**
Come see WTO/99 at The Balboa Theater SF on Sunday, April 26th 7:30pm, hosted by Hit Factory featuring a post-screening Q&A w/ director Ian Bell. Tickets are available here.**
Filmmaker Caroline Golum joins Aaron to discuss her singular, stunning new feature
Revelations of Divine Love (now playing in New York and Seattle with more cities on the way) alongside the work of visionary Winnipegian aueteur Guy Maddin, and his mesmeric, troubled
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.
Revelations of Divine Love is a dramatization of the life and holy visions of the 14th-Century anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich, whose collected writings are the oldest surviving English language texts written by a woman. the film is also, to quote
friend of the show critic Robert Rubsam “a plague story; a rebellion story; an expression of the persistent supremacy of Love in a world of nearly unbearable suffering. It is both period-accurate and pointedly anachronistic, carefully handmade and plainly artificial. It is totally remarkable, and then some.”
Alongside Caroline, we discuss the linkages between faith and a radical politics, the need for splendor within a vision of a new world, and the ways that the distancing effect of artifice in film binds us to a material history of handcrafted artistry in the medium. Then, we detail the fraught production history and conflicted returns of Guy Maddins
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a film that famously almost broke the director, and led him to consider quitting filmmaking altogether. Finally, we extract the virtues of
Twilight, its place in a canon of "cinema of the erotic lanscape", its gorgeous art direction, and a sublime turn from the inimitable Shelley Duvall.
Watch the trailer for
Revelations of Divine Love.
Follow
Caroline Golum on Twitter.
Follow
Revelations of Divine Love on Instagram.