesiac, its cries washed away in rhtythm of the celluloid train tracks. 

The tracks of the celluloid train's trip stop, sharply, suddenly, in 'real life' at a cliff overlooking 70mm Cinemascope and Technicolor. The train you were on ("when you left... Europa") sails off into the red, blue and yellow orbs of early color TV projectors, no longer track-bound, but on wings of surround sound. But Maddin has gotten off at the border. Maddin shuns everything except the old 2-Strip sprocket train trod by the Winnipeg forefathers. Down into the trackside gully trundles Guy, to pick up the undeveloped scraps of discontinued stock, the 'ends' tossed by wasteful cinematographers, the old combustible silver nitrate that boils and twists in the heat of the projector lamp, but cooks down real nice into twisty jewelry. 

Then, wondering what kind of Brakhage-based nonlinearity cinema might have grown up on had the silent-to-sound conversion gone differently, Maddin sets to wandering the largely unexplored land betwixt German expressionism and post-nouvelle vague hipster retro meta-narrative. Tip-toeing down the slope below the sprocket tracks and into the tulip beds of the unconsciousness, out the shutter, through the gate, and into the blackness beyond any flicker fusion threshold, he tallies the dreams of everyone who ever fell asleep on a speeding train (ala... Europa), and finds a new form of cinematic vision, one not so very moored to the speed of rotating locomotive reels, 24-frames per second, one that savors instead the speed bumps on the track, that savors flicker from the shutter that gives the illusion of a single moving image. The landscape, scrolling past outside the window, gets to keep its cigarette burns, its scratches and tape marks, its mismatched rear screen size ratios (waiting commuters seen the compartment window loom large as ogres). The passing scenery freezes and starts burning up under the blazing light of the projector until it's all bright white light. The house lights come on, the whiteness seems to spread all through the theater, and even out into the street outside (Winnipeg! Snow!) The audience groans like groggy nappers. They refuse to leave, or to fully wake, until the light burns so bright the hair on their arms singes. 

Maddin cures his characters of their psychiatric ills by showing them their inner children, hidden in closets, he gives them melted copper nitrate booster shots. He pays a visit to one of his favorite old Boards of Canada-produced pock-marked classroom instructional 16mm films; he has a dream that John Berryman was right.... there, in the fluoride, crossing the racing lines and looking both ways before learning how to take a bath. Here come mothers or actresses paid to wear motherly clothes, scrubbing us so thoroughly we can feel Liv Ullman's breathing on the screen of our thin skin. But in our shame we then notice the horrified rubes peeping through the sideshow curtains at our Oedipal naked soapy infant nakedness! 

A mere dissolve later and we're an old man doomed to die in an abyss of black tail leader. Mama, if we hadn't flinched at their rube-y gawking, would we still be young?

Infancy = Amnesia! 

A good dreamer doesn't know he's dreaming (for he'd wake), nor a character that he's fiction (for we'd wake, and only Brecht or Godard would want that). But in Maddin's world, consciousness extends beyond both waking and dreaming to a new third thing that's better than either, a kind of long great white northern slumbering. Winnipeg--as he notes in his previous film--has the most sleepwalkers of any city. Thus he is unusually bestowed with the gift of mixing film viewing with 'living' in a film as the ultimate in real viewing. Characters in most films are aware of the importance of keeping from the audience their full awareness of the mise-en-scene frame boundaries. They don't need a silver nitrate fireball held right against their mother's temple to keep them from squawking that it's all a gag. They don't want us to stir from our slumber because--to them--we are like the semi-slumbering couch potato titans in Cabin in the Woods, or the languid Red Wolves in the cave the lumberjack infiltrates to rescue Margot. One disgruntled click of a button and everyone on this 'train' will cease to exist.

But still these characters set about seeing you get that bath, scrubbed by that pretty maid. The rube at the roadshow remembers but you don't remember him at all. Future generations will see you in your bath, but now the colors will have all turned to rust. If you're in a Guy Maddin movie, that rust has happened ahead of time,  just far enough for your nightmare third-eye fevered brain to hallucinate patterns upon the bubbling Ektachrome shower curtain into which your silhouette dissolves. It's just enough to distract you, so the skeleton insurance defrauders can lull you into a gentle trance. Your worthless squirming signature on a piece of paper is all they need. Sign and they'll stop pestering you! Sign....shhhh... ine. Initial there and sleeep on....dream and slumber forward into the ever chugging night--sleep while moving faster than you could run. The track culls you forth like a ticking clock, scrubbing blackness from the pink skin of the sky by force of the tick-tock habit. What else does the world turn for, if not lack of other options? Has anyone convinced it to stop twirling like a mad idiot around the sun, to slow its roll and stop unwinding itself? They don't bother to try anymore. We're stuck 'orbiting' the sun like a moth around a light fixture, and it's all mom's fault. We get desperate to burn back up in the white heat of an empty projector, to drink from the sun like a mammary flame fountain and be reborn as an angel... on a new UV-ray disc, the new UV-ray players coming soon - 2034 at the latest.

Every moth who made it past that shade has never regretted it.

Even if their husks are swept up with the dropped popcorn at the end of the night, those moths had that one shining moment... and they're still here. We can smell their burnt impression on that mighty orb. The light's off now, the smell is gone, but the show goes on, repeating every two hours tomorrow starting at 11 AM, until the late show lets you out into a parking lot that's as still as a tomb. Gradually the smell fades, but the memory lingers, and the film won't decompose, not with so much cold. And so, to bed. The road home is waiting for you... come on, pal, fall.. asleep... so the orgy.. can begin, right under your sleeping nose.

