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Magic Mirror: Guy Maddin Interviews Caroline Golum on Revelations of Divine Love
Revelations of Divine Love Revelations of Divine Love, filmmaker Caroline Golum’s 14th century-set chamber piece, recounts the legacy of Julian of Norwich through impressively homespun props, costumes, and miniatures. After a mid-life bout of illness, Norwich (Tessa Strain) was rapt with feverish visions that depicted the crucifixion of Christ. After three long days, she awoke with a newfound devotion to the Catholic church. Julian vowed to spend the rest of her life entombed in a single room, where she could commit herself to the Lord and her book, Revelations of Divine Love, often regarded as the first English-language text written by a woman.
Ahead of the FIDMarseilles 2025 world premiere of Revelations, Canadian independent filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz (Measures for a Funeral, MS Slavic 7) reached out to Golum for an interview. “There’s a real parallel between Julian removing herself from the world to commune with God and the act of making a film,” said Bohdanowicz. “No shit, dude,” Golum responded.
Nine months later, Canadian surrealist Guy Maddin has signed on to conduct an interview with Golum as her film finds a limited release on her home turf of NYC. (In fact, those privy to the local film scene will spot several cameos from critics, programmers, directors, and cinema stalwarts in Revelations). The two dig into each other’s work with gusto, with Golum brandishing her unbridled wit and extensive knowledge of medieval history and culture. Maddin, endearingly self-effacing, shares impressions from his nearly 40-year career that has produced collage-like masterworks, among them My Winnipeg and The Forbidden Room.
Revelations of Divine Love opened at Anthology Film Archives for a weekend run on March 27 via Several Futures. It will continue to screen in New York City, next at Roxy Cinema the weekend of April 17 and then Spectacle Theater the weekend of April 24.
Maddin: So you decided to make this period film. You have a conspicuous miniature, you have a digital Quay Brothers calligraphy title, you’re not using a minimalistic lute score or anything like that, and I think the sets are made out of carved foam. I just love your aggressive take on it. It’s really beautiful.
Golum: That’s the highest honor I think I can achieve. If nobody likes this movie, but you think it’s beautiful, then I can die happy. Truly.
Maddin: When I make collages, my goal is to make something that’s beautiful but stupid. But you’ve made something that’s beautiful and really smart. I’m too cowardly to try something really smart—in a collage, anyway—but I’m kind of crazy about the passion of religious mystics and the way they write. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Theresa Wilms Mont, an Argentine writer. She joined a convent after her boyfriend committed suicide, I believe. I love her writing, it’s so passionate and insane. There are a couple of books she’s put out, I highly recommend them. You know that Luis Buñuel would love them, even though he’s a devout atheist, just because they’re so surreally gorgeous.
Then when I heard you were making this movie and I did a little bit of research on Julian of Norwich, I was all in. This woman with these fever visions all in one night. She’s the first woman to write a novel in English, and she wrote it all in one night, basically.
Golum: The history of it is kind of tough because with the Middle Ages, we’re only working with what we’ve got for primary sources. She describes the visions happening over three days. She was sick over three days, and when she came out of it, we don’t know when she wrote.
Maddin: What did she have, do you think? Wasn’t there a plague going on around the same time?
Golum: Well, there were several outbreaks of plague. We know how old she was when the visions happened: 30 winters old and a half, which means that if it happened to her in the year of our Lord 1373, we reckon she was probably born in 1342, 43, and the first wave of the medieval plague was 1348. So she would’ve been really young when the first one happened, but there were subsequent waves of it because they didn’’t have germ theory. Part of the reason why the plague waxed and waned and came back around is because we had these very sophisticated trade networks in place. People just assume that nobody left their house or whatever, but there’s a lot of transit of people and goods moving all over these trade routes from the Silk Road into the Hansiatic League and stuff. People are going on pilgrimage all over the fucking place. They’re bringing in all kinds of goods. The term “quarantine” comes from the Italian quaranti, meaning that if a ship came into a port in Italy, they would have to leave it there for 40 days before you could move anything off of it to make sure that no one was sick. So they were aware of these things, but I don’t think they really knew how it happened. But it informs her writing in a big way. This came up when I screened the film at Brandeis. She described seeing Christ’s face ravaged with pustules and bleeding and all fucked up.
