The Forbidden Room (2015)

“Dream the molten dream of justice!” — Organizer

If a film is lost, can it be remade?

The answer to that question is waiting to be unearthed in The Forbidden Room, a feverish experimental feature from Canadian auteur Guy Maddin and longtime collaborator Evan Johnson. At once a gleeful throwback to the silent movie era and incomprehensible love letter the “lost movie,” the film’s narrative cannot be easily parsed. It suffices to say that the proceedings involve submarines and amnesia, lumberjacks and lobotomies, bathing tutorials and women skeletons, and like much of Maddin’s absurdist work it invariably leaves most people scratching their heads.

The opening moments of The Forbidden Room are a muddy and melted statement of intent, assailing the viewer with a barrage of old-timey title cards, all badly degraded either physically or digitally, many changing style and typeface mid-credit. Full of half-heard musical overtures and opening notes, this clamourous introduction sets the stage for a chain of seemingly unrelated vignettes based upon silent films both real and imagined. The whole experience feels as though someone exhumed a box of tattered film reels from a partially submerged basement, hastily spliced them together, and projected the strange results out into the world for all to see.

In reality, though, the opening of The Forbidden Room was a far more deliberate affair. Mostly. Maddin charged production designer Galen Johnson with the behemoth task of creating the hundreds and hundreds of intertitles needed for the film (and eventually its opening and closing title sequences), each one specially designed to reflect the story it was a part of and the information being communicated. The final product is a remarkable pastiche of early title design that would be almost indistinguishable from the real thing if not for Maddin’s distinctive sensibilities.

A discussion with Production Designer and Title Designer GALEN JOHNSON

Give us a little background on yourself and your work. You went to school for architecture but then moved into graphic design, right?

I went into architecture school right out of high school. I thought it would be a good compromise between what I liked doing – art – and what I could realistically get a job doing. But to be an architect you need more than just an undergraduate degree – you need to get a masters, to pass registration exams. By the time I graduated I think I…

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