Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin 9780887557125, 9780887553547

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Bark Fish Appreciation: An Introduction
My Brother’s Keeper: Fraternal Relations in the Films of Guy Maddin and George Toles
Guy Maddin: True to Form
Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful
Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin
Maddin and Melodrama
Thoroughly Modern Maddin
Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision
The Heart of His World: Emotional Immediacy and Distance in the Films of Guy Maddin
From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin
Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Virgins, Vampires, and the “Theatre Film”
Demented Enchantments: Maddin’s Dis-eased Heart
Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful
Hit with a Wrecking Ball, Tickled with a Feather: Gesture, Deixis, and the Baroque Cinema of Guy Maddin
“I’m Not an American; I’m a Nymphomaniac”: Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in The World
Conversations with Guy Maddin
Filmography
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

PLAYING WITH MEMORIES ESSAYS ON GUY MADDIN

edited by david church

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PLAYING WITH

MEMORIES GUY MADDIN

edited by david church University of Manitoba Press

© The Authors 2009 University of Manitoba Press Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3T 2M5 www.umanitoba.ca/uofmpress Printed in Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT (Canadian Copyright Licencing Agency) 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 901, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6, www.accesscopyright.ca. Cover design: Doowah Design Interior design: Karen Armstrong Graphic Design Cover image: Guy Maddin directs David Moroni (as Van Helsing) during the shooting of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). Courtesy vonnie VON HELMOLT film. Photo by Bruce Monk. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Playing with memories : essays on Guy Maddin / edited by David Church. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-88755-712-5 1. Maddin, Guy—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Maddin, Guy— Interviews. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—Canada. I. Church, David, 1982– PN1998.3.M332P53 2009

791.4302’33092

C2009-901767-9

The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, Tourism and Sport.

ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS STATEMENT University of Manitoba Press saved the following resources by printing the pages of this book on chlorine free paper made with 100% post-consumer waste. TREES

WATER

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13

4,606

537

1,018

FULLY GROWN

GALLONS

POUNDS

POUNDS

Calculations based on research by Environmental Defense and the Paper Task Force. Manufactured at Friesens Corporation

SW-COC-001271

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword geoff pevere

xi

Bark Fish Appreciation: An Introduction david church

1

My Brother’s Keeper: Fraternal Relations in the Films of Guy Maddin and George Toles donald masterson

Guy Maddin: True to Form geoff pevere

Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful Will Straw

Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin steven shaviro

Maddin and Melodrama william beard

Thoroughly Modern Maddin david l. pike

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision stephen snyder

26 48 58 70 79 96 119

The Heart of His World: Emotional Immediacy and Distance in the Films of Guy Maddin carl matheson

From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin george toles

Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Virgins, Vampires, and the “Theatre Film” milan pribisic

Demented Enchantments: Maddin’s Dis-eased Heart dana cooley

Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful darrell varga

Hit with a Wrecking Ball, Tickled with a Feather: Gesture, Deixis, and the Baroque Cinema of Guy Maddin saige walton

“I’m Not an American; I’m a Nymphomaniac”: Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in The World lee easton and kelly hewson

Conversations with Guy Maddin

133

144

159 171 190

203

224

interview by william beard

239

Filmography

266

Selected Bibliography

268

Contributors

272

Index

275

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Following Page 78 . Einar (Kyle McCulloch) and Gunnar (Michael Gottli) hone their bark fish cutting skills in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). 2. An unfortunate patient (Stephen Snyder) succumbs to disease in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). 3. Gunnar (Michael Gottli) watches Snjófridur (Angela Heck) undress in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). 4. Cameo by Maddin as a doctor in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). 5. Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) and Philbin (Ari Cohen) fly away to their honeymoon in Archangel (990). 6. Perpetually dazed amnesiac Lt. Boles (Kyle McCulloch) in Archangel (990). 7. Boles (Kyle McCulloch) salutes the sleepy battlefield’s fallen troops in Archangel (990). 8. Boles (Kyle McCulloch) and Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) ride off into the dreamscape of Archangel (990). 9. Johann (Brent Neale) prepares for incest with his sleeping mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska) in Careful (992). 0. Klara (Sarah Neville) and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) in Careful (992). . Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) peers into the abyss in Careful (992). 2. Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) tries to resist his mother’s (Gosia Dobrowolska) charms in Careful (992). 3. Keller (Jim Keller) and Caelum (Caelum Vatnsdal) transfixed by the distraught Berenice (Brandy Bayes) in The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity (995). 4. Anna (Leslie Bais) in The Heart of the World (2000) exhibits Maddin’s use of 920sstyle exaggerated expressions, ominous close-ups, and stylized makeup. 5. Osip (Caelum Vatnsdal) sacrifices himself as the passion play Christ in The Heart of the World (2000). 6. Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) gives herself to the vampire (Zhang Wei-Qiang) in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002).

viii PLAYING WITH MEMORIES

7. Maddin directs David Moroni (as Van Helsing) during the shooting of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). 8. Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) menaced by evil forces in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). 9. Mina (CindyMarie Small) wards away the undead threat in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). 20. Guy Maddin on the set of The Saddest Music in the World (2003). 2. Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) addresses the crowd in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). 22. The reunited Kent family performs together in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). 23. Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) grants a visit with Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). 24. Guy (Darcy Fehr) consoles Veronica (Amy Stewart) in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). 25. Dr. Fusi (Louis Negin) performs the ill-fated abortion in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). 26. Meta (Melissa Dionisio) manhandles the hapless Guy (Darcy Fehr) in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). 27. Mother (Ann Savage) embraces the ersatz Cameron (Brendan Cade) at the end of My Winnipeg (2007). 28. Mother (Ann Savage) with the Maddin family surrogates in My Winnipeg (2007). 29. Lovers (Erica Rintoul and Rob Thomson) stroll among the frozen horse heads in My Winnipeg (2007), incorporating sadness into their days.

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS Photos 1–4, 8, 14–15, 24–26 by Guy Maddin. Photos 5–7, 9–13 by Jeff Solylo. Photos 16–19 by Bruce Monk; courtesy vonnie von helmolt film. Photos 20–23 by Jody Shapiro; courtesy of Rhombus Media. Photos 27–29 by Jody Shapiro.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are first due to R.L. Rutsky for his valuable guidance during this project, and to David Carr and Glenn Bergen at the University of Manitoba Press for shepherding the book through to completion. I also owe a debt of gratitude to (in no order) Mark Peranson, Caelum Vatnsdal, John Patrick Bray, Gregory Bray, Deco Dawson, Kenneth White, Bradley Will, Margherita Sprio, David Foster, William Beard, Eugene Walz, Robert Enright, Meeka Walsh, Will Straw, Geoff Pevere, George Toles, David L. Pike, Donato Totaro, Roberto Curti, Andrew Leland, and to all of the editors and publishers who granted their kind permission for previously published essays to appear herein. Thanks too to Jeff Solylo, Jody Shapiro, Bruce Monk, Vonnie Von Helmolt, and Joanna King (Rhombus Media) for permission to use their production stills. My deep appreciation goes out to Guy Maddin for his generous assistance throughout the project. Finally, I must thank my family for their love and encouragement. “Guy Maddin: True to Form,” by Geoff Pevere, was originally published in Take One, Fall 992, 4–. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful,” by Will Straw, was originally published in a slightly expanded form in Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 5 Canadian Films, ed. Gene Walz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 305–320. Reprinted by permission of the author and Rodopi. “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin,” by Steven Shaviro, was originally published in slightly different form in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 980,

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eds. William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 200), 26–22. Reprinted by permission of the author and the University of Alberta Press. “Maddin and Melodrama,” by William Beard, is an updated version of an essay originally published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 4, 2 (2005): 2–7. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. “Thoroughly Modern Maddin,” by David L. Pike, is an updated version of an essay originally published in CineAction 65 (2004): 6–6. Reprinted by permission of the author and CineAction. “From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating With Guy Maddin,” by George Toles, was originally published in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 8, 2 (999): 52–63. This revised version of the essay was published in George Toles, A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film, 39–334; © 200 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 4820; all rights reserved. “Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful,” by Darrell Varga, was originally published in slightly different form in Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, 2 (999): 56–70. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Portions of “Conversations with Guy Maddin” originally appeared in William Beard’s booklet Conversations with Guy Maddin (Edmonton: Metro Cinema Society, 2007). Reprinted by permission of the author and Metro Cinema Society.

FOREWORD

GEOFF PEVERE

Of the myriad endearing perversities at work in the films of Guy Maddin, nothing quite beats his love of hockey. If you understand what hockey means to Canada—or at least a certain traditional idea of Canada—this is an especially resonant facet of the Winnipeg-born and -based artist’s work. “The Game,” as it’s reverently called, is considered Canada at its purest, and Maddin’s love of the game—which involves body odours, soapy genitalia, and wildly displaced homoeroticism—is anything but pure. Therein lies the nub of his prodigiously uneasy relationship with his country’s officially approved sense of self. Maddin, whose father worked for a Winnipeg team, loves the sport the way some people are captivated by fishnet stockings or spanking. That he spent so much time in locker rooms as a boy only sharpens the whiff of impropriety. Maddin, who has been engaged in a decidedly eccentric filmmaking practice for nearly twenty-five years, is both an exception and a rule as a Canadian artist: an exception in that he’s the only artist north of the forty-ninth parallel to have made an international reputation for himself as a inspired excavator of cinematic tropes and twitches from the late silent period, but a rule in that he hews to a certain tendency in Canadian cultural endeavours that are marked by a kind of belligerent, unwavering impracticality. You might

xii PLAYING WITH MEMORIES

call it the Beaver Principle: the human creative corollary to the activity of an animal (interestingly, also the national symbol) that spends its life building dams against currents of water that obliterate the efforts almost as quickly as they are made. This could be Maddin’s story. As anyone who has followed the director’s career probably knows, Canada has not been exactly accommodating to this particular mammal’s efforts. Ever since he first emerged in the mid-1980s as part of a group of Winnipeg-based filmmakers who converged around the Winnipeg Film Group, Maddin has confounded the prevailing national idea of the kind of filmmaking practice Canadians should properly be engaged in. When our national “tradition” was largely considered to be documentary or at least realist in practice, Maddin proved a resolute fabulist: a bare-hands digger for inspiration in the most artificial of filmmaking styles and periods, and a proudly onanistic explorer of the most personal and perfervid of psychosexual obsessions. When the winds of state-sanctioned funding blew in the direction of commerce and audience-friendly compromise, Maddin tilted the other way—toward ever more esoteric adventures in retrofitted experimentation. And, most pointedly, when it seemed that even those few forms of support for his singular pursuits had fled the country entirely—to places like Germany, Japan, and New York City—Maddin carried on anyway, a beaver programmed to do the only thing he could. (Or perhaps like a sleepwalker, of the kind that stumble so often through his films, answering some deeply resonant psychosomatic summons.) The early twenty-first century has been especially kind to this compulsive excavator of the early twentieth. After seeming, right around the time of the release of the benighted “commercial” movie Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, to be ready to return to his formative trade of house painting, Maddin has not only bounced back in style (his own, naturally) with the industrially paced releases of The Heart of the World, Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary, Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World, My Dad is 100 Years Old, Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg—and a plethora of shorts, spurts, and fragments—he has insinuated himself as part of the country’s larger discussion about itself. These days, on those rare occasions when people talk about “the Canadian cinema,” they cannot help but talk about Guy Maddin. In this regard, Maddin’s sheer beaverishness must be given due credit. While it is no small credit to his artistry that he is so original, focussed,

xiii

inspired, and inimitable, it is also crucial that he probably can’t help himself. Like the beaver, he is predestined to do what he does with whatever means present themselves to do it, and his only alternative is a sad lifetime spent in the collegiate summer job purgatory of painting houses. This makes Maddin, as a Canadian, anyway, participant in a fascinating national tradition of stubborn mutiny, a tendency to keep on dragging wood to water, no matter how much the current insists on washing those efforts into splintered oblivion. Maddin’s country, a place at once ridiculously vast and suffocatingly intimate, tends to produce such obstinacy in the same way it makes the best of most things that render life in North America’s northernmost dominion challenging—like, for instance, the weather. And especially, perhaps, the weather in Winnipeg. In the genre-flummoxing first-person autobiographical movie memoir My Winnipeg, Maddin fixates on his hometown as a kind of narcotic-secreting teat, a place which releases such a flood of melatonin in its residents that they drift like sleepwalkers along streets that in turn drift with snow. They can’t leave. This, too, is Maddin’s story. And by staying put, he lodges himself along a national-cultural continuum that might also include such otherwise indigestible mutant-Canuck presences as David Cronenberg, Glenn Gould, Michael Snow, Rush, curling, and New Year’s Day polar bear swims. By simply refusing to go away—a reasonable, when you think about it, permutation of the same obstinate pioneer spirit that planted a country on this godforsaken tundra in the first place—Maddin and his ilk have compelled their own inclusion in the exclusive trading post of Canadian culture. The beaver, by just about any standards, an ungainly, annoying, and unseemly symbol of national character, once again suggests an apt analogy: by refusing to stop building its dams no matter what natural forces insisted otherwise—and merely because it had no choice—it became the anthropomorphic emblem of what it means to be Canadian. By making movies that don’t sit well with prevailing prescriptions of proper cinematic conduct, and by continuing to do so even against what were once raging currents of confusion and indifference, Maddin has taken his rightful place. At the very least, his dam would seem to be holding.

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BARK FISH APPRECIATION: AN INTRODUCTION

david church

Sometimes he intentionally separated himself from his favourite toys, and played with the memories of them. And then played with the memories of the memories. There were inexhaustible powers of renewal within these two homes for the child without qualities. —Guy Maddin, from his unfilmed treatment The Child Without Qualities I wanted to design little stories that were, I hoped, original ways of showing people themselves. But I also wanted to just indulge myself in the surprisingly tasty textures of audio scratches and acting devices and cutting techniques of a forgotten film vocabulary. And for some reason, that film vocabulary seemed just as sexy and new as the women in those 920s films. They seem sort of eternally new every time I look at them, and more beautiful each time, almost. I almost feel as if the excitement I feel is necrophilia of some sort. If that’s what necrophilia is, then so be it. —Guy Maddin2

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The movies of Guy Maddin are an uncanny amalgamation of personal obsessions and private memories made public. Maddin’s fears and desires sparkle forth amid melodramatic tropes so winkingly heightened and bizarre that every new convolution begs for laughter. Lovingly digesting the visual tropes of archaic cinema, he infuses his fervid narratives with a gaze into the dusty corners of the medium’s bygone years, drawing upon an encyclopedic (and largely self-taught) knowledge of classic film. Whether inspired by the stylistic innovations of Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean Vigo, or the deliberate anti-realism of Luis Buñuel, Josef von Sternberg, and Douglas Sirk, he layers his low-budget tableaux with the grain and grime of decades long gone, evoking a time when movies were still taking on strange lateral developments. In collaboration with long-time writing partner George Toles, Maddin makes the sort of pictures that he dreams had been made by directors both great and forgotten, but in doing so he paradoxically creates something strikingly new and original in contemporary cinema. Despite an idiosyncratic and distinctly recognizable aesthetic widely praised by critics, Maddin’s movies have proved somewhat difficult to describe, earning (largely misplaced) comparisons to contemporary filmmakers as disparate as David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Lars von Trier. While some detractors have accused Maddin of empty formalism and pretentious self-indulgence (often blaming the evacuation of meaning supposedly endemic to postmodern art), other critics have delighted in his playfully empurpled evocations of the past. His films have been much commented upon but little analyzed, frequently relegated to the sidelines of academic discussion as charmingly opaque oddities. There is a tellingly absurd moment in Maddin’s first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988), in which Einar, in a lustful but unsuccessful ploy to gain the nurses’ attention, allows Gunnar to teach him the Icelandic hobbies of “bark fish cutting” and “bark fish appreciation.” In the midst of their delirium, the two bedridden men pass the time by crudely cutting pieces of tree bark into the shapes of fish, and then pondering intently at their primitive and decidedly inartistic-looking creations. This eccentric and seemingly throwaway detail within the film is perhaps indicative of more than Maddin’s mockery of his self-serious Icelandic heritage; it implies that there is something almost ridiculous about the very task of looking too deeply into his own deliberately primitive handiwork as well. For example, explaining the relative scarcity of allegorical content in his work, he observes that “the idea of storytelling, as far back as campfires and Cro-Magnons, is that it’s supposed to be entertaining and engaging, not a cryptoquote to be

Introduction

solved and then disposed of.”3 I want to briefly suggest, however, following the above epigraphs, that Maddin’s libidinal and mnemonic overinvestment in “dead” cinematic styles serves a personally, and perhaps even culturally, revitalizing function, rendering memory into material form as a sort of necrophilic art. A caveat before proceeding: in a book of this nature, the velvet-lined trap of auteurist criticism is perhaps inevitable to some degree, but all the more so for a cine-literate director who has, through a plethora of candid interviews and commentaries, self-consciously performed the role of auteur, cultivating powerful connections between his films and his own life. Given the deeply personal nature of his films, it would be difficult to properly unfold the major themes of Maddin’s oeuvre without detouring through his own history, even though it may be near impossible to separate indisputably true events from the more emotionally “truthful” self-mythology he has woven. *

*

*

Born on February 28, 956, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to a family of IcelandicCanadian descent, young Guy Arthur Maddin’s formative years were split between two sites forever associated with each of his parents: the beauty shop owned by his mother Herdis and aunt Lil, located adjacent to his family’s apartment; and the cavernous Winnipeg Arena, home of the Winnipeg Maroons, the hockey team for whom his father Chas was general manager. Much of his childhood experience stemmed from being the youngest of the family’s four children.4 With his older siblings Ross, Cameron, and Janet already within the grips of adolescence by the time he reached cognizance, Guy found himself in a household that had apparently seen its best days in the years before his birth. He analyzed the family history that preceded him, playing with hand-me-down objects and the associated memories of fonder times.5 “To be born to old parents is to be given the gift related to nostalgia,” he once wrote of the struggle to understand and please one’s family. “One has to work that much harder, look backwards so much further, to make real as people one’s parents, grandparents—even pets!”6 At night he was lulled to sleep by detuned radio and tv shows, tucked in by blankets of static fuzz as the broadcasts struggled their way across Manitoba’s icebound prairie. These early forces may have inspired Maddin’s love of degraded imagery and archaic forms—but it was not a simple rose-tinted nostalgia that resulted, for darker events soon unfolded.

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In February 963, only a week before Guy’s seventh birthday, teenage Cameron shot himself upon the grave of his recently deceased girlfriend. Cameron’s death marked Guy deeply, leaving him a “living ambassador of [his] dead brother, as this living ambassador of suicide” until about age twenty, and in My Winnipeg (2007) he describes the year 963 as perhaps the key to all that makes him what he is.7 It was only after this traumatic incident that he sensed that his was a family in decline. The celebrity once enjoyed by his father was on the wane following the corporate merger that transformed the Maroons into Canada’s national hockey team. Several years later, Guy was “cast into the role of an unlikely mediator trying to bring peace” between his mother and teenage sister.8 The matriarch’s Lutheran strictures and desire for control clashed with the precocious teen in a series of nasty quarrels—and mothers have played a significant role in Maddin’s films ever since, typically portrayed as powerful, domineering, or repressive. The place of fathers has also been a seminal element in Maddin’s work, owing in large part to his father’s premature death from a stroke in June 977. As with the passing of his brother and grandmother, Guy was stunned by the loss, and yet somehow unable to properly grieve: “I was shocked that I wasn’t hit with the tsunami of grief that I thought I would be. I wasn’t even upset. I realized that some psychological mechanism had kicked in—the grief would overdraw me at the bank and I would have to pay on the instalment plan. I make these weekly payments during my dreams, paying in tears for all of the loved ones I have lost.”9 Chas’s death struck him as more of a desertion than a tragedy, as if his father had merely shirked his duties and gone to live with another family.0 Persistent dreams about Chas’s return would later inspire Maddin to pick up the camera and shoot his first short, The Dead Father (986); fathers have subsequently been portrayed as either deceased, absent, or cowardly in virtually all of Maddin’s pictures. These early traumas surface repeatedly like so much scar tissue, but he is no mere miserablist. Familial strife commingles with heartfelt nostalgia, met by a strong gallows humour, as though suggesting the absurdity of remaining fixedly in the past and obsessively uncovering such old wounds. Desire always teeters on the edge of despair in his work, and his resolutely self-destructive characters often repress their sadness, sublimating it into strange or inappropriate forms, only to rediscover it too late—as with the wave of catharsis channelled into a single tear at the endings of Careful (992) and The Saddest Music in the World (2003).

Introduction

Maddin worked as a bank manager, house painter, and photo archivist in the years before turning to film. In late 979, he gravitated toward film classes taught at the University of Manitoba by professors George Toles and Stephen Snyder. Maddin quickly fell in love with their degraded 6-mm prints and fifth-generation film-to-video transfers of old movies, ranging from Buñuel’s early surrealism to Dreyer’s stark Lutheran melodramas to the nascent thrills of pre-code Hollywood.2 Inspired by the artifice and primitivism of Snyder’s own experimental shorts and the films of fellow Winnipegger John Paizs, Maddin began learning how to make movies. He joined the Winnipeg Film Group—an artists’ cooperative responsible for much of the “Prairie Surrealism” committed to celluloid—and, armed with his rudimentary knowledge of filmmaking, completed The Dead Father over a span of three years. Its deeply personal story of a son revisited by his briefly revived father bears strong indications of the strange humour and archaic stylings that Maddin would increasingly pursue over his next three films. Aside from a voice-over and intermittent sound effects, the film is mostly silent, setting the stage for his subsequent “part-talkies.” For Maddin, silent (or at least quasi-silent) films have become such a wellspring of inspiration because they “seem like the perfect stepping stone between the literal-minded movies of today and all other art forms, plastic or otherwise.” Unlike the verisimilitude demanded by so much of contemporary film, silent cinema “is already far too stylized, monochromatic and, well, silent, to even begin to represent reality to sophisticated modern viewers. To most viewers, it might as well be painting, poetry, or classical music.”3 In this light, the belated bereavement in The Dead Father displays an early attempt to capture “the spirit of prose poetry”4 in his work. Maddin proudly works under the banner of primitivism—which, at the beginning of his career, was largely due to economic and technical necessity, having neither large production budgets nor formal training—but it remains a vital part of his work, something more than the makeshift sets, Vaselinesmeared lenses, and flickering 8-mm and 6-mm footage. Like the bark fish, Maddin’s films seem personally handcrafted, left with rough edges by the act of cutting and shaping, laden with the mythos of his own history (in contrast to the mass-produced newness of much contemporary cinema). This aesthetic is refined in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988), a folktale inspired by a period of intense male rivalry and set during an 876 smallpox epidemic that devastated the Icelandic immigrant population of Gimli, Manitoba. Although he found that descendents of these immigrants were

5

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“humourlessly obsessed with their own history,”5 Maddin began dressing up his cultural heritage as absurdist comedy. He used this taboo topic as an “irritant,” something “to make people squirm,”6 like the speck of sand that grows a pearl—in this case, playing his ancestors’ pestilence for laughs. For many viewers, however, perhaps the film’s most obvious broken taboo is its coy depiction of necrophilia—which relates directly to the symbol of bark fish. Insignificant at first glance, the bark fish ultimately prove crucial to the loosely assembled narrative, for it was Gunnar’s wife Snjófridur who originally taught him the hobby. The sight of her bark-cutting shears triggers Gunnar’s recollections of her untimely death during their honeymoon—while for Einar, it prompts his inadvertent confession that he had stolen the shears after performing sex with Snjófridur’s corpse. The creative act of bark fish cutting, like the act of filmmaking, infuses crude material forms with powerful memories. This is why the themes of decay and necrophilia that reappear in Maddin’s films are not merely taboos to be exploited, but in many ways reflect the formal strategies he employs, most notably a perverse fetishization of “dead” cinematic styles. For example, Gimli Hospital assumes the look of a part-talkie, aping the awkward emergence of sync-sound films, but Maddin strongly eroticizes the very archaism of his depictions; the crackling ambient soundtrack and expressionistic lighting seem as freighted with authorial desire as the pre-code nudity of Snjófridur’s bare backside and the dense makeup worn by the muchlusted-after (but suspiciously young) nurses. For Maddin, tropes from old movies become mnemonics for not only the cultural past, but ghosts from his personal past. He seems forever placing both past and present objects of desire (e.g., lost romantic loves, deceased family members) at a faux-historical distance, relegating them to the dustbin of history as unnaturally old and impossibly unattainable.7 When he frequently resurrects the dead in his films, it is, in his own words, “a quick shorthand for the desire to see someone again who has been removed from me, or from a character, through death or rejection.”8 The dramatic “heart-to-heart resuscitation” in Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) self-reflexively visualizes this key component of Maddin’s aesthetic: subjecting oneself to great pain in order to revive the dead with a powerful love. If his films are necrophilic, it is not to destructively defile or exploit the past, but to retool its lost potential (as Dana Cooley similarly asserts later in this collection) by simulating and then affectively refilling discarded containers of cultural memory with intensely personal feelings of desire and despair. However, an illusory raising of the

Introduction

dead is only achievable by making one’s memories affectively tangible within the dreamlike realm of cinematic fantasy. This limitation is manifestly acknowledged through Maddin’s constant emphasis upon the materiality of film, restoring his loves (both cinematic and autobiographical) not in a state of pristine newness, but showing heavily fetishized signs of decay. *

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Despite Maddin’s desire to evade easy classification, his “romantic kitsch hybrids”9 all share some common qualities, primarily motivated by the vagaries of memory. His stories intentionally evoke the structure of fairy tales as a means of disguising certain autobiographical details, but also to preserve the truthful heightenings of emotion that one finds in such supposedly juvenile literary forms. “The bedtime stories told to us as children can never be completely fathomed, but they can be felt—much the way sophisticated art for adults operates, so I make virtually no distinction,” says Maddin.20 His films are playfully regressive, even childlike in their means of self-mythologizing his own life or his hometown of Winnipeg. However, as in the literary inspirations of Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, and Robert Musil, Maddin’s memories are tinged with melancholy as “rotten myths,” leaving him rejecting and sorting certain childhood feelings that initially seem convincing but fail to properly explain the workings of the world and its inhabitants.2 Shooting largely instinctually, often with only a few seconds given to each decision, he taps into the ways that actual events are affectively distorted into basic, enduring tropes (e.g., cruel parents, weak/absent fathers, cowardly sons, competitive siblings, jealous lovers) by memory and dreams. “The only real themes that matter to me are how humans love each other or hate each other or are envious of each other,” he observes. “All the timeless stuff.”22 For Maddin, there is little capacity for humans to change, improve, or fail to repeat prior mistakes. Reflecting the filmmaker’s own fixations, his characters are driven by irrational desires—cowardice, sexual jealousy, incestuous urges, unrequited love, etc.—fated into revisiting the exquisite joys and pains that might otherwise remain better off repressed into a haze of quaint ambiguity. His narratives profess not only the influence of fairy tales, but also the results of amnesia, which Maddin believes is a universal condition: “Forgetfulness is a kind of anaesthetic for the painful life we all live. We’re forced to constantly think about the shameful things we’ve done, the painful things that have happened to us. We owe most of the feelings we have, as

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sensate beings, to shoddy memories.”23 For Maddin, amnesia explains how people can forget their responsibilities to family, loved ones, and friends. This dominant narrative motif appears in many guises throughout his work, stretching from the dazed and grieving son in The Dead Father to My Winnipeg’s sleepwalking inhabitants, but it reaches its apotheosis in Archangel (990). Inspired by World War I propaganda films and a smattering of historical trivia, the film is set in a snowbound outpost on the Russian frontier where no one has bothered to tell the troops that the Great War has ended. Soldiers from nations large and small now fight on sleepily through the haze of memory, filling the conflict’s absurd emptiness with their own personal crusades; for example, Canadian army lieutenant John Boles mistakes another woman for his lost love Iris, imagining the demonized Germanic hordes as rivals for her affections. Melodramatic emotions and individual motivations are muted into a melancholy blankness as lovers/fighters forget their relationships but remain intensely dedicated to shifting conceptions of love, marching fixedly onward in real and imagined battlefields as the loose narrative circles back upon itself. If his narratives are often elliptical, it is because the processes of editing and remembering echo each other: not following a linear trajectory, certain details are cut out while others are amplified, springing back into consciousness when one least expects.24 In a more conscious form, Maddin links amnesia to a recurrent theme of cowardice, with men and women (but especially men) being cowardly in love or otherwise shirking their duties—such as the “Guy Maddin” character in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), who manages to forget his girlfriend upon the abortionist’s operating table, becoming yet another father who flees his family out of spinelessness. Since amnesia allows one to forget pains and promises alike, it also allows Maddin to continually revisit these ordeals in his films, repeating his mistakes, each time stumbling upon them with a renewed emotional intensity shot through with the uncanny. As we are told in Brand Upon the Brain! everything happens twice because emotions exceed containment when memory fails to suitably capture events the first time around. Maddin admits in My Winnipeg that he sometimes even forgets who is alive and who is dead—but his films preserve such personal ghosts, trapping them on seemingly pre-decayed celluloid, lingering just barely above the forgetful abyss of history as well. As Geoff Pevere suggests, however, Maddin’s formal aesthetic also reflects a broader sense of amnesia, haphazardly layering filmic references that “seem less the product of a single imagination than of an entire

Introduction

culture’s. A culture that shares something fundamental with the lost souls who stumble their way through Maddin’s movies; a culture that’s having a hard time remembering who it is and where it’s been.”25 Whether alluding to films halfremembered, unseen, or altogether forgotten by history, Maddin is not trying to faithfully recreate past cinematic styles, but rather “cannibalizes” such traits “as part of [his] vocabulary the way other people use words.”26 His necrophilic usage of archaic films suggests that he is too cowardly to express his fears and desires through a contemporary, “living” film style; indeed, his least successful works, such as Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997) and The Hands of Ida (995), are arguably those that eschew the comforts of a postmodern or retro-modern pastiche of older styles. Like an amnesiac, he seems to lose himself in his love of dead forms, but inevitably returns to the core of memory that inspires his overarching affective investment in loss and decay. A case in point is Careful (992), in which he excavates the German Bergfilm (or mountain film), a dead historical subgenre whose place as a container of cultural memory is long past, allowing Maddin to obsessively transform it into a mnemonic for more personal issues. Perhaps set in the mountains of British Columbia or Switzerland, this melodrama about dark family secrets held in check by severe social strictures uses a pro-incest “irritant” as a reaction against “the people who felt left out if they didn’t have any horror story of [child] abuse, who felt it was trendy to get diddled.”27 The film also bespeaks the huge role of mothers for both Toles and Maddin: a desire to return to the womb, mixed with a dread of emotional closeness to such looming authority figures. There is little recourse to subtext in Maddin’s films, leaving such raw impulses playing out upon the stylized surface of things—but the autobiographical nature of his work ensures that it is never just surface. The double-edged psychosexuality in so much of his output is a prime example: his violently Oedipal plots amplify hoary old Freudian master narratives to the point of ironic ridicule—and yet the tired plight of Oedipus also finds justification in Maddin’s assertion that, yes, these twisted emotional brambles truly are (at least to some degree) rooted in his own life experience. The dense layers of artifice and excess suggest that Maddin is performing personal history as much as cinematic history, but there are genuine emotions beneath his self-reflexive performance. While high emotions in film are largely disparaged today (especially by the educated middle-class spectators who comprise the bulk of Maddin’s viewership), he revels in these feelings, provocatively exhibiting them before

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those audiences who might routinely disavow such sensation. In the tone of a manifesto, Maddin declaims: “In our lives, melodrama is hyperbolized, it’s the narrative of our dreams with all the nocturnal terrors and desires given the respect they deserve. It’s the chaos of the everyday ordered into an obedient cast of characters we can understand…. These magnifications happen in our nightmares and our movies again and again, not because of lapses in taste, but because they are the truth. Melodrama makes our true feelings easier to recognize. Much like the philosophical dictum declaring that everything more or less tastes like chicken, all good stories contain at least traces of melodrama.”28 Using archaic film styles as personal touchstones, he recollects his own life through the same fervid optics encouraged by cinematic containers of cultural memory that may today be frowned upon by high culture audiences as maudlin and manipulative, ignored by mass audiences as outdated and pretentious, or altogether dismissed as unapproachably bizarre. By temporally uprooting once-popular, now-marginalized forms like silent film or melodrama, Maddin highlights the historical variability of taste, yet maintains a belief in certain timeless themes and feelings that should not be rejected, even if their particular shapes of expression have fallen out of vogue. Making an emotionally eviscerating movie is one of Maddin’s stated goals, but contemporary ironic reading strategies drain much of the potential for melodramatic affect, allowing his aesthetic to be interpreted as merely an exercise in alienation and emotional flatness. Maddin claims, however, that contemporary irony and melodrama are not mutually exclusive, for he is often captivated as much by irony as pure emotion (as in Sirk’s films), depending upon a given film’s success or failure at tugging the heartstrings.29 Camp, for example, certainly is/was one expression of this dynamic, traditionally blending pathos and heightened emotionality beneath thick layers of nostalgia and artifice—but camp has also become emotionally neutral with its increasing ubiquity in mainstream (straight) culture, and we can see this tension between camp’s affective capacities in the potential reactions that viewers have to Maddin’s films.30 The ability for viewers to experience his work in such varied ways is, in a sense, a built-in defence mechanism, a means of engaging the audience’s interest at all costs. After all, he suspects that responses to his films will be closer to those attending the historical avant-garde than attending a mere nostalgic replication of past forms: “I want to unlearn how to watch movies. I want to flip dyslexically the images of my film to jangle their readability for the viewers; I want to re-create the thrill I felt as a boy when I

Introduction

finally recognized three words in a row!”3 While we may feel too alienated from his films to experience powerful emotions in a traditional sense, we are given plenty of access to other kinds of affect, such as the pleasures of distanciation, intertextuality, and humour. For Maddin, what is most important is sentiment, but even if tears do not result, it is enough to make contemporary audiences feel something—anything—in the chance that they might someday overlook the present historical moment’s aversion to melodrama (see William Beard’s essay in the coming pages) and affectively use his own films the way he has used “dead” film styles. Linked to his uncanny reanimation of archaic cinema is a dissociative sense of strangeness, which has arguably become a major component of his cult reputation, setting his movies apart from others consumed within the same predominantly bourgeois cultural stratum of “art cinema.”32 Maddin’s work is not a celebration of exploitation or “trash” cinema (as is so much of contemporary cult film), but rather a memorial to more “legitimate” film styles that have been discarded by history—and perhaps most importantly for those who hail him as a cult director, discarded by “mainstream” audiences. Maddin cultists may favour the perverse eccentricities of his work in opposition to the supposed respectability of “high art,” even as they paradoxically rely upon bourgeois reading strategies to differentiate themselves from “the masses.”33 As cult objects, Maddin’s films undoubtedly reward those with high-culture reading competences, whether educated viewers with a strong knowledge of film history or those privileging form over content, but viewers can also invoke the pleasures of subcultural distinction. Maddin’s various images of grotesque or taboo sexuality and violence (necrophilia, cannibalism, incest, fisting, disembowelment, etc.) are, for example, often interpreted through the distanced lenses of irony, excess, and camp, but cultists may fetishize the low-cultural qualities of such imagery in order to distinguish themselves from the supposedly effete, erudite high-culture contingent of his viewership. While several critics have observed that the degraded look of his films reflects the degradation of his characters themselves, this quality gives his work an almost illicit air, making it seem all the more exclusive for cultists. Moya Luckett claims that “the dynamic between looking and repulsion is the core pleasure of many cult film genres,”34 and this tension is reflected in the very form of Maddin’s films: our vision is focussed by the countless iris shots, blurred lenses, simulated degradation, and deliberate artifice, even as

