Hauntings I and Hauntings II

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2010

Hauntings I
Guy Maddin with Jody Shapiro, Darcy Fehr, Michael Maryniukm, Caelum Vatnsdal
2010 Silent
Super 8 and HD Video transferred to DVD
Black and White and Colour
Production Designer: Richardo Alms
Screenplay: Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk, Guy Maddin, Caelum Vatnsdal
Editor: Join Gurdebeke
Principal Cast: Louis Negin, Udo Kier, Tattiawna Jones, Kim Morgan, Suzanne Pringle
Producer: Phyllis Laing, Jean du Toit, Jody Shapiro
Production Supervisor: Evn Johnson

Hauntings II
Guy Maddin with Jody Shapiro, Darcy Fehr, Michael Maryniukm, Caelum Vatnsdal
2010 Silent
Super 8 transferred to DVD
Black and White
Production Designer: Richardo Alms
Screenplay: Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk, Guy Maddin, Caelum Vatnsdal
Editor: Join Gurdebeke
Principal Cast: Louis Negin, Udo Kier, Tattiawna Jones, Kim Morgan, Suzanne Pringle
Producer: Phyllis Laing, Jean du Toit, Jody Shapiro

The ghosts of cinema loom large in Guy Maddin’s body of work. Hauntings, a series of very short films commissioned for the opening of TIFF Bell Lightbox, makes explicit his fascination with these cultural spectres; his first comment upon seeing our building under construction was that “this place needs some ghosts.” Both a cheeky commentary on the idea of an essential films list and a harrowing exploration of the regret and weakness felt by cinema’s great masters, this is both Maddin’s most expansive work in terms of the sheer size of its palette and his most personal. For years, he has been collecting tales of unrealized, half-finished or abandoned films. This impulse rhymes remarkably well with Maddin’s thematic obsession with regret and the perils of wild abandon

The series is deployed in two separate locations. Hauntings I involves eleven projections of reclaimed fragments of cinema’s lost history. Maddin turned tales of lost films into actual scripts with lengths set between thirty seconds and five minutes, depending on the complexity of the found material. Shot in Winnipeg earlier this year and starring Fassbinder legend Udo Kier and Maddin regular Louis Negin, the fragments range from lost avant-garde projects by Hollis Frampton (left on a subway) and Michael Snow, to lush dramas from F.W. Murnau and Oscar Michaud. The projections crowd the front part of the new main gallery, like ghouls from an alternate reality confronting and questioning visitors as they enter and exit the space that celebrates our “sanctified” Essential 100 films.

Hauntings II is an original work based on inspiration moments from the making of Hauntings I. (A fragment of fragments, if you will.) It involves a vast ethereal curtain that gradually reveals a siren of cinema, meant to beckon visitors to enter TIFF Bell Lightbox and become entranced by her cinematic offerings. Hauntings II spans the length of the building’s northern bank of windows on the fifth floor every night of the Festival.
—Noah Cowan