Margot (Clara Furey) of the Ridden Red Wolves

Baffled Woodsman (Roy Dupuis)

The orgy is, Kafka and Lacan and De Mille all say, an act. It's performed not enjoyed, and it's performed only for you, the one who misses it. It exist only for you to feel you're missing something - that's your gift. The accident on the road that gives JG Ballard a bloody boner, that's why the road is there. It's your one consolation gift upon exiting the cinema of perfect oceanic union with Mother Night and her comforter abyss. No matter what happens here, whether you enter the sunshine and arbeit macht marks with daddy Sarastro and his golf monk posse, or just hang out at home like an idiot and watch another movie, know this: you will never get that blissful pre-egoic union back. Not until the next show, but even then, the show is about missing it. We can only wish we didn't know this sad fact, we men who aren't coke dealers, that the orgy is only ever, just now, over.

But with a little meditation-- and/or Lacan and/or addiction recovery--under our belts, we may one day accept the insider view: that the angst of missing the orgy is all that keeps me, you, us, it, whatever, from breaking down in abject torn-and-frayed pin scratch despair. Those who participate in every orgy, who live at the 'mansion' and drown each night in coke and bunnies, imagine their despair when they have to go home alone on a Greyhound full of obese tourists? Their sobs are heard three states away... Was it better to have not been to one at all? What does one bring back from the orgy, once one runs out of bros to boast to? Nothing but STDs and regrets, and longing for a feeling that maybe never existed, but nonetheless makes your forthcoming small normal joys seem like mockery. Hey, maybe... maybe you were there at the orgy, the one I missed, and you just don't remember.

If you remember me there, then you definitely weren't there, because I wasn't at the same one you were, cuz I don't remember seeing you there, or anyone. The ones I went to were.... how do we say... unter-attended? Yes, iss that the phrase?

Skeleton Insurance Defrauders (themselves)

If you started reading the above and thought, good god he's being awfully flighty, then just START READING HERE:

The stories of The Forbidden Room are seventeen or so of the shorts Maddin filmed at museums and historic sound stages around the world, woven together in a grand fusion of Brakhage-Decasia film decomposition and Freudian psychological disintegration. The stories enlarge and swallow each other so that one leads to the other and each new character in the last story has their own story they must tell, on and on and inward and inward until it finally hurls five crosscut D.W. Griffith's Intolerance climaxes into the Russian doll vortex of Jerzy Has Wojciech's The Saragossa Manuscript. Everything congeals and fuses itself back into an old man's bathtub submarine, full of compressed explosive jelly... to pancakes full of oxygen, and to the wild forest, to 'Canada' as it exists in the mind - the maple syrup and mounties to the USA's apple pie and baseball.

And there, in the endless forests of the Great White North, the woodsman forced to watch his Red Riding Hood luxuriating post-orgy (he missed it) amidst the wolf pack, like she's the hot Kurtz of 40s Jungle Jim lost tribes.

And like his best work and that of only a handful of other filmmakers--Lynch, Bunuel, Antonioni, Martel--Maddin's style defies easy description or analysis, and so falls into the collective amnesia of the 20th century, coming at us the closest thing yet to the baroque yet strangely cheap look of our own dreams. The only one who can tell us what it all means is a Freudian analyst, smoking in his train compartment (Forbidden Room includes a 'train psychiatrist' - like a ship's doctor, on the 'Berlin-Columbia' Express) while trying to seduce a young zombified girl through hypnosis, to cure her of

Amnesia!

Amnesia is, I explain to my students (when I have them - which is never), the key to understanding not just this film but all art films. This is not the search for small meanings, or even big ones, but nones, nones meanings. If film itself--the physical, ever-decaying reels of it, most of which are deteriorating in dark hidden chambers deep under long closed cinemas and Nazi bombing rubble--was to go into psychoanalysis, under the care of a licensed emulsion scratch that grew and shrank (fee-wise) according to the size of the epiphanies realized, then this film would be that breakthrough session. The result? Film has a message for us: Hey, it says, sorry for misleading you. You, my watchers, who choose to watch me, the cinema, instead of living some full dumb life playing sports or pursuing fame, money, power, altruism: sorry for leading you astray. It realizes now (that it's too late) it had no right to dominate us so completely. It took advantage of our vulnerability to the dark and glowing images, the bulb using its wattage to hypnotize a nation of moths, and it made certain deals with our unconscious we didn't even know about. We didn't know when we signed on that line, just what the contract entailed.

But now cinema is sorry, and so--here in Maddin-land--cinema self-flagellates with rust and emulsion scratches and cigarette burns, because it still wants you back! And you stay, because those burns are beautiful, hypnotic. They can't help but console and cajole and cosign your trust, which they will then defraud!! Drop that pen! Rust! Rust while you can!

The emulsion scratch shrink, now widened into a flickering blue-green band down the right side middle, smiles as the client image dissolves.

