Is anyone out there game for having their senses assaulted by a silent film?  I know this sounds oxymoronic, but Guy Maddin’s 2006 offering, Brand upon the Brain is just the film for you.  Maddin continues his silent cinema “autobiography,” logically following the existential path macheted by his previous silent effort, Cowards Bend the Knee.   Black and white images shot in 8mm flicker by quickly and shots and sets pay equal homage to German expressionism and MTV.  Roger Ebert describes Maddin’s technique as Poe meets Dali, but one cannot ignore the influence of David Lynch as well (although any film that’s “different” is ubiquitously going to be compared to the buddha of strange cinema).  Originally intended to be shown with an orchestra, a castrato, and a narrator, The Criterion Collection’s dvd release defaults to recorded music and luminous narration by Isabella Rossellini.

Plot, you ask.  Let me try – a middle-aged man named Guy Maddin (yes, that is the director’s name)  is returning to his childhood home, an island called Black Notch, to give it two coats of paint to welcome back his dying mother who hasn’t seen the island in decades.  The wild island’s only architectural feature is a lighthouse with an attached family dwelling and a labyrinthine basement.  We immediately begin a series of flashbacks as Guy tries to make sense of his childhood traumas and loves.  Mother, of course, is a control freak; and father is a mad scientist toiling away in his basement laboratory.  Mom and pop, who have two children, Guy and Sis, also run an orphanage out of the lighthouse.  On Black Notch, strange and inexplicable happenings occur on a regular basis and out of the blue, up show teen sleuths, Chance and Wendy of Lightbulb Kids fame.  Guy and Sis fall in love with said teen sleuths, who, unbeknownst to them, are the same person.  These loves must be kept secret at all costs as mother spies on everything from the lighthouse.  Meanwhile, orphans escape into the wilds of the island at night and weird, savage rituals ensue.  The teen sleuths solve the mystery of Black Notch (not surprisingly involving the mad scientist in the basement) and no one lives happily ever after.

In typical Freudian fashion, the past comes crashing back upon the adult Guy as he tries to put to rest his childhood demons (it’s no accident he’s been asked to put two coats of whitewash on the lighthouse), especially the fear of parental abandonment.  To recite the plot and conclude is too simple.  Maddin, using the earliest motion picture technology to make an experimental film, addresses Oedipus, Freud, noir, pulp, science fiction, Lord of the Flies, Proust, gender, vampire films, Frankenstein, the detective genre, and Medea.  But I suspect I’m only scratching the surface here; and did I mention that Brand upon the Brain has a wickedly humorous streak as well?

Because Maddin’s universe simultaneously pays homage to and revolutionizes cinema, all viewer expectations are toyed with and undercut.  Boys are girls; girls are boys.  The benevolent are cruel; the cruel benevolent.  Saviors kill and killers save.  The only constant is that the past is the present is the past is the present and that we’d all be better off if we reproduced via parthenogenesis.  Both visually and intellectually challenging, Brand upon the Brain is a wild ride through a maze of mirrors and lights that soughs about your brain for weeks after you get off.

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