The Heart Of The World (2000)
Guy Maddin
Canada
6 Min.

 

One of the most exhilarating works of the last decade, Guy Maddin’s six minutes of undiluted phantasmagoria, The Heart of the World (2000), is a postmodern film about modernism. Like The Limits of Control (2009) – a postmodern film about postmodernism – Maddin’s picture parodies modernist ideas of grand narratives and universal philosophical and political truths, obtainable through science, that could help change humanity for the better. But while Jarmusch’s latest took up arms against capitalist modernization and cultural homogenization, Maddin’s film is merely nostalgic and mocking in attitude. Constructed using pseudo-degraded film stock, expressionist, distorted images, atypically ambiguous Eisensteinian montage and a pulsating track by Georgi Sviridov (which was also employed by Peleshian in Beginning (1967)), the film’s “grand narrative” opens with the image of an omniscient cinematic eye peeping into the diegesis and follows Anna the scientist (the mother figure in the film – wielding a telescope that points downwards – is possibly modeled after the titular queen in Aelita (1924)) as she tries to save the “heart of the world” – the truth – from a breakdown due to, well, individualism and capitalism. Even at the minimum, The Heart of the World, teasingly and cheerfully, presents a scintillating time capsule of an age that exhibited a utopian optimism towards psychoanalysis (the film is a Freudian’s playground), feminism, technology and cinema (the last two of which Vertov uses almost interchangeably when he says that Kino-Eye can transform man “from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man”), be it through Kino-Pravda, Kino-Train or Kino-Eye.