Matthew Rankin's The Twentieth Century is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries starting February 15, 2021 in the series Festival Focus: Berlinale.
The Twentieth Century is my first feature. As with all my short films, directing this film was akin to willfully relaunching the Hindenberg knowing full well that it’s going to blow up. Like a rutting salmon hurling himself ridiculously upstream, yearning to actually DIE in the moment of his most creative outpouring, the images I am chasing are so difficult that they might well exceed my reproductive competence. Such was my process on this movie. The resultant film is an unbridled surrealist epic, an insurgent attack upon the biopic form and a lament for 21st Century nihilism. It is also an encyclopaedic effort to irritate my fellow Canadians.
The film takes as its subject the youthful obsessions of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950). In reading the young politician’s diary, particularly between 1893 and 1905, I was struck by how much it resembled my own diary: blistering with psychosexual confusion, fulminating with maudlin, melodramatic outbursts and smugly beaming with mother-worship. Anyone who has ever kept a diary knows that it is not so much a factual testimony of lived experience as it is a “parallel consciousness,” an illusory catalogue of uncertainty, vanity and shame. I grew up in the belligerent Canadian city of Winnipeg and have long since had all hubris beaten out of me, but I felt I could see something of my own youth in Mackenzie King’s vainglorious confessions. It was Looking deeper into his Freudian turmoil, I felt I was staring directly into the deepest pathologies of Canada itself.
I describe The Twentieth Century as a nightmare Mackenzie King might have had in 1899 rather than a fact-based biopic. Real characters and events from King’s factual life are fed through an oneiric prism and emerge in the film completely transformed; much like our anguished, sleeping minds reprocess the minutiae of our waking lives. Historical films typically seek to hide their furtive manipulations of the historical record, which is why historians typically hate them. My feeling is that even the most rigorously fact-based biopic will always be more hallucination than reality, more artifice than authenticity. So I’ve tried to be really blatant and brazen about my fictions in this thing (even though historians still hate it). The cinematic nervous system of this film is deeply connected to a long succession of stylists—Lang, Reiniger, Fellini, Zeman, John Waters, Terry Jones, Anna Biller and, of course, my deepest and most-beloved master, Guy Maddin—who gleefully reclaim and defiantly embellish the artifice of cinema. The cardboard décors and bargain basement VFX in The Twentieth Century are part of the historical conceit. I wanted the viewer to be relentlessly confronted by the fakeness of the Canadian nationality.
I don’t think of this film as a political movie, but it is nonetheless preoccupied by the exercise of power. More than any other politician I can name—and much like the nation he would lead for almost 22 years – Mackenzie King incarnates the most meaningless convictions of political centrism. Between the utopia and slapstick, between the tenderness and the fury of the 20th Century, between good and evil, Mackenzie King gingerly walked a very cautious line right down the middle. His legacy will be celebrated wherever we celebrate the most compromised version of ourselves. But in our time, which seems every day more fanatical, more binary, more unwilling to listen, I find myself haunted by the political centre—the possibility of its wisdom, its propensity for self-pleasuring snugness as well as the malignant horrors that the centre can so often be used to camouflage. The Twentieth Century is my way of exploring this triangularity of ideas, as the world continues stretching like some cruel elastic to its snapping point.
As you will see, this delirious concussion of feelings is so intensely incarnated by one of Canada’s very finest actors, Daniel Beirne. Dan’s virtuosic performance as Mackenzie King moves so exactingly between the earnest and the ironic, attesting to the fact that even our most profound and sacred yearnings must coexist, necessarily and always, with a vile, ectoplasm-spewing cactus. At least in Canada.
