Seances (film)

Lore & Background

Seances grew out of Maddin's Hauntings project. Noah Cowan, a former director of the Toronto International Film Festival, told Maddin 'he didn’t think it was possible to make art on the Internet,' which 'reminded [Maddin] of what people said about cinema when it was starting out.' Maddin began with the idea of 'shooting adaptations of lost films' and originally conceived the project as making 'title-for-title remakes of specific lost films' but altered this plan in favour of producing original material. Maddin completed 11 films to show as installation loops for Noah Cowan and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox theatre for the 2010 Hauntings project.

At the SXSW 2012 festival, Maddin announced that he had begun production on the Seances project, for which he would shoot one hundred short films within a hundred-day span, at locations in Canada, France, and the United States. However, Maddin abandoned this approach to focus more fully on original script creation, partnering with writers Evan Johnson and Robert Kotyk, with additional writing by Maddin’s wife Kim Morgan and American poet John Ashbery. Maddin and Johnson also co-directed and shot, concurrently, a feature film titled The Forbidden Room, with the same writers. Although often misreported as the same project, The Forbidden Room 'is a feature film with its own separate story and stars' while 'Seances will be an interactive Internet project.'

Reader's Guide

Seances represents a significant experiment in digital storytelling, merging historical film preservation with algorithmic recombination. By shooting recreations of lost or unrealized films—ranging from works by Alice Guy, Ernst Lubitsch, and Kenji Mizoguchi to unrealized projects by Erich von Stroheim and Alfred Hitchcock—Maddin aimed to capture the imagined 'spirits of the films, rather than of their directors.' The project's software, designed by Halifax-based Nickel Media, utilizes an algorithm to create a 10- to 13-minute film from the footage, each with a unique title, ensuring 'hundreds of billions of unique permutations.' Launched online as part of the Tribeca Film Festival's Storyscapes program on April 14, 2016, Seances received a Webby Award nomination in the Art & Experimental/Film & Video category in April 2017. On December 31, 2025, the project became inactive on the National Film Board's website, as 'the technology it relied on is no longer compatible with the updated standards of [its] platform.'

Did You Know?

• Maddin began the project in 2012 in Paris, shooting footage for 18 films at the Centre Georges Pompidou under the title Spiritismes.
• The Paris and Montreal shoots each took three weeks, with Maddin completing one short film of approximately 15–20 minutes each day.
• The project's software ensures 'hundreds of billions of unique permutations' of the film.
• Seances was launched online on April 14, 2016, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival's Storyscapes program.