Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006)

Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006)Like most of Maddin’s films, this bizarro fantasia reanimates the cinematic past with its silent-film structure and willfully archaic visual quality. Shot entirely on high-contrast 8mm and edited like an experiment in Soviet montage, the film’s jumpy, hyperkinetic, grainy visuals create the illusion of watching a long-lost film that has been moldering in someone’s attic for decades, a tattered thing of sublime beauty that is as stirring as it is decrepit. Strikingly unique, albeit not for all tastes, it will fire the imaginations of those who adore the grim bleakness of Weimar-era expressionism and associative editing and alienate anyone who resists the ambiguous and bizarre. (DVD)