Coincidental double Amnesia: 

I started watching some Canadian sci-fi show on Netflix called Dark Matter after Forbidden Room ended, which tells the story crew who wakes up from frozen sleep on a space ship and don't know who they are or what they're supposed to be doing. But amnesia is not just Canada's identity crisis, it is the root of all film viewing. We come to each new character in any narrative as an amnesiac viewer, picking together details from the surroundings - i.e. a sketchy unshaven dude in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets walking down the street in the middle of the night while ominous music plays --all those signifiers tell you loads about him, none of which may be true; maybe he's just going to get milk for his mom's sick cat, and not to break into your house or sell crack to your infant daughter. (you could be reaching for "stand your ground" laws if you get too caught up in perceived signifiers rather than actual immediate threats). Artists like Maddin see right through the elusive reality of false signifiers by making them all opaque. We needn't pretend to know what's going on if we don't speak the language, talking the same English but in a foreign accent as if that will magically convey our wish to enter the tongue's forbidden chambers, to access the king's inner ear, each ossicle a connecting tunnel around a rickety carnival funhouse ride choo-choo track leading down into a roiling surf of lava and beer foam.

Playing around with speed and reversals, decomposing blobs around a lighted figure in a dark room seem to be breathing in and out of dissolving bubbling lava-like abstraction and--almost like free association--BOOM there's a volcano. And while each of the interlocked stories and subroutines feels familiar, there's no time or inclination to really identify or understand: a woodsman comes into the forbidden cave to rescue his lady love from a wolf pack in an inverted Red Riding Hood myth, he thinks. But they're all dead and she's shaking as if possessed, and then, what? Rather than speak on the crime of squid theft, the volcano lectures the gathered tribe on the impossibility of gaseous emissions speaking coherently.

I'm going to rear back and take a non-educated guess that the Canadian gift for portraying amnesia stems from its identity crisis as the middle child between louche America and stiff upper England.  "America" --as you see it today--no longer has a national fixed identity beyond our psychic conservative/liberal split, but at least we know who we aren't. Canada has niceness, pancakes, dry ginger ale, weird football rules, mounties, eskimos, woodsmen, better wax museums on their side of Niagara Falls... but it's too cold up there to have much else.  We in the US imagine Canada a bit like Alaska stretched out wide and got socialized health care. Cold and underpopulated, mostly forest, a kind of giant air pocket full of magical snowy sky over our heads, mappily speaking...

Until the movie starts...

by which I mean we trek with snow shoes and sled dogs between Leni Reifenstahl's alpine romances, baroque Russian coronation ceremonies, and South American mining accidents, until the sky falls below us like a blanket with a Buster Keaton hole in the center.


I'm an American but I still love most Maddin films, at least the first half, until their lack of coherent narrative onus leaves me drowsy, but it's helped me to have seen each one with a different girlfriend, and I've loved the ones I saw with girls from Europe or Buenos Aires, but not the ones with American girls - who don't get it. The last film of Maddin's I saw was with Branded on the Brain, with live orchestral accompaniment (with Cripsin Glover narrating in person) and it was okay, the (American) girl I was with was 'meh' about it. I enjoyed more the Saddest Music in the World at the Landmark in company of my Swiss-French mistress who was suitably impressed that I could even explain it. Before that I saw Tales of the Gimli Hospital at a midnight screening in Seattle circa 1990 with my girl from Carmel, NY. This was back before anyone knew anything about Maddin other than his film was a Canadian surrealist black and white homage ala Eraserhead. I liked the framing device with the radiator but I had a roaring headache and my girl was all pissed because I brought a flask and reeked of booze. I thought Careful was a masterpiece of psychosexual Freudian deep ice floe plunging that I saw with my Argentine ex-wife, and we swooned as one. Is there a connection?

I can't even wade a half our into Careful nowadays, though, it seems way too pleased with itself and there's one towhead too many.

Maybe this: Americans, even me, can become bored by alienation and Lost in Translation-style dissonance when there's nothing to grab onto. We're not used to having our desires toyed with. Our craving for some kind of narrative thread, some kind of familiar signifier, to orient ourselves by and lose ourselves in, is not something we admit is an addiction. We think movies should bring us out of our heads, to take us on a 'ride,' not bury the only escape route in avalanches of ice. When a European art movie toys with this desire (as in Godard or Antonioni) it eventually drive us half-mad and into boredom when not in the right mood or company.

This boredom speaks not so much to our diminished attention span as much as our addiction to reproduced images and sound. Our loss of contact with the real has become awkward, like that friend we should have called last week when they got out of the hospital, but we waited too long so now just thinking about calling them makes us break out in a cold sweat. We've alienated ourselves from the 'real' to the point we resent anyone who uses our beloved imaginary-symbolic realm as a tool to bring us back to it. As a result, we're burdened by the constant need to have the TV on, or the radio, or ear buds, or (for me) a white noise machine. Silence and emptiness are too tomb-like to endure. The existential lonesome nipping at our heels barks so quiet the blood flowing through our ears is deafening; we latch onto any promise of escape, any noise, long as its loud and/or steady. Up north they don't seem to need that. Maybe loneliness couldn't find them in all that forest and had given up. Or the wind howls constant like a lullaby.

FRAGMENT!

Maddin works in the realm of dreams and 'Kino,' but whose dreams? He picks some unconscious realm where Eisenstein and Oscar Micheaux crank out Klopstockian anti-war propaganda, a place connected directly to the zone where narrative identity shifts and bends and follows no clear linear path, or logical sense, but everything seems familiar... little signifiers that add up to little more than Jackie Treehorn's penis drawing in Big Lebowski ---phallically hip, but sans an address. So if you get hung up somewhere in this maze then your stuck for the duration, beating your head against a wall until that room of the game is 'passed' as if by some anguished miracle, and the detox can begin, level two (or '2').

