Enjoy the Silence

Guy Madden is into silence. Sort of.

The director (known to some as “Canada’s David Lynch”) is at Luminato this week for several events, including a series of restored silent films, a showing of his own most recent film Brand Upon The Brain, and an audience discussion tonight.

During this week’s showing of By The Law, a 1926 silent film by Russian director Lev Kuleshov, Madden was on stage, talking a blue streak, like he was trying to make up for the lack of sound in the film itself. He was nervous, he said, and felt unprepared for some reason, like in an anxiety dream.

“But I do have my pants on, anyway,” he said.

By The Law, like most films of the silent era, inhabits a world foreign to our own — even to our own history of the time. Everything exists in either shadowy pitch or burned-out glare, and everyone’s pace is just a pinky-width away from normal. You get the sense that these aren’t tricks of shutterspeed or f-stop, but that the world was really like that.

This is, apparently, the world that Guy Madden wants to live in.

Madden’s audience talk is tonight at 7:15 at the Drake Hotel. Admission is free.

PODCAST: Zounds!

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Goro Koyama was, um… relieving himself in the middle of the Elgin Theater. That’s sure what it sounds like. Gross.

But of course, loyal Luminatites do know better, and may have deduced that Koyama is a perfectly polite foley artist — a guy whose job is to make artificial sounds to use in movies. One of his specialties begins with a “p.” It also sounds like the letter “p.” This is a family website, so we won’t go any further.

Listen to our newest podcast about the brains behind the onomatopoeia at Guy Madden’s film “Brand Upon The Brain,” and you can hear Koyama and his colleagues, Caoimhe Doyle and Andy Malcolm, making the sounds that make us listen with awe. And occasionally wince.

Listen here.