Guy Maddin: Imagining ‘entirely original worlds’
Perhaps the best compliment ever paid to Guy Maddin's cinematic work came from the world's best-known film watcher. In the opening line to a review of Maddin's critically acclaimed 2003 feature, "The Saddest Music in the World," Roger Ebert wrote: "So many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original worlds."
Even fewer filmmakers consistently share that vision on celluloid in the manner with which Winnipeg's Maddin approaches his art. Set in 1933 in his hometown - a location as familiar in his work as Manhattan is to Woody Allen's - "The Saddest Music" tells the surreal tale of legless brewery baroness Lady Port-Huntly (a blonde, wig-wearing Isabella Rossellini) who runs a contest in the "World Capital of Sorrow" to find the world's most melancholy music.
Its grainy, black-and-white look evokes memories of a cinematic era long past, but which, as Ebert ably points out, "never existed" except in Maddin's incredible imagination.
Though his style and influences have led to wide-ranging comparisons from David Lynch to such early cinematic pioneers as F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Luis Buñuel, Maddin's eclectic body of work – 25 feature and short films over nearly two decades – has confounded any attempts to define his overall singular filmic touch, though some have tried: critic Derek Hill described his work as "black comedic excursions into the netherworlds of silent film.”
In the absence of labels, at least one critic has suggested that Winnipeg's most famous cinematic son has created his own genre. Born in Winnipeg in 1956 and holding a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Winnipeg, the one-time house painter's passion for moviemaking evolved from avid watcher to adventurous creator.
Maddin's first feature film, "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" (1988), about two men quarantined for smallpox and locked in a rivalry, became a must-see cult classic, playing for years at midnight in New York City and launching his reputation as one of the world's kings of underground cinema.
Two years later, he released his second feature, "Archangel," a dream-like melodrama set in Russia about an amnesiac First World War soldier who can't remember the love of his life. The film’s crackling soundtrack and breaks in action give it a look of a film that could have been made 60 years earlier. The film won the Best Experimental Film award from the National Society of U.S. Film Critics.
Maddin's first colour feature followed in 1992. "Careful", situated in an alpine village whose residents speak softly for fear of risking an avalanche, is "a claustrophobic farce of incestuous desire," according to film critic Gerald Peary. In a fitting tribute to Maddin's interest in early film styles, it was screened in Paris in 1995 to mark the centennial of the birth of cinema. (The latter two films both received support from the Canada Council.)
In 1995, Maddin became the youngest ever recipient of the Telluride Film Festival's Medal for Lifetime Achievement, joining the likes of previous honorees Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood and Gloria Swanson.
In 2001, the U.S. National Society of Film Critics named "The Heart of the World," a commission for Toronto's International Film Festival, the best experimental film. Shot in black and white, running only six minutes, and covering science fiction, Jesus Christ and the birth of cinema, the film was crafted, said Maclean's, like "inscribing the Bible on a grain of rice."
The turn of the century also found Maddin crossing artistic disciplines when he released "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary," which featured dancers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and was broadcast on CBC's "Opening Night." The production earned an International Emmy and a pair of Gemini Awards, and put Maddin into the mainstream.
- Christopher Guly