Eerie, avant-garde film installation SEANCES available to stream for free.
Almost every director working in the first half?century of film history has lost at least one film to the quirks of fate. These lost works remind me of ghosts. Its easy to equate these films long gone missing, which exist forensically only in the form of a few production stills and some old Variety reviews, as restless spirits that haunt us. The landscape of cinema history is thronged with their likes, tormenting us with their promise of a return, of their warm refulgent brilliance restored to us, as in a miracle. There will never be the kind of closure the discovery of a dead body can bring to a family. These films will never be declared dead with any certainty, they will continue to haunt us with the possibility of their return. These lost film titles are the hauntings we hope to invoke with SEANCES.
? Guy Maddin, co-creator
Winninpeg-based surrealist/expressionist filmmaker Guy Maddin (TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, CAREFUL) has been making challenging, personal, witty and deeply unapologetically weird avant-garde cinema for decades. Now, his fans have a new way of experiencing Maddin’s unique film narrative with SEANCES, a groundbreaking achievement in data-driven cinematic storytelling from iconoclastic filmmaker Guy Maddin, co-creators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson and the National Film Board of Canada.
Launching online at here as well as at the Tribeca Film Festivals Storyscapes program as an installation-based experience, SEANCES dynamically assembles re-imagined lost films in never-to-be-repeated configurations. This project was born from the mind of Maddin, who has long been haunted by the idea that 80 percent of films from the silent era have vanished. SEANCES is the latest project to emerge from a cinematic story-world that also includes the acclaimed 2015 feature film THE FORBIDDEN ROOM, named to TIFFs Canadas Top Ten list.
SEANCES re-imagines the lost works of such cinematic legends as Alice Guy?Blaché, Alexander Dovzhenko, Jacques Feyder, Benjamin Fondane, Alfred Hitchcock and more, and was filmed at the Phi Centre in Montreal and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It features a stellar cast of Canadian and international actors, including Mathieu Amalric, Geraldine Chaplin, Louis Negin, Ariane Labed, Jacques Nolot, Udo Kier, Adèle Haenel, Charlotte Rampling, Clara Furey, Paul Ahmarani, Caroline Dhavernas and Karine Vanasse.
Festival-goers at Tribeca took part in this collective cinematic séance, through the interactive installation at the Tribeca Storyscapes Exhibit and Lounge at Spring Studios. This unique communal on-site experience utilizes two 55-inch touch-screen displays and features three interactive screenings every hour. The installation will come to Canadian cities later in 2016.
Seances is a collaboration between the NFBs North West Studio and Digital Studio, and is produced for the NFB by Alicia Smith and Dana Dansereau, with David Christensen and Loc Dao as executive producers.
Watch SEANCES for free now HERE.
Warning: once it starts, you can only STOP it by closing the window….
