A few weeks ago, I opened my laptop and started a piece called “Faces.” I had a vague idea of what I wanted to write, but nothing of substance except a story from a friend, whose patient had told him:
“When I look at you, I see archetypes. I see, behind the young man, hints of a person who has lived hundreds of years. Has anyone ever told you that you have many faces?”
I wrote out the quote, stared at my screen for several minutes, and snapped my laptop shut. That question lingered in the back of my mind for a long time: “Has anyone ever told you that you have many faces?”
On a recent Thursday evening, I crawled out of the office earlier than usual to attend a talk hosted by the cinematic arts department. I had been invited to the talk by a friend, whose film professor had urged her to attend. My friend had fallen ill, so I guiltily went alone.
I had no context for the talk except the title: “Man on a Ledge—Filmmaking above the Cinematic Abyss,” and the description: “Director Guy Maddin presents a talk on the topic of centennials.” These days, I lived moment to moment and could not be bothered to look up who Guy Maddin was before taking my seat in the small and crowded theater at the arts center. I asked the student beside me what the talk was going to be about. He was as clueless as I was and nudged his friends, who said that Guy Maddin was an experimental filmmaker whose work was inspired by the silent movie era, which had drawn to a close about 100 years ago. This aligned well with the university’s ongoing celebration of its centennial.
After a lovely but windy introduction from a film professor, a bearded man in his 60’s took the stage, with very little ceremony. He seemed to have as little idea of what the talk was going to be about as I did. He had been invited to speak, he had been handed a mic, and he spoke whatever came to his mind in the moment. At random, a question would appear on the screen behind him, which someone in the audience would read aloud and he would have to drop whatever subject he happened to be on and take up the new one.
He talked about his films and the inspiration behind them, and why he avoided modern technology, expensive props and overly rehearsed lines. I had always privately laughed at this kind of experimentalism as being an excuse to do shoddy work, and perhaps it is, but what defines an artist is not their ability to wield technology, but to distill feeling into whatever media, crude or refined.
He said that when he began film school, he met people who had been making films since early childhood and knew he would never be as slick as they were. He decided the best he could do was make films that were full of honest feeling, and that to do so he would have to be willing to make himself vulnerable through his films, no matter how personally humiliating. This is why many of his films, though fanciful, are autobiographical.
I’ve felt that way about my writing. I am only able to write well if I am writing from experience. Without the art of concealment, I must turn to the art of exposure: to exercise what little creative element I possess is to bare myself to the world, to be, literally, an open book. As someone whose social mask is painted with a permanent smile, whose personality is amorphous, willing to be whatever the situation demands of it, writing is an act of absolution. On the page, at last I am honest, and honesty covers a multitude of sins.
On the topic of honesty, Maddin talked a lot about lying. He confessed that in the Q&A session following a screening of “My Winnipeg,” he lied half the time and told the truth the other half, in the spirit of the film about his hometown being half truth and half fiction. I wondered if he was lying to us too, for example about his grandfather’s grave filling with water so all the children had to stand on the coffin to make it sink. I told my friend about this afterwards, and she said sometimes the craziest things are the things that are true.
He said that all creative work is a kind of lie, and paraphrased David Shields: “The instant you write something down it becomes fiction.” He said that the biggest lies are the lies we tell ourselves. The lies we tell other people often tell them more about us than the truth does. And isn’t that the point of storytelling? To infuse a fiction with more truth than the facts can hold?
For some reason, this made me think of the “faces” question. The person we present to the world is, in a way, fictional.
In my pre-graduate school days, when I had time on my hands, I would sit in cafes or walk around downtown alone, just to watch people. It’s a poor substitute for socializing, but it was the best I could do.
Watching people is like reading a book. Most people have a vision of what they want their life to be and try to write it that way. You can catch glimpses of that writing in their faces and the archetypes they present to the world. A good writer makes the reader feel their feelings and think their thoughts. Joan Didion called it a hostile act. At the very least it is an intimate one. This is why most people wear faces that aren’t theirs and write stories that conceal rather than reveal. “I am many men all at once,” someone once told me. And, indeed, most people select from their wardrobe whichever face suits the occasion. Each has a shred of truth, but not one has the full truth. To tell the full truth all at once feels absurd.
We are all actors, constantly changing our masks and impersonations and writing the play as we go along. Perhaps what Maddin was getting at was that there doesn’t have to be falsity in this. Narrative is something the mind creates unconsciously, not to convince but to communicate. His films reflect this: they make no pretense at reality, and are deliberately dreamlike.
“The sleeping actor is the best actor.”
-Guy Maddin
One of the questions during Maddin’s talk was, “Are you the man on a ledge?” The man on a ledge refers to a scene from “My Winnipeg,” in which a young man stands on the ledge of a window, ready to jump, while his mother urges him to come back inside. Maddin said this was a recurring memory he had as a child, which he later learned was a scene from an old movie. He assumed the scene stuck with him because of his brother’s suicide when he was young. He thought of dreams and fuzzy memories like this as “paying out his grief in instalments.” To distill the narrative his mind told naturally, however foggy or absurd, was to retain the poignancy of his grief in art.
There’s many variations of the quote “art imitates life,” and I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that they are one and the same.
“Each day we file away in the cabinet of existence pieces of our lives. The theatre, which makes up the mind’s cinema of experiences, is always open.”
(anonymous friend)