Maddin's best moments, for me, always occur when he dares to go deep into the psychosexual, as in the mother-son/ father-daughter incest bonds amidst the isolated Reifenstahl-ish Alpine hamlet of Careful.  Existential frozen misery sagas like Gimli Hospital are burdened by too many scenes of fat guys eating or starving and so forth (as I recall, from 25 odd years ago, drunk in Seattle at midnight). When narrative expectations are thwarted, there needs to be someone or some place pretty to look at, something that won't demoralize our senses while we wait for our attention span to widen and our sanity to disgruntle itself. For example, in Red Desert there is the beauty of Monica Vitti; Catherine Deneuve beautifies the madness in Repulsion; Anna Karina has a giant head in My Life to Live.  In Maddin's best work there is always a good center to hold, ala Saddest Music in the World's Isabella Rossellini and her beer stein glass legs launching the switch to color, and there was the sad music competition, a familiar narrative we can become involved to the point we can rest our European 'art' eyes and flip over to our American 'entertainment' eyes. If we have to be weaned along the way, well we can at least see our mom as she was then, gorgeous and more than five times our height, towering above us like an Easter Island moai crossed with a fairy princess. When she leaves, we may be terrified, alone as soon as the light switch hits, pissing ourselves, afraid to go to the bathroom on our own, waiting for the all-absolving warm pink dawn to dispel the nightmare that is darkness and quiet (for there's always some tiny...scratching... little... noise deep in the muffling silence, and in the thick black of night, phantom grey shapes).


But soon we've learned to hold it in, like good little boys and girls who paid attention during that instructional film on potty training. And the figure we so venerated in our cribs starts getting smaller every year of our own growth, like Alice on a slow-slow-slowly kicking-in mushroom, from that towering Easter Island moai to little old lady with a paisley shawl.


That said, Forbidden Room zips by way too fast in parts. Maddin rushes to cram all the shorts in and give every actor he used during his long globe hop a shot or two. My favorite critic Kim Morgan has only a split second appearance with a wolf skin (that I saw); I imagine it would be quite worthwhile to get this on Blu-ray if it includes all the other short films from which this be culled and more. Because my favorite is still that short, Heart of the World, which my Buenos Aires girl and I saw on the big screen at Angelika before.... what the hell was the main feature? My Buenos Aires girl and I were so thrilled I don't think we even paid attention to the film that came after. I wish I could remember what it was...  but I can't even remember who I am except I'm an American.

Because even now I'm hearing the siren call of TCM behind me, in the other room, as I write this, left on, all the time, to beat back the silence. Hey! It's Joan Crawford bitching about losing some part, some romantic leading man cringing on his side of the Cinemascope screen...even that... even that terrifying Woman's Face of hers... hair coiled around her head, tight and butch, like a face hugger alien reaching out to the warmth of applause like plant tendrils to the sunlight, then retracting in curlers when it dies and she fades to scary coat hanger parody, even as her mask becomes a harsh severe horror, that flat dark pink lipstick and trowel grey foundation, even she is better than the abyss.

Also spracht der filmdose! 

The Film Cannister tells of his rich childhood: Udo Kier played his ghost dad and like all ghost dads is always erupting like burns in the emuslion, ja? He keeps making final farewells to his son, leaving him a can of fake mustaches with which to fool his blind wife in any Oedipal domestic clinches that might result after sufficient time has elapsed. Trouble is: Udo, with ghost beer and a friend he met in the afterlife, comes back again and again. Dad, thirty feet high, seen through a train window rear screen projection, passing us a can of mustaches to call our own, with Udo's soulful eyes to swim in. Are we not men, we who wake up from drunken black-outs? As children in the night? Wearing canned mustaches?

Every new viewing of any DVD comes with an FBI/Interpol warning -a sign you've slipped again, passed out, must begin anew. The trick: don't admit you don't remember. Just feel your way along, acting like you know every detail of last nights drunken boorishness. If people seem to know you, from Chicago, when you were in some sadomasochistic cabaret act, just sleep with them and let your razor speak on your behalf if they cannot please you sexually. God knows what else they saw you do, and in what aspect ratio. Better no witnesses. Jess Franco knows, for you. And you alone, in the dark, with a squid in your mouth, still struggling like that Korean Elektra complex en verso Oldboy. That's psychosexual mustache fraud, Charlotte Rampling, and the best present any man can give a woman is a sculpture of Janos, the god of doorways. Janos, the guiding spirit of The Forbidden Room! Janos: for there are many doorways to this Room and many beginnings and always the rewinding to the FBI warning and mustache-dabbed memory, and the black paint dripping in the dark corridor where memory was supposed to be.

Thinking about this movie is so close to watching the actual movie itself that both seem to dissolve when one does either: the rusted emulsion and dissolving nitrates breathe and pulsing like real lava, even when the pause button is on, like Ingrid Bergman gazing into the volcano...in STROMBOLI, either jump in or move to the left, honey, the line is all the way down the slope, and winding like an unspooling film roll snake.

Oh, and I almost forgot... It's HILARIOUS!

Let the Darionioni Nuovo entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)

Stendahl syndrome is a real thing and now I know because it happened to me with this experimental-narrative post-modernist hybrid fairy tale-erotic awakening giallo bit of mind-melting genius, Amer (2009). I didn't pass out but I did get a full bore panic attack mind shatter moment of pure Vulcan mind meld between image and reality. I have fallen into this film like Alice into that K-rabbit hole down through the 'David Lynch-as-a-girl twisted up with a giallo fan version of Maya Deren' Wonderland. Amer isn't just a film, it's a disintegration engine, sucking up the distance between the viewer's mind and the screen like lovers on either end of a Twizzler, swallowing towards the middle and into the blackness.

