The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

138 Guy Maddin
Maddin: Oh my God, it’s just a continuity ellipsis. It’s analogous to a brushstroke
in a painting. It’d be like people writing books listing all the different
brush sizes used in the Louvre or something like that. I think I’m just expressing
memories of disappointment with the general viewing public.
I love the sounds of part-talkies, and the first part-talkie I saw was L’ âge
d’or. You know, it’s partially silent. Every now and then they’d talk, and I love
when you can hear the tape recorder or whatever they used, the big discs,
when they started recording the sound. You can hear the stylus digging
into the grooves and you could hear the silence ending, the records being
changed in the soundtrack. I loved the feeling, the clunkiness. It’s like looking
at a painting and loving the paint and not what it’s representing. I just
have a feeling of what went into making the painting and the soundtrack of
L’ âge d’or. You could just feel the torn edges of the collage overlapping with
each other and the way it was put together. You could just feel it, and it was
like a big celebration of the way it was put together. It felt really good to me.
It’s kind of half-silent, half-talkie. It’s got a pre–World War I documentary
about scorpions tacked onto the front of the film, but then it’s also
historical. It’s a melodrama. It’s a piece, according to Buñuel, about
desire and the frustration that comes with that. What other genres do
you think it straddles?
Maddin: The frustration was really good, and he started in that movie right
in the beginning, by hammering home the fact that people don’t really want
sexual gratification. There’s that fantastic sequence in L’ âge d’or where the
two lovers, when they finally have a chance to be alone together in that
gravel garden, intentionally sabotage any chance of consummation in one
of those stillborn Jerry Lewis slapstick routines.
Gaston Modot picks up Lya Lys, who slides out of his arms. Then they’re
on the ground, they bonk heads, and just when they’re about ready to kiss,
he gets distracted by a statue. They just don’t know what to do with each
other, and all they really have to do is what comes naturally for so many
people. They’re just delaying what could only be anticlimactic. He’s always
got people delaying, and he does it with food, too. He never has people actually
putting food in their mouths. It’s just such a simple look at desire, and
yet there’s just so much truth in it.