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those same qualities put us off from his densely stylized images. Voyeurism is encouraged, but simultaneously made difficult or even punished—as exemplified by the scenes of unpleasurable looking in several of his pictures.35 Supplementing the pains and humiliations that eternally return in his narratives, this potentially masochistic affect is one of the ways that Maddin makes his mnemonics tangible for the viewer through a libidinal overinvestment in the decaying materiality of cinema’s historical “bodies.” *

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After the critical success of Careful, Maddin spent the following few years in preparations on The Dykemaster’s Daughter, a feature with necrophilia literally at its heart. The project was envisioned as an operatic musical, set either in nineteenth-century Holland or on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, about a male automaton brought to life containing the hearts of two dead men: the effeminate singer Ole, once engaged to the dykemaster’s daughter Catharijna, and his brutish murderer, Tede, a would-be successor to the lofty status of dykemaster. Loved by both Catharijna and the alchemist Mergel, the automaton eventually breaks free from his master’s control, unleashing a disastrous flood that washes the tangled web of lovers into oblivion. The film was in preproduction by the time that financiers at Telefilm Canada pulled out, describing the picture as “a lateral move” for Maddin.36 Although many of his films are financed in part by federal or provincial funding, he remains ambivalent about his relationship to public monies: grateful to receive them, but nervous about the constraints of “Canadian content” quotas. He rejects the Canadian film industry’s emulation of American filmmaking models, believing impersonally made, poorly distributed films to be the result.37 Such would be the fate of his return to feature films, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997), a dreamlike 35-mm fantasy that misfired with critics and audiences alike. Perhaps out of fears that he had “worn out [his] personal mythologies,”38 Maddin not only ceded sole scriptwriting duties to Toles for the first time, but relinquished his antiquated visual style at the urging of his producers. With his film stripped of its handcrafted primitivism and signs of decay, Maddin was left doubting the worth of such pleasurable artifice: “If these people, Telefilm, Alliance, etc., had simply listened to me when I tried to explain how I took a short-cut to my modest position in the film world, how I entered the industry through the back door, as a novelty act without a ticket, how I was quite clever in doing so and owed my very presence there to

Introduction

peculiar trickery, then these people would not be so quick to remove all these tricks from my bag: my Vaseline, scratches, monochromes and tableaux, all my mannered dialogues and feigned magic-lantern innocence.”39 Overcoming the belief that he would never shoot another film, he picked up the camera anew in 997 to shoot Love-Chaunt in the Chimney, a “really nicely dovetailed amalgamation of Herman Melville short stories stuck together” by Toles.40 Attempting to recover confidence after the Ice Nymphs debacle, Maddin assembled a loyal cast and crew of friends to shoot this small, low-budget feature in conjunction with several separately financed short films. After amassing a huge amount of footage, Maddin and editor John Gurdebeke began experimenting with step-printing to further fetishize the images: manipulating the speed of motion, repeating and reversing movements, making images flicker and stutter for an instant before searing into the frame. These experiments (eventually released in 2005 as Fuseboy, Rooster Workbook, Zookeeper Workbook, and Chimney Workbook) were the only survivors of a fire set by vandals in Maddin’s garage, which destroyed virtually all other footage of the unfinished feature. However, they would prove forerunners of the “neurological editing” used extensively by Maddin and Gurdebeke in Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! Bearing visual similarities to the work of experimental filmmakers like Martin Arnold and Matthias Müller, this digital editing style does not seek to directly replicate the processes of memory, instead amplifying Maddin’s links between affective memory and bodily sensation—bombarding the viewer’s delicate eyeballs with flashes and spurts of images that jangle the nerves, lingering just below the surface of conscious recognition before surging repeatedly into view, like sense memories being involuntarily sorted by the mind according to intensity. In the late 990s, Maddin began teaching film classes at the University of Manitoba. One of his students, Deco Dawson, inspired him to begin using Super-8 format and micro-montage in his films. Determined to use more rapid editing in the wake of Ice Nymphs, he and Dawson turned to the most frenetic of Soviet Montage films for their muse. These studies yielded The Heart of the World (2000), a delirious blend of agitprop and apocalyptic melodrama, originally commissioned for the Toronto International Film Festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Channelling Gance’s La fin du monde (93) amid Russian constructivist trappings, Maddin compresses an expansive, would-be feature-length plot into six short minutes: a beautiful state scientist sacrifices the promise of passion and wealth to become the new heart of the

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world, saving humanity as a beacon of love and cinema. There is something patently ridiculous about Maddin’s propagandistic fervour here, but a valid revolutionary desire remains. By his own admission, he was attracted to the idea that a person “stymied by indecision in a love triangle or a love quadrangle” could escape jealousy and temptation altogether, undertaking the quixotically altruistic task of “sav[ing] the world by producing… ironically, its biggest opiate since religion. Actually, it was just an excuse for a new creation myth of cinema.”4 While the film is a sort of self-contained manifesto for his overall aesthetic, Mark Peranson has read Maddin’s celebrated plunge into Toronto—the heart of the Canadian cinema world—through a more political lens: Maddin’s seemingly disposable entertainment, made for the same festival that rejected Gimli, ends with the self-sacrifice of its heroine, who, after choking the evil, cigar-chomping industrialist Akmatov (played by Maddin’s former producer, Greg Klymkiw), descends to the earth’s heart, saving the world and “creating” film. In La fin du monde, Gance himself played Jean Novalic, the son of the astronomer who discovers the approaching comet. Jean becomes a wouldbe messiah, denouncing the ribald excesses of humanity and getting himself crucified. How Maddin, his congested career at the time in a semi-constant state of torment with regards to filming and funding, would identify is obvious.42 Having apparently reinvented himself, Maddin’s next project would be an unlikely one, born of economic necessity: a made-for-tv adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Dracula. Although Maddin had little affection for ballet (filmed or otherwise), Bram Stoker’s novel, or even vampire movies in general, he was determined to “treat it like a movie where dancers just happened to be performing the roles,”43 using micro-montage, intertitles, and other silent cinema techniques. As with many of his films, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) takes not only male jealousy and sexual repression as its narrative core, but the pains and pleasures of loving the (un)dead. Maddin’s Dracula was followed by his largest and most widely seen production to date, The Saddest Music in the World (2003). While novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s original screenplay was a satire about Third World nations exploiting themselves for alms upon the international stage, Maddin was somewhat uncomfortable with such a blatant political allegory until he and George Toles drastically rewrote the script around a family melodrama set

Introduction

in Winnipeg during a brewery competition to discover the titular music.44 Although this change allows the film to more affectively act as a repository for Maddin’s personal memories, it also makes greater appeals to the “timeless” emotional commonalities of viewers’ own experiences (should they accept to be so moved). * * * While in preproduction on Saddest Music, Maddin was commissioned to make a gallery installation that became Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), a heavily autobiographical story refracting Maddin’s memories from his early days in Lil’s Beauty Shop and the Winnipeg Arena. A blend of Electra, The Hands of Orlac, and film noir, it is the first movie in a personal trilogy featuring “Guy Maddin” as protagonist—an especially masochistic choice on his part to let viewers peer in at his most painful personal secrets. In the film, amnesiac hockey player Guy does not assert responsibility for his most irrational actions, deserting his girlfriend and becoming a multiple murderer at the behest of a woman obsessed with her dead father, Chas. In doing so, Guy finally joins the pantheon of cowardly men who have deserted their responsibilities and fallen into ignominy. In revealing such fears and shames throughout the trilogy, Maddin is reaching toward a more mature self-awareness of the past, using cinematic doppelgängers to dissect the workings of memory within his own adult life. The films retain the fairy-tale quality of his earlier work, but with less naive results. The appeals to artifice and ironic distance are less pronounced here, allowing his defences to fall away, revealing deeper “truths” and emotional poignancy. That level of exposure is evident in his first feature shot outside of Winnipeg, Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), a childhood remembrance story about young “Guy Maddin” and his older Sis’s secretive exploits in an orphanage run by their puritanical Mother and mad scientist Father.45 Like a pre-emptive strike upon future sorrow, Maddin’s film ends with grown-up Guy reconciling with his once-monstrous Mother just before her death, realizing that he is now utterly alone as his family’s last survivor, having neglected deep familial bonds over the transience of unfulfilled romantic love. The final image of Guy perched high above his family’s island, either commanding his destiny or becoming impossibly vulnerable, suggests this circular tension between either an abandonment or rediscovery of whatever is held most important. He appears confronted with a choice—whether to push ahead through his grief and isolation, or to follow in the steps of so many other

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Maddin protagonists and simply succumb to it—but there seems something almost hopeful on the precipice of this private apocalypse, a sure measure of inner strength. Like Cowards, what sets Brand apart from Maddin’s earlier films is a deliberate drive to actively emerge from the mental fog of amnesia, reducing the circuitous pretenses for confronting the mnemonic core of his work. But the film also illustrates the double edge of that pursuit: the dangers of becoming seduced back into the far-flung territories of one’s own mind. For the mature Maddin, amnesia and remembering can ultimately yield similar emotional consequences. Hired to film a portrait of his hometown on the cusp of a planned move to Toronto, Maddin crafted a “docu-fantasia” that evokes a profoundly Canadian sense of place, serving as a heartfelt farewell to a locale so often distorted or blurred out in his work. The final film of his autobiographical trilogy, My Winnipeg (2007) portrays the city as a strange and mystical place populated by sleepwalkers who have forgotten their way and landmarks primed for demolition. Maddin attempts to escape town through the act of cinematically documenting its idiosyncrasies, meanwhile reconstructing his childhood experiences and studying their perpetual effects upon him. Family and civic history are metonymically linked as he deliberately tries to remember the places and events that his fellow denizens have apparently forgotten—but now his personal recollections take on a distinctly political tenor. The working-class city suffused with Maddin’s memories is slowly being razed and replaced by the “low-priced newness” of corporate capitalism—a destruction of civic/cultural memory. “What if City Hall ever listened to the wishes of the people?” he wonders, invoking the 99 Winnipeg General Strike as a shining moment of collective resistance. He imagines the city’s forgotten inhabitants, such as First Nations peoples and World War I veterans, reclaiming the fleeting joys to which they are entitled. Meanwhile, “Citizen Girl,” a female bastion of labour and civic union, emerges proudly upon the horizon to ensure that Winnipeg will be in good hands during Maddin’s absence. Forged at the intersection of pastiche and personal history, My Winnipeg, like Maddin’s other films, deftly restores or recreates individual-cumcollective mythologies, marked by a populistic emphasis upon emotionality and a patently artificial archaism that never lets viewers forget cinema’s role in constructing cultural memory. By resurrecting past artistic styles in the form of pre-decayed artifice, he implicitly calls into question those styles’ original artificiality, while at the same time celebrating their ability to both convey

Introduction

and acquire meaning across time (even if the resulting cinematic fantasies ultimately fail to restore dead loves to life). Rather than merely sacralizing these neglected vessels of cultural memory in a bath of unblinking nostalgia, Maddin esteems them as raw material for a proposed democratization of affect—a means of allowing viewers to confront their class-based taste biases and, if willing, reconnect with their emotions in the face of ironic distance. The impoverished, low-budget primitiveness of his necrophilic aesthetic suggests the relative accessibility of creatively reworking the past in the present in order to express highly distinctive, and yet emotionally universal, experiences. Revaluing archaic cinema’s potential to both capture and shape modern-day experience, his unapologetic blend of high and low art employs multiple registers of authenticity and irony, and can therefore simultaneously engage and alienate audiences across class boundaries. Over the past two decades, this quality has earned Maddin a devoted following as “the most eccentric of mainstream filmmakers (or the most accessible of avant-gardists),”46 but like the outwardly absurd practices of “bark fish cutting” and “bark fish appreciation,” his peculiar creative process remains a powerful mnemonic method for allowing the personal/cultural past to tangibly reverberate in the present, and not merely vanish as the real/reel unspools and flickers away. *

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As the contributors to this volume illustrate, close examination reveals surreptitious depths worth plumbing in the work of this eminent Canadian filmmaker. As with any collection of essays, particularly one devoted to a working filmmaker, the following perspectives represent a particular period in Maddin’s critical reception and, while obviously not intended as a final word on the subject, should hopefully provide helpful points of entry to the aesthetic, political, and personal issues at play in his work. In a nod to the collage-like qualities of Maddin’s movies, both new and previously published essays appear within these pages, sketching various lines of exploration that form a detailed image of his oeuvre and the responses it has garnered. The difficulty of analyzing Maddin’s films is a hurdle explicitly addressed in the earliest chapters, but the authors quickly lay a fertile groundwork for discussions to follow. Against complaints that his wilful archaism and narrative extremes are little more than inscrutable gimmickry, they debate the seeming contradiction in his work between ironic form and emotional

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content, finding the two aspects to be profoundly interlinked. In the first essay, Donald Masterson draws upon his own interviews with Maddin and screenwriter George Toles to explore the brotherly bonds in their working relationship. Both artists draw upon familial experiences for their proposed rehabilitation of sentiment, each having conflicted feelings about their older brothers. Fraught fraternal interactions play crucial parts in films like Careful and The Saddest Music in the World, variously inspired by Maddin’s sorrow over his brother Cameron’s suicide and Toles’s rivalry with his brother Tom Toles, a widely renowned political cartoonist. Meanwhile, Toles’s own affiliation with Maddin has gradually evolved from paternal mentor to fraternal cohort, but not without a bit of “sibling rivalry” along the way. In a more journalistic, early assessment of Maddin’s general aesthetic, originally penned shortly after the release of Careful, Geoff Pevere argues that Maddin depicts social forms and rituals as powerful but ridiculous in their compulsive and often cruel drive for order. The individual becomes alienated from his/her world and suffers a crisis of perception, often meeting a tragic end for following his/her instinctual desires beyond the edge of cultural prohibitions. For Pevere, the form of Maddin’s archaic and degraded aesthetic negotiates the social and personal destruction portrayed on the level of narrative, highlighting how social forms, including the rituals of cinema, are already fragile and decayed—potent in their effects upon the individual and yet subject to implosion when repressed urges and fears inevitably return. In his essay “Reinhabiting Lost Languages,” Will Straw differs with Pevere, positing that a thematic analysis based upon “Canadian” repression is difficult to establish in Maddin’s work, precisely because the director’s greatest influences are obscure filmic styles that have very little relevance to either a Canadian literary/cinematic tradition or the Canadian lived experience. Unlike other Canadian art, Maddin seems less concerned with repudiating the colonizing influence of other cultures (such as Hollywood) than with restoring grotesque violence and sexuality to archaic genres (e.g., fairy tales, nineteenth-century melodramas). Resisting essentialist readings of “Canadianness” in his films, Straw argues that Maddin’s inspirations are less national or regional than generational—a means of playfully reworking historical styles into a pastiche reflecting his generation’s memories of past cinematic forms. As a result, perhaps the most Canadian quality of his work is the privileging of “lost” cinematic languages as minor and marginal as Canadian cinema itself.

Introduction

For Steven Shaviro, Maddin does not so much revitalize archaic cinematic styles as empty them of their relevance, foregrounding their excessive semblance of antiquity. His films are not about restoring the past but forgetting the present; not about situating one’s unrequited desires in terms of what is or was, but within the virtual realm of what might have been. Although melodrama is transformed into camp as high feelings become absurdly impossible to realize in one’s present experience, the very impossibility of that realization allows the alienating effects of camp to be rendered strangely affective. In a rare appreciation of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Shaviro describes Maddin’s films as decadent spectacles that stimulate impressive affects but serve no functional sense of thematic expression. Visual excess does not motivate narrative excess in his work, but nevertheless allows extreme feelings to flourish beneath a thick patina of artifice. In his chapter “Maddin and Melodrama,” William Beard picks up from Shaviro, considering the tension between unironic seriousness and ironic distanciation in Maddin’s films. For Beard, however, Maddin’s idealistic use of archaic visuals and melodramatic plots is highly functional, providing the filmmaker with narrative forms particularly suited to his preferred stories: autobiographical yarns with the emotional content magnified to grotesque extremes by a childlike naïveté. Maddin’s visual excesses share the classical Hollywood melodrama’s need to sublimate unspoken emotional content into an excess of style—but unlike classical melodramas, Maddin’s self-consciously ironic formalism points toward the difficulty of expressing emotions in an innocent or authentic manner in a cynical postmodern age. Naive, excessive forms like archaic melodramas may allow Maddin to delve into a naive, excessive emotionality that seems strange and ridiculous to the learned adult, but this contradiction between emotion and irony reveals the more universal dilemma of how one should forcefully articulate one’s feelings when certain avenues of emotional expression have been culturally closed off. While the preceding essays are inflected by the prevalent view that Maddin’s films are fundamentally postmodern, David L. Pike offers an alternate reading that downplays the role of camp and pastiche, instead stressing Maddin’s lineage in the modernist aesthetics concurrent with the 920s films from which he draws so much inspiration. Recalling many modernist writers, Maddin’s childlike use of autobiography explores issues of decay and memory, glancing back toward an era in which his parents and cinema itself were still in their childhood. Pike claims that Maddin engages more with Hollywood

9

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cinema than perhaps any other major Canadian filmmaker, associating Hollywood with childhood memory in a way that allows authentic emotion to be experienced without the distractions of ironic distanciation. Like the Dadaists and Surrealists, Maddin uses primitivism to subvert bourgeois realism, collapsing together trash and art in his invocation of avant-garde and popular culture alike. In fine modernist fashion, Maddin eschews ideologies of progress, dredging up the untapped potential of outdated styles and technologies as he intertextually dissolves class-based distinctions of aesthetic quality without appealing to the ironic slumming so commonplace in postmodern culture. The next handful of essays examines a variety of personal and creative issues in Maddin’s work, including his oft-intertwined treatment of sexuality, humour, and emotional loss. Several of these pieces are written by Maddin’s long-time friends and collaborators who share intimate knowledge of the filmmaker’s creative process and working methods. For example, writing with an ear to the Freudian milieu from which Maddin’s work blossoms, Stephen Snyder revisits the geneses of Maddin’s first features, tracing them back to long days of watching movies in Snyder’s living room. From Buñuel, Maddin inherited a belief that sexual anticipation can produce far more imaginative energies than the actual consummation of desire. Perpetually reinvented, the individual is lost in his or her own self-images, and in the obscure objects of desire that must always evade one’s grasp. Outrageous fantasies of limitless male desire merely spawn limitless castration anxieties—but sexuality’s role as a transition into adulthood is never fulfilled in his films. For example, sexual inadequacy becomes represented as disease in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, while romantic dispossession of oneself finds expression in the multiple amnesias of Archangel. As if filming in Lacanian terms, Maddin’s syndromic depictions of sexuality are undergirded by an inability to use language for representing self-identity, alienating the individual from him/herself and others. In the next essay, Carl Matheson addresses the difficulty that many viewers have in narratologically interpreting or emotionally connecting with Maddin’s work. Comparing earlier films like Archangel to Maddin’s more recent, increasingly autobiographical output, Matheson discusses the push and pull between immediacy and distance in the filmmaker’s oeuvre as more applicable to the processes of dreamwork than to standard cinematic narratives. While the distortions and exaggerations found in dreams and

Introduction

nightmares account for the defamiliarizing effects of Maddin’s aesthetic, the recurrent themes of incest, and the wildly exaggerated character types, those same qualities also reveal the obsessive emotions and deep, irresolvable pain at the heart of (almost all) his movies. Moving from dreams to fairy tales, George Toles addresses his creative partnership with Maddin in the following essay, “From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin,” providing valuable insight into their respective writing processes. Fairy tale structures may allow them to rework certain autobiographical issues (though not in a wholly “safe” way), extending the discomforting sense of moral twilight and artistic ambiguity so pervasive in their work. Maddin and Toles do not presuppose a position of ethical superiority over their characters, instead sharing in their creations’ fears and torments. Comedy often springs from horrible situations in their films, ultimately reinforcing pain and making laughter a potential source of shame. Because fairy tales magically renew the sensation of being lost, one can easily forget oneself in such narratives as one’s emotional investments become blurred (but not emptied of affective meaning). Continuing on from Toles’s discussion of Maddin’s literary pedigree, the following chapters tighten their focus on specific films, with Milan Pribisic analyzing Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary as a “theatre film,” a hybrid filmic form that maintains a dialogic interplay between stage performance and cinema. Pribisic details the project’s development and the various transcodings of the Dracula mythology that occur between Stoker’s novel, Mark Godden’s ballet production, and Maddin’s film. By applying silent film aesthetics to ballet, Maddin blurs the lines between cinematic and theatrical audio-visual images, playing to the strengths of each medium without sacrificing the story’s literary origins. Expanding upon ideas earlier raised by Straw and Pike, Dana Cooley reads Maddin through Walter Benjamin’s belief in cinema’s “forgotten futures,” or the radical potentials for cinematically reconstructing reality that were abandoned with the commercialization of movies. Maddin makes advances in cinematic form by regressing in terms of historical practice, returning to an aesthetic of artifice and attractions. For Cooley, his films serve an allegorical function as (neo-)baroque art, foregrounding their own materiality and excess in such a way that we are forced to reconsider the artificiality of our cultural representations. As viewers, we are seduced by the tangled and

2

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unstable arrays of meaning in his films, invited to participate in a realm of self-reflexive play. The decay of memory looms large here, allowing Maddin to create a dialogue with the past in which alternate versions of his autobiography and our collective memories are made possible. Following the thread that Maddin’s work is a cinema that “could have been,” Darrell Varga’s essay “Desire in Bondage” reads Careful through Nietzsche’s writings on tragic art. Here the desiring body struggles to exceed the social discipline that prevents its fulfillment, breaking free from the cultural constraints of social realism and coherent subject positions. In the dreamlike spaces of Maddin’s film, the self can be ecstatically forgotten, and the viewer provided with tragic insight into the horror and absurdity of existence. Idealistic beliefs in rationality, realism, and utilitarianism fall away when existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon linked to the eternal nature of Dionysian art. Saige Walton explores Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! from a phenomenological perspective, returning to the concept of the baroque as she argues that the intertwined roles of artifice and affect in Maddin’s work are not so much symptoms of camp (as Shaviro argued earlier), but rather manifestations of the baroque’s presentational sensuality. Rather than searching for “authentic” emotional depths behind Maddin’s stylized surfaces, we should focus upon the potential of those gestural surfaces to contain and express inner emotions, folding together inside and outside, affecting our own viewing bodies as we unconsciously recognize the gesture’s meaning. The affective relations transmitted between bodies through deixis (a “pointing” via words or form) are reflected not only in the extreme expressiveness of his characters, but in the delirious movement and editing of the film surface itself, to which we instinctively respond on an emotional level. In the concluding essay, Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson examine how Maddin queers ideas of nationality in The Saddest Music in the World, inventing new national mythologies while undercutting the very bases for such mythologies, especially the heterosexual nuclear family’s relation to the nation-state. Maddin’s characters may perversely refuse restraint within a singular (national) identity, but their nostalgic drive for a lost sense of imperialistic heteropatriarchy is doomed to failure, leaving a survival of the queerest. Unlike earlier analyses of the film, the excessive female desires of the nymphomaniac Narcissa and androgynous Lady Port-Huntley receive ample attention as refracted symbols of Canadian national identity within a

Introduction

genre (the musical) wrested away from fantasies of American idealism. It is Maddin’s ever-idiosyncratic ability to engage past cinematic genres and styles in such politically and aesthetically meaningful ways that makes him one of the most important Canadian filmmakers, and a subject worthy of the essays contained herein.

Notes . Guy Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003), 87–88. 2. Guy Maddin, interview by Jeremy Smith, “Mr. Beaks gets to the root of brilliance with Guy Maddin—an absolute genius!” Ain’t It Cool News, 30 April 2004, http:// www.aintitcool.com/node/7448. Maddin’s statement recalls Paul Willemen’s suggestion that cinephilia is somehow necrophilic, in that it relates to “something that is dead, past, but alive in memory.” Paul Willemen, “Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered,” in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 994), 227. 3. Guy Maddin, interview by Caelum Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2000), 8. 4. His childhood is detailed in the autobiographical, Robert Musil-inspired film treatment The Child Without Qualities (written in 992), published in Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 76–208. Many episodes from this treatment have become manifest in Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg. 5. “What loving and vigorous play these toys and couches had been submitted to before the CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES had entered the world. Now, as a result, a residue of better quality seemed to sit on everything in the deserted house. The house held a dormancy, a potential to divulge what it held for his family before. Every object in it was full and ready to discharge its payload of history. The CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES was permanently expectant. Everything seemed ready to move forward, at any moment, back into the time of its heyday.” Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 87. 6. Ibid., 52. 7. Maddin, interview by David Church, “Dissecting the Branded Brain: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Offscreen 0,  (January 2006), http://www.offscreen.com/ biblio/phile/essays/branded_brain. 8. Ibid. 9. Maddin, interview by Marie Losier and Richard Porton, “The Pleasures of Melancholy: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Cineaste, Summer 2004, 22. 0. Maddin, interviewed in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 32. . “Sex is a stupid little jab of the needle, an anaesthetic that becomes, quickly, less and less effective with each application,” he writes in his journals. “But how it has worked to local effects when my grandmother, my father, and my aunt all died. One could almost surmise that sex kills loved ones, but this is no more true than a notion that anaesthetic cuts open the chest.” Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 45. 2. The Surrealists’ love of primitivism was a major influence upon Maddin. “The most exciting movements in art in the last century and a half have been reactions against

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 20. 2. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 3.

technical sophistication and have gone ‘backward’ to find honesty and truth, the essence of things,” he once explained. Guy Maddin, interview by James Quandt, “Purple Majesty: James Quandt Talks with Guy Maddin,” Artforum International, Summer 2003, 60. Guy Maddin, interview by Mark Peranson, “Count of the Dance: Guy Maddin on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary,” Cinema Scope, March 2002, 6–7. Guy Maddin, interview by Robert Enright, “Far From the Maddin Crowd: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Border Crossings, July 990, 39. Maddin, interviewed in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 45. The book Gimli Saga (Gimli, MB: Gimli Women’s Institute, 974), a historical chronicle of “New Iceland” compiled by a local townswomen’s guild, read like a humorous catalogue of misfortunes to Maddin, proving inspirational while writing the film. Ibid., 98. He says, for example, “I like to look at certain women from the past in movies. And it’s also a matter of their inaccessibility—the keyhole stuck in the door that’s seven or eight decades thick makes them very alluring to me.” Guy Maddin, interviewed in Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 2. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 59. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 87. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 58. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Enright, “Far From the Maddin Crowd,” 36. Childhood remembrance stories are among his favourites. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 8. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 60. According to Maddin, interview by Robert Enright, “Chicken Soup for the Stone Baby: Interrogations for an Autobiography,” in Guy Maddin, Cowards Bend the Knee, ed. Philip Monk (Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003), 44–45. Geoff Pevere, “Guy Maddin: True to Form,” Take One, Fall 992, 9; reprinted in this volume (53). More recently, Steven Shaviro has fittingly described Maddin’s films as “hauntological,” invoking Derrida’s term for spectral traces of an ungrounded, nonoriginary past that persists in the present, challenging chronological historicism and ontological binaries (such as being/non-being and presence/absence). For Shaviro, Maddin “seeks to present to us the reality of the past: which is to say, not the past as it really was, but the past as past, the past as a memory, the actuality of the past as it is re-called or re-presented, rather than actually present.” Steven Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!” The Pinocchio Theory, http://www.shaviro.com/ Blog/?p=589. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Enright, “Far From the Maddin Crowd,” 39. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 78. Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 76. “When melodrama isn’t working, I crave irony. If the sweetness isn’t working, I need something savoury, something very salty or something horrible, caustic to undermine it.” Guy Maddin, interviewed in Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 58. Steven Shaviro, “The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions,” Criticism 46,  (2004): 32. See also Shaviro’s essay in this volume. Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 09.

Introduction

32. While Maddin claims that educated Westerners cannot properly recognize melodrama until it is imported, the same could be said of his own work, given how frequently US and European critics implicitly link his Canadian heritage to his films’ strangely melodramatic (or just plain strange) content (Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 77). The sense of uncanny familiarity, yet apparent foreignness, of “Canadianness” in the reception of Maddin’s films is perhaps linked to his nation’s neurotic “Third World” status as a country perceived as neither fully American nor British. See W.J. Keith, “Third World America: Some Preliminary Considerations,” in Studies on Canadian Literature, ed. Arnold E. Davidson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 990), 5. 33. Mark Jancovich, “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital, and the Production of Cultural Distinctions,” Cultural Studies 6, 2 (2002): 30–3. 34. Moya Luckett, “Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: The Films of Doris Wishman,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, eds. Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andy Willis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 54. 35. For example, Johann’s severe anxieties about spying on his mother in the bath (Careful); or Brent Neale’s character cutting himself and transforming into a woman after peering at a rival for Snjófridur’s affections (Hospital Fragment); or even how viewers had to crouch to view the peephole installation of Cowards Bend the Knee. 36. A synopsis, excerpt, and storyboards from the project were published (with an introduction by Meeka Walsh) under the title “Dikemaster’s Daughter” in Border Crossings, Fall 997, 34–4. An episode from The Dykemaster’s Daughter was also filmed as the 994 short film Sea Beggars. 37. Maddin, interviewed in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 5–53 and 83. 38. According to a 996 journal entry, in Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 2. 39. Ibid., 22–23. 40. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Church, “Dissecting.” 4. Guy Maddin, interview by William Beard, Conversations with Guy Maddin (Edmonton: Metro Cinema Society, 2007), 5–6. Reprinted in this volume (255). 42. Mark Peranson, “The Mouthwash of the Past,” The Believer, August 2003, 5–52. 43. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Peranson, “Count of the Dance,” 8. 44. Guy Maddin, interviewed in Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 205. 45. Brand was primarily inspired by the quarrels between Maddin’s mother and teenage sister, which “seemed really melodramatic in everyone’s sense of the word when they think of melodrama as completely uninhibited expressions of emotion. These fights had a lot of fireworks and they got pretty surreal.” Guy Maddin, interviewed in Church, “Dissecting.” Many smaller personal details became refracted into the story as well; for example, see Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 53–54, 94–96, 25, and 222. 46. J. Hoberman, “Kino Kink,” Village Voice, 0 August 2004, http://www.villagevoice. com/film/0432,hoberman,55796,20.html. For example, Maddin’s allusions to movements like Surrealism and Soviet Montage are melancholy dreams for an avant-gardism that could successfully stir the masses, not just find bourgeois admirers.

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MY BROTHER’S KEEPER: FRATERNAL RELATIONS IN THE FILMS OF GUY MADDIN AND GEORGE TOLES

donald masterson

Early on in the imagining of Guy Maddin’s first widely acclaimed film, Careful (992), the filmmaker faced a dilemma. He knew he wanted to recreate an old genre, in this case the German Alpine movie, as the next instalment in his ambitious plan to re-envision cinema history. George Toles, his collaborator, boldly ventured the idea of a pro-incest film. Maddin, not one to miss a chance to trouble his audience, agreed. Yet, after several discussions and initial drafts, he “didn’t really like where the plot was going.” Nothing was resolved until he intuitively grasped the potential of a term Toles casually used to describe life in an avalanche-prone village: “careful.” The film that developed from the meeting of these two fertile minds has been described as a “romantic kitsch hybrid,” “a confounding, disturbing, and visually brilliant” work, and for some, quite simply, “an unwatchable movie.”2 Careful, as do most of Maddin’s subsequent films, evidences all these features and more. By now it has become commonplace for commentators to recognize the technical virtuosity, broad cinematic reference, and quirky sentimentality that have become Maddin signatures. Certainly, these elements deserve more attention as Maddin’s work finally receives the critical attention it deserves. But my concerns in this essay are more basic. I want to insist that

My Brother’s Keeper 27

it is long past time to foreground the creative collaboration between George Toles and Guy Maddin. This ongoing partnership produced the stunning feature Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), a film that both men regard as their best work thus far. Perhaps this triumph results from a twofold resolution: Toles and Maddin have at last achieved a brotherly equilibrium in their collaborative dynamic. This resolution could well have resulted in part from each artist’s deliberate and determined work on their own life-long family issues as enfolded into their films. At one time or another, each family member takes centre stage in a Maddin film. My discussion, however, will be anchored in the vibrant interaction of brothers. Characters such as Johann and Grigorss in Careful, Chester and Roderick in The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and even Guy Maddin and his own brother Cameron in the recent My Winnipeg (2007) challenge audiences to come to terms with the fraternal harmony and discord in these films. Clearly, then, knowing the dynamics between the “brothers” Maddin and Toles, as well as those between each artist and his actual brother, offers crucial insight into the unique cinema they have created.3

The Beginnings of Collaboration When an artist as much given to irony as Guy Maddin speaks unequivocally, what he says should be carefully noted. On his friendship with George Toles, he remarked: “He led me to undeserved delight.”4 That process began in about 980, when Maddin was a bewildered young man of twenty-four, recently divorced and working as a bank teller. He found his way to Toles’s film classes at the University of Manitoba and hung out with Toles’s circle of friends, watching “lots and lots of movies.” When Maddin realized that he had “gotten a degree without reading,” Toles stepped in and gave him “a guided tour through the world of literature.” Even now, Maddin admits that “when I read a book, I hear it in his voice.” As their relationship developed, a remarkable exchange occurred. Maddin’s intuitive creativity was bolstered by theoretical and historical frameworks provided by Toles’s intellectual guidance. Conversely, Toles, as Maddin recalls, “thought he was locked into the critic mode for the duration of his life.” Yet the mentor soon discovered that by indulging in “goofy” little co-authored pieces with Guy for the university newspaper, he too had access to imaginative delight. Working in a cultural outpost such as Winnipeg also proved advantageous for these two artists. Since both were “really groping” for ideas, they eventually decided to “invent moviemaking from the beginning.” Before this project could proceed, how-

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ever, Maddin and Toles had to come to terms with their fundamental artistic principles and settle on each other’s role in their filmmaking process. Without question, the Maddin/Toles reinvention of cinema, especially their nostalgia for the silent screen, is what initially distinguished them from other experimental filmmakers. For over twenty years, this duo has played with old genres, all the while chasing their dream of making a feature-length silent film. They hoped to recreate the ambience of a 920s production, while also making explicit certain issues that could only be suggested in that era. Brand Upon the Brain! has seemingly fulfilled this dream. Maddin, an artist typically ill at ease with his own work, admits that he is “very pleased with it,” but adds dryly that “for the first time in my life, the walk-out ratio is really low.” This accomplishment notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to conclude that the apparatus, the ambience, or any other technique of silent film (or even of film in general) are Maddin and Toles’s primary concern. Years ago, Maddin declared: “The only real themes that matter to me are how humans love each other or hate each other or are envious of each other. All the timeless stuff.”5 Toles approaches this issue from a slightly different angle. Speaking of one of his notable contemporaries, Atom Egoyan, Toles observes that “he’s too cerebral, he’s too distant. There’s always idea first and other things after.”6 Those “other things” for Toles—an academic always wary of being dominated by ideas—is feeling, all the “timeless stuff ” that he prefers to call “sentiment.” Foremost then in the Maddin/Toles cinematic agenda has been the rehabilitation of feeling, of sentiment, in an era of too often uncontested irony and the supremacy of style. The timeless residence of humankind’s most powerful feelings lies within the family, invariably the location of a Maddin film, and his first three movies serve to illustrate this point.

