Of
all the inter-acty programs at this year’s Tribeca, you have to get behind this
one, because it directly and necessarily led to the creation of Guy Maddin’s
incomparable cinema fantasia The Forbidden Room. Originally, this was the interactive tribute to and
resurrection of lost silent films Maddin had in mind, but a condition of his
funding required the production of a conventional feature film as well. This is
probably the only time Maddin’s Forbidden
Room and the word “conventional” will ever appear in the same paragraph.
Regardless, Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, and the National Film Board of
Canada allow viewers the chance to invoke the spirits of some of the weirdest silent
ever lost in Seances (trailer here), which concludes it viewing
period today at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.
Twelver
viewers at a time enter the Seances booth,
where they choose the elements of their film on the spiritualist’s table and
then sit back to enjoy the show. After it concludes, the unique algorithm that
produced the fifteen minute-ish short is deleted, so it can never be replayed.
Much like Forbidden Room, Seances introduces an eccentric set of
characters in the framing device that soon melts into some sort of flashback
sequence, which is interrupted in turn by a Maddinesque flight of fancy, before
repacking itself like a Russian doll.
After
watched three in row at Tribeca, certain elements started to reappear, but
scenes never repeated themselves. There are an awful lot of trippy, ghost films
for participating viewers to draw from, featuring Maddin regulars like
Geraldine Chaplin (who truly provides an apostolic link to the silent era),
Mathieu Almaric, Maria de Medeiros, Charlotte Rampling, and the great Udo Kier.
(In fact, the Seances producer seemed
rather receptive to our suggestion for a special Udo Kier button, allowing each
audience to vote yes or no whether they wanted some tasty Udo nuttiness in
their film.)
Seances is wildly cool, but the
VR-oriented Tribeca Festival Hub might not be the most sympathetic place to showcase
it. There is just too great a disparity between the be-a-shark-in-the-ocean,
be-a-lion-on-the-Serengeti VR programs and Seances,
which offers patrons the chance to make their own unique Guy Maddin movie,
especially if you are not already familiar with his work.