Maddin: Very Catholic.
Golum: I know. We didn’t get a chance to do any of that grizzly makeup, which is a huge bummer. I know you and I have talked about dream logic, that permeable boundary between your waking life and your dream life. I think in her instance, I don’t want to retroactively psychoanalyze her, but I’m sure growing up and seeing the plague occur must have worked its way into her visionary experience. I mean, this movie takes at face value that she was shown these things by Christ. I’m not here to say whether she was hallucinating or not, because that’s not really part of the movie, but it’s definitely part of her visionary experience, even though it doesn’t show up in the film. The mysticism angle of it is really fascinating to me because you don’t really get those kinds of people anymore—these holy hermits and seers and things like that. I don’t think of you as a religious figure per se, but I do think that there are metaphysical and spiritual aspects of Western thought that have made their way into your work. I don’t think it would be outside the realm of possibility, given that you have characters that have visionary experiences or these wild dreams or they sleepwalk.
Maddin: I grew up with a lot of nutty people. And then worse, I found out when I fell in love for the first few times, that I was nuts. Just crazy. If someone didn’t like me back, then things really got crazy. My first few movies were usually about that. I understood Dracula when I read Bram Stoker. I understood sleepwalking as just wishful, lustful thinking.
Sometimes, because I’ve made movies about my dreams and then put them away, I’ll watch a movie I made 35 years ago and realize what I was really making a movie about. My first movie was almost queer without my realizing it. It was about a love triangle involving me, another man and a woman. This other man involved in the triangle was mine. If someone said something bad about him, I would defend him because I was the one who had to attack him. Finally, the woman left us both, and that just left us two men to be passionate about each other. Even though in real life and in the ultimate movie nothing literally gay happened, it’s pretty queer. I think if you’re just honest with what’s going on in your heart and in your memory, you may never figure out what your movie is honestly about. But if you live long enough, you acquire this self-knowledge rate slowly.
I’ve known lots of great couples that are…I don’t even know the term. It’s not bi-religious—
Golum: Oh, interfaith.
Maddin: Thank you. These relationships actually seem to work better than other ones for some reason. Were you raised religiously, or no? Were you just tribally Jewish?
Golum: I mean, I had to go to Hebrew school to become a Bat Mitzvah, but there are a lot of Jewish atheists. I was raised reformed too, and it’s really not about adhering to Halachic law, keeping kosher, keeping the Sabbath. In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I live in, there’s a really big Orthodox Jewish community. And where my parents live in LA also has gotten very frum. I see them and I’m just sort of like, “Did my family flee a pogrom so that I could wander around with a shmatte in my head?” I don’t know. Ultimately, I think what a religious education gets you is a toolkit for when you have to deal with a birth, a marriage or a death. My cousin had a baby naming and I knew what to do. My grandfather passed away last month, I said the Kaddish.
Maddin: I’m sorry to hear that, by the way.
Golum: Thank you. He was 102, and you know what? Good run. I hadn’t been to services in a really long time, but last fall I went to High Holy Day Services because I finally found a congregation that was reflective of my political principles. I’m not going to start going for Shabbos every weekend, it’s not really my bag, but it was nice to have…I guess a tradition. I don’t necessarily believe in the God of the Old Testament because he seems really nasty and misogynistic, but I’m also freely willing to admit that I don’t have all the answers. I guess what I took away from my upbringing, besides my aversion to organized religion in a traditional way, is that it’s nice to have that cultural context. I also believe that the contributions of the Jewish diaspora to the labor movement in this country, for example, or the cultural scene, are important and I’m proud of them. I’m not proud of the genocidal aspect of it, but I don’t think that that’s going to be a permanent fixture. I think eventually that strain will be pushed out and we’ll go back to just being progressive commie weirdos.
Maddin: What’s your favorite of the visions?
Golum: The best one is the one that we didn’t get to film, which is the plague face.
Maddin: It would be too Roger Corman or something because of budgetary [constraints]?