Maddin’s Apprenticeship Like many novice artists, Maddin started with material close to home; in this case, bittersweet dream visitations from his recently deceased father provided the material for his first film, The Dead Father (986). Maddin describes his effort as a “garage-band film poem,”7 but his visions needed a framework. Already Maddin was tinkering with techniques gleaned from silent films, mainly Erich Von Stroheim’s, and from Surrealists like Man Ray and Luis Buñuel. His reading of the Polish Surrealist Bruno Schulz strongly influenced him as well.8 The Dead Father evolved slowly as Maddin took great pains over a three-year period to create a challenging but accessible work, though his

My Brother’s Keeper 29

audience found it unbearable. What many considered a failure, George Toles, not surprisingly, found encouraging. He remembers that “many, many people had no idea what Guy was up to,” but he thinks this response is caused by the “false barriers” most people put up against an honest recognition of a common experience when a loved one dies. They return in our dreams, “making curious requests ... they have unfinished business. Is this not at some level what everybody knows?” In the particular instance of The Dead Father, the shared experience of Maddin and Toles with their own emotionally distant fathers surely made them more keenly attuned than most to the situations in the film. Toles recalls, “My father lived in the house, but in some ways he was like Guy’s dad, in that getting his attention was nearly impossible. Our shared image of fathers ... the turned back.”9 Having Toles as a mentor was crucial in sustaining Maddin in these early years. Granted, Maddin also relied on a group of friends and fellow Winnipeg artists that he tagged “the Drones,” with whom he created his first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). But during the time he laboured as a house painter to pay the bills, made “Gatsby lists,”0 and suffered the indifference of his more successful contemporaries, Maddin’s creative energy was mainly encouraged by Toles, his “guru,” his partner in feeling. While not yet a collaborator, Toles supervised the production of Gimli Hospital, a film that has since become a cult classic. Much commentary has been offered on Gimli Hospital, and I need not add to it here. It is enough to say that Maddin remembers how, during its making, Toles’s “word was law to me.” Archangel (990), his next feature, was the first on which Toles fully collaborated on the screenplay. Members of the Drones also worked on the project. As with Gimli Hospital, Archangel has attracted much critical attention, much of it directed to the film’s broad cinematic references. Set in Russia shortly after the First World War, Archangel is richly suggestive of the great Russian filmmakers contemporary to that era. Nonetheless, attentively watched, the film reveals its highly personal nature. Apparently, for Toles and Maddin, deep feeling was still foremost. Unfortunately, the film also had a “high walkout quotient,” and Maddin remembers that audiences were “lost and bored.” As a result, he and Toles made sure that for their next film, Careful, “we had a script as clear as the mountain air.”2

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Brotherly Love / Sibling Rivalry As has been said, Careful is a breakthrough film. An instant hit for a host of reasons, perhaps the film’s most successful feature was its coherence. As we have just seen, Maddin and Toles now fully understood the problems inherent in their idiosyncratic style. Careful may not be as “clear” as Maddin claims, but its visual brilliance is never undercut by gratuitous byways in the screenplay. That script offers all the “timeless stuff ” mentioned earlier: thwarted love, intense family rivalries, incest, suicide—what one review called “a Freudian wasp’s nest.” At the centre of these conflicts lies the rivalry between Grigorss and Johann, two brothers alienated by mutual love for Johann’s fiancée Klara. Much darker issues emerge as Johann’s incestuous desire for his mother ends in his melodramatic suicide. Remember that Careful originated with Toles’s penchant for disturbing audiences with troubling issues—in this case, incest. Clearly, Toles’s strategy requires audiences to navigate difficult emotional terrain, but so must he and Maddin. Johann and Grigorss stand for the love, frustration, and sorrow that both Maddin and Toles admit to having felt for their own brothers. Add to this observation the additional complication that the Maddin/Toles relationship was moving from mentor/student/father/son to collaborator/partner/brother, and it is readily apparent why we need to hear what each has to say about their brothers. Other than the death of his father, the single most traumatic event in Guy Maddin’s early life was his brother Cameron’s suicide. The act itself was as melodramatic as any in a Maddin film: Cameron shot himself on his girlfriend’s grave. Maddin admits that “the death of my brother looms large in my movies ... I can trace the influence back to a specific moment.” That moment was the immediate aftermath of his brother’s death, when at age seven, he sat on his Aunt Lil’s lap and was told: “Your brother Cameron has decided to go to heaven to be with his girlfriend Carol, and they’re going to be married and they’re going to be very happy.” Told to him as a kind of fairy tale, this terrible news would be obsessively reshaped time and again in Maddin’s imagination. Sometimes this event took form as a gesture of love as found in the German romantic novels Maddin read. In others, it took shape as haunting apparitions. Not surprisingly, the incident resurfaces indirectly in his films. Some might consider this process a healing action, but Maddin disagrees: “Rather than a working through, I’ve just submitted myself to a species of aversion therapy.” As unpleasant as it is for Maddin the fifty-year old man still burdened by such memories, Maddin the artist still profits from them. Now more than fifteen

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years after Careful, he acknowledges that in his latest film, the documentary My Winnipeg, he is for the first time explicitly discussing his relationship with Cameron. He has in fact gone so far as to find an actor who “looks like a fucking clone of my dead brother.” But Maddin insists that neither bitterness nor sibling rivalry are in any way a part of Cameron’s emotional legacy. In fact, in a journal recounting a visit to his brother’s grave a decade ago, he writes of “all that love lying latent in the earth,” and adds, ‘“He’ll be back!’ as I predicted the day he died.”3 What then of the tension between Grigorss and Johann in Careful or the bitter rivalry between Chester and Roderick in the later film, Saddest Music? “That’s all stuff from George,” Maddin remarks. Before examining the manner in which Toles’s sibling issues are woven into the films with which he is involved, his shadowy presence in what is ostensibly a Guy Maddin film needs to be addressed. Remember, he was responsible for the core idea in Careful and wrote most of the screenplay. Nonetheless, he remained in the background, especially after Careful gained wide recognition. Toles has much to say about why this is so, acknowledging first of all that “I function best as a collaborator” because “I like to be attached to someone to share the creative risk, to be a little bit behind, a little bit shielded, a little bit protected.” He admits that this response may be due to the fact that, as an academic, he needs to have his “own impulses constantly checked and challenged.” Most tellingly, Toles admits that “what freed me up and added to the sense of invisibility is that, rather than writing for myself, I wrote as Guy Maddin.”4 Doing so insured that he would place the feeling before the idea. Clearly, Maddin’s own deep feelings for Cameron may well have given Toles permission to explore in his screenplays what seems to have been a genuinely conflicted response towards his own brother Tom. Tom Toles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post. While George offers that he takes “enormous pride in his brother’s accomplishments,” he also admits that at times he wants to “assert his original rights as an older brother.” He adds that he avoids even playful competitions with Tom because “I don’t like to lose.” At a deeper psychological level, George understands Tom as his “perfect complementary opposite,” his “twin-splitting alter ego.” As we shall soon see, Saddest Music presents the most complete cinematic integration of the rivalry of the brothers Toles, but the process clearly began with Careful. As I mentioned earlier, even cinephiles intrigued by Careful have difficulty watching the film, primarily due to the incest issue. Played out in two

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families, but explicitly shown only between Johann and his mother Zenaida, this trauma results in Johann’s self-mutilation and subsequent suicide. Until Johann’s obsession overcomes him, he and his brother are twin-like, sharing equally in day-to-day routines in hopes for their future as butlers, and, most important, sharing in their mother’s affection. But why incest? A comprehensive answer could well be that Canadian filmmakers have always been interested in pushing the limits in their portrayal of sexual practices. By the 990s, this risky business had informed a number of films. Atom Egoyan’s wistfully romantic love scene between a father and his teenage daughter in The Sweet Hereafter (997) serves as a case in point. Egoyan lamented that depictions of incest “had become banal and lazy.” He sought to create a dramatic situation in which “distinctions are blurred,” characters are “confused: guilt and responsibility are not easy to assign.”5 If one subscribes to Egoyan’s formula for dealing with troubled family dynamics, then Careful, released five years before Egoyan’s film, set the standard. By now, though, we know that Egoyan’s emphasis on ideas over sentiment was never the primary motivation for Maddin and Toles. Using a metaphor from Careful, Maddin acknowledges that, for both Toles and himself, “our mothers are bigger than any mountain in the world.”6 For two men so deeply bonded to their mothers as were these artists, it is hardly surprising that they would problematize this affection in service to their art. In doing so, Toles and Maddin can usefully be seen as projecting themselves into the film as the tortured brothers. Neither exclusively corresponds to Johann or Grigorss, just as the film blurs distinctions between guilt and innocence, love and revulsion, dreams and actuality. What makes Careful so memorable are these very tensions, all of which are left unresolved as the film ends. As usual, audiences are offered no easy answers from two artists driven to explore the darker regions of the psyche. Now it is time to step into the film to see how all these feelings are fashioned into cinema. As I have mentioned, the originating idea behind Careful was to reprise the German Alpine film genre popular in the late 920s and 930s. No doubt, Maddin looked to Arnold Fanck’s work, but probably settled on Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (932) for particular inspiration. A number of Riefenstahl’s characters and motifs suggest those in Careful. At the centre of The Blue Light is a white witch, but Maddin’s Zenaida is a more complex figure. At once motherly and sexually enticing, she sows discord everywhere. Years before, she had rejected her first child, Franz, because he “smelled” like her since-deceased husband, whom she loathed. Franz, mute and confined

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to a wheelchair, spends his days isolated in an upper room of the house. He personifies the effects of all the family’s twisted relationships. However, Johann and Grigorss, her pure and handsome sons, are lavished with affection. Almost indistinguishable from each other early on in the film, they obey all of the many strictures imposed in Tolzbad. One of the most significant sections of the film shows the two brothers playfully waltzing with Zenaida. Johann and Grigorss repeatedly cut in on each other to secure their mother’s embrace. Each seems happy to share her affection. Brotherly love, certainly, but perhaps not in the traditional sense. In her discussion of erotic triangles, Eve Sedgwick reminds us that women are often a medium of exchange for “cementing the bonds of men with men,” including homoerotic bonds.7 Clearly, trouble is brewing. Earlier, Johann has proposed to Klara, who seems to also have Grigorss’s attention. Later in the film, after Johann’s suicide, Grigorss will pursue Klara but gain no satisfaction. As I have said, love triangles are central features in a number of Maddin’s films, but this one becomes particularly wrenching in a subsequent dream montage wherein Johann envisions an erotically charged sequence ending with him conflating Klara and his mother as his love object. The plot has become thick, indeed. From my perspective, most of the essential issues in Careful are presented by the end of Part I. The rest of the film mainly plays out these tragic entanglements. These problems clearly take shape as Johann alienates himself from Klara by obsessing over his mother. His dead father appears to Franz as a Hamlet-like apparition, bemoaning Johann’s fearful condition: “His heart is full of sores. He dreams of his mother like a bridegroom.” But the mute and crippled Franz can do nothing, and neither can Klara. Johann scorns the purity of spirit which she had so valued in him. Even Herr Trotta, Klara’s sinister father, shows concern; serving as a narrator of sorts throughout Careful, he diagnoses Tolzbad’s collective illness. According to him, Johann suffers from “mountain fever,” a condition in which mountains are described in terms of women’s bodies, and “who can resist the temptation to climb upon them?” (Recall Maddin’s comment about mothers and mountains.) In one of the film’s many sadly ludicrous scenes, Johann hangs upside down in a passageway and spies on his mother in her bath, using a makeshift mirror. His passions now fired, he prepares a love potion for her and visits her later as she sleeps, in a scene that encapsulates why Careful is so disturbing to many. Picture this: Johann approaches his mother’s bedroom in silhouette, pruning shears in hand. He cuts away Zenaida’s nightgown with the shears, caresses

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her body with his right hand, and sucks on her nipple. Child, lover, rapist, and would-be mutilator all at once, Johann is immediately overcome with guilt. Those feelings are rendered even more powerful when his mother moans his name in her sleep as a lover would. Yet this emotional agony is insufficient for Maddin’s purposes. Johann burns his offending lips with a hot coal and severs the fingers of his now-blighted hand with the shears. In his tortured mind, even brutal self-mortification cannot expiate his sin. He climbs a nearby peak, leaving a bloody trail, and leaps off the mountain. His cry, “Forgive me, mother,” echoes down the mountain as he falls to his death. Melodramatic, certainly—but understandable if we recall that several shaping events in Maddin’s life, especially his own brother’s death, were also theatrical. All of this pain would have overcome audiences, I think, and Maddin’s dreaded “walk-out quotient” would have remained high, were it not for the visual irony that he and Toles employ. We cannot help but laugh at Johann the voyeur, suspended like a bat. What about his bubbling love potion, concocted in a makeshift laboratory? Then there is the ridiculously outsized shears. Finally, in a definitive Maddin gesture, Johann carefully closes a gate behind him as he walks to his death, a move Grigorss mimics even as he pursues his desperate brother. Nevertheless, it would be a serious mistake to conclude, as many have, that for Maddin, irony is paramount. Toles comments on this point: “For years people would say about Guy’s films, ‘Isn’t it all about satire and irony? Aren’t they all stylized in a way that would make feeling the last thing that seemed really at issue?’” Toles adds that such sceptics usually prefer to address what he calls Maddin’s “postmodern parasitism on earlier forms of cinema.” He insists that such approaches miss the issue that most matters, and he echoes what we have heard him say before, that “feeling is central to the whole enterprise.” Perhaps this most convincingly explains why viewing a Maddin film can be so taxing for serious-minded people. Toles explains the process: “You are involved in shared risk, going inside yourself and locating these ghostly filaments of connection and confusion that make up the strangeness of a place you thought you had a map to.” Describing this experience another way, Toles calls it “the defamiliarizing effect that is basic to nearly all authentic art experiences.” This term was coined by Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky who, like Toles, is a theorist deeply committed to feeling, as a line from one of his novels attests: “Love is like the nails used to pierce hands.”8 To paraphrase Shklovsky, art may be technique, but its substance is always the sometimes overwhelming calculus of relationships.

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After the stunning success of Careful, Maddin did not quite become a household name, but he was no longer just an art house hero. Unfortunately, successful projects did not immediately follow. As a result, Maddin and Toles decided to try their hand at short films, making five between 993 and 997. All might be best described as interesting curiosities. A full-length feature, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, followed in 998, but it too was problematic compared to Maddin’s earlier successes. What did work in Ice Nymphs was Toles’s hilarious high-camp script. On Toles’s writing, Maddin observes, “It’s exactly the kind of humour I like: it doesn’t go begging for laughs, but is based on long, carefully articulated, and grammatically correct sentences ending in a surprising, delightful and mischievous way.”9 This marriage of Maddin’s visual genius and Toles’s language artistry gave birth several years later to remarkable films such as Saddest Music and Brand Upon the Brain! but sadly, their collaboration was interrupted for a time by a misunderstanding that is in itself worth some attention. Before moving on to Maddin’s much celebrated short, The Heart of the World (2000), I will examine the dynamics of this disengagement and reconciliation. Remember for a moment Maddin’s comments on his early relationship with Toles. To these I will add his most definitive statement: for Maddin, George was a “messianic leader of a cult of one.” Yet, successful collaboration over a long period is difficult to sustain under such circumstances. Maddin admits that “we have had some rough periods.” Toles is far more explicit. He allows that even though he considers Guy his “best friend for over twenty years,” that friend is nonetheless “one of the least knowable people in my acquaintance.” Toles adds that, for all of Maddin’s apparent openness on personal issues, “there are bulwarks behind his candour. You can hear 00 amazing tales from Guy and still not get down to the burrow of where you feel ‘Okay, this is where Guy truly and finally lives.’” Toles suspects that the reason behind such apparent guardedness is at once a problem in Maddin’s personal relationships, but also “where the creative impetus comes from in his movies.” Toles illustrates, “Guy can do, say, 7500 takes on his relationship with his mother without getting to the ‘figuring it out’ moment.” This obsessiveness “gets him back on the merry-go-round, speeds up that merry-go-round until he makes himself dizzy.” That dizziness, in both senses of the term, lies at the core of a Maddin film. As for their falling out, Toles can only speculate, but his gut feeling is that Guy “needed to kill me off as the too insistently present father/mentor figure. What he needed to do was make that amazing Heart of

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the World entirely on his own, and stand completely away from whatever we were doing as a pair.” Much has been written about The Heart of the World, Maddin’s short film described by one reviewer as a “pocket masterpiece.” Set in the early Soviet era, the movie is at once a frantic homage to Eisenstein’s shock montage style, a parody of Soviet agitprop, and, as Maddin says in the script’s preface, “A Melodrama of Intense Personal Anguish.”20 The film centres on two brothers: Osip, an actor, and Nicolai, a mortician. Both vie for the affections of Anna, a beautiful state scientist, setting up yet another family love triangle. In keeping with Maddin’s directions, Osip and Nicolai cram in enough suffering to sustain an epic. Osip appears as an actor in a passion play, exaggerating Christ’s agony beyond all proportions; no doubt his condition is a sublimation of his thwarted love. Nicolai is a darker figure. After his first appearance, he is shown slicing a cadaver and, in following shots, we see him loading bodies onto a conveyor. Burial is his obsession; salvation is his brother’s. Both are in what Bennet Schaber calls “the resurrection business,” noting that this is why his cinema students conflate rather than distinguish one brother from the other.2 Little wonder then that Anna cannot choose between them. Her dilemma is emphasized in a statement declared in bold incremental intertitles: “two brothers love the same woman.” In one of the film’s most engaging shots, Anna stares at the brothers, eyes flicking back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match, while an intertitle flashes “which one to choose?” Anna’s consciousness is further divided as the world suffers a heart attack. An astro-geo-cardiologist of sorts, she uses a telescope to diagnose the earth’s impending death. Another complication develops when Anna is further distracted by a fat capitalist (caricatured after the figure on a Monopoly board) who woos her with a trunk of gold coins. She succumbs, and, as the gold flashes, it looks almost like sperm. Osip and Nicolai realize instantly that they have been betrayed and freeze in mid-shot. The world senses their anguish and shudders in its death throes. We know, however, that in such films, the greater good must prevail. Accordingly, Anna strangles her bloated husband on their honeymoon, and then slides down the telescope to the earth’s core, becoming the glowing, healthy heart of a revived world. In this feature-length narrative compressed into five minutes through furious editing, Maddin’s characters cannot deliberate and posture as in his earlier work. Osip and Nicolai are frantic as they lose Anna. Like all of Maddin’s brothers, they are obsessively self-absorbed. Their only strategy in their quest for Anna is to

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impress her by pursuing their warped vision of life more intensely. They cannot share her larger social purpose and are, therefore, barely evident in the film’s apotheosis of the redeemed masses. Because its dazzling technique left audiences enthralled, The Heart of the World put to rest some of the serious doubts that Maddin harboured about his work. He could write, edit, photograph, and direct a successful film on his own. After about a two-year separation, Maddin and Toles renewed their collaboration at Guy’s suggestion. He asked for Toles’s advice on original material for what many regard as their most accessible film, The Saddest Music in the World. George remembers: “Before I even looked at it, I was determined that it was going to appeal to me because I really wanted to work with Guy again.” He adds that “before long, we were off and running again.” Taking the long view, Toles reflects on his work with Maddin: “There was a long fatherly phase. I would say now it’s more fraternal.” Why did Saddest Music make its way to the shelves at Blockbuster unlike any other Maddin film before or since? Perhaps it owed its appeal to its leading lady, Isabella Rossellini, an actress with an international reputation. It could have been the film’s conventional narrative, a script based on novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s original screenplay. Possibly its tongue-in-cheek use of 930s genres, such as the extravagant musical and the newsreel, appealed to film buffs. More generally, Saddest Music recapitulated themes that Maddin fans had come to expect. Of course, all of these features contributed to Maddin’s main intention for the film: “to reach more people.” But the plan for doing so had to be carefully formulated by Maddin and Toles. Incredibly, much of the initial outlining was done in one long phone call. Toles recalls that after this initial discussion, he “massively reworked” Ishiguro’s screenplay, a scenario that was “steadfastly solemn.” Toles introduced most of the surrealistic situations and all of the zany characters. Many assume that the wonderful silliness in Saddest Music comes mostly from Maddin, but Toles is actually responsible for much of this child’s play. When writing, he often regards himself as “an eternal eleven-year-old,” which gives him licence to be “extreme, excessive, and just larky.” Maddin’s film treatment refocussed the narrative from Ishiguro’s contemporary London to Depressionera Canada, allowing him to continue his project of retro filmmaking and also introduce issues of both personal memory and Canadian identity. Maddin recalls the very beginning of that phone conversation: “Right away it started with brothers.” Toles adds that, in Ishiguro’s original text, “one character

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bore some resemblance to Roderick, but there was no Chester figure—not even a remote parallel.” From this point, the partners decided to return to a favoured device, the love triangle. As Maddin notes, “We are always looking for the third part of the triangle.” In this case, they created two, both involving Roderick and Chester, thereby setting up profound fractures of fraternal and paternal relationships. As we have seen, the originating influences for such conflicts admittedly come from these artists’ family backgrounds, but in Saddest Music, these sources mainly spring from Toles. Reflecting on Chester, the protagonist in Saddest Music, and Roderick, his brother and foil, Toles notes: “These characters are versions of my brother and myself. I think I have Chester’s agreeable but sometimes wearying cheerfulness, even euphoria, and his can-do attitude, but also a kind of brittleness that can go with that.” Roderick, it seems, was to some extent drawn from his brother Tom. A dark, Poe-like character, whose ridiculous morbidity carries much of the film’s humour, Roderick is a deeply depressed hypochondriac. Toles cautions that “Tom is not really in any sense a hypochondriac, but he was prone to illness and a kind of depression.” Fleshed out in Toles’s screenplay, the brothers offer a fascinating dynamic. Each shares the same woman, Narcissa, Roderick’s lost wife and Chester’s current mistress, creating the familiar love triangle mentioned earlier. Chester denies his emotions, especially sadness, which he describes as “just happiness turned on its ass.” For him, all life is showbiz, and people are simply actors to be manipulated in a musical production. Roderick, on the other hand, is beset by nostalgia and remorse. Wearing a black veil and a dark cape, he is literally shrouded in sadness. In one of Maddin’s most macabre gestures, Roderick is introduced holding a jar containing his dead son’s heart and his own tears. Meanwhile, Chester the huckster schemes to regain the affections of Lady Port-Huntley, his former mistress, and then win the prize money for the world’s saddest song. He represents the first genuinely proactive character in a Maddin film, initiating much of the action. But if Toles aligns himself and his brother with Chester and Roderick respectively, cannot these two also be understood as representations of a duality in Maddin’s own nature? At once a comedian and a moralist, Maddin fashions characters that help him define these roles for himself. Yet, as with everything Maddin does, these figures also call to mind classic cinema. Think of Chester as Jimmy Cagney in Footlight Parade (933)—or, better yet, Groucho Marx, the wacky, sardonic jokester whose humour is often heavy with truth. On the other hand, imagine

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Roderick as Max von Sydow, wandering through a desolate Bergman landscape. In this case, that desolate place is ‘“Winterpeg,’ that capitol of sadness,” the site of Maddin’s memories and a representation of things Canadian. Taking a comprehensive approach to Saddest Music, George Melnyk sees the film as “Maddin’s over-the-top treatment of nationality and global identity.”22 Speaking about his film treatment, Maddin addresses this question as he comments on his initial ideas for Chester and Roderick: “We’ll have brothers—one being pro-American like so many Canadians are; one can embrace old country roots, like the other half of the obnoxious Canadians.” In one of the film’s early scenes, the tensions between nationalities and personalities are nicely conflated. Chester’s father Fyodor, with whom he has shared a conflicted relationship with Lady Port-Huntley, responds to a question from Narcissa, Chester’s current mistress. She thinks Chester is an American, but Fyodor claims, “He may have the stink of America on him, but I assure you he is 00% Canadian.” That “stink of America” is personified in Chester’s prodigal nature—the charlatan, expatriate son who has lost the traditional values Canadians share. Roderick represents the “old country”: tiny Serbia, which still clings to its medieval past, just as Roderick does with his relics and mourning robes. Much is made throughout Saddest Music of the bitter conflict between the brothers: powerful America and tiny Serbia, fakery and truth, the present and the past, the libertine and the celibate, the man of action and one who falls into a coma of sadness. In a film that is ostensibly a musical, Chester’s genre is Tin Pan Alley. He loves big numbers, extravagant costumes, and, one of the film’s primary tropes: legs, legs, legs. Meanwhile, Roderick prefers lugubrious European music played solo on his cello. In Maddin’s previous films, sibling rivalry was nuanced, but Saddest Music gives us two bad boys who cannot keep from scrapping. Three times the brothers come to blows and have to be separated. Chester vows to “crush” his brother. Roderick, in a final confrontation laden with implications, mimes his brother’s murder, playing the assassin who shot Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia. Suggested in this fratricidal gesture are not only all of the conflicts just mentioned, but also the sad condition of the brotherhood of man. Roderick repeatedly reminds us that the archduke’s murder resulted in “nine million dead.” If we also consider that Maddin and Toles made Saddest Music shortly after the brutal civil strife had ended in Serbia and Kosovo, then it seems likely that the fraternal conflict in the film is indeed a weighty metaphor. Yet Maddin has always been the enemy of the unmitigated ethical statement.

40 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Remember, the moralist is also the comedian. Just so, each of the brothers’ fights look more like scuffles between the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges. Slapstick softens the film’s tragic elements and sets up the audience for its problematic final scenes. Of his two sons, Fyodor prefers Roderick, doing his best to alleviate Roderick’s sorrow over his son’s death and Narcissa’s desertion. Nonetheless, he uses Roderick as an agent to gain Lady Port-Huntley’s forgiveness for sawing off her legs. The beautiful glass legs he sends to her with Roderick are filled with the beer she hopes to peddle to desperately depressed Americans. No good can come of such a gift, even if it makes the elated Beer Baroness feel as if she is really a leggy beauty once again. Fyodor, the inept Canadian musician, fails in the contest, dies, and plops into the swimming pool of beer. Now Chester and Roderick are left to confront each other directly in the contest—but sadness prevails over contrived joy. Roderick’s screeching cello shatters Lady Port-Huntley’s glass legs as she performs in Chester’s number, and she is carried off the stage humiliated. The little guy defeats the impresario and is rewarded with Narcissa’s return, while Chester dies in the burning beer hall after being stabbed by Lady Port-Huntley with shards of her glass legs. A fitting ending? Perhaps. But Roderick, who thrives on nostalgia, cannot fully share his memories with Narcissa the amnesiac. Meanwhile, Chester finally has to admit to pain and sadness as he dies, but while he does so, he bangs out a wild arrangement of the romantic ballad “The Song is You” on a piano. No schmaltz for Chester, even when schmaltz is called for. Maddin’s final touch is to give Chester the film’s last words after the screen has darkened: “I ask you, is there anybody here as happy as I am?” The jokester, it seems, has the upper hand. But not so, says Toles. He claims that irony only rules if there is nothing in a work that “truly hurts.” Can we really argue with Roderick when, in talking about his life, he paraphrases Shelley: “There are too many thorns. I bleed”?

Will the Real Guy Maddin Please Stand Up? Many may remember a television program called What’s My Line? during which two guests impersonated a third person, all of whom answered questions from the panellists trying to determine which one was not an actor. Perhaps Guy Maddin, who admits to watching countless hours of tv as a child, saw the show. In any event, it should be clear from my discussion that he was fascinated by such identity games, especially those involving himself.23

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To some degree, this issue explains why, successful as it was, Saddest Music felt incomplete to him. He admits to being distracted by other projects at the time, but suspects the actual reason that he senses “something missing” in Saddest Music is because he “didn’t enter into it masochistically, autobiographically.” Apparently, he was learning a powerful lesson: “I needed to leave myself open to criticism. To create a cruel or self-pitying protagonist is too easy unless it is named Guy Maddin.” The main “distraction” during the making of Saddest Music was his work on Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), a remarkable experiment in which a series of short films were screened through peepholes in a gallery wall. Some called it Maddin’s peep show, but he labels it an “autobiography” and describes his creative process: “I took an autobiographical episode, examined as through a looking glass, then shattered the glass and rearranged the pieces.” The original episodes involved a cast of characters who were “complete facsimiles” of his family. As a consequence, he gave them the “gift” of being both “the real thing and the fake thing.” Maddin’s gift to countless numbers of fans was his next film, Brand Upon the Brain! wherein he felt the need to be more “straightforward and representative ... to put my own name on it.” As intimately personal as the film is, Toles again collaborated with Maddin in its making. Once again, the remarkable compatibility of these two artists became evident. Much has already been written about Brand. Almost all reviews of the film are praiseworthy. David Church’s comments are representative: “Not only is this one of the year’s best films, but it stands as perhaps the finest achievement of Guy Maddin’s oeuvre.”24 Audiences that attended the film’s openings in several North American cities were treated to an event more akin to a John Cage 960s “happening” than the typical first screening: a live orchestra, foley artists, an alleged castrato, and a celebrity narrator performing in accompaniment to Maddin’s first original, full-length silent film. In a typical Maddin response, he admits to being “very pleased” with Brand, but can’t help fixating upon a negative review in the New Yorker which blasts the film as “self-pitying.” In his usual enigmatic fashion, Maddin claims, “I was kind of glad to read that in a way,” but we need only recall his previous comments on self-pitying protagonists and necessary masochism to understand this response. Church, speaking again about Brand, emphasizes this point: “This is Maddin at his most masochistic—exposing his pained adolescent desires and private familial conflicts for all to see.”25 Maddin insists that these desires and conflicts were all grounded in actual events, and then given a mythic life

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in this emotionally capacious film. Child abuse, homoeroticism, incest, and gender troubles abound in Brand—all Maddin’s “timeless stuff.” Darragh O’Donoghue adds that Maddin’s work “affirms family relations as fraught and perverse.”26 Admittedly, I cannot do all these exquisite complications justice. Instead, I will shed some light on a small, dark corner of Brand that offers insight on the film as a whole while illustrating yet another variation on Maddin’s treatment of problematic fraternal relations. Among the children at the “Mom and Pop” orphanage run by Young Guy’s parents on Black Notch Island resides Little Neddie, described in an intertitle as a “little bundle of tics.” We learn that he was traumatized when he accidentally killed his older brother. This announcement occurs within a black mass conducted by Savage Tom, an archetypal bully whose primary victim is the quivering boy. Another intertitle shouts that Tom will “cut out Neddie’s beating heart” as a sacrifice. As innocent as the young boy seems, this scene clearly enacts a scenario of guilt and punishment. All of the fraternal turmoil poured into Maddin’s previous films overflows in this creepy episode. It apparently begins as child’s play, but ends only when a knife-wielding Tom is thwarted by Guy’s omnipresent mother spying from her lighthouse. Maddin places the scene in the film’s first chapter (of twelve), strongly establishing the film’s dark tone. He confirms that the film incorporates a number of his and Toles’s favourite concerns, especially noting “George’s obsession with his brother.” At the same time, he offers that Neddie also serves as a surrogate brother for Young Guy. Maddin adds that, in the broader view, Tom and Neddie stand for the “ruthless market forces” that govern children’s lives, recalling that during his boyhood he found himself in the middle of two friends, one stronger and the other wilfully weaker; Neddie was the figure of the “expendable” friend that most of us have known. Maddin concedes that he “axed” Neddie in the middle chapters of Brand only to bring him back to “tie up loose ends.” In my view, however, Neddie returns in the penultimate and most disturbing chapter not simply as a device, but rather as an essential element in the tangled narrative. In the third chapter, a now-terrorized Neddie creeps from the orphans’ quarters into Young Guy’s bed. The intertitle explains: “Neddie, terrified, afraid to sleep in the same room as Savage Tom.” Guy welcomes him—friend, surrogate brother, fellow victim, and, yes, even love partner. The apparently insignificant Neddie actually personifies many of the concerns Maddin and Toles continually explore. Of course, the homoerotic question raises a

My Brother’s Keeper 43

now-familiar issue, but Brand offers an even more challenging scenario in that it puts adolescent boys in this situation. Toles is convinced that “in Brand, Guy is telling as much as he currently or has ever known about sexuality.” Much of Maddin’s carnal knowledge is brought to bear during the spinthe-bottle scene in the second-to-last chapter. The foursome of Young Guy, Neddie, Guy’s sister, and Wendy Hale (disguised as her brother Chance) play the childhood game, but we realize that the fun is really foreplay. Earlier we witnessed Wendy and Sis entwined in a sexual embrace. Voyeur-like, Young Guy observes the pair and his troubles mount. He pines for Wendy, while having ambivalent urges toward her in her guise as Chance. In some fashion, Neddie serves to mediate between Guy and the two girls. They smother the little fellow with kisses, while Guy pouts and turns away. He longs to be the object of Wendy’s desire, but how can he possibly sort out his feelings when, at age twelve, he is entangled in a four-part affair? The morose, black-clad figure of adult Guy who appears as the film opens, accompanied by refrains from the narrator (“secrets, secrets ... the past, the past”), has prepared us to witness childhood suffering, but nothing quite like this. Wendy disappears. Sis murders her father and is eventually destroyed by her own greed. Guy is orphaned and leaves the island. But Little Neddie suffers the most gruesome fate. After Guy’s father is shocked back into life with jumper cables attached to his wife, this absurd Frankenstein-like scene is followed by one in which Guy’s mother prowls for more Nectarite to restore her. This substance, drained from the children’s brains throughout the film, is the perverse commodity fuelling the evil on Black Notch Island. Sold for profit and used as an aphrodisiac, Nectarite becomes an addiction for her. Searching for more, she captures Neddie and feeds on his body. Her ghoulish mouth (still dripping with blood as she is banished from the island shortly after) is among Maddin’s most powerful emblems of human depravity. Toles observes that “ferociously edited” scenes such as the ones just described can “induce a kind of hypnotic tripping” in audiences, further enhancing their power. As the film ends, the question remains whether the adult figure of Guy Maddin, standing naked on the lighthouse, will jump to his death or somehow redeem himself from his tortured past. But Maddin’s recent “documentary” My Winnipeg suggests that, for this artist, redemption may indeed be possible. My Winnipeg opens with a collage of newsreel footage showing frolicking citizens and Maddin’s own shots of Winnipeg’s bleak, wintry city landscape. A crooner sings: “Wonderful Winnipeg / It’s no Eden that you would see / but it’s

44 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES home sweet home to me.” Immediately we are presented with the film’s main themes: nostalgia for a past imagined as “sweeter” than the here and now, and a profound ambivalence concerning the narrator’s sense of place. A review of My Winnipeg quotes Maddin in labelling his work a “docu-fantasia,” and calls the film “a potent, highly personal blend of fact and fiction.”27 Ever the breaker of genre boundaries, Maddin, the one-time archivist, lays a factual foundation of sorts with newsreel footage and old photographs. Upon this framework he builds a narrative spine: Guy Maddin on a train, muttering “Winnipeg, Winnipeg, my home for my entire life. I must leave it.” Into this mix, Maddin adds re-enactments of public and private events, hoping that he can “film my way out of here.” As a true Winnipegger, he admits to being “always lost, befuddled,” a person who can “never really know anything for sure.” To ground himself, Maddin recreates episodes from his family drama, hiring look-alikes to play his mother and siblings. After years of mythologizing his personal issues, Maddin finally confronts questions of home and family in a bemused but nonetheless direct way. Apparently he needed to undertake this task alone. George Toles kept his collaboration to a minimum, merely contributing some of the re-enacted familial dialogue. At the centre of both Brand and My Winnipeg, we see Guy Maddin’s mother, the antagonist in both films. Brand is a mythic work, and so the mother becomes a sinister, larger-than-life figure. A harpy, a vampire, a ghoul clothed in domestic attire, she rivals only the father in her monstrous desires. In My Winnipeg, Maddin disposes of his father early on in his re-enactments, adding in an aside that his dad will appear only as an exhumed corpse hidden under a rug. But his mother, here more a nag than anything else, anchors these family episodes much as she must have done in real life. By all accounts, Maddin is a dutiful and loving son to his aged mother, but he obviously remains deeply conflicted about her in some realm of his unconscious. In the film, he softens his mother’s character through humour. She dialogues with the suicidal “Ledgeman” in one of the film’s hilarious episodes—yet we all know that suicide is no joke, especially for Maddin. That is probably why he sets these scenes in 963, the year of Cameron’s death. George Toles remains astounded that Maddin continually returns to a trauma in which his mother played a major role. Toles remembers that “the night after Cameron killed himself, she gave Guy his brother’s bed and said ‘This is your room now.’” But bitterness is not the legacy Maddin wants to leave us with in My Winnipeg. Rather, I regard it as his most affirmative work. Near its conclusion, a figure called “Citizen

My Brother’s Keeper 45

Girl” appears in order to “undo the damage.” She reprises Anna in The Heart of the World. All of the social and political wrongs that have occurred in Winnipeg history will be righted. Nevertheless, however qualified, the resolution that matters most to Guy Maddin is not a collective one. He confronts his past directly in a heart-wrenching tableau at the end of the film. In its final scene, just before My Winnipeg ends with a montage of old family photographs, Maddin gives us images of his mother embracing Cameron as they lie in the snow. Just above them is a fire hydrant, perhaps to suggest that the scene is set on a Winnipeg street (are they now homeless?). The haunting pose reprises a similar one near the end of Brand Upon the Brain! but this film is far more leisurely paced, and we are allowed to enjoy the pathos for a time. In a voiceover, Maddin wonders what effect his “home movie” had on his mother: “I don’t know what this experiment did to my mother. She really developed an attachment to my dead brother Cameron, gone these forty years, or at least for Brendan who played him.” Maddin cannot quite bring himself to present the scene as unmediated love and forgiveness between mother and son. He has to deflect his pain just a bit by suggesting that his mother’s affections may just be directed toward Cameron’s stand-in. Nevertheless, the dialogue is more straightforward and sincere: mother: It’s better between us. cameron: Yes. mother: Now that you’re gone. cameron: I didn’t use to like being this close. mother: Why? cameron: I just wasn’t comfortable. mother: And are you comfortable now? cameron: Mostly, I guess I am. This sequence could well be Maddin’s most painfully honest to date. Finally creating a long-overdue elegy to his dead brother, and at least trying to envision his mother as nurturing, the artist seems to be moving beyond nostalgia, beyond self-pity, and into a newfound reconciliation. Still, he remains bewildered: “Who’s alive? Who’s alive anymore? So hard to remember. Sometimes I forget my brother Cameron is gone. I forget my father is gone since I was twenty-one.” George Toles believes that Maddin, in moments such as these, “has hit a vein of visionary truth.” Who else would know better? Each

46 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES artist, as we have seen, gratefully acknowledges his debt to the other. In the very best sense, then, each is indeed his brother’s keeper.

