Brand Upon the Brain!
| Brand upon the Brain! | |
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Theatrical film poster
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| Directed by | Guy Maddin |
| Produced by | Amy Jacobson |
| Written by | Guy Maddin George Toles |
| Starring | Sullivan Brown Gretchen Krich Maya Lawson Erik Steffen Maahs Katherine E. Scharhon |
| Music by | Jason Staczek |
| Cinematography | Benjamin Kasulke |
| Edited by | John Gurdebeke |
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Production
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Seattle Classic Films
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Release date
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Running time
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99 minutes |
| Country | Canada United States |
| Language | Silent |
| Budget | $40,000 |
Brand upon the Brain! (2006) is an avant-garde silent film directed by Guy Maddin and shot in Seattle with local actors. Maddin directed the film from a script co-written with George Toles, shooting over nine days and editing over three months, on an estimated budget of $40,000.
Guy Maddin (played by Erik Steffen Maahs as an adult, and Sullivan Brown as a child), returns to Black Notch, a deserted island on which stands a lighthouse that was his family home, an orphanage run by his parents, to slap a fresh coat of paint on the lighthouse. The film is divided into twelve chapters, each of which is a flashback that Guy's ancestral house-painting has brought to the fore of his memory.
Guy, twelve years old in his memory, attends a secret meeting of orphans run by Savage Tom, a believer in pagan rituals. Tom says he will cut out the heart of Guy's friend Neddie but Guy's mother interrupts through the use of her "aerophone," a radio/loudspeaker that Guy's domineering mother uses to communicate across the entirety of the island and so keep control of her children, whom she also spies on with the help of a telescope mounted with the lighthouse's revolving light. In the orphanage/lighthouse, mother delights in repressing the orphans' desires as fully as possible, especially the sexual yearnings of Sis. Mother relates that she herself was an orphan because Maddin's grandmother was bald and scalped her sister for her hair, while her sister was so jealous of the pregnancy that Maddin's mother was literally cut out of her own mother's stomach. Maddin's father, little-seen, spends his time in a basement laboratory while Mother oversees all else.
In the woods one day Guy meets a young girl, Wendy Hale, a famous teen detective investigating why orphans adopted from the island all have holes bored in the backs of their heads. Guy falls for Wendy and the two join Sis and Neddie for a game of spin the bottle. Wendy falls in love with Sis and impersonates her twin brother Chance in order to pursue her. Guy develops a "Boy crush" on the disguised Wendy/Chance, who moves into the orphanage to further her/his investigation. Guy helps Wendy/Chance investigate and they discover that Father is using a sharp signet ring to drill into the skulls and draw nectar from their brains of the orphans (and his own children). The nectar is harvested and shipped to the mainland, and also used to extend Mother's youth. She becomes twenty years younger, and hopes to eventually return to infancy, but the effects are daily reversed by the age-ifying efforts of keeping Sis and the other children in line and properly repressed. Sis being the biggest problem, Mother sends her for additional nectar-harvesting, but the over-harvesting causes Sis to murder Father in self-defense.
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