Golum: I mean, the film is dedicated to Roger Corman and he’s a big part of our working methods, but I agree that it would’ve tipped it into gore territory. I’m just bummed we didn’t get to film it. I guess in both the text and in the movie, the hazelnut is my favorite part. It’s from her shrine in Norwich. They have a little dish of hazelnuts at her church. I grabbed one and I took it with me, and that’s the one that’s in the film, which is insane that I’ve had it for that long.
Maddin: When did your heart just become inflamed with the actual compulsion to adapt this novel to the screen?
Golum: Right after I heard about it. Maybe spring 2017, so about nine years ago. I didn’t really know that much about Julian until my then-roommate read a paper that he had written about her. He’s in my first movie, Feast of Man—Dr. Lawrence Bond, PhD. Based on his paper about her, I thought this would make a great movie, and I just became obsessed. The way that I operate, as far as I can tell, is that I become obsessed with something, and then the only way that I can rid myself of that is to make the movie.
Maddin: When you’re just starting out, unless you’re a total careerist or something, just make something you’re obsessed with. It’s true that the act of making a movie eventually becomes some a version therapy, because you’re working with this obsession for so long—during the inspiration, the writing, the casting, the storyboarding, the setbuilding, the costume fabrication, the shooting, the editing, the sound mixing, and then the talking about it afterwards at film festivals. You eventually can’t even remember why you were obsessed with something, but you’re only halfway through this process right now. So you should be foaming at the mouth still—and you are, I see.
Golum: I feel like a giant baby bitching about this because I’ve worked really hard and now this movie’s out, but I will say having been obsessed with the Middle Ages for a really long time, I go back and forth where I think I never want to look at 14th century art ever again. Last Halloween, I went to see the silent Phantom of the Opera from 1925 with a live pipe organ accompaniment at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine here in New York. I went with Grant [Stoops], who did the art direction in this movie. We’re both heads for the Middle Ages. I’m looking around and I go, “Oh my God, I think I’m over this shit.” And then I sit down in this Gothic cathedral and I’m bowled over by it all over again. I said, “Grant, why do you think this is? And he said, “It’s high-effort stuff.” Not long after that, I was in Spain and England showing the movie at a festival and then at a punk microcinema. I was going and looking at this medieval stuff and just thinking like, “Wow, it still hits. I’m still obsessed with it. ”
It’s bewitching to me. I think it’s bewitching to a lot of people, and that’s part of the appeal. I say this as someone who’s not a Catholic, but loves medieval Catholic art and stories. How gruesome and grizzly they are was my first blush of affection with it. But there’s so much more there than just the blood, although that’s what gets you in the door.
Maddin: Obviously the world was way more religious before the internet came along, but in the 14th century when someone had visions, what percentage of people just believed?
Golum: I mean, if someone had those visions now, no one would believe it. They’d rather believe a cute pet video that AI made. When I was explaining the role of the medieval church to the crew and the cast of this movie, we can’t really wrap our heads around just how pervasive and influential the Roman Catholic Church was in people’s lives in the 14th century. But the way that I would explain it to people is that it’s kind of like the internet, where there are specific places where you can access it. It’ll be your phone or the computer or the library. But even when you’re not on the internet, it’s still there and you’re still thinking about it. I could be wrong, I’m a Jew in the 21st century and not a scholar. My hunch is that it was similar to that, where you would go to church to pray, but you would also have a little religious object at home that you could access. Even if you are going to the market to sell something. or you’re going to a fair, or even before you fall asleep, the church is still with you. It’s still pervasive.
We’re talking about, “Oh, do people have these religious visions now?” And you mentioned AI—which I’m really hoping is just a fad—but people will have these psychosis episodes when they’re talking to ChatGPT and it’ll say, “Yeah, it’s totally normal for you to want to shoot your whole family.” I mean, there are lawsuits about this right now—people hallucinate and the AIs themselves also hallucinate because they’re only regurgitating information. They’re iterative and not generative. I mean, it’s not such a far reach to connect the role of the church 600 years ago and the internet in our modern era being kind of the same thing.
