Guy Maddin is Live-Streaming Seances from Paris, Because of Course He Is
except these aren’t just any seances, no, these are seances for the ghosts of lost silent cinema. the project is called SPIRITISMES:
“Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it. This absence haunts me. I need to see these films. It’s eventually occurred to me that the best way to see them would to make contact with their miserable spirits and invite them to possess me. And with actors quite willing to participate in some para-normal cinematic experiments…
…Every day my actors will plunge themselves deep into a trance, and open themselves up to possession by the unhappy spirit of a lost film. And every day my actors will act out the long forgotten choreographies that once lived so luminously on the big screen for thousands, maybe millions of viewers.”
Maddin’s first bit of channeling? Jean Vigo’s unrealized film LINES OF THE HAND, for which Maddin got Vigo’s daughter Luce to co-star with Geraldine Chaplin and Udo Kier. oh yeah.
you must you must you must click over to Kim Morgan’s (a.k.a. Mrs. Maddin) Sunset Gun for the full scoop.
and here’s the SPIRITISMES website for the after-life streams, themselves.
