More Brand Upon the Brain!

"How did it come about that John Ashbery joined the roster of celebrity narrators for Brand Upon the Brain!?" Jessica Winter asks Guy Maddin for the Poetry Foundation. A few questions on, Maddin says, "Ashbery thrills and excites me more than any other poet.... I don't think about Ashbery's work in conventional evaluative ways. I don't care if Ashbery's work is 'about' anything. I tend to think of it as one enormous poem, and I rarely distinguish one poem from another. Having said that, sometimes I feel I can just shoot some of his lines, or that he shot them by writing them - the latter is probably more true."

As for the film, Lawrence Levi writes at Stop Smiling, "It's a bizarre bildungsroman cum scare flick, with Mom as the chief villain - Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate by way of Psycho. And like so many of Maddin's films, it's oddly and uniquely affecting."

Updated through 5/17.

"[W]hat makes it a must-see is its rare event quality," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay of the full-blown live version. "When the musicians start, the foley artists summon up the sounds of wind, and the spotlight hits the narrator (last night it was an excellent Crispin Glover), you do feel yourself within a privileged moment echoing what audiences must have felt decades ago."

Earlier: "Interview. Guy Maddin."

Update, 5/14: "As par for Maddin's crazed course, it's both intimate in its perversity yet coldly detached in its silent era formalism. Verdict is out on the film, as it was clearly upstaged by the event," writes Kevin Lee, who's also got a good snapshot of the ruckus and several lines by Ashbery for rounding things out.

Updates, 5/16: "To reach the climax of Maddin's movie and then notice that one of the Foley artists has a watermelon at the ready is to have your definition of suspense thoroughly turned inside out," notes Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab.

"It is one of the most compelling avant-garde excursions into the narrative cinema ever," declares Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Update, 5/17: Andy Battaglia talks with Maddin for the AV Club.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2007 6:06 AM