Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2013: #32. Guy Maddin’s Spiritismes

Spiritismes

Director: Guy Maddin
Writer(s): Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk
Producer(s): Phyllis Laing
U.S. Distributor: Rights Available
Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Amira Casar, Adèle Haenel, Ariane Labed, Elina Löwensohn, Mathieu Demy, Jean-François Stévenin, André Wilms, Grégory Gadebois, Jacques Nolot

High set of profile actors join one crazy project which is best described by the avant-gardist himself – “Over eighty percent of silent films are lost. I’ve always considered a lost film as a narrative with no known final resting place — doomed to wander the landscape of film history, sad, miserable and unable to project itself to the people who might love it.”

Gist: Every day, Guy Maddin invites visitors of the Centre Pompidou to witness the making of a new film inspired by a long-lost movie. Summoning these wandering spirits of cinema in theatrical “séances”, Maddin and his actors inhabit their ghostly scenarios. Example: Maddin and his cohorts would “contact” the ghost of a lost film – William Wellman’s Ladies of the Mob, for example, or Mikio Naruse’s The Strength of a Moustache – and then recreate/reimagine it as if under the influence of the cosmic ectoplasm.”

Release Date: We’re not sure if this can be packaged as one 5-6 hour ode to lost films, (there are 100 short films in all) but I could see the Toronto Int. Film Festival attempting to package this for consumption.