“SPIRITISMES” by Guy Maddin

Every day from february 22 to march 12, Guy Maddin invites visitors of the Centre Pompidou to witness the making of a new film inspired by a long-lost movie. Summoning these wandering spirits of cinema in theatrical “séances”, Maddin and his actors inhabit their ghostly scenarios.

LIVE NOW FROM THE SET HERE

“Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place… doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable, and unable to project itself to the people who might love it. Their friends, their family, their loved ones and the public.

This absence haunts me. I need to see these films. It’s eventually occurred to me that the best way to see them would to make contact with their miserable spirits and invite them to possess me. And with actors quite willing to participate in some para-normal cinematic experiments.

These are not direct re-creations or the imitations of the films themselves. I would never dare consider myself capable of even the lousiest impersonation and wish to pay respect to all… Jean Vigo, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Ed Wood and all.

Every day my actors will plunge themselves deep into a trance, and open themselves up to possession by the unhappy spirit of a lost film. And every day my actors will act out the long forgotten choreographies that once lived so luminously on the big screen for thousands, maybe millions of viewers.

This project made ​​its way into my head for almost twenty years. During all these years, he moved my heart and even my soul, until I myself am possessed! I learned that there are lost films. Beautiful films, made ​​for a very long, generally silent, popular films, glorified, loved, raised to the level of myth by millions of spectators, some obsessively. Films which, however, dying in obscurity. Since I realized this, I literally haunted. Some of these films were destroyed by the studios, simply because they needed shelves, some were thrown into the sea or burned in a bonfire at picnics countryside. Others were reduced to dust because they were poorly preserved, others perished in the flames in an accident of projection. Some of these films have simply disappeared from history.

These are films that have no abode, films can not be thrown in their public accounts unfortunates condemned to wander forever in the landscape of film history. It is the fact of not being able to see, that haunts me, because they were all made ​​for that! I feel their pain wandering when I go to the movies, particularly in old cinemas. Yes, these films sadden me as much as they intrigue me. I thought that the only way to restore a situation as melancholy was to hold séances to contact these desperate souls and give them the chance to show again a part of themselves, even tiny. I decided to set up a device in which we could all attend these séances and perhaps, if we’re lucky, take a look at the past glories of cinema.”

Guy Maddin