The Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker whose work is crafting documentaries, short films, animation or work for television.
Far from the Maddin Crowd
By Steve Seid
The story goes that in the mid-eighties Guy Maddin retreated to the darkness of his living room to unspool countless reels in a total-immersion film-appreciation course of his own design, a sort of self-medicating movie mania. When he emerged, he was possessed of an unstoppable imagination that continues to roll out one-of-a-kind films. Now known for his furious passion for cinemas past, Maddin, director of such notable nougats as Careful (SFIFF 1993), The Saddest Music in the World (SFIFF 2004) and Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), has amassed an extraordinary body of work that shudders with revelatory invention. Maddin wildly embraces the things of yesteryear, the stylized genres, the gauzy effects, the giddy artificiality, but does so with an unsettling sense of twisted nostalgia. The past-and its conjoined images-is a wellspring of extrasensory disturbance, not some idyll to be reanimated. Many of his films come off like agitated paeans to long-repressed memory.
For his first feature outing, Canadian-born Maddin stuck close to home.
The imaginary ward in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (SFIFF 1989)
lies amidst the grey village of Gimli, an isolated outpost of forlorn
fishermen somewhere north of Winnipeg. Using a tackle box of visual lures
from Carl Dreyer, David Lynch and George Kuchar, Gimli is a fishy concoction
of Scandinavian folklore. Suspended in what seems a fantastical snow globe,
Archangel (1990), Maddin's next feature (written with his lifelong
collaborator, the indubitable George Toles), conjures a perpetual present
of dreamlike warfare as German, Russian and Allied soldiers swarm across
the countryside, circa 1918. Interrupted only by ironic intertitles, Archangel
is a triumph of sardonic circularity in which identity is continually
reinvented in a roundelay of gas-induced memory loss.
If you had to point to a particular preoccupation of Maddin's, it would
be the stuff of libido-id-matter seems to color every frame like a tincture
of titillation. Bathed in golden hues, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs
(1997) recalls A Midsummer Night's Dream (with Shelley Duvall,
of all people), but now the pent-up passion leads to a communal bout of
braying. More inhibited, Careful threatens all with its papier-mâché
peaks tottering over the repressed alpine village of Tolzbad. A mountain
film à la Leni Riefenstahl, this breathless fest features a group
of Aryan villagers with their libidos firmly leashed, lest an unbridled
cry of ardor were to trigger an avalanche.
Even the reckless curiosity of Careful couldn't prepare you for Maddin's
forceful adaptation of that infamous novel of bloodletting by Bram Stoker.
Performed by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's
Diary (SFIFF 2003) is both elegantly composed and deliriously absurd
and, with its woozy sexuality, strangely Victorian—or, better yet,
strangely Victorian's secret. Yet the frothy film that insures Maddin's
eternal life is not Dracula, but The Saddest Music in the World,
a joyously stilted comedy wed to the extravagance of a dizzy '30s musical.
Though it his most mainstream undertaking, in no way does Maddin forsake
the idiosyncratic delirium of his earlier work; rather, his wit is wiggier
than ever. Set in Depression-era Winnipeg, the film follows bewitching
beer baroness Lady Port-Huntley (the ever-enchanting Isabella Rossellini),
who announces a competition to determine which nation possesses the most
sorrowful song. Based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, The
Saddest Music in the World plays out in a frosty never-never land of oedipal
intrigue.
Maddin makes the oedipal even more complex in his virtuosic but veracity-vexing autobiography, Cowards Bend the Knee. Amidst a wonderland of beauty parlors and hockey rinks, a femme fatale seeks a suitor who might sew on the hands of her father as an act of desirous consummation. An anguished array of startling zooms, stuttering cameras and swishing pans create an uneasy past, rollicking, lurid and gripped by the clammy claws of wishful thinking. A stripling of near 50 years, Maddin is set to release the seamy sequel to his speculative autobiography this year. The new installment, titled The Brand upon the Brain is intended for a live orchestra and three foley artists. And we await more additions to his growing gaggle of shorts-almost 20 at last count-perhaps crowned by The Heart of the World (SFIFF 2001), a breathtaking parody of Soviet film propaganda condensed into a few miraculous minutes of proletarian panache.
Currently Maddin is planning a remake of the Svengali story, presumably retreading John Barrymore's 1931 portrayal of the depraved hypnotist with the piercing pupils. The young Trilby, the object of Svengali's testy telepathy, will dance merrily through the film à la The Red Shoes, only this time Maddin promises to place "the sexual desire . . . where it can do the most damage." Every film director has a bit of the Svengali inside, the desire to mesmerize, to entrance. But Guy Maddin is just the opposite of that ill-willed charmer. When you awake from a film by Maddin, you will remember everything.
Steve Seid is a film and video programmer at the Pacific Film Archive.
Guy Maddin
Selected Filmography
My Dad Is 100 Years Old (short) 2005
Sombra Dolorosa (short) 2004
A Trip to the Orphanage (short) 2004
The Saddest Music in the World 2003
Cowards Bend the Knee 2003
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary 2002
The Heart of the World (short) 2001
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs 1997
Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange
Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (short) 1995
Sissy Boy Slap Party (short) 1995
Careful 1992
Archangel 1990
Hospital Fragment (short) 1988
Tales from the Gimli Hospital 1988
The Dead Father (short) 1985
Previous Recipients
Adam Curtis 2005
Jon Else 2004
Pat O'Neill 2003
Fernando Birri 2002
Kenneth Anger 2001
Faith Hubley 2000
Johan van der Keuken 1999
Robert Frank 1998
Jan Svankmajer 1997
Festival Screening: The Heart
of Guy Maddin