What sets Amer apart from almost all other films, and it's clear from every frame, is that it's written and directed by a male-female team, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. They come together like the reunification of the conscious mind and the unconscious. "It’s because we are a couple that we can work together," they noted in a 2010 desktop interview. "It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate." That they sure as fuck can. Their names evoke their respective Italian male and French femaleness, which makes sense because there are certainly strains of Catherine Breillat as well as Argento, Antonioni as well as Claire Denis, but then again, they're Belgian... and beautiful. So that does happen.

If it helps the process, maybe have seen enough experimental cinema to check the references in advance: Antonioni-ish ur-ambiguous 'intentionally signification resistant' art, and Argento-ish European erotic fairy tale horror films from the 60s-70s, so the analytical signifiers and references can cascade upon you, the way Un Chien Andalou cascaded instantly recognizable political horror upon rioting Parisian art critics in 1929, or the Basilica of Santa Croce cascaded upon poor Stendahl. Thanks to these two kids who made this wild film, Stendahl syndrome's not just for Florentine tourists, or Asia Argento, anymore. This time it's poison L. This time they came for me.

Until mon Amer there's always been a weird dissonance, a grinding disagreement, between the iconography of experimental film and narrative film, even in Europe, where art doesn't have to be framed and velvet roped the way it does here. A mirror to this twin dissonance might be found between the Jungian anima and the Mulveyan male gaze, between Jess Franco's 1967 Succubus and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman. But Amer brings to this twin dissonance (experimental vs. narrative / male fantasies about what girls dream vs. female artist's impressions of girls dreaming about men) a twin serpent DNA lover's frequency that harmonizes all those dissonant tones, and the resulting unified field harmony expands wider and wider until it envelops and entrains other dissonances, widening its wave until even the most ideal sympathetic response to the film is swamped and carried off ever outward into space until the floor rises up to meet you like a wall

and then forward into panic
the image of self within your mind shatters
like Ellison's glass goblin
ancient crumbling nitrate like Edison's ghost dance.
Your crystal skull's shambling pedestal falls
to the marble Florence floor
Its eye sockets, twin gondolas, stay afloat.
Your back's hard against the couch still
watching the shards of your coil's shard's scatter,
the cards shatter off the diving board
couch in a 52 pick-up of fluttering
raven-hoofed watery wings,
and you swim

deep

deep down, Diabolik-ish.
The floor sinks towards you like a mouth,
Betty Blue Boy blows candy canings,
the outcast cowboy burning constantly at stake

But what mouth?
Don't do drugs,
but let them do you if they wish-
it would do you honor.

And what is the difference between faking not having amnesia and not having it but secretly pretending to hide that you have it (as in pretending you know what's going on when you don't but not really, i.e. faking it even to yourself?) This is what we black-out drinkers are familiar with --easing our way into our lives each morning like we know all that happened the night before but we don't - it's an art, a bit of sly detective work as you suss out the night's events and all witnesses' remembrances of your actions without letting on you don't remember. With a level of remorse that would crush a sober man, we eye our girlfriend on the couch for signs of her displeasure, trying to fathom what we may have done to embarrass her... pretending we already know and are sorry, as we quietly (when she's in the bathroom),
and with practiced legerdemain,
spike our orange juice.

Many have tried and a few have come close to harnessing the kind of alternating current a romantic male-female directing-writing team couple can generate: Debra Hill and John Carpenter came as close as anyone with Halloween (1978) but every film has to get up from the table and go pick a bathroom sooner or later, and Halloween eventually chooses the Men's, which means John Carpenter in the limelight, Hill to the side. No film has made it all the way past the border of gender and to the boundary of the split subject, avoiding picking the man as the director, woman as producer, or writer, or vice versa --no film makes it past nationality, temper and even age, smashing through the wall between the bathroom doors and finding its own special hidden alcove. Amer isn't the male gaze or the female gaze but both gazes sliced up in long celluloid pupil Laura Mars strips and arranged in Sergio Leone eye close-up layers to form something as new as neither, something genuinely transgressive without relying on anything so paltry as meaning, story, narrative, coherence or logic... or even cheap shocks. Would your dreams ever deign to use them? Why should Amer? Instead it resists even the fundamental hazard at a guess of meaning critics might find in something similarly post-structuralist like Antonioni's Red Desert or Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. It's something as slick and enjoyable as any modern movie but deeply entrenched in the experimental and certain to confuse or irritate anyone expecting signifiers of the real to properly adhere.

The male-female creative interaction of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani seems mirrored in the zig-zag rhythm of the shots - one step into giallo narrative, one step back along fractured dream surrealism, each refracting and reflecting the predecessor - move, countermove, and so nothing is ever clear or unclear. Everything resists a concrete interpretation but continually beguiles us into wanting one, uses that want for its own purposes, maybe even better than Antonioni did: it doesn't charge ahead like a boy with an Uzi and climax or dissolve into curios like a girl with a flower, yet if you don't run away in disgust, or boredom and if you don't dismiss it all as girly stuff or misogynist or think you don't know what's going on, and if instead you just ride with it, but remain alert and enthralled and ideally high on lack of sleep and Jung and art and Robitussin, then there it is, in its sublime perfection, the mind--both halves--inner and outer, conscious ego and unconscious animus locking into place while busting open at the same time, the unconscious's language signifiers becoming reshuffled, the normal narrative progression cracked open like a nut, the inside goodness free falling in slow motion and for a moment you and the unconscious and the images onscreen are all one - the barrier of screen and speaker between you has evaporated.

