Brand Upon the Brain! (The Criterion Collection) [DVD]

Brand Upon the Brain! is Guy Maddin's 2nd film in an autobiographical trilogy, which started with "Cowards Bend the Knee" (2003) and ended with "My Winnipeg" (2007).I have been a fan of Maddin for a long time and absolutely loved The Saddest Music in the World (2003) but Brand Upon the Brain! is by far the best film I have seen by him (I have yet to see My Winnipeg which also got rave reviews).Maddin is one of the few directors who still makes silent films. This film is in fact only partly silent. There was a short time when silent films had soundtracks (music and sound effects), and Maddin does the same thing here. He also uses a narrator, but they where sometimes used at the time of the silent films (then live), especially in Japan.The film is pure surrealism. It is autobiographical in the same way as Kafka was is his books. It has the humor of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the horror of David Lynch. It is, in a nutshell insane and amazing. Strongly recommended to anyone interested in Avant-Garde cinema.About the DVD. The Transfer is very good. It offers multi narration track, which is much appreciated. The documentary about the film was really good and informative. The same goes for the essay on Maddin, by film critic Dennis Lim. The two new short films are far from being the best I have seen from Maddin. "It's My Mother's Birthday Today" is some kind of music video and "Footsteps" is in fact just a documentary about the foley artists which worked on the film.

this is a beautifully conceived and truly original surrealist comedy drama, filled with romance and terror, pathos and parody, a half painted lighthouse and a staircase of orphans, a claustrophobic island and the eternal cycles of memory, the bald head and the baby, a tushy crazed mommy and a workaholic father, vampyrism of brain nectar and lesbianism of sex, turpentine baths and butter on the wall, the maternal searchlight of anger and the paternal foghorn of purity -- and raging aging! and rumania! oh don't forget rumania!everything is told in black and white, grainy and misprinted film, wobbly and erratically vignetted images, and a campy imitation of the silent film conventions of motion pantomine and text slides (but with punctuating sound effects, deliriously incoherent music, and a fiendishly arch narration by isabella rossellini thrown in).i wasn't sure what to expect and now, well ... i'm not sure what to tell you to expect. you won't forget it, you won't always enjoy it (i found it dragged in places), but you will find it not quite like anything you've ever seen before -- unless it was by guy maddin.

Brand Upon the Brain at first looks like a film from the silent era, black and white with scratches and so on. But in this case it is intended, and unlike the most silent films this explodes with images in a high tempo and in an almost dreamlike way. The result, I think, is very watchable and very well made. The basic story is a mix of childhood memories and horror story: tha adult Maddin returns to the island where he grew up and remembers macabre things involving orphans whose brains are used to make longevity nectar, and this is controlled by the dictator mother and mad scientist father... It is of course possible to read in a lot of interpretations from psychoanalysis or whatever. But I don't even try - the film is entirely watchable without this, and presents to us a slice of Guy Maddins personal universe. Even if you don't like this universe, the film is still worth watching because of it's unique style.The DVD contains different narrator tracks, a documentary and two short films by Maddin. Highly recommended!

I'm a longtime fan of Guy Maddin - I own every one of his feature films on DVD from "Gimli Hospital" up to "Brand Upon the Brain". I anxiously await the video release of "My Winnipeg" since there is no arthouse theater around here where I could have seen it. I have long felt that Maddin's movies deserve to be honored with the prestigious, pretentious, pricey Criterion label ...But not this one.I hate to say it, but Guy is slipping. He's starting to repeat himself, and the spastic editing style does not help to conceal that fact. It actually makes the movie LESS watchable. I appreciate the effort that went into chopping up the movie so it looks like a deranged chimpanzee had a seizure whilst gripping the jog-wheel of a DVC deck .. but after about 15 minutes the edit pace stops meaning anything, and the flickering images blur into a sleepy incoherence. We've fallen a long way from "Saddest Music in the World," in which the pace of the editing varied to match and magnify the emotional intensity of the scene. Here it is ridiculously fast & choppy throughout, and it just seems to be style for style's sake, nothing more. I was disappointed.Of all Guy Maddin's films, this one least deserves to be released on Criterion. It is worth seeing, but not at this price.

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The 400 Blows meets Eraserhead. Maybe a bit of Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. Brilliant film.

You won't be sorry. This is easily the most original film of 2007 and the disc is loaded with extras. You'll be screaming "Romania! Romania!" for weeks after you see this movie.From some unknown corner of heaven, F W Murnau is looking down at this movie and smiling ...

Glad to get this hard-to-find DVD.

This is definitely one of Guy Maddin's best films! I loved it!