The Heart of the World
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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It’s not an experimental film in any normal sense–unless one thinks of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, a work with which it has a few unexpected glancing affinities. But then there’s nothing remotely normal about any of the Maddin films I’ve seen, all of which were made in Winnipeg and appear to have penetrating if indirect things to say about Canada, allegorically or otherwise. Tales From the Gimli Hospital (1988), his first feature, looks Nordic, surrealistic, and (deceptively) like early David Lynch, at least in its handling of gore. Archangel (1990), stranger and better, has something to do with amnesiac victims of mustard gas during World War I and the Russian Revolution. Careful (1992) is his first color film and uses subdued pastels and tinting; it’s set in a remote Alpine village seething with incest where everyone speaks in whispers to avoid setting off avalanches, and it’s plainly the most hilarious movie ever made about Canadian repression. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), in more conventional color, was the first Maddin feature to disappoint me, despite the presence of Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin, an ostrich ranch, and a classic Maddin-esque romantic triangle. There are also early Maddin shorts–the frequently unreliable Internet Movie Database lists 11 titles, some of which may be imaginary–of which I’ve seen only the relatively minor The Dead Father (1986) and Odilon Redon (1995).
The driving, pounding momentum of the piano, percussion, and orchestra accompaniment helps foster the impression of a silent-movie screening. The title also calls to mind D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1918)–a propaganda effort that had been intended to persuade America to enter World War I–though a likelier, if still remote, silent model would be a futurist Soviet space opera made six years later, Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, which anticipates Metropolis in a few particulars. The characters all have Russian names, and another Russian detail–more self-referential than anything else in the movie–is the intertitle “kino,” the Russian word for “film,” repeated as a kind of punchy punctuation at least six times in the closing stretches. (Responding to this aggressiveness, Mike Rubin aptly noted in the Village Voice, “I could watch this film every morning as a substitute for coffee.”)
Each of the above intertitles is separated from the next by rapid montages–brief shots sprayed at the viewer like bullets–that has provoked some commentators to think of Eisenstein. But in spite of Akmatov, who could have stepped straight out of Strike or October, no Eisenstein movie ever displayed the stuttering syntax of Maddin’s intertitles as they lurch drunkenly through a single sentence or the chaotic discontinuities of his flashy camera movements and cuts, which often become a form of gibberish. This jumble of effects suggests Eisenstein only because the shots hurtle by without leaving us time to think or pause for breath; look at the film more closely, as I was able to do because I had a video copy, and you discover how the film’s breathing overtakes ours. It’s quickly apparent that Maddin’s splintered allegorical narrative and diverse spastic effects follow obscure laws that are entirely their own.