When dealing with the giallo genre in the scope of female fairy tale iconography it's important to stress that the collective as well as personal unconscious does not recognize the border between life and death, between the alive and dead version of you, the ego/soul/body/consciousness. Your dreams are the same whether or not you die outside of them - death in your bed doesn't wake you from the nightmare. The razor in the hand of the man chasing you is never just a phallus, penetration anxiety or even fear of death. It's a fear of dissolving, a loss of self, the split - you are afraid to turn around and face the demon chasing you in your nightmare for a very good reason - once you turn around and face it the demon will merge with the 'you' who stopped running, both will cease to exist and a new life will begin. Only through fear of change, or merging, of opening the self's border, does one hold onto the virginity of a tangible unchanging self. All else is transition. All of Amer is this transition - it is a coming attractions highlight reel of infinite length, the narrative arc of the 90 minute film split three ways, and from there three more.

The first such split occurs during childhood - the Freudian key that unlocks Bluebeard's secret dead bride storage: Bava's Black Sabbath, Suspiria, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm, and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The second turns sunny and erotic with the girl on the cusp of sexual maturity: Rohmer, Betty Blue, Emmanuelle, Fellini, Blow-Up and Chabrol, and even maybe Cocteau. The third and final turns to the dark again: Argento, later Bava plus Blood and Black Lace, Soavi, Fulci... but with the jittery bipolar modern 'twang' of Antonioni's Red Desert. The eternal dance of metatexual refraction never ends even at the end. The movie becomes a male-female duel in exquisite corpse fashion, each image reinterpreting the one that came before, ever circling dark truths but resisting meaning and remaining the pinnacle of cinematic 'dream logic.'

The only way to describe what's going on is to give these kids a name that can link them with certain of their peers, so I'm calling them the Darionioni Nuovo, a group of filmmakers who have melded the experimental and deeply psychoanalytical styles and substances of Argento and Antonioni into a modern new vision for cinema, one geared towards not just the moviegoer's eyeball but their pupil, not just their ear but their ossicles, a group who refuse to label Antonioni and Godard as art and Fulci and Franco as trash, but to see each as half and half. This is a zone that we usually don't trust 'new' filmmakers with, especially not in America where everything has to be laid out with big yellow lines and breasts and 2.3 children and token minorities and police and moral lessons and zeitgeist-dictated products placed according to rating and market. But in Europe and South America and places where socialized education and less hysterical reactions towards sex and cigarettes lets the youth get super intellectual for free, there is thrives. Maybe it's their less repressive attitude towards sex that frees them from infantile obsession, helping them to make deeper movies: Berberian Sound Studio, Only God Forgives, Magic Magic, Boarding Gate, Beyond the Black Rainbow, A Field in England... but mainly or totally in this instance, Amer. Maybe they can't be appreciated, or even endured, without familiarity with the 60s-70s European horror film canon, but if you haven't experienced any of it, then what are you, un poulet? dive in to the grinder! If it don't make sense, congrats. Take some acid and try it now. If it makes sense at last then bro, you missed it.

Now when a guy, a bro, a dude tries to make a female coming of age story, no matter artsy or 'feminist' it's still a male fantasy, in the end, am I right guys? And that's a shame, because on the one hand we're not allowed to get turned on by the Blue is the Warmest Color because it's still the leering male gaze (a middle-aged man filmed it), and on the other we can't enjoy Chris Lilley's HBO show Private School Girl because our anima gets jealous (if anyone should pass as a school girl, it should be us). And when a woman makes a coming-of-age film she either lets her animus, "her master's voice" lure her into a phallus-sacrificial circle in the forest, ala Thirteen, or she projects said voice clear out of the room with the flat-age swack of a musketeer's sword (Breillat's Bluebeard). Instead of either, Amer rolls elegantly along the sharpened edge of the blade and into the 'win a free game' hole at the end. When it emerges it is, como si dice?, ready for the Lynchian eraser factory.

Counter, Paul!

And what then? The lights come in corners of this massive mausoleum of industrial space that have been dark for years. You forgot those lights were even there; you forgot the corners were even there; you forgot the machines were even there. The machines that now start whirring but you forgot what they do or what you're supposed to do to them to make them run. But people are applauding you, Nina! You didn't even know you were onstage! You've moved from being just another American whining for his phallic climax to a European calmly engaging the bivalve sensual. Now, Nina, Now! Now you really are the Black Swan. And as some trick velvet light trap choker snaps shut behind you, the concrete Basilica floor tilts up to greet you like the concrete smack of a grounding lover. And on the count of three you are back to one / true unified / split. Two/ Snap, dragon. Truth or illusion, George, at last, and for all time, there is no difference. 3

Amnesiac Cinema: THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) and SUCCUBUS (1968)

  "I would have preferred modernity. Here you move and everything squeaks."

