The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

L’âge d’or
141
entomology books because I’d heard that Buñuel loved them. So not just
Jean Henri Fabre but Maurice Maeterlinck’s descriptions of insect behavior,
which are every bit as surreal in the depiction of the way insects love
and behave. It’s like parallel universes to human behavior, and they’re
really cool.
But other than that, I don’t know. Most of those sections have to be deliciously
endured the way you have to wait through Christmas Eve to get to the
presents in the morning. Especially that bandit sequence, which was pretty
dull. When you finally get to Gaston and Lya, then things are great. So I always
try to make myself watch the movie from start to finish, but many times I’ve
cheated and just watched the Gaston and Lya sections.
One of the most controversial scenes is in the sixth section of the film:
Christ comes out after murdering somebody whom he’s presumably
raped, and then there are scalps on the cross. What did you make of
that, if anything, when you first saw it?
Maddin: I’d always been pretty secular, and I kind of bought it. It always
seemed like fair game to kind of scalp the church somehow. It just seemed
kind of quaint that the savagery of Buñuel’s attack always seemed kind of
charmingly distanced for me because I’d already made quite a happy secular
space for myself—that it felt a bit like looking at a picture book of World
War I, or something. There was so much time and space between me and
it that I just saw it as something that must have been pretty important to
the artist.
It gave me a thrill, because clearly he was saving this up to the end and it
really seemed to matter. It just seemed like a Winnipegger sitting pretty far
upwind from the Bible Belt. That curious form of rebellion was like looking
at something under glass, so it didn’t lash me into excitement in any way.
For 1930, it was much more controversial. According to some scholars,
it’s his invocation of Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom.
Maddin: Well, I’m sure, you know, you couldn’t see that type of scene in
any American studio film then or now without controversy. It would still
be pretty controversial for some people, but for some reason it is the movie
that changed my life the most—made me make movies. It was his approach