Maxwell's Mind
An experimental surgeon in the 1940’s develops a new life support device, one that promises to maintain the health of the human brain no matter what condition the body is in. Eager to prove the worth of his research, he persuades a terminally ill colleague, Professor Julian Maxwell, to become his test subject.
Though the experiment seems to be a success and the patient’s brain remains sentient after ‘death’, it soon becomes clear that nothing can bring the tuberculosis-stricken body of the patient back to life. Without any hope of a recovery and with his colleagues losing confidence, the surgeon finds himself in uncertain moral territory as he resolves to keep Maxwell’s mind alive, no matter what. Soon the only kind words he hears are those of his patient, electronically piped through the machinery, urging him onward, ever onward….
Filmed in stark black and white and paying homage to the look and feel of classic horror fare, this film is based on the Edgar Allen Poe short story 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'.
In this quick project, shot in three days, I wanted to capture the terse, odd and unironic presentation that made so many of our favorite old horror movies great: claustrophobic design, spare, stoic dialogue, incongruous music, and the unabashed transport of grue and gore into high concept moral territory.
This project came primarily from of a lifelong love of Tourneur films like Night of the Demon and I Walked With A Zombie (the genius of which can't be distilled into a seven minute homage, admittedly) combined with the discovery of film footage, faked by the Russian government in 1940 as propaganda, that depicts severed dog heads being kept alive through a mass of glass and stainless steel called the 'Autojector'.
The notion of infamously experimental and traumatic 1940's brain surgery being ostensibly used to preserve an entire mind seemed a natural fit to the often-overlooked Poe story 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'. The story itself is presented, much like our Russian Dog Experiment, as a factual document depicting a soul kept in a dead body through mesmerism. After a time, the man begs to be released from the trance, whereupon he decays into a mass "of detestable putrescence". Compared to a 1940's film meant to impress upon a gullible public the superiority of Russian science, there is little to no narrative difference between the supernatural usage of mesmerism and the supernatural abilities of the Autojector. The two were made in the same spirit of awe and fear that comes whenever the scarcely-understood mechanisms of life and death are once again subject to scrutiny.
Today, with genetic research promising to one day remedy us of our ills and ages, it's as good a time as ever to look back and see that there has always been a layer underneath our present understanding, whether we are aware of it or not. That layer will always fuel our fears and fire our imaginations in equal measure. The classic products of this conjured up images of brains in jars and sputtering electronics and voices from machinery. Though their perspectives may seem crude or funny or naive to us now, they come from fears and convictions that are universal, and therefore will never fail to strike a nerve.