The amnesiac occupies an understandably hallowed place in post-war European cinema, where endless language barriers, generation and gender gaps, entangled ancient and modern architecture, passport red tape, culture shock, changing politics (communist insurgencies etc) and class stratification work both for and against a sense of formed identity. In any European metropolis, if a woman wakes up and doesn't remember her own name or what she's supposed to be doing with her life she can still get by fairly easily. As long as she's not too old or young or unattractive, is reasonably cool, sexually casual, happens to be wearing decent clothes and doesn't have a tendency to panic when things get weird, she can spend whole European films comfortably navigating bedrooms and jobs without ever losing her uneasy sense of displacement, or we in the audience--or the character she meets--ever knowing she even has amnesia. Is she just a 'modern' woman? Do these people she's talking even really know her? Are we supposed to know? If we stand up in the theater and announce we're lost in the plot we're liable to be heckled as a petit-bourgeois square. It's the 'not knowing' that opens the way for the 'modernist' response so coveted by the art house cinemagoer. Once a Bazin-ist figures out the plot, he gets up and leaves.

And it's always a woman with this hidden amnesia. Guys would never hide it. They'd grab the whole movie by the lapels and demand it become a detective yarn, grabbing the first pretty girl they find and begging her to let them crash on their couch and be cared for like a broken winged bird. But women if they're hot, don't even need to grab the lapels or tell the guy the truth. What guy would really worry about getting to know her past? He'd just remake her into his mother, or a whore. Why bother finding out the difference? Thus girls are comfortable conveying a nowness, a lack of past we all want to believe is the same thing as 'spontaneity.'

So... I hate to ask, but is the main character in THE HEADLESS WOMAN (2008) trying to conceal that she doesn't know who she is or who anyone else is, or is she faking amnesia to avoid having to report possibly running over a child (she bumped her head as she ran over whatever she thinks she may have hit)? No one asks her anything specific as she navigates her way forward through her days; she's able to cruise through her Argentine town on auto-pilot. Everyone--servants, husband, landscapers, patients (she's a doctor)--preparing for her arrival and departure like no matter where she chooses to go she's been expected.
--

Unless it comes with a big forwarding narration or establishing title crawl (i.e. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") or is a sequel, we begin all films as amnesiacs (unless we've seen the movie before), so an amnesiac heroine can just seem... modern. It's also modern for her to actively resist interpretation, or labeling (She's more than just your whore, Charles!); it's as if she wanders into each new scene as if from the movie across the multiplex, and no one dares tell her she's in the wrong place. She resists our using her words and expressions to establish her identity and relationship to those around her. She stays neutral or 'surprising' so as to not admit she doesn't know the correct response to each new challenge. A man keeps bothering her, touching her, and if she doesn't know if its her husband, a lover, a brother, or just a pesky stalker, rather than dare ask she might just start loudly calling for attention, jumping up on a cafe table and trying to get him to sing. She doesn't dare ask who she is, as that would leave her vulnerable to their interpretation.

Anyone coming out of a long night or life of blackout drinking knows just how she feels. Wake up next to someone you don't know once or twice, and you'll 'get' what I mean.  You don't want to ask their names as that confirms you don't know them; it might seem prudish to ask if you had sex, or naive to ask if you used a condom, or dumb to ask where your pants are. Better to just sneak out while they're asleep.

The drawback to being so free of class distinctions here in the U.S. is that you can't just walk up to random people and start conversations and expect them to answer you and judge by your clothes and manner that you can be trusted; nor identify and expect to be taken care of by, a distinct indentured class (like the Argentine native-'Indian' population). Who do you choose to ask for directions when you're lost? What economic/class group are you in and which class are you comfortable exploiting? Can we ever be sure the person who approaches us and seems friendly won't in the end be just some homeless bum asking for money, or a psycho glommer, or a charming serial killer? If they act like our lover, maybe, they think, we're amnesiac enough to believe they are.

In THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the (possible) amnesiac is Veronica (Maria Onetto), a dentist in a small Argentine town. Wherever she goes people know just who she is, or seem to, and someone seems to be cleaning up her past behind her as she goes. Her amnesia begins when she hits her head on the roof of her car after running over... something-- either a dog or a small boy -- she can't trust herself to remember, and as the film goes on, we don't know what her game is. What first looks like a cop digging up bodies on the side of the road turns out to be a plumber digging up a clogged pipe; the droning dissonance of pop songs on the radio seem halfway to being haunting ghost voices in her head, they almost seem to accuse her. In one of the greatest scenes she hides out in a bathroom in the hospital and it takes awhile for her, and us, to realize the nurses barging in and kicking in the stalls are not after her. The only thing we do know: director-writer Lucretia Martel is a friggin' genius.

It helps to understand socialism and the much more enlightened way that doctors and dentists don't automatically get to be rich in places with truly socialized medicine. Argentina's doctors still make house calls and their hospitals have the kind of rundown institutionalized look we usually associate only with public high schools and prisons in this country. Frankly this how it should be, and having been there twice with my ex-wife, once before once after the economic collapse, I can vouch for the casual, physically affectionate way people relate to each other, based almost purely on signifiers of either the young intellectual class, which included doctors and dentists, the noveau riche (which most Argentines refer to simply as "gangsters") and the very poor, the local Indian class who here in the complex mise en scene of THE HEADLESS WOMEN have a kind of mystic spiritual omnipresence.

When looking for comparisons one must go to Russia, a huge cultural influence on the hip socialism of Argentina. Woody Allen's CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS covers similar ground but is a shrill Jerry Lewis face compared to the subtlety of Lucretia Martel, which is born of Chekhov. Argentina has a close relationship to Russia, to the point where many people are given Russian names (1), Russia is certainly a land of an illustrious but strange, violent past and the 'amnesia' of THE HEADLESS WOMAN recalls the mystery of Anastasia,  the black spots in Russia's history thanks to its various purges and Argentina's own 'Reign of Terror.'

