Seances (film)

Seances is a 2016 interactive project by filmmaker and installation artist Guy Maddin, co-creators Evan and Galen Johnson, and the National Film Board of Canada, combining Maddin's recreations of lost films with an algorithmic film generator that allows for multiple storytelling permutations. Maddin began the project in 2012 in Paris, France, shooting footage for 18 films at the Centre Georges Pompidou (this installation was titled Spiritismes, the French word for “seances,” leading to press confusion about the project title) and continued shooting footage for an additional 12 films at the Phi Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Paris and Montreal shoots each took three weeks, with Maddin completing one short film of approximately 15-20 minutes each day. The shoots were also presented as art installation projects, during which Maddin, along with the cast and crew, held a “séance” during which Maddin "invite[d] the spirit of a lost photoplay to possess them."

Seances grew out of Maddin’s Hauntings project. Noah Cowan, a former director of the Toronto International Film Festival, told Maddin “he didn’t think it was possible to make art on the Internet,” which “reminded [Maddin] of what people said about cinema when it was starting out, when the moviolas and kinetoscopes were considered artless novelties.”

Maddin began with the idea of “shooting adaptations of lost films” and originally conceived the project as making “title-for-title remakes of specific lost films” but altered this plan in favour of producing original material as the project developed. Maddin completed 11 films to show as installation loops for Noah Cowan and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox theatre for this 2010 Hauntings project.

At the SXSW 2012 festival, Maddin announced that he had begun production on the Seances project, for which he would shoot one hundred short films within a hundred-day span, at locations in Canada, France, and the United States. However, Maddin abandoned this approach to the project to focus more fully on original script creation, partnering with writers Evan Johnson and Robert Kotyk, with additional writing by Maddin’s wife Kim Morgan and American poet John Ashbery.