Notes . Guy Maddin, quoted in Caelum Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2000), 76. 2. Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 87; Brian Bergman, “Maddin’s Madness,” Maclean’s, 23 December 2002, 50, quoted in George Melnyk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 94; Donald Masterson, interview with Bennet Schaber, Professor of Cinema Studies at State University of New York at Oswego, 0 November 2007. Schaber observes that, while his cinema students deeply appreciate other Maddin films, they have genuine difficulty with Careful because of the incest issue. 3. It is worthwhile to note that the “brothers” Maddin and Toles have expressed keen interest in the work of the Brothers Quay, especially their short film The Street of Crocodiles (986), based on the story by Bruno Schulz. 4. Donald Masterson, telephone interview with Guy Maddin, 2 June 2007. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent Maddin quotations will be from this interview. 5. Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 8. 6. Donald Masterson, telephone interview with George Toles, 2 June 2007. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent Toles quotations will be from this interview. 7. Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 34. 8. As noted above, Bruno Schulz’s work has figured prominently in Maddin’s thinking. He had just read Schulz’s novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass when he began planning The Dead Father. 9. The distant father with his back turned to the camera is a motif than spans the entire range of Maddin’s films from The Dead Father to Brand, where it is most dominant. 0. “Gatsby lists” is Maddin’s term for his obsessive plans for self-improvement written in his journals at the time he was developing his career. See Guy Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003). . Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 56. 2. Ibid., 69. 3. Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 24. 4. For additional insight into the Toles/Maddin collaboration, see Toles’s chapter, reprinted in this volume (44–58), “From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin,” in his A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 200), 39–334. 5. Atom Egoyan, interview by Richard Porton, “Family Romances: An Interview with Atom Egoyan,” Cineaste, December 997, 8–5. 6. Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 77–78. 7. Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 985), 26.

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8. Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo or Letters Not About Love (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 200), 20. Another expanding reference is in order here. Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (993), a film Maddin says he has seen “millions of times” and which George Toles also greatly admires (see his essay in A House Made of Light), is another brilliant family drama that makes significant demands on its audience. 9. Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium,  20. Ibid., 46. 2. Donald Masterson, interview with Bennet Schaber. 22. Melnyk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema, 98. 23. On the evening before Brand Upon the Brain! premiered in Toronto, Maddin appeared at a forum, apparently to be interviewed by a local film critic. Maddin passed on the interview and instead played a game in which various characters in old, often obscure films represented him at differing periods in his life. Hardly informative, the event was nonetheless entertaining. 24. David Church, “Ode to a Nectarite Harvest: On Brand Upon the Brain!” Bright Lights Film Journal 58 (2007), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/58/58brain.html. 25. Ibid. 26. Darragh O’Donoghue, “Particles of Illusion: Guy Maddin and His Precursors,” Senses of Cinema 32 (2004), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/32/ guy_maddin_precursors.html. O’Donoghue is not directly referring to Brand here, but to a number of Maddin films. His essay is a rich store of references to Maddin’s influences, cinematic and otherwise. 27. Alison Gillmor, “Home Truths: Guy Maddin Takes a Dream-Like Tour of Winnipeg,” CBC News, 5 January 2008, http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tiff/features/ tiffmaddin.html.

GUY MADDIN: TRUE TO FORM

geoff pevere

“There shall be dancing. Lower the sheepskin!” — Careful

Prologue: Toronto, 1988 In a small—real small—screening room in the former National Film Board offices on Lombard Street, the three members of the Toronto Festival of Festivals’ Perspective Canada selection committee are screening a short feature. Only seventy-six minutes long, the film is the first feature attempt by a thirtysomething Winnipeg filmmaker named Guy Maddin whose only previous short, The Dead Father, had been selected to appear in the 986 festival. The film is an exercise in low-budget, no-holds-barred strangeness called Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and shortly after it’s finished a vigorous debate begins. Among the committee members, reaction ranges from enthusiasm (“brilliant”) to indifference (“I didn’t get it”). Operating on a principle of unanimity or nothing, the committee eventually turns the movie down. It will be a decision that will contribute greatly to the developing renegade reputation of Maddin, and it will figure prominently in the discussion of his work as Gimli begins to build a modest cult rep in places like New York City.

True to Form

Practically every time he writes about the director, for example, Maddinbooster and Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman will invoke the Toronto rejection, perhaps as a means of indicating just how misunderstood Maddin is even in his own country, or perhaps as a means of indicating how un-hip the Toronto festival is. Whatever the reason, the incident ultimately works in Maddin’s favour. It ends up playing a key role in his burgeoning mythology as the country’s leading quirkmeister (and will be featured prominently in his press resumé), and it will certainly open doors. Two years later, Maddin’s second feature, Archangel, will be selected for the Festival of Festivals. In 992, Careful will also find a welcome in Hogtown. *

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“A memory strays into my head, famished and pleading…” —Careful Not merely one of this country’s impressive filmmakers, Guy Maddin may also be our most inscrutable. Cloaked in thickening layers of industrial noise and dust, the Winnipeg-based filmmaker’s work bears a sense of bargainbasement artifice like an unpolished metal, and constantly stresses its own status as a decaying material object. Proud as they are of their vaporous ephemerality, you could call Maddin’s films postmodern, which might suit their maker. If the term itself is obscure and off-putting, so—let’s face it—is Maddin’s aesthetic. Part of the frustration, not to mention the considerable power in the work, is precisely this: it seemingly works against interpretation, or at least strives to make interpretation as enticing a task as tackling the slippery ice-glazed cliffs in Careful. Since Maddin’s work dresses itself as garbage, one feels like something of a scavenger simply for wanting to pick one’s way through it. And since it fairly revels in its own status as cultural refuse, it seems so, well, uncool to take it seriously. Yet, take it seriously we must. For not only does one stand to learn a lot about a person and their culture from their garbage, Maddin’s garbage is infinitely more interesting and ultimately more ordered than most.

“It happened in a Gimli we no longer know.” — Tales from the Gimli Hospital

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Not, however, at first glance. On the contrary, approaching Maddin’s work initially feels like seeking order in a place where randomness and chaos rule, like an industrial compost heap. Yet, what impresses initially is the staggering thoroughness of the disorder, the delirious disharmony of formal and narrative elements, the near-sensual abandon to vulgarity and sloppiness, and the sheer exuberant amateurishness of it all. Beneath this one begins to discern, if not order—that will come only with repeated viewings—then its advance messenger, contradiction. For Maddin’s work, if nothing else, is a series of elements locked, much like the clumsy duels he loves, in the form of head-butting, dialectical opposition. If the films themselves often seem to be crackling and wheezing their way through the projector, and often feel as though they might melt or unspool at any moment, it’s tempting to read this as a form of diegetic self-immolation. Like the dumb, ritualized masochism so common to their worlds, Maddin’s films seem determined to tear themselves apart. Yet, to consider this apparent nihilism as just that is to miss something big indeed: a social order made pathologically neurotic not by disorder, but by a compulsive drive for order itself. Garbage perhaps, but garbage with a cause.

“It became apparent that my father wasn’t dead in the traditional sense.” —The Dead Father For example, while the honing of Maddin’s raw but immense talents in the short distance between 985’s The Dead Father and 992’s Careful is impressive, these loose-limbed narratives are decoys for an equally impressive consistency of theme. All tales of radical alienation (otherworldly as his muse may frequently seem, Maddin is nothing if not Canuck), each film hinges on a crisis of perception: namely the way the protagonist, usually played by the wholesomely bright-eyed but glazed Kyle McCulloch, comes to realize he’s got no idea what’s going on around him. Worse, there’s usually a lot going on. In The Dead Father, a dark, suburban Oedipal struggle in sitcom drag that fascinatingly anticipates the arch-familial intrigues of Careful, it’s a young man’s attempts to deal with the presence and demands of his inconveniently undead dad. It’s not that pop is reanimated that troubles the hero of The Dead Father; it’s that in death, as in life, he’s still such a hard guy to please. In Tales from the Gimli Hospital, it’s the crisis faced by Einar the Lonely, a troubled fish-smoker who finds himself, bedded alongside the immense

True to Form

Gunnar (Michael Gottli), incarcerated in the feral, barn-like confines of the Gimli Hospital. Ignored and feverish, Einar watches the comings and goings of the hospital with churning feelings of anger, confusion, and desire. In the film’s most pointed expression of Einar’s plight, the young man lets fly a bloodcurdling (if typically post-dubbed) scream and still fails to rouse the interest of the spectrally white-clad, lushly lipsticked nurses. Poor guy, he’s been sent for care in a place where no one does.

“Your father said he’d drive me to the aerodrome. Have you seen him?” “He’s dead.” “I can see that. Nothing seems to be going right today.” —Archangel Archangel, Maddin’s most complex, elusive, and dark film, also represents the most radical expression of this acute perceptual discombobulation. Amnesiac, one-legged, and suffering from mustard-gas delirium, Canadian army Lt. John Boles (McCulloch) limps across World War I-ravaged Mother Russia in search of a lost lover. Existing in a state where memory and impulse hold equal dominion, the tranced-out Boles is drawn from one tragic misapprehension to another. Roused occasionally to clarity by a fleeting sense of national duty, he can, like a sleeper dimly perceiving outside stimuli, just as easily collapse back into stupefied reverie. Not that he’s alone. In Archangel, which was released in Toronto almost simultaneously with the outbreak of the Gulf War, anyone seems capable of instantaneously losing grasp of any sense of whom, what, or where they are. In Lt. Boles’s shell-shocked world, either amnesia is catching, or that incessant, hypnotic bombing is strafing the surface of consciousness itself.

“I’m the one who struck you in the head with a rifle butt the other night.” “Really? I’d think I’d remember that.” —Archangel While Careful, Maddin’s first colour film (imagine Timothy Leary’s Munchkinland), is the director’s most approachable story (one hesitates to say accessible), it nevertheless remains in the murk where consciousness itself is a

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diminishing resource. Oedipal to the max, Careful suggests a community virtually built on the slippery precipice of misperception. Set in an archly generic village in the Swiss Alps (somewhere near the point where Heidi and Ibsen merge), the story follows the fated journeys of two brothers, Johann (Brent Neale) and Grigorss (McCulloch again), toward certain and utterly fatuous self-destruction. Staunchly loyal to both their mother and their vocation (they attend the Butlers’ Gymnasium, presided over by a wickedly thin-lipped Jackie Burroughs), the two men are exemplary citizens of what may be called Maddin’s world, a place where most forms of social, political, and religious organization, erected as they are on a creaking foundation of denial, are as ridiculous as they are powerful. In Careful, more than in any other of Maddin’s films, society itself is seen as a rather pathetic attempt to keep natural impulses at bay, a process which necessarily nourishes a walloping case of perceptual discord. For society to work at all—and, in Maddin’s films, it frankly doesn’t—everyone must agree not to feel what they feel, not to see what they see, and certainly not to say what they mean. Or, in Careful’s case, not to say much at all. In this mountain community, where animals have had their vocal cords severed to keep them quiet, even the slightest noise threatens to bring down an avalanche. Needless to say, a precarious arrangement, and one that demands both unremitting repression and constant vigilance for the ever-present possibility of snowbound apocalypse. In Careful, Maddin’s most refined and audience-friendly movie, the aware perish and the oblivious survive.

“Oh, Klara, you’re a wild one!” “So are the reindeer when summer is come.” —Careful In some ways Maddin’s work may seem yet another expression of that most careworn of Canadian narrative concerns: the individual chronically alienated from society. And to a certain extent it is. In their interest in people in a state of terminal withdrawal from their surroundings, or their delineations of cruel, indifferent social orders policed by the agents of repression and denial (not to mention their bad weather), Maddin’s films can be quite easily situated within what may rank as the predominant thematic tradition in English-Canadian movies. Tracing the line from the doomed teens and

True to Form

working-class losers of the sixties and seventies, to the more chicly deadpan disaffectation of Bruce McDonald, Atom Egoyan, or David Cronenberg, Maddin’s films can certainly be seen to belong to the persistent Canadian tradition of alienated individuals, or not at all. (Now, that’s alienation.)

“Strangled by an intestine!” —Archangel Part of the problem, of course, is that this tradition is deeply rooted in the discussion of theme, and theme in Maddin’s work is merely like jars of paint. Crucial to the picture, to be sure, but hardly the whole thing. First and foremost, what either impresses or repels you about Maddin’s work is its singular sense of form. Possibly the most stylistically inventive feature filmmaker working in the country today, Maddin makes films in which form isn’t merely reflexively foregrounded. He makes films that take the form (or forms really) as their subject. Thus, if his style strikes one as off-putting, there’s little recourse but rejection. Here, style is subject. Significantly, though, it’s not a matter of style deployed as a means of asserting authorial voice (as the chilly precision of Egoyan or Cronenberg suggest), or even as a way of establishing an ironic distance from the drama. If anything, Maddin’s use of form(s) serves to mute the presence of the filmmaker’s sensibility, to literally bury it (and us) beneath an avalanche of references, allusions, and the briefly reanimated corpses from film periods past. Steeped in the seemingly ancient conventions of silent films, operetta, Teutonic legend, and heroic mythology, and deploying images that evoke sensibilities ranging from James Whale to Andrei Tarkovsky, from David Lynch to Ed D. Wood Jr., Maddin’s films feel like the nocturnal fevers of some film-pickled collective unconscious, or like film history disinterred and unceremoniously plowed into a single heap. They seem less the product of a single imagination than of an entire culture’s. A culture that shares something fundamental with the lost souls who stumble their way through Maddin’s movies; a culture that’s having a hard time remembering who it is and where it’s been. Thus the luxuriant, disorienting feeling of déjà vu that one experiences watching these movies. They are at once dimly familiar and utterly strange. You know you’ve been there before, but have no idea when or even where “there” is.

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“I’m making gooseberry pie.” “My favourite! And a brimming mug of cow-warm milk to go with it.” —Careful Yet, as effectively weird as Maddin’s movies are, there’s much more at stake than weirdness. Apart from the considerable visceral impact provided by the director’s deft manipulation of long-buried conventions and codes, form is what the films are essentially about. In the same way that Maddin’s emphasis on the material construction of his films constantly works against any possibility of our immersion in their narratives (as if these flamboyantly phony narratives invite immersion by any but the most Boles-like among us in the first place), their constant hewing of our concentration to matters of form insists we consider the role and meaning of form itself. And I mean insists. Apart from the bargain-basement elegance of the jerry-built sets (Maddin’s films are almost entirely studio bound), the relentlessly non-psychologized performances, and the shimmering, high-contrast lighting and lenswork throughout, Maddin enlists a host of other means to keep us as emotionally distant from the dramatic spectacle as possible. Significantly, most of these have to do with the sheer mechanical nature of the processes of filmmaking and viewing: sudden jump-cuts that suggest missing frames; roars, hisses, and scratches on the soundtrack, as though the film we’re watching is as physically deteriorated as it is dramatically archaic. There probably aren’t five minutes of Maddin’s work that don’t contain some kind of jarring reminder of the sheer mechanical fallibility of the spectacle we’re watching. Call it Brechtian or call it postmodern (or call it, as many likely do, insufferable), but whatever you call it, it’s crucial—as crucial to Maddin as latex ick is to Cronenberg.

“Up into the dewy wreaths, above the snow shoulders, of Quilici…” —Careful Ironically, perhaps, the motivation for the constant material emphasis in Maddin’s work may be found in precisely those archly antiquated narratives the director seems hidebound to prevent us from suspending our disbelief in. While they are as arcane and elusive as lost or unfamiliar cultural languages

True to Form

inevitably are, there is a deceptive consistency to the ways the stories unfold. Drawn to stiflingly repressed cultures (a trait which makes him a loppy, distant relation to such specialists in freeze-dried spirituality as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, or Ingmar Bergman), Maddin’s films are fascinated with the often cruel and desperate means cultures employ to keep what terrifies them in check. In centring his stories upon individuals who have found themselves unceremoniously dislodged from the sphere of rationality, Maddin also tells stories of people who suddenly become aware of not only what a culture is working so hard to repress, but whose newly sprung desires unleash precisely those things whose containment a community’s survival may depend on. In The Dead Father, for instance, Dad’s bizarrely stubborn refusal to lie down and act dead is nothing less than unresolved Oedipal tensions between father and son sitting up and saying “We’re back!” In Gimli, the source of Einar’s delirium finds perversely displaced expression in the film’s climactic, penultimate buttock-clinching wrestling match between Einar and Gunnar. Archangel’s amnesiac Lt. Boles, possibly the most complex of Maddin’s characters, senses practically nothing of his past except a lost lover’s name (“Iris!”) and the abiding residue of profound patriotic duty. In other words, in the absence of any sense of history, personal or otherwise, Boles, like Ronald Reagan, finds refuge in the comfort of ritual itself. For him, playing soldier, fighting enemies, and making war is necessary precisely because it needs no explanation to be meaningful. Its meaning and its solace is its form.

“How sweet to die for one’s country!” —Archangel In Maddin’s work, generally form and ritual offer means of escape, and structure promises retreat from chaos. Much like those insistent reminders of the medium’s mechanical nature, ritual acts are everywhere. In Gimli, storytelling itself acts as a way of putting form to the psychosexual chaos that churns just below the characters’ dumbfounded demeanour, just as Einar and Gunnar’s bizarre buttock wrestle must be interpreted as a ritualized displacement of pure, frustrated sexual energy. In Archangel, war itself represents a form of structured, socially acceptable butchery. In one scene, Boles insists on whipping Geza, the young boy living in the barn where the soldier is billeted. Proclaiming that the meting of corporal punishment is man’s work, he takes up the task of punishing the boy (whose infraction has been minor)

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with barely contained relish. For Boles, the ritualized beating clearly offers temporary ventilation for buttoned-down impulses. Later, in a remarkable montage sequence scored to the distant thump of artillery fire, much is made of the latent association between war and male sexuality as Geza, frightened, climbs naked into Boles’s straw bed.

“Freighted with immense psychic history…” —Archangel Careful, Maddin’s most direct delineation of the social consequences of sexual repression, is not coincidentally the film most obsessed and rife with forms of ritual. Duels are fought with an absurdly correct observation of form; butlers attend a type of Marine boot camp; and, in a very funny sequence, even tables are set with fascistic precision. Even in the moments when what is repressed threatens to erupt—as in the primal Oedipal moment when Johann threatens to ravish the mother he’s just doped senseless—form and ritual prevails. Having laid her out with a violently violet “love potion,” Johann creeps up on her slowly with an enormous pair of sheep shears, and with excruciating deliberation (enhanced by amplified sound of fabric slicing on the soundtrack) proceeds to snip his way through her bodice. So repressed and ritualized is Johann’s dementia, it can’t even express itself spontaneously. Later, in a scene that would do Luis Buñuel proud, after Grigorss effectively seals his doom by killing a nobleman in a duel, the distraught young man carefully and senselessly lays the corpses of freshly shot geese in two symmetrical rows. Maddin’s world is thus a world where form itself is an act of desperation, our conditioned means of keeping natural but disruptively anti-social impulses safely (or so we think) beneath the surface, and of keeping acts of individual desire within “community standards.” It’s the order we give to chaos, the thin envelope of “civilization” we wrap around our otherwise animal natures. In Maddin’s world, not only is the process dangerous and absurdly funny, it’s also hopeless. If the fragile social orders of his films ultimately prevail, it certainly isn’t due to any innate integrity, but to sheer stubborn obliviousness. Eventually, the snow will come tumbling down, and the bombs will find their way to our straw beds, because the means we’ve devised of shutting out what we fear merely makes those fears stronger. Which, whether you swallow this world view or not (and I do), certainly pulls all that other formal stuff, the stuff of filmmaking itself, into somewhat

True to Form

sharper focus. In the same way that the stories told in Gimli act as a way of structuring chaos, so the medium of movies itself has provided an incalculably important function of displacement and denial in twentieth-century culture. In Maddin’s films, when we think of movie “form,” we must not only think of the material conventions of filmmaking, but of filmmaking as a “form” of social ritual, as a way of processing what terrifies us into safer, more familiar and socially acceptable “forms,” a kind of table setting over our psyche. Thus, if Maddin’s films seem to emphasize the fragile, constantly deteriorating nature of their medium, if they seem as if they might spin off the projector at any moment, they’re doing more than having a postmodern good time. They’re reminding us of the forms we use to keep chaos at bay and how thinly stretched they are across the face of our own fears.

“Lower the sheepskins. We’ll have music!” —Careful

Postscript: Toronto, 1991 I am contacted by Greg Klymkiw, a long-time Maddin associate and Winnipeg-based independent producer. He wants me to take a look at Maddin’s script for the proposed Careful and offer my comments. I’m intrigued and accept the offer, despite (or perhaps because of) the underlying ironies. Such as the fact that I will be acting as story editor for a filmmaker with the storytelling instincts of a cubist; or the fact that I was a member of the Toronto selection committee that turned down Tales from the Gimli Hospital. I interpret it as another example of Guy Maddin both honouring form and booting it over the cliff.

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REINHABITING LOST LANGUAGES: GUY MADDIN’S CAREFUL

will straw

Guy Maddin claims that his interest in making movies (he never calls them films) was born at a screening of The Obsession of Billie Botski (980), an early short film by fellow Winnipegger John Paizs. No one would confuse the films of Paizs and Maddin, but in the affinities which link their respective bodies of work, one sees why the films of the Winnipeg Film Group, and of those directors associated with it, have been sentimental favourites among Canadian critics and film scholars. Profoundly grounded in film history, these films nevertheless resist the precocious marshalling of insider references typical of so many upstart schools, from the French new wave to post-Tarantino independent American cinema. The Winnipeg films are ambitious in their painstaking reconstruction of lost or minor filmic styles, yet endearingly free of provocative displays of auteurist bravura. While first-time directors of independent features are typically drawn to reworking the tradition of film noir, or to making loose, Cassavetes-ish documents of their friends and social circles, Maddin (like Paizs before him) prefers the patient discipline of reconstructing obsolete colour processes or mimicking the solemn pretension of late-silent credit sequences. Careful was released in 992 to critical acclaim, garnering reviews which hailed it as the most accomplished of Guy Maddin’s three feature films. By

Reinhabiting Lost Languages

then, the story of Maddin’s career had become well-known in the relevant film-critical circles, and would be repeated from one journalistic profile to another. Much would be made of the fact that Maddin’s first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988), had been rejected by the Toronto Festival of Festivals, then turned into a midnight-screening cult attraction in New York City by distributor Ben Barenholtz. (Barenholtz had earlier made David Lynch’s Eraserhead [977] into an underground hit in similar fashion.) For this, the film’s history has entered the canon of cautionary tales about the failure of Canadians to acknowledge talent within their midst and the need for artists to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The film’s success in midnight screenings in the United States would fuel comparisons between Maddin and the us director David Lynch, comparisons which Maddin consistently refused. (Indeed, “Lynchian” would recur as often as the term “surrealistic” in early attempts to describe Maddin’s style.) Maddin’s first film was a twenty-eight-minute short, The Dead Father, made in 986 and set in the Dominion of Forgetfulness—a place whose name suggests both Canada and somewhere else, and is thus like so many elements of the films which followed. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was made for only 22,000, and set in “a Gimli we never knew.” Its story focuses on the rivalries and frustrations of two men confined to hospital during a smallpox-like epidemic in an Icelandic immigrant community in Manitoba’s Interlake region. The film’s real strengths, however, are less in its narrative than in the set pieces, stunning exercises of reconstructed style. In one of these, three young women dance in the forest as wood nymphs, lit and shot through filters that evoke the lush look of a late-silent mgm film. In another, more absurdist moment, rivals in love engage in a ritualized duel of butt-cheek pinching, a piece of bogus ethnography that has entered cult-film legend. Maddin received 375,000 to make his second feature, Archangel, which was released in 990. That film’s hero is an amnesiac Canadian soldier wandering, lost, in the north of Russia, amidst the carnage of the revolution and civil war. Its sets are minimal, and its scenes of battlefields or flight lack even the low-rent support of back-projection (they are simply filled with fog and snow), but Archangel is endearing in part because it imagines itself as an epic. Its hero is meant to wander across a vast, tragic landscape, fulfilling the formulaic destiny of the lovesick shell-shocked amnesiac. This landscape, however, is somehow claustrophobic, with a handful of ethnic stereotypes standing in for the immense mobilization of multinational forces described to

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60 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES us in intertitles. Likewise, the hero’s forgetfulness is less tragic than it is the pretext for his obliviousness, a trait he shares with so many of Maddin’s heroes. Archangel clarified Maddin’s cinematic allegiances, making it clear that his principal points of reference were the lost codes of late-silent/early-sound cinema, not the dissident traditions of Surrealism or an American underground. While it was well-received, and voted Best Experimental Film of its year by the us National Society of Film Critics, Archangel would come to be considered a failure of sorts by many—a jumbled, inaccessible second film in the tradition of sophomore jinxes (like Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons [942]). Maddin himself, in interviews, encouraged the view that Archangel was illconceived, and that its problems were ones which his next film would resolve.2 Indeed, reviews of Careful have helped solidify the view that it rectifies the weaknesses of its predecessor. The Sight and Sound reviewer noted approvingly that Careful was “more audience-friendly than Archangel, in which a dying man strangles a Bolshevik by yanking out his own intestines.”3 Despite its -million budget, two-strip Technicolor look, and at least three performers with significant careers outside Maddin’s stock company (Gosia Dubrowolska, Jackie Burroughs, and Paul Cox), the production conditions of Careful do not seem a qualitative leap over those of the films which preceded it. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shot in a building which had once been a beauty salon belonging to Maddin’s mother, and Archangel in an “empty warehouse in front of papier-mâché sets.”4 Like its predecessors, Careful was filmed in the Winnipeg area, this time in an abandoned silo, with McCain’s potato flakes standing in for real snow in the film’s climactic sequences. According to Don Gillmor, Careful was “presold… to German television based on a screenplay that promised mountains, German names (Frau Teacher, Herr Trotta) and ‘a lot of Germanic death.’”5 Tolzbad, the Alpine village in which Careful takes place is, in Claire Monk’s words, “at once instantly recognizable and like no place on earth.”6

Rehearsing Film History Part of the triumph of Careful, then, stems from the fact that, while it is a much more coherent, accessible film than those which preceded it, it sacrifices none of the painstaking reconstruction of obscure film styles of the past which made Martin Scorsese and Village Voice critic J. Hoberman early champions of Maddin’s work. Indeed, Maddin’s move to colour, and to a narrative moved along by dialogue and an almost conventional storyline, might be best under-

Reinhabiting Lost Languages

stood through Don Gillmor’s suggestion that the development from Tales from the Gimli Hospital to Careful replicates the history of cinema itself: “Maddin’s oeuvre, viewed in sequence, is like the first term of a film-history course, beginning in the silent-film era: spare, unsynched dialogue, odd movements, black-and-white stock, claustrophobic sets.… With Careful we are moving into the 930s, using the two-strip Technicolor of Maddin’s childhood, colour that didn’t look real. Everything looked like a movie.”7 This view of Maddin’s career suggests a passing comparison to another filmmaker whose work, in its own development, has been seen to repeat the historical development of the cinema. As Bob Colacello has noted, Andy Warhol’s films, from the 960s through the 970s, “started at ground zero, and re-created the history of film as he went, adding motion, music, talking, scripted dialogue, plot, colour, 35 mm and 3d step-by-step.”8 Like Warhol, Maddin is obsessed with the secondary trappings of older modes of production: with the credit sequences and studio logos, the stock companies and star-effects which link even the most minor of classical films to a monumental system. Where this comparison breaks down, of course, is when the painstaking discipline of Maddin’s filmmaking practice is set against the wilfully loose, chaotically playful procedures of Warhol and his Factory. An even more apt analogy, perhaps, is with the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who, like Maddin, is preoccupied with “receremonializing” the cinema, restoring those ritualistic elements which postwar modernism had worked so hard to expel.9 Both Maddin and Fassbinder work to ensure that the lead characters of the cheapest of films are lit and framed like movie stars, and that the most hackneyed of plot twists are made to creak with the weight of divine purpose. From this perspective, Careful might be seen as an example of what Guy Scarpetta, writing in the mid-980s, called the new baroque, an aesthetic which favours the ceremonial and the artificial over the referential.0 Certainly, some of the audacity of Maddin’s films stems from the fact that, although they are Canadian, regional, and independent—in other words, minor in all kinds of ways—they nevertheless revel in the rituals of more official and monumental cinemas: the studio title cards, the didactic pre-narrative sequences, the credits sequences in which performers, in posed shots, flutter and blink at a film’s beginning or end. This investment in the ponderous rituals of classical cinema is one of the qualities of Maddin’s films which work against the interpretation of them as surrealist. They are texts wilfully weighed down by the accessories of rigidly codified schools and genres rather than

6

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uncontrolled eruptions of the fantastic and oneiric. Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel contain scenes which are, admittedly, “weird,” but these seem surrealistic only to those unfamiliar with their antecedents in the improbable contrivances and baroque cosmologies of early melodrama.

Imagined Traditions The drive to clarify Maddin’s stylistic ancestry is one of the ways in which critics have grappled with the difficulty of knowing what to say about his films. Careful confronted critics with what J. Hoberman, discussing Maddin’s work in Premiere magazine, called its “‘huh?’ quotient,” and Geoff Pevere has written of the tendency of Maddin’s films to resist interpretation. Reviews of Careful have almost invariably floundered in the quest to describe it, breaking down into scattershot inventories of its stylistic and historical reference points. For Graham Fuller, Careful is defined by “scenes of Caspar [David] Friedrich spectrality, Grimm enchantment, and Cronenbergian nastiness.”2 To the reviewer in Sight and Sound, it offers a “kitschhell of giant flugelhorns, flaxen-haired maidens and flower-bedecked funiculars.”3 Robert Horton, writing in Film Comment, described Careful as offering “the look of an overstuffed ufa film from the twenties, the tone of an sctv version of a Wagner opera, and the overall aesthetics of Dr. Seuss.”4 Lists such as these are often effective in suggesting the variety of resonances which Careful sets in play. They do injustice, however, to the discipline and consistency with which Maddin patiently unearths and reinhabits the lost languages of minor, transitional moments in film history. These lost languages are, most of the time, historically authentic, but the peculiar paradox of Maddin’s films (and of Careful, in particular) is that the stylistic predecessors of which they so successfully seem to remind us may, in fact, be ones we have never experienced to any significant degree. Reviewers who applaud Maddin’s insight into the Bavarian mountain film are unlikely to have seen a great number of these, but that is the point. Maddin’s films are both inventive revisitings of genuine past styles and imagined versions of such styles, seemingly drawn (in Careful’s case) from such ephemera as the illustrations of children’s fairytale books or early sound-era operetta. The coherence of Careful’s world is not solely an effect of Maddin’s careful reconstruction of already existing generic traditions; it springs, as well, from the convincing completeness with which he has imagined such worlds.

Reinhabiting Lost Languages

Maddin’s script for Careful was co-written with George Toles, the University of Manitoba film and drama professor with whom he had collaborated on Archangel. Toles’s contribution to Careful is punningly acknowledged in the name of the town in which it is set (“Tolzbad”), and is evident in a set of thematic concerns which link both collaborations with Maddin and run through Toles’s other work. Toles has produced stage versions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night—modern theatrical cauldrons of constricted or explosive emotion and desire. While the tortured relationships of these works pale beside the intergenerational incest rampant within Careful or the bewildering romantic triangles of Archangel, all centre on strange, dysfunctional familial and romantic arrangements. Toles has also co-written Maddin’s feature, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a film described by its publicist as being “about three men and three women who pursue romantic happiness in a remote region. These residents of an ostrich bestiary encounter the delirium of unrequited love during a summer when the sun won’t set.” At the film’s conclusion, a brother and sister, frustrated in their romantic longings, settle down with each other. As Toles himself has indicated, It frankly has puzzled me that next to no one who has reviewed Careful has been willing to say that the movie may be dealing seriously with the two topics it loudly announced as its main narrative concerns: repression and incest. Incest, when mentioned, is swiftly passed over as a by-product of the German influence. In point of fact, Careful is what it is because of our efforts to enter, unglibly and mysteriously, into a terrain that felt laden with genuine peril. What we didn’t want was anything that would be dramatized—even a decade down the road—in a movie-of-the-week, high-earnestness fashion. All of our choices were made to make the incest theme somehow manageable and approachable. The mountain movie genre was revised because mountain movies always seemed to gravitate toward uncontrollable family attachments. We created a town in which repression is the only available form of character oxygen. We chose to write in the manner of opera librettos and German Romantic tales because that language seemed to carry the authentic flash of fever. Everyone who speaks at any length resembles Hamlet’s “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” condition.5

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64 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES The claim that Maddin’s films are absurdly perverse often stems from the misperception that he is corrupting innocent genres through the insinuation, within them, of deviant relationships or aberrant, “modern” desires. Neither the central European fairy tale nor the silent melodrama were as innocent as we now remember them, however, and one of the effects of Maddin’s films is to restore to these forms the sense of grotesque violence or unholy passion which sanitized updatings or selective memory have erased. As in JeanClaude Lauzon’s Léolo (992), a film which George Toles acknowledges as one of his favourites, the family in Careful is the dysfunctional centre from which cataclysmic narrative events are generated, rather than a place safe from such events. As Careful unfolds, the attic in which the invalid Franz is confined comes to seem less like a prison and more like a refuge from the horrific events happening among the rest of the family below.