To explain, I quote this passage from Suddenness May Happen's Adrian Bregazzi:

On 24th March 1976, a military junta under General Jorge Videla overthrew the Perón government in Argentina. On 19th May, Borges, Ernesto Sabato and other writers met with Videla, expressing their support for the overthrowing of the Perónista terrors, and for Videla's stating that "the development of culture is essential for the development of a Nation."

Between 1976 and 1983 an estimated 30,000 people were 'disappeared' by the Argentinian Dictatorship. On 15th December 1983, writer Sabato became president of the newly-formed National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, the government-established commission empowered to investigate the 'disappearance' of persons in Argentina over the previous 20 years.

In 2007, in his book “Cultural Amnesia”, (the now) Clive James published a personal diatribe against Borges, confiscating his years of creative work and judging him posthumously guilty of silence during the Dirty War of the Argentinian Dictatorship (1976-1983).

Not to get into the whole mess down there, as Martel's protagonist is so strange we're never quite sure if she even has amnesia. And I don't want to spoil the 'surprise' or lack thereof, let's just say that the openness of interpretation is key, because there are two ways to watch an amnesiac movie, and only one will give you pleasure, the other will make you feel 'left out'. If you assume the woman doesn't have amnesia, for example, the films listed here can seem distended, dull, unfocused, sort of like if you walk into an Antonioni film halfway through with a head full of sugar. If you bear in mind the amnesiac precept, you can get your mind kind of blown thinking about the world, language, cultural and gender barriers that separate us and make it relatively easy for a woman--or a country--to go through life with no sense of the past. And the best of both worlds is to have a protagonist who shares our foreign film culture shock in such a way as we never know which one of us really knows what's going on, and that's what ART is all about!


I first came to this conclusion watching SUCCUBUS (AKA NECRONOMICON), the 'Sensation of 67' a few years ago, who has a similarly amnesiac heroine, this one a nightclub performer who loses touch with reality and can't tell if she really is a sadistic killer or just plays one on stage:

Strange characters come up to her at the various soirees, seemingly thrilled to have found her at last, as if they've been looking and looking for Lorna since they last met. She merely stares at these interlopers blankly, not doubting what they say, but also not caring. In this context, the pick-up line, “Haven’t we met before?” takes on an extra creepy overtone. Anything that happened before the credits of the film--anything that we have not seen on-screen--does not exist for Lorna or for us. Thus relationships between Lorna and her lovers are always in flux. After her first performance, which is the first lengthy scene of the film, Lorna mysteriously appears at Mulligan’s (Jack Taylor) front door. He’s already in his bathrobe and when he answers, and seems to not remember who she is. As viewers, we can’t tell whether she’s just shown up uninvited like a stalker from the club or whether they in fact live together and are just playing a sexy game, or whether this is merely the result of language difficulties. Is he just hungover and doesn't trust his own memory? Is he used to inviting women to "come over later" and then forgetting who they even are? Or is he just, by default, unable to say no to a sure thing?




Whatever the real truth might be, the not-knowing works to both excite and disconcert. As the pair move playfully into the bedroom, we begin to think that maybe Lorna herself isn’t sure why she came there. Anyone who has ever tried to hide the fact that they don’t remember someone who knows them will relate. Is she taking advantage of his amnesia, or is he taking advantage of hers? Or is Franco's sporadically amateurish direction and the bad dubbing (2). In the cat and mouse game of who remembers what, it’s the being in the moment that counts, and Franco’s sense of the moment, and the erotic by extension, is very advanced—and perfectly suited to the world of jetsetting, booze-swilling, partner swapping glitterati of swingin’ ’67!

From there the film just keeps rolling back and forth through a haze of flashbacks, dreams and different countries. Lorna feels her way through events by the impulses coming from her unconscious, be they to seduce, kill or spout poetic monologues. She bears her amnesia close to the vest and in this way she is a perfect stand-in for the viewer, the "art film" viewer in particular, who may be forever wondering what's going on in the narrative themselves. We've all walked into the middle of a movie before, and had to instantly guess what was going on and who was what to who, people sshhh-ing us if we asked what was going on. So wither la Succubus? Is Franco a bad director with no vision, or is he a genius whose films improve on repeat viewings?” To paraphrase the stilted English dialog in the film: “What good would it do to freak out about amnesia when not knowing can be so pleasurable?”

(...) And of course, with the ancient architecture of Europe backing her up, Lorna’s amnesia stretches back far longer than her American counterparts: the amnesiacs in Memento and Mulholland Drive can only regress a little ways in their young, gaudy, pre-fab countrysides. Vertigo’s Carlotta Vance has to come from the pre-U.S., version of California, requiring long drives in Scottie’s car out to nationally preserved landmarks. Lorna’s European location allows for so much ancient architecture all around her that her amnesia can slide back through several centuries without much effort.





(More here: Time Travel for Amnesiacs: Succubus and the Moebius Love Strip)
 NOTES:
1. My Argentine ex-wife was given the Russian name Natacha, for example, and strangely enough, she looks a lot like the girl in the upper right of the top picture. 
2. Inevitably these 'international' productions are filmed MOS or with actors all speaking in their own languages, then for the dubbing the actors contribute to the language track of their native tongue, so Jack Taylor might contribute to the English track but not the French, while a French actress vice versa, etc.