Seance means
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Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, premiered in February 2015 at the Berlin Film Festival), thus forming the basis for Seances. 3 Maddin, a well-known aficionado of early cinema who has consistently referred to that period in his films, first conceived what would become Seances as a project to re-create early films that are considered lost (or were unmade in some cases). Maddin chose one hundred real movies of which some accounts exist, including films by F.W.Murnau, Kenji Mizoguchi, Alexander Dovzhenko, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, among others, some of which were filmed publicly at Centre Pompidou in Paris and Phi Centre in Montreal in 20. In the end a total of thirty films were shot by Maddin and his crew, and later edited into the feature film The Forbidden Room (dir. Seances is a step aside from traditional filmmaking, feature or short-length: it has been exhibited as a video installation (unveiled at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016) and is also available online.
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1 The relationship between Maddin’s aesthetic and that of surrealism had been evident long before Seances came about, in the auteur’s proneness to using his own mental processes as source material, his interest in popular culture and his employing what Breton, the founding father of the movement, described as the “juxtaposition of more or less distant realities.” 2 Exemplary in this regard is Maddin’s most widely celebrated work, My Winnipeg – a self-professed documentary full of bizarre imagery (horses’ heads sticking from a frozen river being the most iconic scene), ambiguous family relationships and fantastical stories from the history of the filmmaker’s home city, delivered as factual. The very form of Maddin’s small masterpiece is inherently surrealist: the dreary reality of Winnipeg (“the world capital of sorrow,” according to Maddin’s film The Saddest Music in the World) is rendered dreamlike by the filmmaker’s impressions of it indeed, the film’s narrator, named Guy Maddin, is only shown on screen asleep. Together with Montana-born David Lynch, Maddin has been described as a “prairie surrealist”, and while the Manitoban director may shrug at the coinage, he himself cited Eraserhead by the neo-surrealist Lynch, alongside L’Âge d’Or by Buñuel and Dalí, as among the films that inspired him to be a filmmaker. Ten to fifteen minute videos that viewers can access are generated on the go by a computer and erased after the only viewing: an army of ghost films under grotesque titles, also computer generated and unique: “Madly the Feelers Walk,” “Clocks and Boutiques,” “Love Songs of the Scattered Cowards.” Those bizarre word combinations are worthy of the poet Pierre Reverdy whom André Breton quoted as a model surrealist poet: “In the brook, there is a song that flows,” or “Day unfolded like a white tablecloth.”
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Seances, a video work by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and the National Film Board of Canada, offers its audience an infinite number of unique film experiences – each of which can never be repeated. “It is your only chance to see this film”: the opening phrase of Seances is one whose meaning is now all but forgotten.