There’s that famous flow chart that makes its way around every once in a while of when you were allowed to have sex according to the medieval church. And it’s like, “Oh, are you on your period? Is it a feast day? Is it this, that, and the other?” Then you can’t have sex. But I think we know all too well that people were doing it anyway. I think everyday people still had, if not friction with the beliefs of the church, they might have bristled against the authority of the church itself as an institution. In the logic of the movie, I still don’t think Julian was hallucinating. I believe that this experience happened to her.
Maddin: No, I like that you presented that way. That’s a very smart decision.
Golum: Part of that anachronism is also making sure that people look at this and they don’t write it off right away, that they’re taking it at the face value of the historical era in which it’s set.
To bring it all back around with respect to our works in the medium, you’re treading in some very rich waters here—aesthetically, thematically. Your films are good because you’re taking in and processing the stuff that’s good to begin with. You’re getting back to the grammar of the medium in a really beautiful way. Your films really prioritize creating a sense of place and time with how they look. Everything’s done by hand for the most part. Things are really built out and really beautifully rendered. And the result is that your films are smart and beautiful.
Maddin: Well, exactly the same thing could be said about yours. Your approach just seems so consonant with my own with utterly different results. You’re a woman, you have a completely different history, your own personal neuroses, whatever they are. I don’t know you well enough to know them all. I volunteer mine far too quickly, but I love how beautiful and how decisive your aesthetic decisions are. Then what’s better than these utterly visionary, super passionate Christ, well, visions?
Since I’m the world’s worst interviewer, I want to make sure that if there was something you’ve pre-visualized that we haven’t talked about, please feel free to take a breath and think for a sec.
Golum: The other thing that I wanted to touch on is that even though your work is really labor intensive, and my movie also is somewhat labor intensive, it’s fun.
Not to be reductive like, “This is why we do it.” Obviously we’re both damaged people who are reaching for something in our respective works and going nuts and whatever. I’ll freely admit this. But it’s more fun to make a movie that way.
Maddin: Absolutely. You go into a trance.
Golum: Yeah. And you can really dig down. You dick around, you experiment, you see what works and what doesn’t. You’ve obviously got quite a few more under your belt, so you know the ins and outs of this a little bit.
Maddin: But when I was starting out, I was in a trance and I usually knew without anticipating a question. If someone helping me on a movie said, “Should this be like this or like that?” I would just go, “Well, obviously like this.” I was so decisive. I wish I had that decisive obsessiveness back again. Now I’m genuinely going, “I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”
Golum: I don’t know how you are on set. I act like I hate it, but I fucking love it. I’m being modest in a really false way by saying, “Oh, I don’t want to be in charge, but put me in charge.” I love being in charge.
Maddin: The first few years, I was so anxious and nervous because I’m a pleaser. I felt everyone was bored, so I was anxious and I kept things moving along quickly, but the passage of time has transformed all that uncomfortable anxiety into pure pleasure. And my recollections of those early sets was that nothing felt better. So I could be honest by saying it was both hell and the best feeling ever.
Golum: It’s nice when you have people that are picking up what you’re laying down. I think that’s the other fun part, you have a hairbrained idea—I’m going to do a model shot for this, or use tiny foam beads, or potato flakes to make fake snow, or carve this stone out of insulation foam—and it comes across. Like you said, it’s a labor intensive process. And I will say, I haven’t watched this film since it premiered in July because I’m fucking tired of it. It’s a great film, but I can’t watch it anymore right now. Maybe years from now it’ll be different. But when you look at the result and you go, “There’s no way anyone’s going to buy this,” and then they buy it, that’s the fucking best. I’ll chase it for the rest of my life. Making movies—it’s my mistress and my jailer.
Maddin: That little high is the way P. T. Barnum felt every minute of his life, creating suckers. May you have many, many more intoxicating productions. I suspect you have many up your sleeve because you are an obsessive. If the obsessiveness goes away, at least by then, maybe you’ll have some sort of craft mastery to replace it—but it’s far more fun being an obsessive
Golum: I agree. And I will say, I don’t think the next one’s going to be a medieval period piece, not because it’s so hard to do, but because I want to make every movie different from the one that came before it. I’m going to make a Jerry Lewis movie that’s a satire of the manosphere. I think that’s the next one I’m working on.
