Day 5: Guy Maddin, Rodney Ascher, and a Perilous Journey Into the World of Drug Cartels

Just when you thought things were calming down a bit in Park City, with the wild first weekend giving way to a tamer, milder (temperatures reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit), more manageable Monday, two of the most audacious films of the Festival shook things up again at the Library Theater. First came The Forbidden Room, the latest stream-of-celluloid-consciousness feature from the slaphappy genius of Winnipeg, Guy Maddin. And then Rodney Ascher's documentary horror story The Nightmare proved true to its title, keeping the midnight crowd up even later than advertised.

The Forbidden Room by Eric Hynes

It's all but impossible to describe all that happens in The Forbidden Room, since it's all but impossible to track all that's happening in the moment. So let's just say it has something to do with a doomed submarine, a woodsman determined to save his beloved from humanoid wolves, a manacled gardener, a soused parachutist attorney, a poisonous skeleton unitard, posthumous drinking buddies, an inner child murderer, and baths, for starters. It's a film in which digressions aren't really digressions, but rather thresholds to new flights of fancy, to more and more fervent valentines to lost and imagined cinematic worlds, to beautiful imagery and bawdy jokes.

I started just be being a little bit tortured or haunted that some lost films by some of our favorite directors couldn't be watched, Maddin explained during the post-screening Q&A. And then I asked Evan [Johnson, the co-director] if he wanted to help me research a bunch of lost film narratives, and then we discovered that we're sort of glad that these things are lost, because we want to shoot our own versions of them they sound really good. And then we realized when they were being filtered through the medium of us, and the things that matter to us most, that they all had our voice, and that they all fit together, and that the male characters all tended to be similar in response to female characters, and that there was a kind of jellification of manlinesses as our parents and parents' parents generations expected men to behave, and then sort of jellified and quivered as much as film emulsions have during the time it took my generation to finally grow up. So it was just a matter of pointing ourselves all in one direction and making sure all the stories rhymed with each other, and fitting them all together.

Directors Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson.

Sundance Institute | Jemal Countess The film makes hay with a full array of early cinematic flourishes, from sprocket jumps and emulsified celluloid to copious intertitles and prominent foley sound, which engendered quite a few questions about process and the material provenance of his mad creation. Maddin confessed the movie was more filmic in spirit than in fact. I don't know if I should be giving away recipes, but we just shot digital. I don't even know if there are any films in the Sundance Film Festival this year, he said, before continuing in much the same manner as his florid, funny narrative. But there's definitely a tribute to emulsion. And since a lot of the stories within the stories within the stories were inspired by lost film stories, it just felt that there should be a nod to emulsion anyway. And just the way that emulsion moves around when it's aging and buckling and falling apart has always reminded me of what ectoplasm might look like if it moved around the ectoplasm we know from those old spirit photographs. It just seemed like a nice vertical integration of feelings from start to finish of film history.

And when asked why he shot in color after working in black-and-white for films such as Brand Upon the Brain! and Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, he grew mock testy. I'm done with black-and-white. Black-and-white is so, I don't know, yesterday. It's time for color. It's time for color, he said. Then Canada's greatest unrepentant avant-garde film fetishist added, I'm trying to make a hit here.

The Nightmare by Eric Hynes

A follow-up to his sleeper hit Room 237, in which numerous fanatics of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining offered audio commentary about its hidden meanings (it debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival), The Nightmare is also a polyphonic tapestry, though this time the subjects appear on camera, and the subject is the horrifically mysterious phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Ascher, who mentions on camera that he's also suffered from the malady, toggles between eight subjects whose testimonies are both unique and eerily similar almost invariably it involves a kind of paralyzed liminal state in which a shadowy presence taunts their motionless body. The film dramatizes these experiences with a tone that slides between horror and comedy, documentary and fantasy. After the screening, Ascher asked how many in the audience had experienced sleep paralysis, and about 50 people raised their hands, eliciting gasps from the rest of the crowd.

When it happened to me, the Internet wasn't what it is, so it took 2 years before I found out that it was a condition that happened to other people, and that had a name, and that was hugely comforting to me, Ascher said. But now, because of where we are with social media, everybody's able to share their stories and reach out, and I instantly got sucked into the rabbit hole. The amount of thought and difference of opinion was really fascinating to me. I was spending so much time reading that stuff that it made sense to start doing it on the clock.

The Nightmare

Ascher said he looked into the science, psychology, history and folklore of the condition, but ultimately decided to focus entirely on the experiences of those victimized by it. I was just most interested in first-person accounts, eyewitness testimonies of ho

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