Careful and Canadian If Maddin’s films challenge interpretation, they have proved even more resistant to distinctly Canadian traditions of critical analysis. More specifically, Maddin’s films have been poor fodder for a criticism which seeks to trace links between characteristics of works and the condition of life in English Canada. When the elements which normally ground thematic analysis—character predicament, narrative worlds, psychological motivation—come already built into the historical genres and styles being evoked, it is difficult to see such elements as responding directly to Maddin’s lived experience or social background. Critical commentary has laboured, nonetheless, to suggest ways in which Maddin’s films manifest a Canadian sensibility at the level of theme and story. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that the amnesiac hero in Archangel is quintessentially Canadian, in that his principal trauma is the loss of his identity.6 This seems at once a forced reading and an apt explanation as to why the bumbling, naive idealism of the film’s protagonist seems to ring so true. A full account of this naïveté, however, requires that we take into account the unidimensional, stereotypical character of almost all of Maddin’s characters. If, as Geoff Pevere suggests, each of Maddin’s films is, at some level, a fundamentally Canadian tale of “radical alienation,” this is in part because they all unfold within styles and generic traditions which offer little room for psychological depth or for narrative trajectories leading to complex self-knowledge.7 Similarly, the humility and collective acquiescence to rules of polite com-

Reinhabiting Lost Languages

portment which are enforced in the world of Careful have been taken as emblematic of a national character marked, in Kieran Keohane’s insightful analysis, by the fear that others might be enjoying themselves too much.8 This, too, rings true, but the film’s elaborate recounting of these rules, and its staging of didactic episodes in which we are shown the deadly consequences of non-compliance, are also stylistic conceits, mannerist games which evoke a whole history of filmic prologues and moralizing tableaux. In other writings, the link is made between Maddin’s stylistic exercises and a distinct regionalist, Prairie aesthetic. One interviewer, citing Terry Heath, suggests that Maddin’s films demonstrate the essentially surrealistic quality of Prairie culture, an interpretation to which Maddin acquiesces only partially.9 Marie-Josée Minassian has asserted that the composite, pastiche quality of Maddin’s films reflects the composite nature of Prairie identity.20 Her argument is convergent with Linda Hutcheon’s claims about the ex-centric, decentred qualities of Canadian postmodernism.2 It is now a commonplace of English-Canadian cultural criticism that many of our most revealing works are characterized by the ironic appropriation of those cultures which dominate us. While this clearly helps illuminate the films of John Paizs, so many of which engage with the paracinemas of us industrial films and 950s cartoons, Maddin’s work has little to do with Hollywood or any other major villain in the drama of Canadian cultural dependency. The Icelandic saga, the Soviet montage film, and the Bavarian mountain melodrama are all almost as minor as Canadian film itself. It is almost as if, by rewriting the history of movies so as to privilege these minor, marginal movements, Maddin has helped to create a new constellation of styles and schools in which Canadian cinema itself might occupy a place. Maddin’s own responses to analyses of his work carry no automatic claim to truth. However, his insistence that his main allegiances are generational, rather than national or regional, is at least as useful as other accounts in explaining the impulses which fuel his films. Responding to the suggestion that the prairie experience is one of isolation, and that his films express this isolation, Maddin says: “So maybe there is something geographical and demographic that makes people from Winnipeg make the same kind of film. I have another theory, though. When you attend film festivals worldwide you realize there’s a type of film that comes from an age group. There are films from Sweden and Denmark that remind you of films from Winnipeg. So this undercurrent is less geographical or cultural than chronological.”22

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66 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Like John Paizs, Guy Maddin has grown up in a world where, arguably, differences in stylized renderings of the world spring less from regional or national experiences than from the specific combinations of film stock, period style, and colour process which shape each generation’s experience of images. We are all subject to what Susan Stewart has called “the self-periodization of popular culture”—to the ways in which changes in the technologies with which films are made and the channels through which we see them shift the meanings of stylistic languages and shape our sense of historical time.23 The codes of late-silent melodrama or two-strip Technicolor are, at one level, part of the collective cultural archive of the West as a whole. Only for a particular generation, however, will these also resonate with memories of childhood television viewing, or be marked with the sense of peculiar obscurity conveyed by washed-out prints of movies shown late at night on independent television stations. As films which are principally about style and sensibility, Maddin’s works are open to the criticism that they are merely clever, that he would rather rework discarded conventions with cold distance than develop a stylistic vocabulary through which he might express his own condition. Hal Foster is one of several critics who, over the last fifteen years, have bemoaned tendencies towards pastiche in the visual arts: “Modern art engaged historical forms, often in order to deconstruct them. Our new art tends to assume historical forms—out of context and reified.… This ‘return to history’ is ahistorical for three reasons: the context of history is disregarded, its continuum is disavowed, and conflictual forms of art and modes of production are falsely resolved in pastiche. Neither the specificity of the past nor the necessity of the present is heeded” (emphasis in original).24 The choice offered here is between an excavation of historical styles which functions to criticize them, and an uncritical adoption of such styles which drains them of their historical meaningfulness. Clearly, the marginal status of those styles Maddin has chosen to revisit is such that there would be little point in seeking to “critique” them: as suggested, the Bavarian mountain film is hardly a significant foundation of cultural power in Canada in the 990s. What other purpose, then, might we ascribe to the sort of exercise in which Maddin is engaged? Keir Keightley has suggested that we must learn to see certain works of pastiche as, in effect, historical essays on style. Writing about movements in popular music which strain to capture the sensibility of past styles and moments, Keightley notes that this “is an example of a growing trend for musicians and filmmakers to ‘do the work’ scholars apparently have abandoned, i.e.

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archaeologically recuperating occulted histories.”25 Maddin is clearly engaged in this archaeology, making careful calculations about how to best convey the sense of being inside certain historical styles, offering implicit claims about what is central or important within them. The maddeningly interminable scene in Careful, in which Grigorss fusses with the makeup of the count’s dead mother, risking discovery and reprimand from the head butler, is a meditation on historical constructions of cinematic time as profound as any produced by theoretical reflection on the subject.

Peculiar Pleasures While Careful offers more narrative coherence than Maddin’s previous films, it would be disingenuous to claim that the film’s pleasure comes from our being drawn into its story and narrative world to any significant degree. Careful’s delights, like those of Tales from the Gimli Hospital or Archangel, come in those moments when the mechanics of lost forms are both meticulously reproduced and innocently offered up. The exchange of glances between Johann and his fiancée as Johann anticipates, then completes, his flugelhorn solo, is blissful at a number of levels. It pleases because the film is so highly invested in the idea of the young, ruddy-cheeked romantic lead, and in the formal rituals (of crosscutting and pacing) through which the bonds between the couple are highlighted within the broader, community context of the sequence. In this respect, the scene is so obviously overdetermined by generic and historical convention that we cannot be drawn fully into its emotion or drama. Neither, however, do we simply revel, as connoisseurs, in the careful perfection with which this exercise of stylistic reconstruction is carried off. The pleasure of the scene is also elsewhere, in our admiration for a film which would indulge itself in mounting, so painstakingly, such a ludicrous set of events and images. A more striking example of the densely affective appeal of Careful comes when Frau Teacher leads the students at Butler School through an exercise in which they read instructions from flash cards and carry out the actions written upon them. The hurried montage of shots here is meant to signal busy, choreographed activity, even as the minimal resources with which the scene is mounted render it, at a profound level, pitifully forlorn. At the same time, the disembodied voices and rhythms of speech and action all evoke the sense of a musical number in which songs are somehow not possible. The sequence is exhilarating, as musical numbers conventionally are, in the way it breaks loose from the careful control of the rest of the film. More importantly, however, in

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its desperate and clunky attempt to crank the film into another, more extravagant mode, the sequence evokes the proud lineage of all those moments in film history marked by pathetic, failed ambition. Here, as throughout Maddin’s films, we are won over by the discipline and principle with which he resists opportunities for facile effect. In his choice of marginal, transitional moments in film history to revisit, Maddin has closed off the temptations of easy parody, of simply extending or exaggerating the decadent campiness with which more prominent styles from the past already come laden. Maddin’s filmmaking is wilfully “minor,” not only in the modesty of the means employed, but in the obscurity of the historical sensibilities with which his films engage. Like John Paizs’s feature Crime Wave (985), which wants nothing more than to be a “colour crime movie,” Careful is happy being a part-talkie, two-colour mountain tragedy of doomed love.

Notes I would like to express my thanks to Gene Walz for invaluable suggestions and meticulous editing. George Toles was an amazingly generous source of background information, materials, and inspiration. Thanks as well to Rebecca Poff, for her assistance in tracking down reviews and articles. . “Far from the Maddin Crowd: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Border Crossings, July 990, 36. 2. Paul McKie, “Maddin reaps praise in New York,” Winnipeg Free Press, 3 October 992, C. 3. Claire Monk, “Careful,” Sight and Sound, October 993, 42. 4. Paul McKie, “Maddin tackles career movie,” Winnipeg Free Press, 4 September 99, 33. 5. Don Gillmor, “Start Making Sense,” Saturday Night, September 992, 36. 6. Monk, “Careful,” 4. 7. Gillmor, “Start Making Sense,” 36. 8. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Harper Collins, 990), 29. 9. I take this use of the term “receremonialization” from the work of Guy Scarpetta. See Guy Scarpetta, L’Impureté (Paris: Grasset, 985), 46. 0. Ibid., 92. . See J. Hoberman, “The Children of David Lynch,” Premiere, February 99, 36; and Geoff Pevere, “Guy Maddin: True to Form,” Take One, Fall 992, 6; reprinted in this volume (48–57). 2. Graham Fuller, “Shots in the Dark,” Interview, December 992, 53. 3. Monk, “Careful,” 42.

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4. Robert Horton, “New Bridges,” Film Comment, November/December 992, 68. 5. Personal letter from George Toles, 7 April 997. 6. This argument was made in a number of papers produced for a film course which I taught at Carleton University. 7. Pevere, “Guy Maddin: True to Form,” 7. 8. Kieran Keohone, “Symptoms of Canada: National Identity and the Theft of Enjoyment,” CineAction 28 (Spring 992): 23. 9. “Far from the Maddin Crowd,” 38. 20. Marie-José Minassian, “Prairie Films in Paris,” Newest Review, June/July 993, 5. 2. Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 988), 3. 22. “Far from the Maddin Crowd,” 33. 23. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 984), 67. 24. Hal Foster, Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 985), 6. 25. Keir Keightley, “The History and Exegesis of Pop: Reading ‘All Summer Long’” (MA thesis, McGill University, 99), 80.

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FIRE AND ICE: THE FILMS OF GUY MADDIN

steven shaviro

. 2.

3.

4.

“To me, the primary colours of my life are yearning and humiliation, in a melodrama.” This is Guy Maddin, describing his 997 film, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. But the remark could apply just as well to his three previous feature films: Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988), Archangel (990), and Careful (992). Maddin’s movies are all delirious poems of romantic misery. They all play with the form of melodrama, in order to tell stories of unrequited love. They all wallow in feelings of yearning and humiliation. And one more thing: they are all extremely funny. Maddin’s films are driven by a tension between romantic excess on the one hand, and absurdist humour on the other. This could also be called a contradiction between gorgeousness and camp, or between the beautiful (rather than the sublime) and the ridiculous. In the first place, Maddin’s films are visually ravishing. They are beautiful, frame by frame, in a way that has almost nothing to do with meaning or plot. The backlighting, the shadows, the frontal close-ups, the figures in silhouette, the arbitrary jump-cuts: these all seem to exist for their own sakes. Maddin’s images are entirely non-functional. They don’t do anything to advance the story. They are also not means of thematic

Fire and Ice

5.

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expression, because they don’t have anything beyond themselves to express. They arrest the gaze, rather than moving it onward. Maddin’s images belong to a cinema of spectacle, or a “cinema of attractions” (in Tom Gunning’s well-known phrase),rather than to any sort of narrative impulse.2 At the same time, Maddin’s films are chock-full of narrative, even to excess. They tell stories, full of exaggerated twists and turns, with extreme emotional responses, in the tradition of stage and silent film melodrama. Melodrama has always been a paradoxical genre. It has both a conformist and a critical edge. On the one hand, it is shamelessly populist and kitschy. This is why it has so often been scorned by high-minded critics. It invites the viewer to indulge herself or himself in vicarious identification with its characters. It plays on this identification in order to wring out cheap emotions. On the other hand, as Thomas Elsaesser and other scholars have pointed out, melodrama is often extremely self-conscious.3 In the films of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among others, melodrama presents the gap between aspiration and achievement, or between the characters’ dreams and their reality. In this way, it promotes critical reflection about the emptiness of ordinary bourgeois life. Maddin’s films insist on being “melodramatic” in the most pejorative sense of the term. Both their plot twists, and their emotional displays, are arbitrary, unmotivated, and excessively histrionic. Maddin’s films indulge the feelings of yearning and humiliation in so over-the-top a way that these feelings come to seem like unreal poses. The situations that provoke them are too ridiculous for the audience to enter into them or to identify with them. When we watch Maddin’s films, we are always laughing at the characters, rather than crying along with them. In this way, the critical and conformist edges of the genre exchange places. The gap between aspiration and achievement is no longer a social condition on which we are invited to reflect. It becomes, instead, a metaphysical absolute. On the other hand, emotional excess no longer provides the occasion for over-identification. Rather, it becomes the source of a new kind of alienation effect. We do not “naturalize” the story in our minds, but revel in our distance from the spectacle. There is a word for the situation that I am describing. In Maddin’s films, melodrama is transformed into camp.

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Maddin himself rejects this characterization. He says in an interview that he has no desire for cult-film status, and no particular “allegiance” to the idea of camp. He would “rather be considered ‘decadent’ than ‘kitschy’ or ‘tacky.’” He wants people to say about his work: “‘Wow, is this ever rich and strange.’ That’s what I’d rather have, not ‘Wow, is this ever hokey.’”4 9. In short, Maddin wants us to take the emotional predicaments of his characters seriously, even though he makes it impossible for us to do so. He wants us to find his mise en scène dreamy and poetic, even though he makes it ludicrous with incongruous details. But this may well be less of a contradiction than it appears to be. In Maddin’s movies, it would be wrong to say that emotion is emptied out and turned into camp. The logic is rather the reverse: camp is the enabling condition for a particular kind of emotional expression. Ludicrousness is the mask, under whose cover the cultivation of extreme feelings becomes possible. We cannot help looking ridiculous when we are overcome with passion, or driven by desires that have no hope of success and no rational grounding. It is only by opening oneself to such ridicule, and acknowledging it internally in the form of shame, that one can transform oneself into a work of art, in the way that Oscar Wilde recommended. Camp, for Maddin, is a shortcut to radical aestheticism. 0. Maddin’s sense of absurdity is at one with his sense of beauty. When I watch Maddin’s films, I am absorbed by beauty, pulled into a state of ravishment. At the same time, I am distanced by the films’ flagrant display of phoniness, their stagy sets and highly mannered acting. But the gorgeousness and the absurdity have at least one thing in common: they are both equally gratuitous and ungrounded. They are non-utilitarian and non-functional; there is nothing that justifies them, nothing which they are for. This is what makes Maddin’s movies so decadent, rich, and strange. . Consider a scene from Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. As Peter (actor uncredited) and Zephyr (Alice Krige) make love, the tide rises, and waves wash over their bed. Later, when their passion has been spent, and the tide has gone out again, Peter casually picks up a lobster from among the sheets, and tosses it back into the water. What are we to make of such an image? Its absurdity is matched only by the insouciance with which the film offers it to us. For this incongruous lobster is not a symbol. It is not a metaphorical visitor from the depths of the unconscious. It is just there,

Fire and Ice

a gratuitous gift of the sea. It’s a decadent detail, precisely because it has no ulterior use, and it doesn’t come up again anywhere else in the film. 2. Maddin’s love of gratuitous detail can be linked to an even more important trait: his self-conscious archaism. Maddin crafts all his films to look like old-time movies. This willed anachronism is most evident in Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel, both of which are shot in black and white to emulate the look of silent film. These films have extensive musical soundtracks, but their dialogue is sparse. They use title cards, exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, heavy-handedly ominous close-ups, and stylized makeup reminiscent of the 920s. The result, though, is not actually to imitate films from the 920s, so much as it is to replicate the stereotypical ideas we have about such films now. Pantomime was never so exaggerated in actual silent films as it is in Maddin’s parodies. Nor were D.W. Griffith’s own melodramas ever quite so “melodramatic” as Maddin’s simulations of them are. Maddin does not try to reinvent silent film as a new medium, in the way, for instance, that Aki Kaurismäki does in his 999 film Juha. Rather, Maddin resurrects silent film precisely in its oldness, its decrepitude, its inadequacy, its failure to keep up with historical and stylistic change. 3. Maddin’s point is not to return to an earlier time, but to dramatize the impossibility of such a return. His films do not bring us back to the era of silent film. Rather, they demonstrate how long ago that era was, and how far away from it we are now. In his black and white films, Maddin deliberately reproduces effects that have to do with the aging of movie prints, rather than with the way such prints would have looked when they were first released. His lighting, for instance, is often streaky or washed out. His special effects, like the repeated sequence of a World War I airplane flight in Archangel, are made to seem rudimentary and obviously unreal. For this is the way old special-effects techniques tend to look in the wake of technological improvements that have surpassed them. 4. Careful is Maddin’s first work in colour. But it is just as archaizing as the previous pseudo-silent films. For one thing, Careful doesn’t really have a full-fledged colour scheme. Rather, everything is bathed in an oversaturated yellow glow. This simulates the effect of tinting the individual frames, as was often done before the advent of reliable colour film stock. Careful also parodies a mostly forgotten early film genre: the German mountain film (Bergfilm) of the late 920s and early 930s. Eric Ames

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describes the genre as follows: “The films used melodramatic plots, typically involving accidents and last-minute rescues, and usually featuring male heroes. On another level, they represented ‘elemental’ nature and pantheistic ideas while flaunting the power of technology, the camera’s ability to exhibit alpine views (shot on location).”5 The ideology of mountain films was quite appealing to the Nazis; it’s noteworthy that Leni Riefenstahl got her start in mountain films, starring in a number of them, and directing one. 5. Careful is set in a high Alpine valley, where everyone must speak quietly for fear of starting an avalanche. Nature is a burden and a source of guilt, rather than something to be celebrated or struggled courageously against. Nature is also ostentatiously artificial in Maddin’s film; it is evident that everything has been shot on a sound stage. In place of heroism and vitalism, Careful centres around ideals of servitude and repression, together with incestuous fantasies and Oedipal guilt. As Maddin summarizes the plot, “whenever anyone unburdens her or himself of their true feelings, they’re punished in an Old Testament fashion with a maiming or an instantaneous death.” 6. In all these ways, Maddin gleefully inverts the original connotations of the mountain film. The result is to distance the genre yet further from us, to drain it of whatever vitality it may have had. Indeed, this is precisely why Maddin chooses as his target a genre that few people have even heard of, much less have seen or even remotely cared about. Postmodern films often strive to revitalize old genres, either by upscaling them with big budgets and high-tech special effects (as in the Star Wars series), or more interestingly by updating and cross-fertilizing them (as when Blade Runner combines film noir with science fiction), or else by appropriating them through tongue-in-cheek homage (as Quentin Tarantino does with blaxploitation films). In contrast to all these examples, Careful only makes its chosen genre seem mustier, less vital, and less relevant than ever. 7. We generally think of movies as unfolding in the present tense, even if they are set in the past, and even if their narrative structure involves flashbacks. The vividness and immediacy of the filmgoing experience trumps everything else. The fact that images seem to move, and their overwhelming presence on a large illuminated screen, while we are seated anonymously in the dark, gives film an overwhelming sense of

Fire and Ice

the now. This was already the case in the silent era. The impression of immediacy is even greater today, thanks to powerful speakers and multichannel sound. Gilles Deleuze insists, nonetheless, that “it is a mistake to think of the cinematographic image as being by nature in the present.”6 Other temporal relations are possible. It is difficult, but not impossible for film to evade the present. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze traces the different ways that modernist filmmakers (starting with Orson Welles and the Italian neo-realists) have worked to detach film from the present tense and open it up to other tenses and to different forms of temporality. The only thing these various approaches have in common is that they all disrupt our usual habits of perception. 8. Maddin’s (mis)appropriation of past genres is his way of making films that do not unfold in the present tense. Careful evokes the mountain film and Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel evoke silent-film melodrama in order to produce the sense that everything in them is already past, already out of date, already lost. Another way to put it is that these films are not about remembering, or bringing the past back to life in the present. Rather, they are about forgetting: watching the present slip away into the past, consigning that past to oblivion, and yet remaining enthralled by such oblivion. 9. The main characters in Archangel suffer from amnesia and cannot remember whom they are in love with. In a parody of Freudian repression, they repeat the past while remaining unable to grasp it. And in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Einar (Kyle McCulloch) recalls violating a female corpse, who turns out to have been the fiancée of his hospital mate Gunnar (Michael Gottli). The two men come to blows over something that is irreparable. They proceed to wrestle in the shadows, in a ridiculous extended sequence that is the closest the film comes to a climax. The characters in both films are trapped, less in the past than in their distance from the past, which they can neither recover nor free themselves from. 20. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is similarly oriented towards an irrecoverable past, even though it doesn’t replicate any particular genre or style from the 920s or 930s. For with its garish colours, static camera, and exaggerated style of acting, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs seems like an archaic experiment in colour cinematography gone awry. We cannot help feeling that it should have come from the era of early film. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs has a built-in sense of obsolescence. Everything in it seems

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hopelessly passé and outdated. The film is stilted and airless, like a kitschy souvenir preserved under glass. Its images come to us like delirious, halfforgotten dreams. 2. An exquisite radiance suffuses nearly every frame of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. The film takes place in the mythic land of Mandragora, where the sun never sets. Each scene is backlit in gorgeous tones of gold, silver, or pink. The diffuse light streams horizontally through the forest and along the shore. It glistens over the long necks and tiny heads of the ostriches on the ostrich farm. It makes even the most common objects glow with an unearthly sheen. It burnishes the actresses’ pale skin, and illuminates the pastels of their costumes. 22. Such a light is not found in nature. It is something extra, something we add to what we see. It glimmers only in our nostalgia and yearning, or in the artifice of a movie studio. It connotes idealized retrospection and therefore pastness, rather than present-day actuality. Maddin creates an unreal world of wistful dreams and tacky glamour. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is ironically nostalgic. It makes the motions of returning us to the past, but the past it bring us back to is one that never was. Or more precisely, the events of the film are always already faded into the past. There has never been a time when they would have been present. Disappointed love is always looking back to a moment of erotic plenitude that never actually was, but that is constituted after the fact. We only encounter the gleam of the midnight sun in retrospect. That is why these heartrendingly lovely tints are the colours of yearning and humiliation. 23. The temporality of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is perfectly exemplified by what Juliana (Pascale Bussières) tells Peter as she abandons him: “This might have been the day we first knew we loved each other, and my kissing you now would not have meant goodbye.” The speech is a past conditional, compounded with negation. It expresses a potential state of affairs that is nonetheless both contrary to fact and no longer present. The speech also loses in conviction, and thereby perhaps gains in poignancy, by virtue of the fact that it is repeated three times in the course of the film. What seems at first a spontaneous utterance (at least to the admittedly limited extent that anything in the film can seem spontaneous) is transformed into a speech repeated by rote. The second time Juliana repeats these lines, she seems to be under the hypnotic control of the sinister mesmerist, Doctor Solti (R.H. Thomson). The third time, she is

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25.

26.

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evidently quoting herself, and referring Peter to the previous occasions. In this way, the consummation of erotic bliss, the focus of Peter’s desires, continually recedes further and further into the past, without actually ever having taken place. We cannot ever quite pinpoint the moment at which anticipation turned into nostalgia and vague yearning gave way to lost memory. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs continually evades the finality of the present moment. This is also to say that every character in the film is driven mad by the pangs of unrequited love. Peter allures Zephyr, only to spurn her, in the same way that Juliana first allures and then spurns him. For her part, Juliana is disturbingly entranced by Doctor Solti, who seems to value her the less, the more he is sure of controlling her. The doctor also toys sadistically with the affections of Peter’s gawky sister Amelia (Shelley Duvall). And Amelia, in turn, suffers the ambiguous advances and persecutions of her handyman at the ostrich farm, the aged eunuch Cain Ball (Frank Gorshin). Beyond these entanglements, all of the characters in the film seem subject to the whims of Venus, whose enormous statue looms over the shore. Even the doctor is vulnerable to the flawless beauty and unrelenting coldness of the Goddess of Love. He embraces the statue, seemingly willing it to come to life. But Venus’s only response to the characters’ ardent prayers is to topple down upon them. The statue has already mangled the doctor’s leg, making him a cripple, before the film begins. It falls again, crushing Zephyr to death, at the climax. Despite its delicate beauty, the light of the midnight sun is cruel and implacable. It uncovers all secrets. It forbids repose. It tracks the characters relentlessly, leaving them no place to hide. These people all seem lost in an insomniac stupor. Sometimes they wander aimlessly through the woods. Other times, they hold a single posture, as if frozen. They break down in paroxysms of futile passion. They gesture emphatically, to no avail. They don’t engage in conversation, so much as they declaim vehement speeches to one another. Indeed, Maddin post-dubbed the dialogue, and had all the actors speak in different accents, in order to get this sense of disconnection. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs dramatizes its characters’ various hopeless infatuations in a series of ludicrous tableaux vivants. The film lurches from one lurid, embarrassing incident to the next. Each scene reaches new,

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operatic depths of despair and entombs yet another blasted emotion. All the while, overwrought romantic music plays on the soundtrack. Eventually, Amelia loses her mind and murders Cain Ball. Meanwhile, Juliana and the doctor drive Peter to the utmost depths of despair and humiliation. 28. When Peter cannot stand it any longer, he cries out to the trees in the forest, whom he thinks of as his only remaining friends. In a lovely absurdist touch, he calls upon each species of tree by name. Peter begs the trees to crash down and obliterate them all. It’s a wonderful melodramatic moment, full of rhetorical sound and fury. If I must perish, then let the whole world perish along with me. For an instant, the wind rages, as if responding to this plea. But in the end, of course, nothing happens. The world remains unmoved by Peter’s ridiculous gesture. For why should things be tailored to the measure of his desperation and longing? Ultimately, frustration is every bit as fleeting, and as disappointing, as desire. Even Peter’s overwhelming sense of desolation finally succumbs to disillusionment. 29. Each character in the film struggles with the dead weight of the past, which is also the fatality of his or her desire. Each event in the film is shadowed by the ghost of all the things that did not happen. That is why the film cannot take place in the fullness of a living present. Things are always in process of fading away and saying their farewells.

Notes . Bruce Kirkland, “Primordial soup to nuts,” Toronto Sun, 27 September 997, 30, http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Artists/M/Maddin_Guy/997/09/27/76004.html. 2. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 990), 56–62. 3. See, for example, Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 99), 68–9. 4. Guy Maddin, “The Pretty Good Films of Guy Maddin,” interview by Mike Rubin, http://web.archive.org/web/200022745422/http://www.motorbooty.com/ maddin/guypage.html. 5. Eric Ames, personal correspondence with the author. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 989), 05.

MADDIN AND MELODRAMA

william beard

Guy Maddin’s films are inevitably described by critics as “bizarre,” “wacky,” “totally strange,” “outrageous,” or “hilarious.” Maddin’s art, with its elaborate pastiches of silent cinema and other plunder from the cultural past, and its absurd juxtapositions of high-flown melodrama and ludicrous deflation, is a highly diverting one. It is full of wit and invention; it challenges and rewards the erudition of film buffs; its striking mixture of avant-garde sophistication and impoverished made-in-the-basement provincialism is stimulating to the jaded palate. Every Maddin feature (and I am confining my comments here largely to his features) is overflowing with silliness. In Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988), fish are nailed to the outside walls of the buildings, and the hero wrings gunk out of one of them onto his hair like Brylcream. In Archangel (990), one of the characters, disembowelled by a Bolshevik, summons the strength to strangle the assassin with a handy length of his own intestines. Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) begins with a man squeezing sperm onto a microscope slide, then gazing down into it to see a diagrammatic overhead view of a hockey rink with little players skating around. The Saddest Music in the World (2003) is set in Depression-era Winnipeg, which has just been proclaimed “the world capital of sorrow” for the fourth straight year, and where a legless lady beer-magnate is holding a cash contest to see

80 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES which country produces the saddest music. So you can sit through a Maddin film and laugh and laugh, while simultaneously admiring the cleverness of his mimicry of silent-film tropes, or the constant visual inventiveness of his presentation, or the ornate and usually preposterous scenarios and dialogue by the director and his frequent co-writer, George Toles. But there is another, and to my mind crucial, element of Maddin’s cinema that is not talked about so much, or perhaps not even consciously recognized: an element of unironic seriousness. One scholar who does recognize it is Steven Shaviro, who, in his fine essay “Fire and Ice,” identifies this dimension as one of beauty. Shaviro sets out the Janus-like nature of Maddin’s work: “Maddin’s films are driven by a tension between romantic excess on the one hand and absurdist humour on the other. This could also be called a contradiction between gorgeousness and camp, or between the beautiful (rather than the sublime) and the ridiculous.” He goes on to describe Maddin’s cinema as “visually ravishing,” but in a way that is “entirely non-functional ... [and does] nothing to advance the story.” This realm of independent aesthetic power is contrasted, then, with a narrative content of “extreme emotional responses, in the tradition of stage and silent-film melodrama,” but exaggerated so far as to be “arbitrary, unmotivated, and excessively histrionic.”2 “When I watch Maddin’s cinema,” Shaviro says, “I am absorbed by beauty, pulled into a state of ravishment. At the same time I am distanced by the films’ flagrant displays of phoniness, their stagy sets and highly mannered acting. But the gorgeousness and the absurdity have at least one thing in common: they are both equally gratuitous and unmotivated.... [T]here is nothing that justifies them, nothing which they are for. This is what makes Maddin’s movies so decadent, rich, and strange.”3 We may note that in this last description, Shaviro too has settled on a classification of Maddin’s work as fundamentally “strange.” *

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For the past quarter-century, the critical literature in English on melodrama has pointed out the relation of that form—first in theatre and literature, then on the screen—to social, ideological, and psychological conditions in the societies producing them. Whether in Revolutionary France, in nineteenth-century European cultures undergoing political and spiritual crises, or in a mid-twentieth-century America struggling to reconcile traditional ideological certainties with a very different lived experience, the heightened dramatic contrasts and vivid gestures of melodrama could be employed to

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reflect the psychic shock of viewers trying to make sense of a bewildering world. In this respect, the excesses of melodrama become psychological symptoms of social and personal confusion. The psychoanalytic affinities of this situation were evident to pioneering English-language scholars of film melodrama like Thomas Elsaesser and Laura Mulvey,4 while Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, in a 977 essay entitled “Minnelli and Melodrama,” identified the garish Technicolor hyperboles of big 950s Hollywood melodramas as cinematic examples of Freudian somatization. In Nowell-Smith’s model, the narratives of Vincente Minnelli-directed films like The Cobweb (955), Some Came Running (958), and Home from the Hill (960) present scandalous breaches of moral order, with people and institutions behaving in ways that can only be partly accommodated in ideology—and the “unaccommodated excess” taking a somatic form on the cinematic body as excesses of colour, setting, and decor.5 Many an essay has since been written on mise en scène in Hollywood melodramas directed by Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, or Nicholas Ray, and the ways it reflects a tortured or even hysterical response to problems of race, class, or gender. The field of “family melodrama” has been especially rich, since the family is a crucible of both social and psychic tensions and a melting pot of the two, as well as being aligned with the “domestic” nature of the films that feminist scholarship in particular has been drawn to. Can we apply this line of cinematic melodrama scholarship to Maddin’s work? After all, Maddin’s stories and characters are in a perpetual state of crisis and hysteria, his return to Freudian family relationships with their incestuous and violent dimensions is obsessive, and his mise en scène is scarred by deeper marks of excess even than Minnelli’s. There are certainly reasons to think that such a critical approach might not be very productive. With a few exceptions such as television soap opera, the melodrama that scholarly writing is concerned with is no longer a current phenomenon. There is one very big difference between this historical melodrama and Maddin’s variety: Way Down East (920), Stella Dallas (937), and The Cobweb employ the form of melodrama in an entirely “straight” and unironic way, while Maddin’s films serve up their melodramatic elements in such a thick sauce of irony, and with such an unblinking eye for the ludicrous, that it seems perverse to think of them as true melodramas rather than parodies of melodrama. And ironic detachment and critical self-consciousness are toxic to this of all forms. Perhaps this last statement will be thought questionable, when there is a whole literature on irony in the films of Douglas Sirk, and it seems merely

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commonsensical to think of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s melodrama as having an important ironic dimension. Of course I am not using the term “irony” here to refer to the category of so-called “dramatic irony,” which is lavishly present in feeling-laden narratives from Greek tragedy to Griffithian melodrama. The aim of dramatic irony is to increase affect by adding a cruel extra perspective, not to block it by implying that all forms of strong feeling are ridiculous or impossible. The irony I have in mind is more like derision: a powerful scepticism about the validity of any unregulated flow of affective emotion, a conviction that any such condition is false and deceptive, and that anyone indulging in it is in some sense deluded. I do not believe that there is anything fundamentally ironic in this sense in Sirk’s melodrama. Especially I cannot believe that he regards the suffering of his characters with ironic detachment, or that his films do not ultimately ask viewers to feel with those characters.6 As to Fassbinder, the pervasive and acidic ironies of his films serve ultimately to augment affect, not to disable it: the melodrama of his films is entirely functional, and its irony is incorporated into the melodramatic action rather than sitting outside it with a mocking smile.7 Melodrama, then, requires at least temporary suspension of consciousness and rationality, and a state of what Torben Grodal calls “saturations” of affect, in order to work properly.8 This is true even in Sirk and Fassbinder, and much more true in earlier examples of the form, such as the silent-period models that Maddin most often recalls. If you see the ridiculousness of melodrama with razor clarity, then you cannot experience the flow of feeling that melodrama requires. Thus Shaviro can say of Maddin’s melodrama: “When we watch Maddin’s films, we are always laughing at the characters, rather than crying along with them.... Emotional excess no longer provides the occasion for over-identification. Rather, it becomes the source of a new kind of alienation effect.”9 If this is true, what we find in Maddin’s cinema is not melodrama, but “melodrama.” This melodrama-in-quotation-marks—the presentation of melodrama stripped from its original organic environment and staged flatly as a free-floating cultural fragment—is fully in keeping with what everyone agrees is the perfectly postmodern nature of Maddin’s work. The incongruous juxtapositions in narrative materials and historical attitudes, the happy scavenging of long-dead cultural objects and attitudes, the conversion of all this into style, are all utterly characteristic postmodern strategies.0 Ironic detachment—that toxic-to-melodrama quality—is indispensable to postmodern art. So, in importing melodrama into a postmodern

