Criterion Collection Unleashes Creative Apocalypse: Releases 'Brand Upon the Brain!' and 'Salò' Back-to-Back

The Criterion Collection announced recently that they would be releasing both Guy Maddin's [Brand Upon the Brain!] and Pier Paolo Pasolini's [Salò or, the 120 Days of Sodom](http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=17)" in August. I pause here a moment for dramatic effect... Feel free to re-read the last sentence while I come back to planet Earth.

Frankly, I'm more than a little perplexed by the news. While Salò was already on Criterion Collection DVD, and it makes that they would eventually release a [Guy Maddin] film—after seeing Cowards Bend the Knee, My Father is 100 Years Old and The Saddest Music in the World, I'm willing to accept Maddin as an "important ...contemporary" filmmaker, as the Criterion Collection qualifies all of their films—but to release them in the same month is just downright weird. What manner of person OKed this strange pairing?

I admit it: I haven't seen either film. But everything I've read about Salò makes me think it's one of the most self-indulgent exercises in nihilism committed to film. Taking aside its artistic and provocative merits, the film seems like [Pasolini]'s formal resignation from the human race. Admittedly, he couldn't anticipate his untimely death, but it seemed like with this film, Pasolini had checked out and stopped questioning whether or not it was possible for humanity to move past its inanities and propensity for filth and barbarity.

Like Fellini, some of Pasolini's best films celebrate decline while hinting at a surreal alternative that is equal parts self-flagellation and absorption. In [Hawks and Sparrows], he inserts himself into a father and son's metaphysical journey to enlightenment as a talking Marxist crow. Eventually, his avatar is eaten by the hungry pair but it is a sacrifice the crow not only anticipates but seems to accept. For his radical teachings to be taken in, he must be sacrificed to his creations and in turn the audience. What will come of that act of cannibalism is beyond his abilities to foresee.

Hawks and Sparrows doesn't nearly take itself as seriously as Salò because it playfully acknowledges its finite wisdom instead of indulging in vitriolic bile-spewing. Lars Von Trier would be jealous of what it seems like Salò got away with under the guise of intellectual angst. Its reputation has preceded it to the point where after reading about it, it seems as if Pasolini's darkest and most passionately sadomasochistic fantasies broke loose from his head and became seared using some kind of black magic into celluloid.

Brand Upon the Brain! seems like such a strange counter to Salò because its dark pretensions are always more sprightly than sneering. Maddin's blurry, surreal, black-and-white fantasies of his youth are also reminiscent of Fellini's pageants in how they refuse nostalgia in its traditional sense. Both filmmakers teasingly reject the notion of the past as a place where one can retreat to for traditional comforts and easy answers, instead positing fantastic solutions to the problems of the everyday.

Maddin's films are unreal histories of what could never be in a as many kinds of ways at once as possible. He insists on the possibilities of the impossible by providing alternatives even within the screening of his alternate histories. Brand was originally screened with live musical accompaniment by the Toronto Symphony Orchetra, a castrato singer, foley artists and in-person narration provided on separate occasions by a rotating cast of Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Guy Maddin, Louis Negrin, and Eli Wallach.

The upcoming Criterion Collection DVD allows the viewer to choose their narrator, inviting them to personalize their viewing experience and making up for the fact that the viewer isn't able to have live sound effects and a castrato in their living room. In addition, the DVD includes two short films by Maddin, It's My Mother's Birthday Today and Footsteps. Salò boasts two documentaries, one of which features interview footage of Pasolini, but I'd probably be more enticed if Crispin Glover were narrating the feature.

Admittedly, you'd have to be a little schizophrenic to sit down with both films and watch them back-to-back but there is a certain appeal to watching two films whose reputations place them at such polar opposites. Stay tuned because when they come out I hope to blow my brain to bits by making them a double feature. If all goes according to plan, I'll report back here in late August on the consistency of the mush leaking out my ears .