Charlie likes to point out that cinema is essentially a "dead medium": a movie never changes. Once you've seen a movie, that's it--watch it again and it's still the same film, as opposed to a stage play, where no two performances are exactly identical--line deliveries change, accidents happen, props might get moved around, a director might tweak something here or there. That's one reason Kaufman likes to fill his scripts with enough density and enigmatic meaning that you might spot new stuff--or react differently--each time you re-watch one of his movies.
Along comes Guy Maddin, whose experimental film Seances is literally different every time you view it:
Seances, co-created with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, is experimental cinema for those who like drifting into a madhouse reverie, a strange almost hellishly-inscrutable dream from which there is no waking. It’s an endless hall of mirrors. No escape because there’s no exit.
Technically, Seances is web-based avant-garde cinema art consisting of a large number of short silent films set to music, which are intermixed at random in bits and pieces by computer algorithms. Maddin shot the films, sometimes one each day, at the Phi Centre in Montreal and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, with the participation of actors such as Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, and genre favorite Udo Keir, among many others.
[...] When you click and hold down your cursor it’s as if a roulette wheel is spinning—whatever film is generated is usually a different length, with a title selected apparently at random, with scenes plucked willy-nilly and shown in an order that changes with every viewing. The movie you watch will never be seen by anyone else, nor will it exist after you are finished viewing it. (Source)
Check it out, if you dare, here. Or you can watch 7 of the separate films that comprise Seances at Vimeo.