Maddin and Melodrama

context, Maddin has subjected it to a hostile environment, exposed it where it must suffer the utmost assault of scepticism—and, judging from the wilful absurdities Maddin wreaths his melodrama with, it often seems that he is leading the assault. But the question of what melodrama is doing in Maddin’s work in the first place remains unanswered. Why should he be poking fun at dusty silent melodramas? In a stimulating essay on Careful (992), Will Straw has noted the minorness of the cultural materials Maddin re-enacts. When the Coen Brothers bring back the 930s, or Tim Burton the 950s, or Quentin Tarantino the ’60s and ’70s, in a spirit of affectionate mockery, the cultural history they are referencing is still alive, not just in the memory of its aging original participants, but in contemporary culture through cable tv and video stores. But when Maddin recreates the images and feelings of D.W. Griffith-era silent melodrama, or an Erich von Stroheim or Josef von Sternberg period film, or German mountain films of the 920s and ’30s, you practically have to be a film studies major to have even a dim comprehension of what he is referring to. Shaviro again: “Maddin’s point is not to return to an earlier time but to dramatize the impossibility of such a return. His films do not bring us back to the era of silent film. Rather, they demonstrate how long ago that era was, and how far away from it we are now.”2 This is certainly true, and it indirectly raises the important idea that this cultural past is something that Maddin feels exiled from. But it does not address the question of why the filmmaker insists on returning to this little pasture, and of what exactly is there that rivets his attention. He himself has said that, after all, “I’ve hung around in the 920s longer than the ’20s hung around in the ’20s.”3 It might be said that perhaps Maddin simply likes silent cinema the way a painter might like the colour brown. That, actually, is pretty close to the level of analysis that most commentators have offered on the question—extended sometimes to a biographical note that Maddin’s first love for this cinema came at a formative time when mentor-like friends such as George Toles and Stephen Snyder who happened to teach film showed him these things in their homes. But such explanations don’t take us very far in themselves. What, then, does melodrama give Maddin access to that post-melodrama cannot? The answer in one word is feeling—a particular realm of feeling. The ecstasies and terrors of silent melodrama, its lyrical sweetness and heroic endeavour, above all its simplicity and innocence and directness, and even

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its hoary historical obsoleteness, are just what Maddin needs to give expression to his own peculiar emotional compulsions and artistic affinities. The stories told in Maddin’s films are exactly the stories he wants to tell, and the form he presents them in—both the dead apparatus and the stylized visual representations he adopts—answer precisely to a specific conflicted condition. For however deliberately preposterous they are, the emotional extremes and antediluvian postures of Maddin’s cinema are expressive and functional, rather than simply decorative and empty. Both the rigorous innocence of the characters and stories, and the corrosive acid-bath of ridicule they are subjected to, are working to say something. *

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The first quality Maddin is searching for, I would say, is a kind of childlike naïveté. There are innumerable traces in Maddin’s films of his own childhood, and it is an easy (though extensive) task to demonstrate the autobiographical elements in his films by reference to his many occasional writings, interviews, and commentaries, not to mention the sizable extracts from his journals published in From the Atelier Tovar. His first film was entitled The Dead Father (986), and it is, if we can trust Maddin’s own testimony, in many ways a rather literal representation of dreams and imaginings he experienced regarding his dead father. Tales from the Gimli Hospital returns to his family’s lake cottage at Gimli as well as to the Icelandic ethnicity of parts of his family and community. Cowards Bend the Knee, whose protagonist is actually named “Guy Maddin,” is a riot of autobiographical shards, featuring as primary locations the beauty shop run by his mother and aunt and the Winnipeg Arena where he spent many boyhood hours in the dressing rooms and showers (his father was the manager of the Maroons hockey team). It also has Maddin’s mother Herdis appearing in the role of her own mother, blind and living in the basement. Cowards’ sequel, Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), is a yet-more explicit return to the perspective of the child (again called “Guy Maddin”), while the feature-length documentary My Winnipeg (2007) often speaks its director’s own childhood memories in his own voice(over). In other ways Maddin’s cinema is what we might call confessional. The emotional attitudes his characters manifest towards their parents, and the parents’ actions towards their children, are presented with the dramatic larger-than-life simplicity of a child’s view—or a child’s view as it might be dredged up in psychoanalysis. Is there a more frankly, and literally, Oedipal

Maddin and Melodrama

cinema anywhere in history than Maddin’s? Sons who struggle with images of fathers who are either too weak or too strong, sons desperately in love with their mothers and daughters with their fathers, parents who destructively prefer one child to another, fathers and sons in competition for the same woman, and the hysterical suffering and acting-out that results from these intra-family traumas are a staple of Maddin’s films. Careful—which Maddin and Toles like to describe as “pro-repression”4—is a delirious mix-and-match of Freudian primal situations, and Cowards Bend the Knee is a nightmarish jamboree of Oedipal castration anxieties. Again, the magnification and cartoonish starkness of these situations is childlike and possesses an awesome potency. It is as though the sensibility imagining them had no way to defend itself against their primordial power, even as its merely adult rationality saw them clearly as ridiculous and trite. Also confessional is Maddin’s idiosyncratic return to issues of sexual jealousy and sexual ethics, two qualities his journals show some concern with. Tales from the Gimli Hospital spends much of its time on the hurt feelings of the loser of a male contest for female favour, and in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997) the protagonist manifests a textbook case of irrational male jealousy. Maddin’s male characters have a repeated tendency to waltz off to a new relationship with no thought for the one they are already in. The heedlessness and guiltlessness of this condition is so profound that in Archangel it can be represented bluntly as amnesia (one of the characters, on his wedding night, forgets that he is married while going down to get something from the front desk of the honeymoon hotel and ends up in sexual congress with the receptionist). In Cowards Bend the Knee, the hero—“Guy Maddin,” remember—while holding the hand of his terrified and grief-stricken girlfriend during the operation to abort his child, drops it to rush out and start a sexual pursuit of another woman who has wandered into the room. The peculiar flavour of Maddin’s childhood growing up in Winnipeg in the 960s was marked by a feeling of isolation and enclosure, captured in images of the boy listening to the radio in his bedroom at night, looking down through the floor vents into the beauty salon that was part of his house, or haunting the bowels of the dark, cave-like Winnipeg Arena.5 It was also an isolation from the outside world because of geographical distance and almost of life itself for half the year because of Winnipeg winters. Maddin was the youngest child in his family by seven years, and his experience of growing up in a house previously intensely occupied by siblings who had departed real

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childhood before he even arrived is wonderfully captured in a passage from his unfilmed, and seemingly directly autobiographical, scenario entitled The Child Without Qualities: What vigorous and loving play these toys and couches and radios had been submitted to before the child without qualities had entered the world. Now, as a result, a residue of better quality seemed to sit on everything in the deserted house. The house held a dormancy, a potential to divulge what it held for his family before. Every object in it was full and ready to discharge its payload of history. The child without qualities was permanently expectant.... And so it was with chest swollen so in happiness and in happy solitude that the child without qualities lived his earliest years.6 But this innocent and happy time was struck by hammer blows. When Guy was seven, his sixteen-year-old brother Cameron committed suicide on the grave of his girlfriend, who had recently died in a car accident. A few years later a friend of Guy’s reportedly hanged himself by accident in his own backyard. And then when Guy was twenty-one, his father Chas died of a stroke, the day after Guy discovered his girlfriend was pregnant.7 These dramas were followed by Maddin’s initiation into the world of early cinema, through lessthan-perfect 6-mm prints of silent movies shown on bedsheets or walls. When Maddin started to make films himself, then, it seems from this perspective quite natural and unremarkable that he should adopt the forms and language of a superseded cinematic melodrama. There had been enough events in his own past that could be fitted without alteration into such a framework. In Careful, the hapless swan-feeder, dead father to three of the central characters, had gone through most of his life with only one eye, having lost it in infancy when his mother carelessly left a broach pin open on her dress front and maimed him while giving him a hug. This plot detail fits unnoticeably into the purple array of family tragedies in the film, but it turns out to be exactly what happened to Chas Maddin as a baby, leaving him with a glass eye for his entire life. Maddin recalls about Chas’s mother that “she felt unbelievably horrible about it and spent the rest of her life poking out her own eyes in all the photographs of her. I’ve never seen a photograph of her without the eyes poked out.”8 The violence and primal effect of these events truly do seem more at home and less surreally happenstance in a melodramatic narrative than a realist one.

Maddin and Melodrama

And they perhaps coloured everything that didn’t seem so excessive, or else fitted in to a childlike fairy-tale perception where everything was powerful in this way and where suicides and baby-maimings and glass eyes seemed not so different from everything else—indeed absolutely of a piece with the blue dye and piles of hair in the beauty salon, the dark cigar-smoking aggression of the denizens of the Winnipeg Arena, and the fabulous ugliness of naked Soviet hockey players in its shower rooms. Under these circumstances the sweetness and the blood-and-thunder of melodrama must have looked to Maddin in his late twenties not like—or not only like—absurdly extravagant kitsch, but like a broad conduit for true feeling. So melodrama in its obsolete and practically forgotten form could offer a vehicle for personal expression, not any the less effective and appropriate for the poignant fact of its despised station in the dustbin of culture. On the contrary, it was more so when the old and used and discarded artifacts of an earlier era could seem as beneficent as the used toys and furnishings Maddin grew up with. Maddin’s principal melodramatic models (and Toles’s too, no doubt) are nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama and its early cinema offspring, the more extreme and narrative-flattening aspects of German expressionism and Soviet montage, the extravagantly romantic cinema of Abel Gance, the freakish silent films of Lon Chaney and Tod Browning, and Hollywood horror movies of the 930s. The pastness of all these forms is so definitive that any attempt to reproduce them in a contemporary context must be disavowingly stylish or contemptuously retro-kitschy or both—and these qualities are strongly present in Maddin’s films. Encasing powerful feelings in such impossible forms answers a double need. On the one hand, the naïveté and extremity of the forms enables the tapping of equally naive and extreme emotions, rooted in childhood and requiring a quasi-childlike intensity and directness of expression. On the other hand, the derisory impossibility of melodrama reflects the grotesque appearance of these feelings and events to an adult, postmodern view (a view, that is, which has long since left behind any narrative as grand as melodrama’s). The melodramatic apparatus in Maddin’s cinema, then, is simultaneously outlandish and perfectly functional. *

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Around us now everything that is idealist in culture is endangered, and we see repeatedly the desperate attempts to rediscover and rehabilitate innocence and belief in the face of a ruling sentiment of incredulity and cynicism. In

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popular narrative—say, mainstream Hollywood movies—the necessity to reaffirm constantly that these things are not lost when everybody strongly suspects that they are leads to flatness or hollowness, worries about simulacra and virtuality, and a move to spectacle and special effects as distractions from any real scrutiny of assumptions. A filmmaker like Steven Spielberg absolutely ties himself up in knots trying to deal with all this. Most efforts at sincerity in this environment, whether heartfelt or not, look phoney because the gestures are too familiar, the truths too automatic and threadbare. The very few examples of serious, powerful melodrama in postmodern Hollywood have to find some way to mark the strangeness or historical obsoleteness of what they are doing. So Magnolia (999) emphasizes how truly extraordinary its torrents of feeling are with a rain of frogs, while Far From Heaven (2002) feels it necessary actually to resurrect bodily the narrative, historical period, and mise en scène of fifty-year-old Sirk films, since nothing less necrophilic can put us in touch with those feelings. In perhaps the most intensely melodramatic of all his films, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (992), David Lynch has recourse to an actual angel, heavily theatricalized and over-innocent, as a symbol for the necessary purifying principle of good that cannot actually be found in his world (a gesture, by the way, that is uncannily similar to that of the children’spageant angels in Tales from the Gimli Hospital). In the sophisticated areas of culture which simply accept that everything is false or unknowable (think Seinfeld), anybody’s desire to believe that innocence and sincerity are viable is ruthlessly mocked, and worldly scepticism is embraced as the only value available. Finding a workable way to express the kinds of perceptions and feelings Maddin wants to is practically impossible under these cultural conditions, especially when the artist has as lively a sense of postmodern disbelief as anyone. In this context we can bring back the old idea from Elsaesser and NowellSmith that melodramatic excess is some kind of symptomatic return of the cultural repressed. Leaving aside the notion that Freudian repression and return are strongly present in an almost literal way in the scenarios of many Maddin films, we can note that the kind of social critique manifested in 950s melodrama has no equivalent in Maddin’s, where the wider social realm scarcely exists. Instead, though, one might argue that the excesses of Maddin’s melodrama—its extravagant gestures, its violence, its lyrical fervour—are symptomatic not of an ideological sickness but of a cultural one. From this perspective, our culture is sick in its inability to express fundamental aspira-

Maddin and Melodrama

tions and primal feelings, in its repression of innocence, pathos, and yearning. In Maddin’s cinema, rooted in the unconscious and childhood perceptions, and assaulted by an adult sensibility of rationality and ironic disbelief, the repressed also returns. But instead of, say, the failures of masculinity as an institution returning as garish mise en scène as in The Cobweb or Written on the Wind, in Maddin we have the failures of culture to allow the expression of primal or innocent feeling returning as garish naïveté and hysterical crisis. The glaring excess of Maddin’s melodrama is then a deliberate exaggeration, an exaggeration unto parody, of perceptions and affects that cannot be expressed in a more uncovered form in the contemporary environment. And in this respect it is really not so different from classic Hollywood melodramas that have to express things somatically because they cannot do so directly.9 *

*

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Writing about melodrama has also emphasized the role of the body and its sufferings in this genre of narrative. Peter Brooks traces this quality right back to French theatre of the Revolutionary period.20 Tom Gunning points out that melodramas in the dominant nineteenth-century model, whose purpose was to reveal an underlying structure of moral rightness in the world, evolved in the theatre of the Grand Guignol into a variant where faith in such a structure had been completely lost and a now much-escalated torture of the body was presented as a spectacle of physical and moral horror entirely without edification.2 And from this early twentieth-century theatrical development, with its emphasis on sensation and monstrosity, it is a short step to horror as a distinct genre, especially in its later cinematic manifestations. With this tradition in mind, we will recall the fact that in every one of the Maddin films we are considering there is bodily disfigurement, mutilation, and dismemberment. From the hero of The Dead Father who eats chunks of his father’s body with a spoon to the legless heroine of The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin presents a carnival of amputation, corpse-violation, and other instances of corporeal abjection. The reckless hyperbole of these phenomena forms a high point of the absurdity of Maddin’s cinema, but it also connects pretty clearly with the festival of bodily mutilation in the films of Chaney and Browning. This violence is simultaneously an evidence of seriousness and the distanciation from that seriousness. For all their ludicrousness, the physical atrocities Maddin’s cinema presents are too awful to be laughed off without trouble. In his essay subtitled “Collaborating with Guy Maddin,” George

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90 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Toles remarks on their mutual fondness for a kind of comedy that arises from death or something else that is fundamentally painful to behold, where some incongruity provokes a laugh that seems to relieve the spectator’s pain but ends up reinforcing it.22 In Maddin’s films, the melodrama of bodily violence repeats the spectacle of terrible meaninglessness in Grand Guignol theatre as remarked by Gunning. The meaningless is doubly inscribed: first, inside the story with the failure of the violence to ameliorate, or educate, or edify in any way; and second, extra-diegetically through its absurd excess and its placement within a discredited historical narrative form. At the same time the violence springs in classic melodrama fashion from tensions of family and sexuality, as bodily expressions of moral and emotional catastrophe and somatic symptoms of primal psychic pain and traumatic breakdowns of moral order. And so the Maddin paradigm is repeated another time. On the surface, the pallidness of old melodramatic forms and gestures is compensated by the piquant extremes of violence, with the constant comic absurdity cloaking or acting as a distraction from the underlying impossible condition—a condition where sadness and violence are substance rather than pastiche. *

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Lastly, Maddin’s cinema can be seen as a form of distinctly Canadian melodrama. More than once the director has expressed his contempt for Canadian cinema, but of course that does not mean that he is not part of the phenomenon.23 To an inquiring eye, Maddin may be seen, rather, to share a good many stereotypical “Canadian” qualities. He has a Canadian appreciation for repression—recognition of its necessity, a vivid awareness of what happens when it is absent. He has a Canadian sense of modesty and self-criticism, combined with a perverse patriotism which is accompanied by the same mockery that attends his depictions of innocence and suffering. Note how the maple leaf keeps appearing in his films, sweetly and affectionately, but always with a discordant and ironic effect because of the extremeness, the over-dramatization, of its context (something that is by definition “un-Canadian”). Epic pioneer narrative in Gimli, Manitoba, in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, the maple-leaf flag fluttering in Archangel like the Red Banner in a Sergei Eisenstein film, blood from an abortion uncannily taking the shape of a maple leaf in Cowards Bend the Knee (not to mention all the hockey violence and hockey atrocity in that film)—these are all markers of a proud Canadian nationalism whose expression is inseparable from its simultaneous disavowal. And of course the

Maddin and Melodrama

legendary weakness and failure of the heroes of Canadian film narrative are shared by most of Maddin’s protagonists. Canadian cinema is famous for its depressiveness and for its distrust of a “clean” narrative, while Canadian culture also celebrates its wild, subversive sense of humour (so starkly at odds with its stereotypes of politeness and “deference to authority”).24 Maddin’s work conforms to these criteria. His films are full of heartbreak, amnesia, self-mutilation, and terrible suffering, and none of them end happily. If they are not depressive in the obvious sense of Wedding in White (972) or Margaret’s Museum (995), it is only because of that ever-present irony discussed above, which sets the spectacle at a distance through its very excessiveness. This irony initially draws off the sting of pain, but the probing viewer will find (along the lines suggested by Toles) that there is ultimately nothing to laugh at, and that ironic distanciation has been a false friend. Canadian cinema’s allergy to classical-realist Hollywood, with its neat categories, moral absolutes, totally “solved” plots, and happy endings is obviously shared by Maddin. Avant-garde exaggerations and discontinuities of pace and style would seem to place his cinema so far outside this realm as not to require further comment. On the other hand, the historical melodrama that Maddin transports into his films does have classical qualities. Indeed its simplicity and innocence, the wholeheartedness of its fervour, are classical. As we have seen, its classicism is somehow more truthful in spite of its historical absurdity—or rather because of its historical absurdity, since the fakeness of the contemporary variety is quite possibly a by-product of its non-historical non-absurdity. There is a kernel or essential trace of classicism in Maddin, but it is far from the Hollywood variety. Despite its manifold differences, Maddin’s cinema does share the quality of anti-Hollywood narrative with the canonical line of Canadian films that might be traced from Goin’ Down the Road (970) and Paperback Hero (973) through I Love a Man in Uniform (993) all the way to Last Night (998). It is a quality that can be observed in any of Maddin’s features simply through the total absence of anything pat or self-satisfied in the destinies of the characters or the trajectories of the stories. In The Saddest Music in the World, however, it has reached the plane of a conscious reflexive allegory about Canada and the United States, Canadian and American cinemas. Here, art (that is, music) is essentialized as the expression of sadness, a response to trauma, and American culture as the automatic “glitzifying” of anything it touches. In the sordid marketplace represented by the saddest-music contest—funded by a

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beer maker and full of game-show trashiness—all art is compromised. The Canadian artist has to choose between being authentic and a loser like Dr. Fyodor Kent, or inauthentically Yankee-glamorous and a winner like his son Chester, self-described as “a producer from New York City.” This character, “Chester Kent,” is modelled on and actually named after the James Cagney protagonist of Busby Berkeley’s 933 movie musical Footlight Parade, and he wants the contest entries he produces to have “sadness, but with sass and pizzazz.” Both Canadian and “American” artists are ridiculous (and so are the Siamese and Mexican and Scottish ones), but the Canadian at least has ridiculous actual pathos, whereas the American has only ridiculous brazen fakery. In The Saddest Music in the World, the weight of true sadness eventually crushes all the tinsel, and Chester sheds his Americanness and succumbs to his own inner sorrow, really Canadian at last. Camp and kitsch dissolve into a psychic landscape of melancholy, and the greater truth and power of Canadian cinema is, in this twisted and baroque fashion, asserted over its gigantic glittering rival to the south. In Maddin’s hands, Canadian melodrama thus becomes a pastiche of impossible earlier idealisms (military virtue, for example, as seen in the solemn soldiers of Archangel and Saddest Music), whose impossibility is recognized soberly and with a sense of regret and renunciation, while a constant subversive irony marks this tragedy with wild mania. His work captures the sense that a true and satisfying expression of underlying fatality in life, one that allows for lyricism, tenderness, elegiac lament, and the placement of suffering in some framework of gravitas and decorum, is beyond reach in our environment. It is beyond reach in the postmodern Western world in general, and in hopeless, anti-heroic, compulsively sceptical Canada in particular. It is a kind of miracle that Maddin has managed to redeploy the form of melodrama to embody this perspective, at once startlingly personal and original and at the same time broadly reflective of a condition that runs right through our culture.

Maddin and Melodrama

Notes . Steven Shaviro, “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin,” in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 980, eds. William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 200), 26; reprinted in this volume (70). 2. Ibid., 26–7. 3. Ibid., 27. 4. Two well-known essays are Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” Movie 25 (Winter 977–78): 53–56, reprinted in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 987), 75–79; and Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Monogram 4 (972): 2–5, reprinted in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 99), 68–9. 5. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” Screen 8, 2 (977): 3–8, reprinted in Home is Where the Heart Is, ed. Gledhill, 70–74. 6. The most important ironies in Sirk are those of so much film melodrama of the 950s, namely the ironies of the failure of dominant ideology, the vast distance between how social institutions, gender roles, and other fundamental values are supposed to function and how they actually do function. Much of this “ironic” social critique of Sirk’s films is overt and uncomplicated (the country-club values in All That Heaven Allows [955] or Lana Turner’s kitsch glamour in Imitation of Life [959]). What the “irony in Sirk” debate is mostly directed to instead is the fact that the films often take up an attitude critical of ideological norms without overtly acknowledging that they are conducting such a critique, and that they present characters in the grip of dominant values (therefore “good” characters) whose ideological conformity is objectively destructive but who are never overtly labelled by the film as hollow or destructive (the Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall characters in Written on the Wind [956] are a clear example). The melodrama of Sirk and his contemporaries is quite different in this respect from most earlier forms of cinematic melodrama (Griffith, for example), where all the values inherent in the films are plainly depicted as what the films think they are. But although the hollowness of some of Sirk’s “good” characters does indeed interfere with the overt ideological work of the narrative, it hardly disables the melodrama of these characters’ sufferings or the pathos of their entrapment in ideology. Indeed the reverse is the case: they are rendered more pathetic by their impossibility, and the film’s distance from their “false consciousness” then functions much like dramatic irony and not at all like any kind of scornful detachment. 7. Countless scenes in Fassbinder contain witheringly sarcastic deconstructions of the poisonous values of society and its individual members. But the innocence and emotional fervour of his idealistic protagonists, no matter how absurd or dysfunctional, never invokes the filmmaker’s scorn. The protagonists of Fox and His Friends (975), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (972), I Only Want You to Love Me (976), and In a Year of 3 Moons (978)—to name only a few—may be ridiculously self-deceiving and self-destroying in their quests for love, but Fassbinder is on their side and not that of reason and reality, and the horrific ironies of his films simply furnish an extra register for his cries of anger, pity, and anguish. For Fassbinder’s films to be fundamentally ironic in the sense of the word I intend, they would

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8. 9. 0.

. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

20. 2.

have to see the absurdity of his characters’ innocence and idealism, and not care. Whenever the detached and ironic perspective arises in Fassbinder in connection with his protagonists, it causes pain to the viewer because it attacks what is good in the characters, it is the enemy of the good. This is very different from an ironic perspective which is felt to embody fundamental truth and to expose the delusions of melodramatic feeling. Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 997), 284. Shaviro, “Fire and Ice,” 27. Indeed, one way of thinking about Maddin as a serious postmodern artist is to draw a connection between his pastiches of ancient film melodrama and his visual treatment of these pastiches through something like the avant-garde practice of marking, occluding, or degrading found footage. Of course Maddin has not literally found this footage, but rather filmed it himself; and yet its meticulous reference to historical forms makes it “found” in another sense. Will Straw, “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful,” in Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 5 Canadian Films, ed. Gene Walz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 305–320; reprinted in this volume (58–69). Shaviro, “Fire and Ice,” 28. Maddin says this to filmmaker Noam Gonick in the course of Gonick’s documentary on Maddin and the making of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs entitled Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (997). It is also quoted by Caelum Vatnsdal in Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2000), 23. See, for example, George E. Toles, A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film (Detroit: Wayne State University, 200), 329; reprinted in this volume (53) A wonderful essay by Maddin describing his childhood experience of the Winnipeg Arena, entitled “The Womb is Barren,” is reprinted in Guy Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003), 87–90. Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar, 87. Graeme Smith, “It’s a mad, mad, Maddin world,” Globe and Mail, 7 April 2004, R. Ibid. In a 2004 weblog posting entitled “Guy Maddin,” Steven Shaviro, writing about Cowards Bend the Knee and The Saddest Music in the World, says the films are “ultimately hyper-emotional, as if the camp were not so much a deflation of the emotion as its protective colouration,” http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/ archives/2004_05.html. This seems something of a departure from Shaviro’s earlier “non-functional” readings of Maddin’s melodrama, but I would certainly endorse the sentiment. Peter Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, eds. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 992), –24. Tom Gunning, “The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde,” in Melodrama, eds. Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, 50–63.

Maddin and Melodrama

22. George E. Toles, “From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin,” in Toles, A House Made of Light, 324; reprinted in this volume (48). 23. See, for example, the various comments in interviews with, or related by, Caelum Vatnsdal in Kino Delirium, 53, 68, and 74. Maddin sometimes accompanies his negative view with a list of exceptions—which, if collated, would be rather substantial. His impatience with the standard template of film production for funding purposes extended by, for example, Telefilm Canada is quite plain; but also one imagines that both the stereotypical grey, documentarist aspect of Canadian cinema and its antitype, the shallow Hollywood imitation, are equally inimical. Maddin’s avant-garde qualities and his fondness for historical-melodramatic excess and fancifulness may certainly be seen as rejections of both of these models. 24. I take the phrase from the title of Edgar Friedenberg’s book Deference to Authority: The Case of Canada (White Plains, NY: Sharpe, 980).

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david l. pike

I do feel a bit like Dracula in Winnipeg. I’m safe, but can travel abroad and suck up all sorts of ideas from other filmmakers—both dead and undead. Then I can come back here and hoard these tropes and cinematic devices…. And I sit here in almost eternal darkness all winter long and try to make these dead things live. —Guy Maddin Wrapping up the fraught production of his fourth feature, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997), Guy Maddin confessed that, “I’m sick of the twenties. I’ve hung around in the twenties longer than the twenties hung around in the twenties.”2 Indeed, Maddin’s habitation of the seminal decade of modernism could be said to date as far back as his formative undergraduate friendship with fellow Winnipegger John Boles Harvie, who not only shared with Maddin his encyclopedic knowledge and cinephiliac obsession with the silent cinema, but immersed himself in the role: speaking, dressing, and acting like a twenties dandy.3 While Maddin’s persona is resolutely contemporary, his cinematic twenties are the navel point of an idiosyncratic but highly original and increasingly influential engagement with the phenomenon of modernism

Thoroughly Modern Maddin

in its myriad facets, a phenomenon that can be said to have stretched from the Romantics through to the end of the Second World War. Consequently, when he accepted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s offer that his next feature after Twilight be a film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 897 novel, Dracula, he was not in fact escaping from his twenties aesthetic, but stretching its centripetal force into an earlier thread of modernism. In this article, I will discuss the many strands of Maddin’s modernism, from the historical aspects of a Manitoban chronology extending from the autonomous Icelandic republic of Gimli in the 870s to the glory days of Winnipeg in the middle of the twentieth century; to the primitivist credo of one’s life as a performance, one’s art as a melodramatic refraction of one’s life, and one’s life and art as wholly at odds with the establishment conventions of professionalism; to the birth of the cinema itself in 895 and the fecund decades of its childhood search for its most effective identity; to the modernist obsession with memory, nostalgia, the past, and buried truth. Moreover, I will argue that it is through Maddin’s peculiar engagement with the era of modernism that we can best distinguish his work from the labels of postmodernism, camp, or pastiche to which it has so often been reduced. For Maddin’s oeuvre can be identified neither with the ironic pop-culture homages of American directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Todd Haynes, nor with the resolutely high-brow and anti-Hollywood productions of much of Anglo-Canadian and Québécois filmmaking; instead, he suggests a wholly different relationship between Hollywood and the traditions of Canadian cinema.

The Garage Modernist It’s sort of like the Ramones. I just refuse to learn how to play my instrument. The Ramones will never go away, as far as I’m concerned. I work more slowly than they did, but I hope that by the time I go away, I’ll have a nice body of work. —Guy Maddin4 Central to Maddin’s image as a filmmaker is an insistence on his status as an amateur, autodidact dilettante, an insistence customarily framed in terms of laziness and neurosis. In interview after interview, he has honed the slacker image of the aimless twentysomething who got into films because he couldn’t be bothered to do anything else. Indeed, in the enticingly narrow but nevertheless essential gap between the slacker persona and the intense labour that

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has produced the oeuvre that established the persona, Maddin has generated a compelling sociological explanation for the twenty- and thirtysomething males who dominated early twentieth-century modernism to at least the same degree as today they dominate independent filmmaking. Still, unlike what we could perhaps call the mainstream American slackers, the video-store, computer game, and Internet addicts that followed Tarantino’s inspirational lead, Maddin’s version taps into the modernist lode of self-mortification rather than the late twentieth-century focus on self-promotion. Commenting on his decision to publish the film diaries from the production of The Saddest Music in the World (2003), Maddin sounds genuinely tormented by the embarrassment their exposure will cause him: “My feelings aren’t even mixed; it’s almost complete regret. Like many things I’ve done, it was a snap decision and probably a foolish one. Someone just said to me, ‘Do you want to publish these diaries?’ So I handed them to him and he published them. That was a mistake.”5 Deadpan episodes like the opening inability to plant a tree from a sapling in his backyard to commemorate the start of the production read like the absurdist failure of a character out of Dostoyevsky or Kafka: frozen ground, skyrocketing overtime rates, and irreparable damage to the garden of his beloved and deceased Aunt Lil echo classic motifs of loser modernism.6 The details of Maddin’s crush on his female stars Isabella Rossellini and Maria de Medeiros, however, tap a contemporary vein of pure lust that would not be out of place in a Farrelly Brothers comedy: mentioning that he feels he has long known Medeiros because of the nude shots he has downloaded off the Internet, or penning a delirious paean to the intimate joys of adr (automatic dialogue replacement) which concludes, “At bedtime I let spit-lubricated Isabella slide out of my cramped and throbbing embrace, and dismount tremblingly from her lips.”7 Such moments form a major leitmotif of the journals published in 2003 in From the Atelier Tovar.8 From the way Maddin also brings them up in the more public forum of the interview, they would seem to be motivated by an idiosyncratic twist on the persona of the director as fan that has dominated non-studio filmmaking since the days of the French new wave. It is less frequently observed that the Nouvelle Vague itself borrowed the idea of the artist as fan, and the slumming populism implied by it, from a strand of modernism that originated in Romantic poets such as Charles Baudelaire and his fellow flâneurs in the Paris of Louis-Philippe. It reached its apogee in the Surrealists, the first true cinephiles, who championed the violent blockbuster

Thoroughly Modern Maddin

serial thrillers of Louis Feuillade, the continuous programming of neighbourhood theatres, and the unashamed pursuit of sexual obsession, even as their own writing, art, and filmmaking remained avant-garde in the extreme. In a review of a program at New York’s most punishingly old-school house of experimental film, the Anthology Film Archives, a program that paired zmovie schlock (East of Borneo [93], Road to Salina [970], The Entity [98]) with the found-footage films inspired by three artists’ obsession with actresses who appeared in them, Maddin alternates his self-consciously adjective-laden and overexcited prose with just enough crit-speak to maintain his bona fides and a fine instinct for “the boner quotient” that for him appears to lie at the core of all cinephilia. He concludes by inserting himself into the genealogy of underground obsessives from Joseph Cornell to Peter Tscherkassky, fantasizing about his own future homage to the reigning queen of “Cinema Rejecta,” Denise Richards, with a found-footage remix of Undercover Brother (2002).9 It is precisely the “boner quotient,” the translation of the classic feminist critique of cinema’s voyeuristic foundation into the sophomoric lexicon of the contemporary teen movie, the late-night channel surfer, and the freeze-framing, video-capturing couch potato, that distinguishes Maddin’s persona from the realm of camp, a label the director himself resists, preferring, as Steven Shaviro has noted, the term “decadent.”0 Shaviro, however, likens Maddin’s stance to Oscar Wilde’s, arguing that “camp… is a shortcut to radical aestheticism.” Maddin’s camp side certainly exists; it is perhaps most in evidence in Sissy-Boy Slap-Party (995), which appears to have been strongly influenced by his friend, fellow filmmaker (and actor in the film) Noam Gonick, whose flamboyantly gay and unapologetically camp persona punctuates Maddin’s recent oeuvre as an untroubled beacon from an agitprop and sexually liberated present-day to a neurotically heterosexual fellow-traveller still working through the repressions of an earlier epoch. While Gonick happily imagines his marginalized films bypassing conventional distribution routes to reach a subculture of “clandestine basement circle jerks around dvd players,” Maddin’s sex-saturated films have always been erotic rather than pornographic in tone, and have treated their material as explicitly perverse rather than straightforwardly natural.2 Until Cowards, Maddin’s “rules for nudity,” as he put it, “ha[d] always been the same as the Hays Office limply enforced in pre-code pictures… a little bit of nudity as long as it’s a long shot, smudged out, or over-exposed.”3 Paradoxically, the tone of the films’ repressed and tortured context (think of Johann staring at his mother bathing through a

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00 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES mirror attached to a stick while hanging by his knees in a stone-lined air shaft in Careful) seems closer to the closeted fifties; there is none of the sophisticated and seductive naughtiness characteristic of the pre-code thirties: until Meta in Cowards and the two starlets of Saddest Music, Maddin’s actors were generally filmed in as unflattering a light as possible, erotic only, perhaps, in the same fetishistic way that led many men who were adolescents in the fifties to prefer Doris Day to Marilyn Monroe—indeed, in Twilight, he even managed to dampen the appeal of the Québécoise icon and art-house favourite, Pascale Bussières. In Cowards, it is as if the challenge of an alien forum—the cool and haughty confines of the high art world represented by the Power Plant Gallery in Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, which commissioned the piece—pushed (or perhaps empowered) Maddin to take control of his images in a different way than he had previously done, bringing his sexualized melodrama out of the closet, so to speak, and embracing the mantle of hipness being thrust upon him. Now publishing in the Village Voice and Film Comment, feted with retrospectives in Rotterdam, New York, and elsewhere, and granted the big budget, bona fide stars, and commercial distribution of Saddest Music: all these factors have contributed to push Maddin beyond the brink of cultdom to the status of a legitimate international auteur. This status has been solidified by a new image of himself as “showman” in his most recent features, especially Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), which he toured widely with a live orchestra, foley crew, and rotating cast of all-star narrators; for My Winnipeg (2007), too, Maddin provided live narration for a screening at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre.4 Still, it takes only a quick glance over at his Toronto-based compatriot Atom Egoyan’s analogous ticket to global renown, Exotica (994), to register the fact that Maddin is likely never to stray too far from his provincial slacker roots. Both Exotica and Cowards revolve around the dynamics of the sex show; both weave their melodramatic narratives out of their sexual theme; and both were received by critics primarily as commentaries on the complicity of the spectator’s act of viewing them, a reception that permitted the ambivalently exploitative quality of that theme to be left unexamined within its safe theoretical container while audiences left no doubt about what had brought many of them to the gallery, theatre, or, later, rental venue. Exotica used its slick, soft-core-derived visuals and detached characters to uncover an emotional core of humanity out of the audience’s thwarted

