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.
October 4, 2010 at 1:55 am
interesting, thank you for sharing it.
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October 4, 2010 at 8:23 am
“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.”
Brilliant capsule of a film that certainly deserves this kind of scrutiny. Maddin has received the expressionist mantle, so to speak, and he’s produced a most impressive body of work.
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October 4, 2010 at 9:13 am
Thaks so much, Sam. I haven’t seen Maddin’s other works, but if this one’s anything to go by, I’m game.
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October 4, 2010 at 10:16 am
[…] Just Another Film Buff’s latest acomplished essay is a brilliant capsule on expressionist Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World: https://theseventhart.info/2010/10/03/short-films-9/ […]
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October 4, 2010 at 5:30 pm
I normally avoid Maddin’s films as I don’t really like them. They seem like part failed comic sketch part silent film pastiche. A couple of interesting images, though (no film has nothing to recommend it).
Thanks. I’m glad I got the opportunity to look at his work again.
P.S. I’ve added the index to my Godard video.
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October 4, 2010 at 6:00 pm
I can see where you are coming from, Stephen. Blame it on the excesses of postmodernism, which is all around us, as opposed to the controlled modernist movement. Some might say The Heart of the World is condescending. I might agree and can live with that accusation.
Cheers!
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October 4, 2010 at 6:29 pm
We need a piece on Enthiran or the Superstar phenomenon!
Let the world know about our Superstar through your eloquent writing.
P.S : Sorry to be commenting totally off subject. :)
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October 4, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Let the ticket price come down to three digits first. But even then I don’t want fanboys, frothing at their mouth, running after me with cricket bats. In other words, PASS!
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