Filmmaker Paul Duane celebrates Canadian cult movie legend Guy Maddin, ahead of his forthcoming visit to Ireland for a tribute at this year's Dublin International Film Festival.
This year's Dublin Film Festival features a retrospective of the work of Canadian maverick filmmaker Guy Maddin. Four features will be screened from his output of twelve features and innumerable shorts.
Roger Ebert once wrote "If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work" - however Maddin’s not exactly a household name, so here’s some background to this remarkable auteur and his weird, funny, beautiful and sometimes disturbing oeuvre.
Maddin was born in Winnipeg, a remote snowbound city which claims to be at the exact geographical centre of Canada, and which features heavily in his movies as a mythic, surrealist place. My Winnipeg (2007) is a frequently hilarious 'docu-fantasia’ packed with fantastical but dubious anecdotes like the racetrack fire that propelled dozens of horses into the Red River, where their ghostly frozen heads apparently re-surface every winter.
The film was adored by critics for its wild, absurdist humour – Ebert gave it his highest honour, four stars. The film also brought the great actress Ann Savage out of retirement, quite a feat given her last film of note was the classic 1945 film noir Detour. It turned out to be her swansong, and a remarkable one it is.
This kind of cinephilia goes right through Maddin’s career, which started in the mid ‘80s, making no-budget movies with a bunch of friends, the Winnipeg Film Group, with no real idea that these primitive works would ever be seen outside of their own screenings.
But Maddin brought a remarkable store of tragedy and dramatic backstory to the work. His brother had killed himself while lying on the grave of a dead ex-girlfriend, and his father had recently succumbed to a stroke. Maddin put some of his complex feelings about his family history into a dreamlike short, The Dead Father, which was enough of a success to embolden him to make a feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, based on stories his grandmother had told him about his Icelandic heritage.
When the cinematographer quit after one day, Maddin was forced to shoot the film himself, and began to develop a visual repertoire which drew on the style of early silent cinema as well as more recent experimental cinema like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. This startlingly original style, combined with Maddin’s self-deprecating folksy surrealism, made the film a minor sensation on the festival circuit after its rejection by the prestigious Toronto Film Festival ironically gave it a PR boost.
This success paved the way for two more minor masterpieces. The first, Archangel – set towards the end of WW1, is based on a historical event where US, Canadian & Russian troops all fought side by side, but recreated the whole epic struggle in bare-bones indoors sets built by Maddin and his friends. The story becomes a delirious love triangle where each of three lovers is suffering from amnesia, causing them to continually forget who in the triangle they’re in love with.
Then Careful!, Maddin’s first venture into colour, which is set in an alpine region where the slightest loud word could set off an avalanche, resulting in the locals continually having to be cautious and quiet in their words and actions until a passionate incestuous love affair threatens the survival of the entire community. Seeing these two films in the early 90s ignited my love of Maddin’s work, which continues to this day.
After an unfortunate and disastrous attempt to make a bigger-budget movie in the ‘sensible’ industrial style of Hollywood filmmaking, Maddin realised that he needed to retain his original, home-made, semi-amateur style of working. He also revitalised his filmmaking via the multi-award-winning short, The Heart Of The World, whose breakneck editing style and inventiveness won him major international awards and returned him to the forefront of indie cinema where he made five features in the following six years.
He’s worked with Isabella Rosselini (Saddest Music In The World) casting her as an amputee beer heiress who ends up dancing wildly on a pair of prosthetic beer-filled glass legs, an incident that doesn’t appear in the Kazuo Ishuguro story the film is based on; revived the Japanese tradition of the benshi artist, providing live on-stage narrative for silent films, with Brand Upon The Brain! (2006) – (his narrators included Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Eli Wallach & Crispin Glover at various live appearances while the DIFF screening will have recorded narration by Rossellini); reworked Hitchcock’s classic Vertigo into a frequently hilarious found-footage piece using only films & TV shot in San Francisco for The Green Fog; made his film Seances in public, with the sets constructed in the main hall of Paris’s Pompidou Centre, before reworking the material into another even more surreal feature, The Forbidden Room, which featured a song specially written for the film by Sparks about the joys of spanking; and generally continued to push the boundaries of what is possible in 21st century cinema.
He started out using Super-8 and 16mm film to create his wildly imaginative visual effects, now he’s firmly in the digital world, which has freed his imagination to reach even greater heights of surrealism via all kinds of data-moshing and digital decay.
His forthcoming film Rumours, co-produced by Ari Aster (Midsommar), marks his return to bigger budgets, casting Cate Blanchett & Alicia Vikander in a story where "seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies meet at the annual G7 summit and what happens when they get lost in the woods while trying to draft a statement in regards to a global crisis". Reassuringly, Guy Maddin has not become any less weird with age, it seems.
Come along to the Light House Cinema on March 2 where I will be interviewing him, using clips from his movies to illustrate the enormous variety of his imagination, and asking him to divulge the alchemy behind his visual effects. We’ve met once before, in London twenty years ago, and I can testify that he’s one of the funniest and most self-deprecating of filmmakers.
Those who attend are promised a good time, and we may even learn something about the art of remaining an independent filmmaker in an increasingly challenging era!
A season of Guy Maddin works plays at this year's Dublin International Film Festival, which runs from February 22nd - March 2nd, with Maddin participating in a workshop with Paul Duane on March 2nd - find out more here.