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 0

expectations of perversion. Cowards counters Egoyan’s nurturing and spatially anonymous strip club—it could be anywhere—with the equally male and equally eroticized setting of the Winnipeg Arena, insisting on a powerfully localized context for its adaptation of the Electra myth. And while Egoyan’s film strongly demarcates its heterosexual main plot from the gay subplot in which Don McKellar’s pet-shop owner picks up men at the opera, in Maddin’s film the homoerotic milieu of the hockey rink and dressing rooms insinuates itself outward through the entire action, however straight its primary actors may play their roles. Rather than an ironic nod at a supremely subtext-aware contemporary audience, however, the steaming bodies of the Maroons’ shower scenes seem to have been reproduced directly from Maddin’s childhood memories. In interviews and in his unfilmed autobiographical treatment, The Child Without Qualities, as well as in a brief elegy to the closed-down arena, Maddin repeatedly returns to the memory of himself as a child lathering up the naked players’ backs, and a primal scene combining a brush with celebrity with an eye-level gape at future Hall-of-Famer Gump Worsley’s “makeshift fig-leaf contrived out of suds.”5 Because it is rooted so firmly in Maddin’s own childhood, this image seems in his oeuvre less a repressed observation of latent homosexuality than a simple fact of his, and perhaps of any life, the child’s free-floating, sense-based sexuality; in “The Womb Is Barren,” he pairs the memory with that of the adjacent room of the players’ wives: “I loved the olfactory shock of passing from this chamber redolent of wet diapers and breasts swollen with milk into a room of damp men, the dubious smell of athletic supporters, unlaced skates and drenched jerseys.”6 The bowels of the stadium are a Proustian lieu de mémoire, evoking an irreducibly, viscerally personal blast from the past whose intimate meaning the artist tries his best to translate into a common language: “In the Winnipeg Arena, my inner and outer landscapes were one and the same thing.”7 It is a past, moreover, that can no longer directly be accessed: the arena was, as Maddin put it, “remodelled, modernized, stupid” in 979, with the same process occurring to those who had grown up with it (it had opened in 955, a year before Maddin was born); it was finally demolished in 2006.8 At the same time, and in good modernist fashion, the artist’s representation of his self is meant to provide an emblem, a rebus for all who follow him. When Egoyan filmed Mia Kirshner caressing his wife Arsinée Khanjian’s naked and very pregnant belly in the office of the Exotica Club, it certainly carried an

02 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES extra-diegetic frisson of exposure and voyeurism, but the meaning of that exposure remained enigmatic, and the act could only be interpreted within the thematic web of the diegesis, the complex play of parents and children, protection and vulnerability. Maddin’s autobiography is both more and less immediately present in his films. It is less so because there is in fact nothing of his current life as such in the film. Even the scene where his mother, Herdis Maddin, playing “Guy Maddin’s” blind grandmother, presides over Meta and “Guy” rolling around at her feet—a scene Maddin reports will prevent him from ever showing his prudish mother the completed film, and which her black-painted glasses prevented her from witnessing during the shooting— even this scene plays on a long-ago-endured (if perhaps never overcome) adolescent embarrassment of exposure in front of one’s parents.9 His life is more immediately present because everything in the film, as Maddin has insisted over and over, is wholly autobiographical and true. And we should take him at his word, because the truth he is insisting upon is not the truth of reality television and afternoon talk shows—performative as their ostensible naturalism may also in the end be—but the truth of modernists such as Kafka or Proust or Beckett or Schulz: autobiography as a mode for revealing the hidden layers of the self and the society from which that self emerged, not the superficies treated by the conventions of realism. Proust was a lazy, asthmatic gadfly who nevertheless managed to complete a three-thousand page novel on top of a lifetime of occasional writing. Maddin certainly does not aspire to such a length, but his resumé of nine features and numerous shorts over twenty years is more than respectable for someone working as far from the mainstream of movie financing as he has done. Granted, he has succeeded reasonably well in regularly winning state funding, and has made a virtue of working on a shoestring budget, but laziness must still be set down as a facet of, rather than a hindrance to, his creative personality. But then, isn’t such laziness itself also a contemporary take on the hoary old modernist Sprachkriese, the ability to write thousands of words on the impossibility of writing any words at all? Nevertheless, while his themes more closely resemble the literary, so-called high modernists such as Proust and Kafka, Maddin’s modus operandi as a self-declared primitivist is closer to the avant-gardists whose styles permeate his filmmaking: the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the constructivists and other Soviet artists who saw their art, if not as demolishing, then as wholly remaking the world that had gone before them, dissolving the distinction between art and life entirely. Theirs

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 03

was a garage-band aesthetic avant la lettre, celebrating the fact that anyone at all could be an artist in the very moment that their own genius gave the lie to the dictum they were celebrating. After all, however hard we may try to commemorate the truly garage-band bands, the bands who couldn’t play their instruments, couldn’t write songs, couldn’t sing, and were lousy performers, what we return to and what we enjoy most are not such failed extremes but the brilliant compromises of trash with art. Moreover, the very act of commemoration transforms incompetence into genius in the process: you can’t even listen to the Ramones today as a tabula rasa, and if Guy Maddin has his way, Alyssa Milano and Denise Richards will be elevated to the camp heaven of Doris Day and Rose Hobart, enshrined as divine apparitions in a garage filmography filled to the ceiling with eroticized dreck. Speaking about how he stumbled into the role of filmmaker, Maddin explains that “to be a great author you need to be a genius and need to have been well read for your entire life, but to be a great pop star, you just need to pick up a guitar, and maybe to be a filmmaker of some impact, it’s more like being a pop star. You just pick up a camera, seize a garage band aesthetic, and go out there.”20 It was during the first decades of the twentieth century that the ethos of the garage band became viable, that artistic creation was ideologically severed from classical technique by movements such as Dada or the Surrealist practice of the exquisite corpse. The motion pictures had a different problem, for they were still seeking to be regarded as an art; the primitivist aesthetic did not hit the mainstream in cinema until the breakup of the studios, the rise of exploitation cinema, and the emergence of the French and other new waves in the fifties and sixties. But you still needed money, either from the guaranteed audience of the genre movie, from your family (Truffaut used his wife’s money, for example, to make The 400 Blows [959]), or, as happened in Canada and a few other places, from the government. With the digital video revolution, of course, cinema has now reached the turning point that popular music achieved in the sixties. There is a tacit but seldom enunciated class distinction here, for it is from the lower middle-class suburban and provincial kids that most garage bands and most indie filmmakers have emerged, while authors (not to mention most mainstream filmmakers), to paraphrase Maddin, generally need a nurturing milieu and a lot more connections. Maddin’s stubborn faithfulness to Winnipeg, where he still lives and works (the sets for each feature have been built in a different derelict local building, relics of better times), to the memories of the hockey arena and his Aunt Lil’s hair salon, to

04 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES the cabin on the lake at Gimli, to the slacker ambitions of his gang of Drones, and to the flamboyant antics that could shock and be tolerated in such equal measure only in an isolated town like Winnipeg: they are all imbued with the demographics of the garage band. Now, you can of course parlay garage-band status into superstardom—witness Tarantino or Nirvana—but then you risk being labelled a sell-out, surely one of the reasons Maddin has stuck so resolutely to his hometown roots. Indeed, this seems to be a bit what K. George Godwin had in mind when he complained in his recent history of the Winnipeg Film Group that it shouldn’t be considered a virtue to do something (twenties films) that used to be really easy and has since become incredibly difficult.2 This seems to me to miss the point, which is first of all that Maddin, like most innovators, maintains that he started making films this way because he was ill-trained and incompetent (famously, Jean-Luc Godard always claimed he invented the jump-cut because it was the quickest way to shorten the overlong first cut of Breathless [960]), and that he continues to make howling mistakes in each film and desperately tries to cover them up; he maintains that the five-minute Heart of the World (2000) is “the only movie I’ve made which looked and felt exactly as I hoped it would.”22 He is equally claiming that he couldn’t really make them any other way—just look at the trouble he got into with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, where all the mistakes were in trying to make the film look pristine, rather than to distress it into the other films’ resemblance of battered relics of an earlier day. To view Maddin’s twenties aesthetics as merely a formal gesture of nostalgia or a collector’s preciosity is to ignore the crucial ways in which the period of the twenties was responsible for shaping our own understanding of these very terms. It is the range and depth of his immersion in the twenties that has enabled Maddin to export his own marginality out of garage-band cultism and into urban hip. Paradoxically, the hipper he has become, the more he has revealed the complex underpinnings of what had been taken by many as a simple pose. The more his movies delve into twenties culture and aesthetics, the more they prove to be immersed in the simultaneously sordid and tragic detritus of the director’s own life. What at first looked like spot-on absurdist inventions—the father in Careful losing his eye to his mother’s brooch; the epidemic of suicides; the whole saga of Gimli—turn out to be factual episodes in Maddin’s life, and common knowledge to just about any Winnipegger with an ear for oral history. Maddin takes this mythologizing to a new level with My Winnipeg,

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 05

which mixes fantastic fact and deadpan fiction in a bid both to reimagine the city in his own image and to rewrite its history for the outside world: “My dream is to show this film at the Berlin Film Festival and have hundreds of Germans watching it as a travelogue of Winnipeg.”23 The film is both carefully documented—the 99 General Strike, a centre for early twentieth-century spiritualism—and wildly inventive—the “Forks beneath the Forks,” the high rate of sleepwalking. Moviemakers worked this way back in the new wave, but they don’t work this way anymore—they either make movies that have nothing to do with their lives, or they transmute their obsessions into fiction (think Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, or Lynne Stopkewich and Gary Burns), or they documentarize them pure and simple (Tarnation and Super Size Me, or anything by Michael Moore). The vertiginous interplay between family history and Maddin’s aesthetic is best elucidated through two categories dear to the practitioners of modernism: the child and the city.

Child’s Play Canada’s Centennial splashed a brief Kodachrome illumination into the musty basements, closets and garages of our nascence. But the illumination was for us children alone, the hyper-sensitive brown studies and centennial projects within our cubbyholes remained guardedly private.… We inscribed the choreographies of our revolutionary pleasures behind our bedroom headboards, interrupted regularly from without by terrors so sudden and vehement as to flatten our lungs. —Guy Maddin, The Child Without Qualities It is a commonplace of the history of modernism that it was a phenomenon of cities: London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Barcelona, Rome, New York. In Maddin’s recreation of the period, Winnipeg takes its proud place among those more celebrated urban centres. The city emerged in the latenineteenth century, and its heyday lasted from the twenties through to 950.24 While, as he put it, “I had to build a Winnipeg because you still don’t want to see the real Winnipeg,” Maddin has still remained faithful to its industrial past in a poetic fashion, creating his fantastic sets in disused industrial buildings around the city (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs in the former Vulcan Iron Works, Heart of the World in the former Dominion Bridge Works, Saddest Music in an abandoned steel mill), or in the case of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, in the

06 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES hair salon of his recently retired Aunt Lil; he immortalizes it with found footage and created footage in My Winnipeg.25 Modernism was concentrated in urban centres due both to industrialization and to the unprecedented scale of migrations across Europe and over to North America. In Winnipeg, the original First Nations inhabitants and Métis descended from Québécois fur traders and local wives were joined by German-speaking Mennonite immigrants from the Russian Empire in 874; the autonomous Republic of Iceland was established in 876 (whence the Maddin family); Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews later settled in Winnipeg’s North End.26 Tales from the Gimli Hospital darkly mocks the tragic history of a smallpox epidemic in the Republic of Iceland that killed some of Maddin’s own ancestors; Archangel recalls the Ukrainian population, not to mention the local soldiers who fought in the Great War, more of whom were killed than from any other part of the country; even the Germanic Bergfilm heritage of Careful has an ethnic toehold in the flattest region of Canada. George Melnyk complains with some justification that this heritage has generally been ignored in the reception of Maddin’s work, as it had been in the reception of earlier experimental filmmakers such as Michael Snow in favour of the critical terms of a contextless avant-garde.27 It remains to be seen if My Winnipeg will redress this reception—it is especially rich in mythologized detail of the early twentieth century—but such oversight has long also been a part of scholarship on modernism, which has tended to regard the avant-garde as functioning in a purely formal register, while personal history and specificity of place and time fade before the demands of a universal and universalizing aesthetics. To recover the specificities of different modernisms is complicated because one of the primary goals of the epoch was to subvert the traditional patterns of meaning based on realist notions of self and society that had dominated the nineteenth century. Most, if not all, modernist artists and writers would have resisted the reduction of their production to the data of their own life and times; nevertheless, most if not all of them addressed their subversions at targets derived precisely out of those data. As much as it sought to make itself wholly new, modernism was parasitic to a degree matched by few other periods. Think of the fondness for allusion, allegory, rewriting—Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s parables, Borges’s tales—not to mention the incorporation of the material world into art via collage, assemblages, performances. Moreover, the motion picture, which loomed as an éminence grise over the entire period, was fundamentally parasitic. The early “cinema of attractions” (in

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 07

Tom Gunning’s well-known formulation) imported scenes from every aspect of life to the screen in one-reel snippets. Little if any distinction was made between what we would now call newsreel footage and the common practice of Georges Méliès and others of recreating current events and disasters in their new studios. The earliest cinematic aspirations to legitimacy as an art form consisted of filmed adaptations of plays. These stilted dramas have received short shrift in the history books, but one has to wonder how many audience members may have found pleasure in the unforeseen combination of the artificiality of production and the realism of the mechanical reproduction of the image. It is a combination eminently familiar to viewers of Maddin’s films, which betray a soft spot for the dated pretensions of the middle-brow achievements of the past, pretensions whose intonations and sleepwalking declamations are pointedly reproduced in the first four features. But in the end, Maddin’s heart, like that of most modernists, is always with the trash of the period. The Surrealists loved the random and shocking violence of the early serials, their oneiric combination of narrative preposterousness and visual realism. My Winnipeg captures this energy in its tale of a General Strike eroticized by the fears of the girls in a local Catholic school, rendered (as is the Whittier Park fire of 926 and the bison stampede that purportedly flattened the Happyland amusement park in 922) in coloured silhouette animation in homage to silent pioneer Lotte Reiniger; in its fascination with ectoplasm; and in its detailing of subterranean secrets of the cityscape, such as the 93 bathhouse that extends several stories into the earth. The motion picture promised a new combination of fidelity to its subject matter and access to truth that was able to bypass the bankrupt aesthetic and political ideologies of realism. Movies only began to become respectable in the twenties, and that cusp between the vulgar energy of their slumming past and the regularized and regulated craft of sound and the studio decades is a crucial factor in Maddin’s fascination with the period. Like the characters of most of his films, the motion picture as an art and as a business was in its late adolescence, wildly and uneasily wielding a potent cocktail of naive motivations and adult desires. It was those nascent desires that had caused the traumas and created the joys of childhood, but it was ensuing adulthood that caused them to be repressed, distorted, and forgotten amid the swirl of sanctioned forms and conventions. This was the modernist narrative of childhood and memory as the path to its hidden truths. It was formulated most famously by Freud and Proust, but as a trope it was everywhere in the early decades of

08 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES the century, and the cinema, the youngest of the arts, was the ideal place to project the anthropomorphic potential of childhood development (or the lack thereof) as a theory of history. The early cinema was regarded as appealing to the “childish” portions of the population, but there were many who turned that pejorative appellation on its head, celebrating the childlike wonders of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and of early Disney, Max Fleischer, and Lotte Reiniger as gateways into an aesthetic place unapproachable through the stodgy rigidities of the venerable arts. In the treatment for perhaps his most self-consciously modernist short, The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity (995), Maddin’s wish list of influences conjures an unlikely but symptomatic merging of a symbolist modernism (Poe, Odilon Redon, Abel Gance) with early cartoons, a dead seriousness of formal and thematic intent joined to an iconoclastic, popular playfulness: “I would like to make a mini-melodrama, very music driven—like a Fleischer Brothers cartoon ... Music will be inexorably linked to the visuals: it should drive the visuals like a Silly Symphony, but with a more Poe-like dead weight.”28 One of the opening shots introduces the synaesthesia that seems to bind these opposing influences formally: a clam shell opens and closes, shooting out steam and blowing like a train whistle, heralding the train wreck and tragic love triangle that are to come. Melodrama is, of course, a time-honoured component of the genre of children’s literature that was invented by the Victorians, but with the exception of The Night of the Hunter (955) and various animal-in-danger scenarios, it has seldom received its due in the movies, and has nearly always been played for laughs, as in Disney’s 0 Dalmations (96, 996). The Night of the Hunter has its moment of farce when Robert Mitchum’s demonic stalker is finally flushed out of Lillian Gish’s barn, but it is a religious-tinged laughter of the devil reduced to a jester rather than comedy. Nor does Maddin deflate the high seriousness of a Poe, a Redon, or a Gance—whose La Roue (923) supplies the narrative and visual backbone of The Eye—at least not in the manner of a camp revision. Rather, he brings to them the child’s point of view, the “mini-melodrama”: the child that was cinema in the twenties and the child that knows how to view that cinema for what was most important about it. The same attitude is evident in an anecdote Maddin relates in an interview: “I once watched a Buster Keaton movie shown at eighteen frames per second [silent speed], and the gags took forever to unfold, like Ordet. Maybe if we watched them at nine frames per second, they’d be funny again.”29 The ideal Maddin film would be the film able to maintain

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 09

comedy and melodrama in perfect, mutually illuminating counterpoise, and he appears to be coming closer to this combination with each new feature. The first movies that had a lasting impact on Maddin were his family’s forgotten treasure trove of silent 6-mm films that he discovered one day hidden away in the house (and which perhaps included the Keaton reel mentioned above).30 The twenties are not just the historical period of modernism for those artists now in or approaching their middle age (Maddin was born in 956); they are the decade when some of our parents were children. Our own childhood is full of available and buried memories both comforting and horrible; our parents’ early years are something far more mysterious, glimpsed only at second- or third-hand, through stories, photographs, mementoes, rumours, and fantasies. Growing up with three teenage siblings, the displacement of Maddin’s memories of the past would have been even more intense. In The Child Without Qualities, Maddin writes that not just the toys and dolls “knew a better quality of play” because of the many hands they had passed through and been subjected to before he came along, but “a residue of better quality seemed to sit on everything in the deserted house. The house held a dormancy, a potential to divulge what it held for his family before.”3 His play, he suggests, was aimed at enacting this potential: “Sometimes he intentionally separated himself from his favourite toys, and played with memories of them. And then played with the memories of the memories.”32 It would not be a stretch to regard Maddin’s films as memories of memories of something from which one has willfully separated oneself; this would account not only for the many strategies of distancing them from the viewer with the celluloid equivalent of the teethmarks, spit-stains, and near-dismemberments that bestowed the “residue of better quality” onto the family toys, but also for the undeniable desire for the emotional connection intimated by them, a connection that lies, as the introductory title to Careful (taken from a line by Kipling) would have it, “lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you: Go!” Deprivation, even for the most privileged of children, is the essence of childhood, and it is important to recognize the inseparability of the pleasure derived out of that deprivation from the pain caused by it. Like many modernists, Maddin has cultivated that childhood insight (or insight about childhood) into his mature aesthetics, privileging the insights of the local, the marginal, the forgotten, the fragmentary, over the easy allure of the clean, new, and polished. As the concluding line of Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles” reads (a line placed by the Quay Brothers at the conclusion of

0 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES their 986 film adaptation), “Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year’s mouldering newspapers.” Maddin once sent a film critic a tape of one of his movies caught straight from television, complete with commercials. Rather than apologetic, he was pleased with the idea, comparing it to his encounter with Vertigo (958), “the very first movie I memorized off tv… A friend of mine caught it on tv, but this was pre-video, so he just made an audio tape of it. And I listened to it, maybe about a hundred times before ever seeing it, including the commercials. They placed one unfortunate commercial right in the middle of the revelation that Judy is Madeleine… and it was tremendous. So that gave me a thrill. And so I was hoping for some similarly unfortunate mutilations to my movie. And I got some.”33 It is easy to shrug the story off as postmodern archness and self-protection, just as the analogous stance of Maddin’s films is so frequently accounted for in the same terms, or as just plain weird. And, sure, Maddin doesn’t mind coming off as weird; he even likes it at times—that is, after all, part of the épater la bourgeoisie mentality of modernism that is able to thrive today only in isolated enclaves such as Winnipeg. But on its own, intentional weirdness is unable to account for the undeniable power of Maddin’s films, the sheer pleasure and dread of watching them. It can only be hoped that today’s kids have access to some analogous deprivation amid the sensory overload of their current existence, but no one who grew up with black and white television, portable cassette recorders, and scratchy lps can fail to recall a moment such as the one elevated by Maddin into an artistic credo.34 There was no irony (in the contemporary, Alanis Morissette sense of the word) in modernism, only the biting, tragic variety that dates back to the ancient Greeks, the kind that makes you want to forget what you had tried so hard for so long to remember. Like old tragedies, Maddin’s films are replete with ghosts—the Hamlet’s father variety in The Dead Father, Careful, and Cowards; the lost loved one in Gimli Hospital, Archangel, and Cowards; a whole host of them in Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg—not to mention spectral presences, such as the attic-bound brother Franz in Careful or the vampire Dracula. Not frightening in the strict sense of the word, their presence is a driving force in the narrative action; like childhood memories, they are both impotent and overwhelmingly powerful. Similarly, the films are replete with images of bodies resurrected, or at least brought out into the open from their resting places, whether figuratively, as in Einar’s story of the

Thoroughly Modern Maddin

violation of Snjófridur’s body in Gimli Hospital, the wax figures in the Hall of the All-Time Maroons in Cowards, or the Black Tuesdays in My Winnipeg; or literally, as in the buried bodies unearthed to the horror of the townsfolk in Careful and the apocalyptic emergence of the dead from their graves in The Heart of the World.35 We may take pleasure in watching them, and Maddin may take pleasure in manipulating them, but the characters are not granted the same distance. Immersed in the melodrama, they would all be better off remembering nothing. Unfortunately, like the amnesiac soldiers fighting a war that has already ended in Archangel, they remember just enough to suffer from and be haunted by it, but not enough to find their way out before it is too late. “Amnesia,” according to Maddin, “is a timeless storytelling device. Forgetfulness is a kind of anaesthetic for the painful life we all live. We’re forced constantly to think about the shameful things we’ve done, the painful things that have happened to us. We owe most of the feelings we have, as sensate beings, to shoddy memories. The sheer erratic nature of memory keeps life a Luna Park.”36 Childhood is a lifetime of boredom, suffering, and shame; it is also the source of a large part of our happiness, and the surest link we have to the world that came before us. Only children are so constituted as truly to enjoy life as pure sensation, screaming the whole way out of terror and exhilaration inextricably combined. Grown-ups on the roller coaster are usually either bored out of their skull or having a heart attack. It could be argued that Maddin’s oeuvre constitutes one long refutation of the postmodern argument that we have no feeling left, and a demonstration of the fact that there is still a difference between false memories and shoddy ones. This is one reason he has engaged with Hollywood more, and in a more intricate manner, than perhaps any other Canadian filmmaker with the possible exception of David Cronenberg. Hollywood—and, as always by metonymy, the United States—is the Luna Park of Maddin’s adult mind, of someone who only encountered film as such when he was already in college. While his childhood experience of bursts of America through radio static and television test patterns was an inevitable consequence of life in the hinterlands, the mature form he has given to that experience is anything but. The references with which he dots his interviews demonstrate an ecumenical range still all too rare in the anti-Hollywood discourse of Canadian cinema—everything from the Cremaster cycle to Alyssa Milano—although, it should be noted, bereft of any current blockbusters; clearly, for Maddin, the only recent movies worth doing anything with are the termite art, already



2 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES shot through with the holes of niche marketing and on-the-cheap (relatively speaking) production values, but still retaining traces of the effortless glamour and seduction that only Hollywood can do (you won’t find any straight-tocable Canadian fare showing up in Maddin’s discourse). Witness the “Dreyer and Joan [Crawford]” course he has taught at the local university, or the list of “Guilty Pleasures” he submitted to Film Comment, which roams from a “naval musical,” obscure Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes war movies, and a Charlton Heston jungle melodrama to cult experimentalist George Kuchar and even Oskar Feininger’s three-minute modernist city-poem, Walking from Munich to Berlin (927).37 In his brief comments, Maddin appears to eschew the “guilty” part in favour of the “pleasures,” implicitly refusing the high/low distinction of the category itself. If you put enough memories between yourself and Hollywood, he suggests, the themed Disney World rides on which they intend to take you start to break down into something more nebulous and passé—after all, what could be more outdated, more urban and modernist than a Luna Park, a word coined in the twenties from the eponymous Coney Island amusement park to describe those of Europe? These days, we only see them in old movies, or in Maddin’s films—Happyland, “our own Luna Park,” plays a central metaphorical role in the dreamscape of My Winnipeg. Hollywood was young once, too, and it lived its youth during that same magical period that produced everything meant to eliminate what Hollywood would soon come to stand for the world over. A legacy of the First World War, the hegemony was brand new back in the twenties, even in Canada, and the shop-worn products of the time no longer carry the patina of market domination that still radiates from today’s blockbusters, the only lure the audience seems to need. And, as much as Maddin’s films are overtly indebted to the great European classics, we shouldn’t forget (and he certainly hasn’t) how many of the Europeans were also making movies in Hollywood, and how weird the back-lot stuff of the twenties and thirties could sometimes get. After all, this was the period when Douglas Fairbanks and David Selznick brought Eisenstein to Hollywood on the success of Potemkin (925). Maddin’s approach can be distinguished either from the respectful recreation of European cinema (as, for example, in Shadow of the Vampire [2000], E. Elias Merhige’s wonderful take on Murnau’s Nosferatu [922]) or the American independent revision of Hollywood, which seldom delves further back into cinema history than film noir. Both strategies tend to take the older film syntax at face value, recreating it with the obsessive fidelity of the connoisseur (consider the

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 3

production design and cinematography of Far from Heaven [2002] or L.A. Confidential [997]), often tweaking the themes to bring out their resemblance to current mores, or updating the syntax to create an ironic counterpoint to the original; classic examples are Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (973) and Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (978), while more recently one could cite Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate (2004). And then there is the current vogue for the remake as hollow exercise in spectacle and marketing, which is perhaps not without interest for the cultural historian, especially when one sees what gets done to Hollywood blockbusters when transmuted in the powerhouse crucibles of the Bollywood and Hong Kong movie industries. In his fascination with the tropes of vanished genres of commercial filmmaking at least as much as with great films of the past, Maddin’s production is closer in spirit to the latter sort of borrowing.38 Not only in his ongoing fixation on melodrama, but in the technologies he resurrects and the genres he adapts (war movies in Archangel; mountain films in Careful; fairy tales in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs; the musical in the unfilmed Dykemaster’s Daughter and Saddest Music; noir and hockey films in Cowards; the city film in My Winnipeg), Maddin remains intensely engaged in an unholy matrimony between the avant-garde and the popular, a wedding from a Surrealist’s dream. It is not as if Maddin wishes he could actually have made movies in the twenties: “I never claimed that living in the past would be better than living now.”39 The vertical integration of the studios’ heyday militated against any leeway in the sphere of production, distribution, and exhibition at least as much as the multinational media conglomerates do today. Life is arguably better today for a marginal filmmaker working on microscopic budgets as Maddin does; in the twenties he would have had to rely on rich patrons. Where there was play in the cinema then and still is today is overwhelmingly in the reception, which cannot ever be wholly controlled, and where viewers are free to find in a film whatever they want; certainly Maddin could not have predicted the year-long run of Gimli in New York, nor was whatever cult vibe the audience was picking up on likely to have been among the ones he had planned for. Freed of preconceptions of quality and integrity, Maddin’s voracious and omnivorous consumption of the cinematic past has the potential to liberate his viewers from timeworn categories of cinematic quality without releasing them into a void of ironic slumming.

4 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES As he puts it in what unintentionally reads like a manifesto for a new conception of cinematic history, Because film is both a business and an art form, it always struck me that business needs to be fed by technology, and it’s so fast that it moves along to the next technological advance before all the artistic potential has even begun to be wrung out of any particular era. So I always see myself as going back along the road of film history and picking up all these great and completely abandoned technologies and film vocabularies, which I pick up and try on and learn to speak. For instance, the most salient one would be when sound came in. It’s not just a technological thing; it was an economic thing. The technology to make sound movies was there from about 895, actually. It was just a matter of economically converting all the theatres didn’t seem worthwhile to distributors until around 928, but the silent film era wasn’t even close to peaking in its artistic potential then, so mime was quickly abandoned. It was cut down in its prime, cut down in its youth even, so mime and mime comedy and mime melodrama were all euthanized and replaced with a new breed of film that had its own charms, and then the evolution really started fast and musicals came in as a new form and they were quickly deemed cloying and abandoned, even though they hadn’t achieved their potential. And the most extreme and manqué forms are 3-d and Odorama and Surround-o-vision. When a painter makes a painting, he or she can use any colour or any kind of pigment, doesn’t even have to use paint. When a poet makes a poem, they can use any word from any language or even make one up, so it seems to me a filmmaker should have the same freedom to use whatever is out there to make movies: old, new vocabularies, humble technologies, sophisticated ones.40 Outmoded technologies, “abandoned” film vocabularies, and failed gimmicks are not simply novelties to be resurrected as historical curiosities or for a quick laugh; they are untapped potentialities for new modes of filmmaking, available to anyone able to break free of the sealed-off meaning given them by the march of history. To defuse the ideology of progress is a quintessentially modernist idea, and although Maddin gives no sign of having read its chief proponent, Walter Benjamin, there is no doubt that he has assimilated its lessons. After all, what child ever truly wants to grow up?

Thoroughly Modern Maddin

In many ways, Maddin’s acclaimed short The Heart of the World is an object lesson in the aesthetic practice defended in the quotation above. The redemptive ending—having refused her two original suitors, Anna kills Akmatov the industrialist after sleeping with him, and selflessly takes the place of the flawed heart at the heart of the world—is pure Hollywood, but everything in the plot derives from the tropes of Soviet anti-capitalism. But while Anna as state scientist is pure modernization propaganda (she returns as “Citizen Girl” in My Winnipeg), the two brothers that love her play atavistic roles: Osip the undertaker deals in mortality, and Nikolai the actor plays Jesus in the passion play. And although in the script Maddin cites the obvious Soviet prototypes—Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov—the influence of German expressionism is striking as well: Lang’s Metropolis (927) and its crowd scenes and dualistic heroine/villainess Maria, and Murnau’s Nosferatu in the scene of consummation and murder.4 What should have been an homage to technocratic rationalism owes a greater debt to two films dealing with the resurgence of occult forces into the modern world. Moreover, the rapid-fire editing style owes more to the rhythmic crescendos of Abel Gance than to the dialectical montage of Eisenstein.42 Less than their cinematic innovations, Maddin takes from the Soviet filmmakers the dated iconography of utopia, the constructivist faith in machines and in technological progress. As the flimsy sets are shaken by the earthquake caused by the earth’s fatal heart attack, one cannot but recall Maddin’s oft-told story of melting and setting fire to action figures of the astronaut Ed White, timed, according to The Child Without Qualities, to coincide with the patriotic fervour of Canada’s centennial.43 Children are enthralled to an equal degree by the clean, smooth surfaces of the new, and by the potential for disrupting those same surfaces. So, The Heart of the World invokes both the astounding promise of the Soviet twenties and the ominous undercurrents of the Weimar Republic. And while the final transformation of Anna’s telescope into a movie projector from the earth’s core recalls Leni Riefenstahl in its martial and athletic display of flags and bodies, and Vertov’s kino-eye in its repetition of “Kino” as the new mantra of the reprieved world, the stirring image is the director’s own, a world made new by Maddin’s modernist magic. Herein lies his riposte at Hollywood, for, as James Quandt observes, the Sviridov composition that propels the film forward also makes it feel like a music video.44 The driving energy and extraordinary synchronization of image and sound primarily account for the film’s seductive power.

5

6 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES (As opposed to Maddin’s feature films, I have never received a negative response from students after viewing The Heart of the World.) The movie is simultaneously nostalgic for modernism—the apparently boundless potential of a new medium and a revolution, an apparatus apparently capable of changing the world just as aesthetics made equally heady claims to relevance in the making of history; a time of genuine emotion and sincerity—and eager to appropriate the most marginalized artifacts and credos for its own minor art.45 Maddin’s retro-modernist art would not simply create a counter-cinema to Hollywood, but, in the manner of the old avant-gardes, would melt down Hollywood and counter-Hollywood together in a crucible of melodrama to mould them into something entirely new. Given that the globalization of the film industry has for all practical purposes accomplished the same recasting on its own terms, Maddin’s quixotic but strangely plausible quest to explain why Winnipeg may lie at the heart of the world (or, as he reformulated it in My Winnipeg, “the heart of the heart of the continent”) is a timely reminder of the many different ways in which it is possible to march forward while keeping one’s eyes fixed on the riveting detritus piling up in the past, the raw material of some unforeseen future kino.

Notes . Guy Maddin, in Marie Losier and Richard Porton, “The Pleasures of Melancholy: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Cineaste, Summer 2004, 25. 2. Guy Maddin, speaking in Waiting for Twilight (Noam Gonick, 997), quoted in Caelum Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publications, 2000), 23. 3. On Harvie, see in particular Waiting for Twilight and Maddin’s nomination of this “perfervid anachronist, fixated on all things 920s” as “a great genius we’ve never heard of ” in an interview with Scott Shrake in Used Wigs, http://www.usedwigs. com/interview_maddin.html. 4. Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 22. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. Guy Maddin, “Sad Songs Say So Much,” Village Voice, 7–3 May 2003, http://www. villagevoice.com/issues/039/maddin.php. 7. Guy Maddin, “Twilight of the Ice Nymphs,” Village Voice, 3–9 March 2004, http:// www.villagevoice.com/issues/0409/maddin.php; “Wait until Dark,” Village Voice, 5 April 2004, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/044/maddin.php. See also the account of the ADR work for Twilight with Alice Krige and Pascale Bussières (Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 9). 8. Guy Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003), 5–64, 5–6, and 209–28. The journals span fifteen years, but are

Thoroughly Modern Maddin 7

9. 0. . 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

20. 2. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

concentrated in 996, 998–2000, and 2002. According to Jason McBride’s account of editing the journals for publication, Maddin’s self-exposure was originally more extensive. See Jason McBride, “The Secret Sharer: Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg,” Cinema Scope 32, http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs32/feat_mcbride_winnipeg. html. Guy Maddin, “You Give Me Fever,” Village Voice, 2–8 June 2002; rpt. in Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 86. See also Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 24. Steven Shaviro, “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin,” in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 980, eds. William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 27; reprinted in this volume (72). Ibid. For Gonick’s comment, see his interview with Maddin, “Happy Ever After,” Village Voice, 23–29 January 2002; rpt. in Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 83. Maddin, in interview with Robert Enright, “Chicken Soup for the Stone Baby: Interrogations for an Autobiography,” in Guy Maddin, Cowards Bend the Knee (Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003), 45. For Maddin as showman, see Kurt Halfyard, “Guy Maddin Talks My Winnipeg, Self-Mythologizing, Psychological Honesty, and Even The Host,” Twitch, 2 October 2007, http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/guy-maddin-talks-up-my-winnipeg-selfmythologizing-pyschological-honesty-an/. Guy Maddin, “The Womb Is Barren,” Montage, Winter 200; rpt. in Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 90. Ibid. Maddin repeats these polymorphically perverse memories of the arena’s eroticized childhood spaces in My Winnipeg, while also documenting a final piss in the arena’s urinals as a last act of farewell nostalgia before its demolition. Ibid., 87. Guy Maddin, The Child Without Qualities, in Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 77. Guy Maddin, interviewed by Enright, “Chicken Soup,” 36–37. Maddin plays further on the same embarrassment in My Winnipeg, where his narrating voice assures us his mother is playing herself in the film, including scenes with actors hired to re-enact childhood traumas involving her and his siblings; in fact, the mother is played by cult actress Ann Savage, best remembered for her unforgiving role as a femme fatale in Edgar Ulmer’s poverty-row noir, Detour (945). Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 30. K. George Godwin, “Far from the Maddin Crowd: Thirty Years of the Winnipeg Film Group,” Cinema Scope 20 (Fall 2004): 7. Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 2. Quoted in Alison Gilmour, “Home Truths: Guy Maddin Takes a Dream-like Tour of Winnipeg,” CBC News, 7 September 2007, http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tiff/features/ tiffmaddin.html. George Melnyk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 99. For the quotation, see Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 22. For the production locations, see Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 7 and 50; Maddin, “Twilight.” Calamari Wolfland, “An In-Depth History of Winnipeg,” Winnipeg 4, http:// winnipeg4.com/history/indepth/.

