How could I have gone through the last six years without seeing Guy Maddin's utterly brilliant short film The Heart of the World? Perhaps it was from a less than memorable viewing of Maddin's first feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital about 10 years ago. While I enjoyed and appreciated the archaic film technique and gauzy images, ghostly in the way it conjured a seemingly ancient and almost forgotten style, technology and sensibility, the movie's meandering narrative and fuzzy logic left little for me to hold onto. In other words, I was bored. Maybe I wasn't yet ripe enough to fully dig Guy's maddeningly romantic parody of early sound cinema or his creaky and cranky comedy. Maybe it's not that the films we watched weren't very good, but that we weren't quite good enough when we watched them. In any case, I hadn't watched another Maddin film until earlier today, when I saw The Heart of the World.
Well, I wasn't bored with this one. It's a frenetic six minute montage upon montage of images, ideas, symbols and tropes; a multi-layered mixture of history, theory and an allegorical fiction about a young "State Scientist", Anna, who, while warning the world of an eminent calamity (and ignored), is torn by the love of two brothers. She is tempted and seduced by the filty lucre of a wealthy industrialist (who is fat, smokes big cigars, wears a stylish 1920 pince-nez and carries bags of money stamped with dollar signs like Scrooge McDuck). Just as Anna marries and succumbs to the industrialist, the eminent calamity of which she spoke occurs: the heart of the world fails; the earth has a heart attack (a close up of a bladderlike heart pumping crazily). Buildings fall; nations fall. Now Anna regains her conscience, strangles the industrialist (framed in Murnau style shadow-silhouette) and falls through a chute to the center of the world where she repairs the heart by the creation of KINO (cinema, film, motion pictures, movies) and the flickering image of a shimmering Anna are projected majestically on flags and dancing bodies. Indeed, here cinema saves the world.
Built as a parody/tribute to early Soviet propaganda films (particularly Aelita and Man with a Movie Camera, billed as a tribute to the Toronto Film Festival, by way of a celebration of "kino", it's much more than this, although I would be at a loss to attempt to explain it. It's movies like The Heart of the World that allow me to fall in hopeless love with the artform once again, the combination of visual poetry, rythmn and a density of ideas. The only analogue I could find to The Heart of the World as a film is David Lynch's Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, the very short and cery remarkable film he made with a restored Lumiere movie camera in 1997 (see stills and download a small quicktime file here).
While foraging through Russian Live Journal sites (and finding some very cool things!), I found one such site which had links (and not one but two) to a 45MB avi file of The Heart of the World (and if you don't read Russian, like me, the links are here and here (and none of them the dread rapidshare). So, do yourself a favor and watch it. If you want to read about the movie, here's Jonathan Rosenbaum's take, Gerald Peary's take, and an interesting review of the film's typography. If something aural is what you're looking for, here's a CBC interview with Guy Maddin concerning The Heart of the World.
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