Read

Over time, films become lost. Sometimes it’s due to fire or outside damage; other times it’s due to improper storage. Often it’s just the simple product of age. One way or another, films disappear, and many films that existed in the early days of cinema aren’t around anymore.

That idea troubled director Guy Maddin, and it also inspired him to create a live art project, originally called “Hauntings.” The installation employed various arthouse actors and sought to recreate old and lost films with new footage on display in museum spaces. Now known as Séances, the project has evolved. With the release of The Forbidden Room (2015), a concurrently-shot feature-length formulation of the project with its own stories and scenes, the Séances internet experience will further audience’s experiences with Maddin and collaborator Evan Johnson’s imaginations.

“Séances will be launched around the same time as the film is released,” Maddin told Cinema-Scope. “It’ll be a website where anyone visiting can hold a seance with lost cinema. The lights will go down on your screen, and then you’ll see the start of a fragment of one of these lost films. Just like in the séances we all know about from movies, the strength of the signal of one spirit might fade while another collides with it and takes over, so there’ll be a few non-sequitor collisions or collages.”

Internet audience members can move between footage at will, controlling the movie that they see and interact with.

The Séances title stems from combined translations of the term: In France, cinemas refer to the time a film is showing as a séance. It’s similar to the term “screening,” as in the North American phrasing of “the screening will be at 2pm.” French cinemas say “séance at 2pm.” In North America, the term séance is more exclusively used in reference to paranormal visitation. Thus, the Séances project is effectively both: a viewing experience wherein the audience witnesses what look like long-dead films.

“The word ‘séance,’ it turns out, means ‘a seating,’” Maddin explained to Blouin Artinfo. “In both cases, there is seating in the dark; in both cases a bunch of people gather together to see something that isn’t really there, a projection of something that once was. And in both cases, they really want to like, they want to be enchanted, they want to believe, they want to be taken away, they want to be taken in. Then the lights go on, and the people get up out of their seats and discuss among themselves how enchanted they were. And in both cases, there’s some sort of fraud or charlatan behind the whole thing, either a fake mystic or a director who is pulling the wool over people’s eyes… So it occurred to me to make contact with the spirits of lost films, these films of no known final resting place, these unhappy souls doomed to wander the landscape of film history unable to project themselves. I thought I could put a bunch of actors into trances and invite the spirit of a lost film to possess, compel them to act out a long forgotten plot and shoot them as a spirit photographer and make my own versions of these lost movies.”

Although Séances and The Forbidden Room were shot at the same time and embody the same artistic spirit, the productions are different. The internet work will not contain any of the same scenes as the film, allowing for a completely unique experience.

Some of the lost films being reimagined by Maddin and Johnson for the project have intriguing titles, such as The Strength of a Moustache, and Fist of a Cripple. They are a combination of lost films and concepts that were announced but never actually made, originating all over the world, most from the first three decades of cinema.

One thing is for sure: Séances is bound to be unlike anything that has come before it. Speaking further about the concept, Maddin said, “We were even toying with the idea of having so-called ‘weak spots’ within the film: at one point if you touched your iPad, you could push from one story to the next, or there were even weak spots with YouTube clips or weather reports. That may still happen, we’re still fine-tuning. It’d be nice to have a cat video from 2007 in the middle of one of these things.”

Whatever the project ultimately becomes, Séances will almost definitely delight fans of The Forbidden Room’s maddening and inventive take on early cinema.