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In a bonus feature discussing the film’s production, Maddin relates how the film’s jerky visual rhythms came about quite accidentally in the process of reviewing daily footage and attempting to zero in on particular frames. Because of the older film stock being used, the process for Guy and his editor became akin to rocking a car back and forth to ease out of a ditch or to my mind, like a scratchin’ DJ with a bad case of the hiccups as he lords over the turntables. The images unspool with a stutter kick that becomes as effective a representation of the power of the conjured past as anything that Maddin and Toles might have imagined on their own.

For me, this serves to recall an anecdote from Waiting for Twilight, in which Maddin related listening to the radio as a sole source of entertainment during the foreboding Winnipeg winters and how the signals would often waver in and out, leaving voices and songs broadcast through a deep layer of static and noise, always slightly detuned and humming. Brand Upon the Brain! evokes that directly in the device through which Guy and Sis’s mother talks to them, a fantastical gramophone with some faintly telepathic properties. The images of the past themselves are seen through a similar kind of haze, never quite in focus, always requiring some kind of adjustment.

I think Brand Upon the Brain! may have been best experienced in the live format where the entirety of the theatrical staging could be taken in along with the film itself. Maddin attempts a minor remedy of this with the ten-minute short Footsteps, which charts some of the steps the foley group of the same name took in order to create all the necessary sound effects for the live performance. In effect creating their own parallel movie, with a physicality and attention to ambient detail that is startling, their performance is “lost” in the home viewing experience. The key element missing for me from Brand Upon the Brain! that is contained within My Winnipeg and why I would consider that the more successful film is its more direct approach in establishing one’s childhood home (the place and the state of mind both) as something alien and foreign and ultimately lost, when viewed from the perspective of adulthood. Both films consider the flip side of the old maxim “You can’t go home again” which might be expressed as “You may only think that you were able to leave, in the first place.”

As fantastical a marvel of set production as the Maddin lighthouse is in Brand Upon the Brain!, it can’t compete with the director’s real-life locales, as discussed in My Winnipeg : the hockey arena where his father worked and where young Guy spent a large part of his childhood, building up myths about hometown and visiting players alike, and the beauty salon operated by his mother and aunt and the levels and rooms that branched out above behind and beyond the shop front encompassing all the rooms of the Maddin family home. And as erotic and steamy as are the lesbian couplings between Sis and Wendy Hale (a harp-playing crime-solving literary heroine clearly modeled on Nancy Drew), the ultimate resolution of that plotline seems slack and arbitrary.

Maddin’s films could be dismissed out of hand as oddities, curios worth a look for their style more than anything. But in his efforts to connect with cinema’s past, and with a personal past that he can best conjure up as a cinema of his soul, Maddin continues to mine a vein that almost no one else seems willing or able to stake a claim to. Some of those explorations may be more fruitful than others, but they are worthy of a pause and a glance through the peephole (or Keyhole, to reference Maddin’s most recent effort) their creator provides.

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