In the weird and wonderful supercinematic world of Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin, personal memory collides with movie lore for a radical sensory overload. This eerie excursion into the Gothic recesses of Maddin’s mad, imaginary childhood is a silent, black-and-white comic science-fiction nightmare set in a lighthouse on grim Black Notch Island, where fictional protagonist Guy Maddin was raised by an ironfisted, puritanical mother. Originally mounted as a theatrical event (accompanied by live orchestra, Foley artists, and assorted narrators), Brand upon the Brain! is an irreverent, delirious trip into the mind of one of current cinema’s true eccentrics.
Cast
| Grown-up Guy Maddin | Erik Steffen Maahs |
| Mother | Gretchen Krich |
| Young Guy Maddin | Sullivan Brown |
| Savage Tom | Andrew Loviska |
| Nettie | Kellan Larson |
| Sis | Maya Lawson |
| Father | Todd Jefferson Moore |
| Murderous sisters | Megan Murphy |
| Annette Toutonghi |
| Baby mother | Clara Grace Svenson |
| Chance Hale/Wendy Hale | Katherine E. Scharhon |
| Young mother | Cathleen O’Malley |
| Old father | Clayton Corzatte |
| Old mother | Susan Corzatte |
Credits
| Director | Guy Maddin |
| Screenplay | Guy Maddin and George Toles |
| Editing | John Gurdebeke |
| Music | Jason Staczek |
| Cinematography | Benjamin Kasulke |
| Narration written by | Louis Negin |
| Production Design | Tania Kupczak |
| Additional editing | Cheryll Hidalgo |
| Costume designer | Nina Moser |
| Producer | Amy E. Jacobson and Gregg Lachow |
Oct 16, 2009
Our favorite Manitoban, Guy Maddin, cheerfully grim chronicler of storybook psychosexuality and charmingly modest self-mythologizer, is in Paris now for a special event. Though just fifty-three and very much still working, the filmmaker is the subject of a complete career retrospective at the...
by Dennis Lim
Aug 11, 2008
Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was both fully formed and...