8 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES 27. Melnyk, Hundred Years, 95. 28. Guy Maddin, The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity, in Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 64. 29. James Quandt, “Purple Majesty: Guy Maddin Talks with James Quandt,” Artforum International, Summer 2003, 59. 30. Ibid., 57. 3. Maddin, The Child Without Qualities, 87. 32. Ibid., 88. 33. Guy Maddin, quoted in John Anderson, Film Comment, March/April 998, 67. 34. It wasn’t until I was in college, for example, that I discovered that The Wizard of Oz (939) switched to colour when Dorothy left Kansas—my myriad viewings had only ever been its annual network television screening on our family’s old black and white television. 35. See also Quandt and Maddin’s discussion of the theme of resurrection in Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 58–59. 36. Ibid., 60. 37. Guy Maddin, “Guilty Pleasures,” Film Comment, January/February 2003; rpt. in Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 96–98. 38. Indeed, even Maddin’s sense of Canadian cinema combines the local with the Hollywood. “I earned a painful but desperately needed 750,” his journal reads, “for a one-hour lecture on Canada’s cinema century—showing clips from the two great Canadians: Lipsett and Lauzon. Then, clips from Leave Her to Heaven, Written on the Wind, Strange Illusion and Dishonoured. Canadian cinema has been a history of absence. This is what we missed!” Maddin, Atelier Tovar, 58. 39. Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 2. 40. Guy Maddin, in Andrea Meyer, “Melodrama As a Way of Life: Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini Talk about Saddest Music,” indieWIRE, 3 May 2004, http://www. indiewire.com/people/people_040503maddin.html. 4. Maddin’s script for The Heart of the World is reproduced in Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 46–54; the reference is to 46. 42. Losier and Porton, “Pleasures of Melancholy,” 24. 43. Maddin, The Child Without Qualities, 94; see also Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 28. 44. Quandt, “Purple Majesty,” 6. 45. On Maddin’s interest in minor movements and their relation to his own Winnipeg aesthetic in Careful, see Darrell Varga, “Desire in Bondage: Maddin’s Careful,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8, 2 (Fall 999): 66–8; and Will Straw, “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful,” in Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 5 Canadian Films, ed. Gene Walz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 304–7. Both essays are reprinted in this volume. Although I disagree with Varga’s and Straw’s underestimation of the role of Hollywood in Maddin’s filmmaking, I agree with their distinction of Maddin’s use of cinematic history from the strategies of camp.

SEXUALITY AND SELF IN THE GUY MADDIN VISION

stephen snyder

Part 1 That’s something I learned from Buñuel. He almost never allows people to consummate. Even when Gaston Modot and Lya Lys in L’ Âge d’Or, who have been lusting after each other the entire film, are finally alone in a garden, they somehow contrive to prevent themselves from getting together. —Guy Maddin In the early 980s we had a film club in my living room. Here, Guy Maddin, myself, John Paizs, George Toles, and various other people (two practising psychologists, Ulana Baluk and Mary Jane Robinson, future feminist critic Patrice Fleck, New York University student Howard Curle, and a teenage theatre operator, Greg Klymkiw) watched and discussed several films a week on a worsening string of 6-mm projectors that sounded something like unoiled tractor gears. (I don’t feel entirely comfortable watching a film without a steady monotone whine of background noise about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.) We were especially interested in the films of Luis Buñuel because their vision of romance and sexuality—as eternally insatiable desires— seemed to be much in accord with our own experiences. It seems to me in

20 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES retrospect that Guy and Ian Handford (a once-per-decade screenplay writer) derived more pleasure from talking about the failures of sexuality and desire than they did from any relationship. Probably Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988) began as an Ian-Guy “riff ” on Icelandic immigrants and their everunsolved romantic problems (they had a book called Gimli Saga, I think), a group of funny failures whose storyline was short. But there was so much talk and idea sharing in the air that one can only say of Gimli Hospital that its idea evolved amidst a group of friends (Guy Maddin, Ian Handford, Kyle McCulloch) and received stimulation from a group of Buñuel films, including The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (955), El (953), L’Âge d’Or (930), Viridiana (96), El Bruto (953), That Obscure Object of Desire (977), and, of course, Un Chien Andalou (929). Guy Maddin absorbed these films like a sponge cake in syrup. The bootlegged video of L’ Âge d’Or (which I bought at a Purdue University film conference; God bless Ben Lawton) was played until the magnetic tape flaked off on the carpet. There is a scene in L’ Âge d’Or which especially delighted us. Gaston Modot and a young woman (Lya Lys), the obscure object of male desire, are seated in a garden; they glance longingly at each other. However, instead of coming together in a long gelatinous embrace, they begin fondling the feet of the statue, even licking the toes. This scene, we agreed, was marvellous; the lovers aren’t allowed to come together because that which they really desire is the state of anticipation, the endless yearning and the ever-fresh imaginative possibility of sexual congress unsullied by an unsatisfactory fulfillment. Postponed fulfillment can never disappoint one, whereas real-life coupling seemed always to disappoint everyone, leading to either a sense of disappointment or a formalizing of a relationship into a statuesque form of repression. Two people in a state of desire only present to each other limited facets of their personalities, and these facets are not even quite real. We reinvent ourselves in the courting stage, with the result that both parties—the mutual objects of desire—are by nature little more than illusions in the minds of the two people. Yes, we did like Chaplin’s City Lights (93). Another master, in our minds, of the gothic structure of human sexuality was Busby Berkeley. His massive production numbers of oddly floozy-like girls seemed to be a parody of limitless desire, or desire in the imagination—a vision of everyman’s imagined need, and thus, conversely, also an image of everyman’s potential castration, because such a mountain of seductive women is also a mountain of reminders of your potential rejection. The mountain

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision 2

is one, we thought, of sexually alluring women, none of whom is accessible. This situation is explicitly quoted in Tales from the Gimli Hospital near the end where the young festival queen (Donna Szoke), seated on a riser above an admiring group of men, gleefully pushes prospective seducers, or suitors, with her feet back down the mountain. I think some of Berkeley’s style also seeps into Tales. In the film’s opening sequence, the young girl looking in the mirror against a black background is almost a direct homage to the Busby Berkeley style, and so are those succeeding shots of the heads of the young ladies plopping themselves down on the beach sequentially. In fact, much of the grooming sequence seems to have been done with Berkeley in mind, while the odd tonality and subtle absurdity (eyebrow shaving) are also nods to Luis Buñuel. The wonderful song at the beginning, which surfaces from a marked silence, is the Paul Whiteman’s Band version of “I’m a Dreamer,” featuring Bing Crosby with the Rhythm Boys. The song’s theme, like the film’s, is that fulfillment occurs almost solely in dreams and not reality. And by the time Guy heard the song, he had already opted to frame his story as a dream. Sexuality is offered as a central issue of the story in the film’s introduction: we are given an otherwise odd reference to a “celibate” ocean, but more importantly Maddin dwells upon the sexual preening of the young people and their considerable efforts to arrange their faces as objects of desire. Their use of fish roe has a peculiar sexual intonation to it. They are very carefully creating as much sexual appeal as possible; but, in Guy’s logic, they are creating as much potential frustration as possible. And certainly such is the possibility which the film bears out. Einar no sooner gazes upon a gaggle of young beauties than “The Disease”—a feeling of total shame and inadequacy—pure sexual inferiority—strikes him. In a semi-paralyzed state, he ducks behind his shack to gloss his hair with fish roe in order to look and feel more appealing. He endeavours to alter himself to meet what, he believes, are the proper conventions of appeal. The film quickly confirms his “disease” in a hilarious way: Einar cuts his finger, and Maddin shows us a close-up of a microscopic view of germs. Metaphorically, these are the germs of self-shame, inadequacy in the presence of compelling sexual allure. The disease is no more nor less than a sense of being painfully castrated by the very act of seeing someone desirable and beautiful. Sexuality always marks a transition between youth and adulthood, but the transition almost never occurs in any Maddin film, even in Brand Upon the Brain! (2006). Adulthood, in the Maddin oeuvre, can only introduce itself as

22 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES either deceitfulness or a self-inflicted state of paralysis. Thus the dawning of sexuality is an affliction: the assumption of the burning coat of Hercules which human power cannot remove. And in the same mythical vein, all women of beauty are incarnations of the Medusa; they paralyze rather than liberate. The camera in Tales conspires, as film cameras always conspire, to render these youthful beauties as youthfully beautiful as possible. Using composition techniques from Berkeley and others, Maddin photographs the Gimli youth voyeuristically as real objects of desire, and even the camera seems to feel inadequate to their power of appeal. Our view likewise becomes that of the timid awestruck director who is himself in awe of all this thick ectoplasm of Circian sexuality. Einar passes out from his cut (the wound of self-inflicted shame) and “awakens” in a hospital to a dream of his life, in which the elements of his disease—inadequacy in the face of sexual lure—are enacted around him by the beautiful youth-bloomed nurses and the other patients, especially Gunnar (Mike Gottli). Spectacle becomes psychology. While Einar (played by a young Kyle McCulloch) often looks like a movie star, it is his antagonist, Gunnar, with his marvellous Rondo Hatton truck-driver face, who manages to capture the complete attention of all the beautiful girls. But then again the feats of Gunnar are to some degree the neurotic imaginings of Einar. Let us evoke Freud directly and call this business with the nurses a real unconscious projection on Einar’s part of his fear of inadequacy. The more Einar tries to be attractive to the nurses, the more he seems to alienate them; their mythological index fluctuates between the realms of Circe and the Medusa. They lure one in with the promise of amour, but the promise inevitably evaporates, in a whim of rejection, leaving the male figure feeling worthless and castrated. Gunnar’s apparent success is a matter of point of view, in the sense that his is the subjective vision of Einar. Gunnar embodies our common exaggerated fantasy that others are experiencing immeasurable success while we experience only futility. Now, it is worth pointing out that this condition of insatiety has long been the strategy of advertising in North America, and has long been recognized as such. Philip Slater explains in a famous work: “erotic delights are implicitly attached to almost every product that can be bought in America today, at least by adults. The goal of commercial America, therefore, is to maximize sexual stimulation and minimize sexual availability.”2 I am not implying Slater as an idea source, but pointing out how culturally deep the representations of

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision 23

Gimli Hospital reach. By Maddin’s way of thinking, culture only mirrors what nature has in fact minted: an insoluble paradox. Maddin’s films imply, but do not necessarily explore, the issue of cultural construction of personality. The relationship between personal and cultural desire permeates the narratives, but the director has no Godard-like compulsion to expose the mechanical dimensions of the relationship. His interest in psychological mechanism finds its focus most often in the family. Einar’s awakening of sexual desire leaves him helpless and nearly paralyzed. Paralysis, in fact, is the definitive condition of most Maddin male characters—for example, Lt. Boles in Archangel and both brothers in Careful. These figures inhabit a limbo somewhere between childhood and adulthood, being neither children nor adults. The dawn of sexuality does not become a right of passage so much as a bar to adulthood. Then again, the films often suggest that adulthood may be another illusion. The most prominent adult in Tales is the physician in Gimli Hospital, a role played by Maddin himself. This figure of authority seems primarily concerned with amputating limbs from his patients. Another adult coughs up his lungs while Gunnar, in a childlike manner, happily cuts little figures from paper. In another bizarre twist, actor McCulloch suddenly appears as a dark double of himself, the character “Black Face,” whose sense of dislocation is dramatized by his attempt to hunt ducks from his bed. Einar later encounters another mysterious bearer of adulthood in the figure of a public speaker (Chris Johnson) whose speech seems filled with high moral purpose but whose words are incomprehensible. This gallery of adult types forms a checklist of failures: madness, death, brutality, and incomprehensibility. The Maddin character is a victim of his own sexual nature and lives in a world that supplies no clear moral guidelines to relief, coughing up images of adulthood that are thoroughly illusory.

Part 2 But Guymo, your actors are uttering their lines as though reading intertitles for the mentally challenged. —Stephen Snyder, 986 Piss off—they’re lucky to have any lines to utter; I never wanted sync sound. —Guy Maddin (in response)

24 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Guy’s friend and collaborator on The Dead Father (986), John Harvie, had taped an A&E episode about the role of the town of Archangel during World War I. He brought the tape to Guy (while we were watching a Gold Diggers movie on Maddin’s new vcr) and convinced him of the workability of the idea. As far as I know, Guy put together a short script by himself, but was unable, he claims, to reel in Harvie for a serious script discussion. Guy showed his script to me and to George Toles. George, engaged at the time in reading Oliver Sacks’s work on amnesia, urged Guy to add an amnesiac to the story and probably wrote the part of Philbin, as well as a few other things. Harvie accordingly became irate and quit speaking to the rest of us for a year. He is, however, given a story credit for his contribution. The world of Archangel (990) amplifies certain features of the almost unliveable life presented in Tales from the Gimli Hospital. The trauma of sexuality (or potential sexuality) is given a deliberately ludicrous exaggeration: Philbin (played effortlessly by Ari Cohen) on his wedding night slips into a state of amnesia that serves to liberate him from remembering or experiencing anything following the actual wedding. The marriage has remained unconsummated for Philbin; he lives in a perpetual wedding day, bright and empty as a balloon, believing that he has just been married. His mind balks at the assumption of the sort of adulthood that marriage symbolizes, and he retreats from either the fear of inadequacy or the responsibilities that normally appear in the wake of marriage. To be overtly blunt, the marriage act has functioned as nothing less than an act of castration, leaving Philbin dismembered in both senses of being unable to function sexually or to remember his life. Amnesia bestows a kind of liberty on one, exonerating the sleeper from any possible guilt. He is not alone in his paralysis. Lt. Boles (Kyle McCulloch) faints at his first sight of Philbin’s wife, Veronkha—although, in the plot of the story, he faints because he recognizes Veronkha as his own lost love, Iris. In order to avoid her own complicated feelings evoked by Lt. Boles, Iris has retreated into her own form of amnesia, a pretense of forgetting others, which becomes the disease marker for a host of issues that arrive on the coattails of romantic yearning. In a scene late in the film, Boles wanders into the bedroom of Iris/ Veronkha. She, believing her visitor is the pneumatically castrated Philbin, tells her visitor that she loves only Lt. Boles. When she realizes that her visitor is Boles, she covers herself in her coat of amnesia as a way of repressing the fact that she revealed her feelings to a person she loves—to some degree. But to reveal such feelings in such a way can bestow upon that person more power

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision 25

over your life than you want him to have. The convoluted psychology of the characters could be described as the condition of wanting to be loved without risking one’s life or self-image to receive such love. Openness is not a possible choice, for it too seems to open a door somewhere to castration, or to sexual rejection, or even a more subtle kind of identity loss. Amnesia can be a way of saving one’s sense of identity as well as losing it. Archangel does not focus directly upon sexual desire so much as it does upon sexuality’s first cousin, romantic possession, and the need for one person to possess another wholly. This particular desire is especially the disease of youth. Lt. Boles needs to possess Iris/Veronkha, because… because… he thinks he does. His sense of identity, as in youth, is entirely determined by his recognizing himself in the approving eyes of others. He can only find himself as a facet in the Iris, in Iris herself. He is that mirrored image of approbation or rejection sliding helplessly across the ever-alternating eye of the beloved. When Boles finally believes that he has been rejected irreparably by Iris, he is no more. The attentions of the loving maidens (at film’s end) cannot bring him to life, for the maidens have not been given the status of (pardon the Lacanianism) phallic signifiers of himself. Philbin’s predicament is similar, but he has been saved from the pain of rejection by amnesia. But what about Iris/Veronkha herself? I suggest that she desires more deeply than love to escape the possessive claws that grow like Hydra heads on the corpus of romantic love. In the midst of yielding herself sexually to Lt. Boles, she experiences an even stronger need to retrieve herself from his suffocating embrace. She does so, in effect, by fabricating an excuse—he is endangering her to possible capture by “the Hun.” But, more metaphorically perhaps, he is endangering her: he wants nothing less than to consume her entirely. If she remarries Philbin, she does so because he, in his state of perpetual amnesia, can never possess or reject her for more than an hour or two. He is a guarantor of her own integrity, her freedom as a person. He is the “eternal about-to-be husband” who can never threaten to possess anyone. For, in fact, in love our desire to possess the beloved is algebraically compensated by a proportional desire to never be possessed ourselves. We each desire to possess the love of one person, and we each fight to the death to avoid being possessed by one person. Iris’s ghostly partings (“I kissed you in your sleep”) are as humanly germane as are the love desires that militate against them. Sleep kisses are the best we have to offer. No one is undivided, even Lt. Boles, although his film surrogates may not realize

26 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES that fact until a later movie. Iris displays a bright plasticity for changing identity because shiftiness is a survival mechanism as important to human life as is romantic desire. If Maddin and collaborator Toles have been reproached for a latent misogyny in their films, critics might do well to notice that their female figures often represent the deepest human ideals of freedom. It is no accident that Archangel makes Iris the leader of the Russians’ insurrection against “the Hun.” She embodies, I suggest, a very healthy desire to get free of all kinds of things, especially the sexual romantic prisons that are the subject of Maddin’s films ... and Buñuel’s and von Sternberg’s (and countless others)! And from the point of view of Lt. Boles, isn’t Iris little more than a mask of sorts? The butter-thick makeup she wears so obscures the appealing features of the actress (Kathy Marykuca) that an audience may well ponder as to how such a plastered face could inspire passion in anyone, let alone Philbin and Boles. My answer is generally that neither of them is capable of seeing the real person anyway. Each man is in love with some sort of stormy anima image largely projected (as in Vertigo [958], for example) upon the screen of the “other” by his own kinetic life-dreams of a total bliss not unlike childhood. These male characters do not possess a great deal of self-awareness, and their treatment of themselves is possibly visualized by the film as their almost sexually inspired whipping of the little boy early in the film. Love’s eternal attendants in youth are self-hatred and self-excoriation. Youth in the Maddin film is a form of sleep, through which run images of loss and self-recrimination. (Although, in My Winnipeg, some of the recrimination is turned outward.) In Careful (992), the dawning of desire, with its subsequent paralyses and humiliations, is given a more pronounced Freudian hue. Mutual incestuous desires between parents and children short-circuit any potential transition to adulthood and call into question the emotional development of the adults. The children’s clumsy attempts to situate themselves in an adult role by romantically claiming their parents produces an avalanche that destroys everyone. The avalanche becomes a tangible image of the emotional fragility of the various characters. And the self-defacement of one of the disturbed sons stands much like a version of Oedipus’s self-blinding. Careful wishes to suggest that the mother, by nature of her allure, might be the original castrator, but Brand Upon the Brain! will re-examine that idea. In Careful, the issue of humiliation as a product of allure is suspended; it is more pointedly taken up in subsequent films. In the dreamlike currents of Odilon Redon (995),

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision 27

we can still distinguish the humiliated would-be young lover whose head is served up to his would-be girlfriend (and, as well, we can find the father who blinds himself most Oedipus-like when made aware of his daughter’s sexual interest in his beard). The Heart of the World (2000) departs from previous efforts by making a woman the “obvious” protagonist (meaning that one can see Iris as the true protagonist of Archangel); her mission to save the world by restoring its heart allows her to leapfrog the entire sexual gridlock of the male characters of earlier films—although, if we look carefully, we can catch quick glimpses of self-crucifying figures like those in earlier films (such as Einar or Lt. Boles).

Part 3 I always wanted to know what part of nowhere I live in. —Wes Feschuck, “Wim” Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) returns with a vengeance to the role of the mother, but in this more recent film, it is not sexual allure that she exerts on her children but a madness of a more intense and desperate form. Mother blackmails her children by demanding love from them while never supplying any herself. Take Iris from Archangel and turn her into a mother, and suddenly the human need to own without giving anything becomes monstrous. In this way, through continuous blackmail, she consumes the childlike Chronos, and in fact the image of literal consumption is the revelatory moment of the film: Mother eats little Ned alive while little Guy watches. The revelation here, I think, is more horrendous than the vision of the castrating allure of girls in the earlier films. Mother is a vast emotional abyss, who reclaims her children before they have a chance to escape her clutches. In the event they do sneak away, her own aerophone-like commands have sufficiently embedded themselves in the children’s unconscious psyches with roots of Xanadu-like depths so that the kids can never be free. They either turn into Mother or are haunted by her disappearance forever beyond death. Specifically in this film, the parents are engaged in the business of draining the pineal glands of orphans to concoct a youth tonic for themselves, or especially for Mom who must not age. (There is an homage to a film called The Leech Woman [960] here.) Somehow the style of this film, which unspools its narrative in what looks like a rapid-fire series of pixilated still images, matches the fixated mentality of Mother, whose project is to impress each moment of

28 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES life with stillness: to hold fast to what is dear, to restrain sexual growth in her children, to restrain the depredations of time from acting upon her face. But Mother is clearly abetted by Father (who disappears each day to work), whose absence is the image of universal emptiness; and moreover, her career, her grand project, is in fact everyone’s grand project. How many of us are rushing with relish toward an old age defined by limp penises and jowls, or boobs sagging so far we could play soccer with our chins or breasts if we could play at all? Mother’s problem is everyone’s problem; her solution, everyone’s wouldbe solution. Our enemy is the ineluctable nature of our existence. Little Guy has somehow grown up to be big Guy, and big Guy is still in love with the girl he loved as a child. There is no escape from memory and no satisfaction from it either. Memory serves to show us what we can never have. And now, finally, it is not the girl who is the castrator, but a set of complicated conditions that no one but a Buddha could hope to overcome. Words no longer apply to objects, but rather only to absences. Language announces our separation from each other, not our communion. The beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow. – Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra3 If we could view Maddin’s films as the evolution of a psyche, we would see a sexually troubled youth succeeded by an angst-ridden, troubled adulthood in which the cause of unhappiness shifts gradually from pretty women, to Mother, to time itself. In Brand Upon the Brain! the passing of Mother proves as catastrophic as Nietzsche’s death of God. Mother may haunt conscious life like a King Kong pressing its face to our living room windows, but her absence leaves us with nothing. The children in My Winnipeg (2007), all possessing good reasons to be unhappy with Mother, find, nevertheless, that they can’t even prepare food without her: “It’s only good when you make it,” they pine. The city of Winnipeg speaks to the sense of desolation of the lost soul suspended between the unhappiness of the dependent child and the impossible independence of adulthood. Yet what slowly emerges is a feminine spirit of sorts, which carries the seeds of self-liberation in the form of the creative act. The role of the female figure has expanded from that of scapegoat to anima figure—that is, the animating spirit of artistic endeavour. The Heart of the World is unusually clear on this point, but so is Maddin in his long deck of interviews, which are beginning to rival Fellini’s in number, if not content:

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision 29

stop smiling: You’ve said somewhere that the “Guy Maddin” in Cowards Bend the Knee was actually less representative of you than another character in the film. guy maddin: Yeah, it was the girl that Guy went out with, this character named Meta. At some point I realized that I was just as much her as I was myself… I remember Ingmar Bergman saying that in a film like Persona both of the women would be him, but two different aspects of him—that it’s pure autobiography up there.4 Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) does indeed feature a character named Guy Maddin. He peers out at us like the sad, disfigured bust of an old Roman statue, incomplete, eroded, and incomprehensible to himself: a puzzle with missing pieces that cannot be named. His presence (which is a kind of absence) prompts us to understand that the film is a fragmented meditation on the growing gap between representation (word or image) and reality. “Guy Maddin,” the character in the film, doesn’t exactly represent Guy Maddin the filmmaker so much as he represents the confusion we have in relating to people as images. “The joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new” (a line from the film) is a narcotic lure of promise which will not be fulfilled because the new image perpetually dissolves into an incomprehensible person. We repeat endlessly the experience of Chaplin’s flower girl in City Lights looking at the meagre-visaged tramp for the first time and recoiling. Film character “Maddin” recoils from his girlfriend Veronica the moment he realizes that she has something mysterious growing inside her (she is pregnant, apparently). With the aid of a mysterious Dr. Fusi, he drags Veronica to a beauty salon (like Guy’s Aunt Lil’s, but also not like Aunt Lil’s). Words tell us the salon is a bordello by night, but even that information is confused, because the locale is really an abortion clinic. Veronica lies on a table, a hapless victim, while Dr. Fusi seems to be raping her, and Maddin the character stares at a new face, Meta, with a hum of desire and a blankness which is disturbing. (Meta is the daughter of the female counterpart to Dr. Fusi—Liliom. Her name refers to the Fritz Lang film whose character Liliom is utterly without conscience. In the name Liliom is also the memory of Aunt Lil who wasn’t evil.) Through a one-way window, the audience also sees the happy women in the salon who can see only their own reflections in the mirror windows. What is absent to them is the knowledge of human suffering in the shadow side of the salon. What is absent in Maddin the film character is the knowledge of human

30 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES suffering in the shadow side of the salon. What is absent in everyone is… any fit representation of his or her conditions of existence. The salon, our house of culture, obscures the pain of others and minimizes what is perceivable of reality. The house dehumanizes its roomers. The character Maddin embodies in himself the conditions that culture imposes on its individuals. We become addicted to each other as images of desire, and yet remain utterly absent from each other. The heart is missing; conscience is non-existent. In simpler terms, the complex salon with its shadow side constitutes a fragile metaphor of our culture. Its image is an old-style humanist representation of a world in which representation, words or images or knowledge, often mean nothing, point to no agreed upon truth, or, at best, are problematized beyond our understanding. We use the word “self,” but no science has found such a thing and no quorum exists as to what such a thing could be. The fundamental concepts of our existence are thusly problematized: love, individual, conscience, right, wrong. We live around these terms without being able to define a single one of them in a manner that could provoke agreement.

Part 4 If you disregard the paralytic boys of Archangel as fit protagonists and focus upon Iris, you see a person looking for a way out of a suffocating world. Iris, I think, is reborn as the heroine of The Heart of the World who saves us by restoring heart and soul to life. If you carry this idea further, is it not the Shelley Duvall character in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997) who embodies any acceptable human values and who tries to speak for the powers of imagination? Surely the male characters remain adolescent sleepwalkers in a night-less world, habitually defining themselves solely in terms of gaining a hold over others. The one possible release becomes the power to re-imagine the world. Thus says the Maddin narrator of My Winnipeg, “I decided to film my way out of here.” Yes, and thus he directly re-imagines the history of his family and hometown in a manner by which that history keeps testifying to the miraculous presence of creative energy in the oddest places, sometimes running tragically amok, as in the story of the frozen horses, sometimes producing transcendental telepathists who find worlds within worlds. The long lament for the passing of time nevertheless recognizes the shadow of possibilities that emerge. The cruelty of winter brings about a suspension of both crime and law. The oddities of Mother are a goldmine for the creative spirit of the filmmaker. Mom is nuts, but she is also a powerful muse.

Sexuality and Self in the Guy Maddin Vision

Maddin on penury: “The only thing separating me from panhandlers is that I get to go to cocktail parties at international film festivals instead of standing outside of the mlcc [Manitoba liquor store] with my hand out.”5 It’s sad but true. (If everyone could just send  to Guy, c/o University of Manitoba English Department…. We’re tired of watching him sell pencils at Bar Italia.) But all this starving-artist business seems to stimulate his unbelievable filmmaking energy. He seems to be running a film foot race with the 960s J.L. Godard. In the beginning we watched shadows projected on the wall of my living room. The shabby room grew arms and legs and gradually became a cinematheque, and we (John Paizs, Guy, Greg Klymkiw, Patty, myself…) became children of cinema. The house is gone (progress), but for most of us the room still exists, and we still spend more time communing with the gods of our paradise than we do with anything else. Guy became a filmmaker; John, our dean of studies, was a filmmaker already; Patty took a PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Pittsburgh; and Greg became a film producer/teacher in Toronto. I began this essay by suggesting a kinship in visions of unhappiness between Luis Buñuel and Guy Maddin, and have evoked a common theme of insatiety in what sounds like the Freudian rhetoric of castration. I need to reaffirm a simple point, that both artists retreat from Freud as they explore the idea that castrations, or evasions of consummation, are self-willed by their characters. Humans would rather remain in a state of expectation (“the joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new”) than reach their desired goals or possess their desired objects (people), for to do so means to confront the nothingness of human existence, a kind of castration that Freud seldom addresses. Desire is endless and can never be fulfilled, for it has no single actual object of fulfillment, ultimately not even Mom; emerging from the Great Mother might be no different than not emerging. Or, from another view, in Lacanian terms, all our objects of desire are substitutions, only illusions of gratification, for an original that never existed but in imagination. Maddin has often remarked that, in general, the minute a man begins to possess an object of desire like a woman, he is already bored and looking toward a new conquest. Thus, I think Guy’s surrealism owes only a portion of its quality to Freud; it longs in its flamboyance to re-envision more metaphysical human conditions grown invisible through familiarity, to rearrange the shapes of our problems into recognizable events, tamed slightly by the cast of humour he lends them, exaggerated to a point at which we no longer fear to own up to them.

3

32 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES

Notes . Guy Maddin, interview by José Teodoro, “The Stop Smiling Interview with Guy Maddin,” Stop Smiling, Fall 2007, 89. 2. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 970), 75. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Cotton (New York: Russell and Russell, 967). 4. “The Stop Smiling Interview with Guy Maddin,” 86. 5. Guy Maddin, interview by Peter Vesuwalla, “Guy Maddin,” Glove  (2007): 4. Glove is edited by Nihad Ademi and published in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

THE HEART OF HIS WORLD: EMOTIONAL IMMEDIACY AND DISTANCE IN THE FILMS OF GUY MADDIN

carl matheson

Although Guy Maddin’s reputation has skyrocketed in the last few years, many viewers have had, and still have, a problem in finding a point of entry into his films. Their criticisms usually fall into one or both of the following two types. Some encounter great difficulty in following the plots of his films; others have trouble in connecting with his films at an emotional level. The first part of this paper explains why many viewers fail to connect with his films; the second part offers a much more emotionally engaging and compelling way of viewing them. Roughly put, the films are emotionally distant when viewed as standard narratives, but compelling when viewed as dreams or, better, nightmares. Interestingly, the factors that function as sources of disengagement when the films are viewed as narratives often help the viewer to connect with them as dreams. So, this paper is basically in sonata form. In its first half, some basic material is used to create the problem of emotional distance in Maddin’s films. In its second, the same material is used in another context to resolve the problem. Hence, like a sonata, the paper consists of a voyage away and a voyage home. However, the coherence of the sonata is disturbed by a coda in which the resolution of the theme, that is, of my basic thesis, is substantially rejected. My Winnipeg (2007), Maddin’s most recent film, has forced me to

34 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES reconsider my view of his works, according to which Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) were the logical endpoints. Finally, I must issue a partial disclaimer. This essay is loosely argued and largely unscholarly. Furthermore, I have tried to kick sand over any traces of real scholarship that remain in it. Instead of an academic paper, this essay is best seen as a deeply personal love letter to a dear friend whose work I have been closely following ever since the release of Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988).

The Voyage Away: The Woman Problem and the Family Problem “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Chapter Two of Cowards Bend the Knee, relates the abortion of Veronica, Guy Maddin’s (the character’s) girlfriend. As the man who impregnated her, Guy is responsible for making things right by getting rid of Veronica’s unwanted passenger. Like a convicted criminal slowly being led to her place of execution, Veronica is escorted to the Black Silhouette Salon (“Beauty parlour by day… bordello by night”). It is there that Dr. Fusi, team doctor for the Winnipeg Maroons and night-clinic abortionist, will terminate Veronica’s pregnancy, apparently with an egg-beater. Ever dutiful and supportive, Guy squeezes Veronica’s hand until he locks eyes with exotic Meta. Guy is transfixed and transformed by “The joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new,” and the same old story is re-enacted: boy takes girl to abortionist, boy meets that special someone at the abortionist, boy leaves old girl for new girl while abortion is taking place. While one of his hands quietly slips from Veronica’s, the other finds Meta’s. Meta pulls Guy away from the operating room, at which point we leave Veronica: “She’s in the hands of experts.” This episode perfectly encapsulates a basic theme in Maddin’s films. Women are attractive and exciting until they are possessed, at which point they become dull and otherwise featureless dead weights. In Chapter One, Veronica frets while she alternates between touching her pregnant belly and rubbing her aching head. Her face is free of both affect and character, and her dull eyes are downcast. In contrast, Meta hungrily eyes Maddin while sucking a coating of sugar from her index finger. She is active; Veronica is passive. She promises undreamt-of excitement; Veronica mutely demands a lifetime of dream-free drudgery. Will it be Meta or Veronica: what choice could be easier? To say the least, Veronica and Meta are not fully fleshed-out characters. They are archetypes. They are the angel and the whore, except that, in this

The Heart of His World 35

case, the angel is a needy whiner. Later in the film, however, Veronica and Meta reverse roles. Veronica dies soon after her abortion; her ghost reappears as a re-sexualized being. Guy immediately becomes infatuated with her—“The joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new”—and loses interest in Meta. The two women are momentarily interested in Guy, but are eventually reunited with their true loves: Meta with her father, and the ghost of Veronica with Guy’s priapic father (“Son, meet your new mother!”). In this case, women are seen as losing romantic interest in a man as soon as he shows any form of emotional commitment. At any rate, the trajectory of all of Maddin’s relationships involves the impossibility of enduring romantic love. In every case, someone is scorned (Guy Maddin), bored (Guy Maddin), or killed off (Archangel’s Iris). As a result, viewers of his films, at least those older than fifteen, will take his fictional worlds to be unrealistic in an important way: the psychological laws that rule them are false in such a way, and to such an extent, that they block the viewer’s ability to inhabit them. It is impossible, or nearly so, for viewers to treat these films as psychologically plausible narratives in which they put themselves in the shoes of the characters living within the films’ fictional worlds. Since one’s personal involvement with a narrative (at least usually) crucially depends on one’s ability to empathize with both the narrative’s characters and situations, Maddin’s narratives seem to have the essential property of psychologically distancing themselves from their audiences. “The Dirge of Lt. John Boles,” the first section of Archangel (990), opens as Boles gently tucks a war medal into the urn containing the ashes of his dear sweetheart, Iris. As Boles looks over the side of the boat that will soon land him in Archangel, the boat’s skipper is confiscating liquor from the other soldiers aboard. Because the bottle holding Iris’s ashes is indistinguishable from those responsible for the surliness of the crew, the captain is right to take it away from Boles and throw it overboard. Iris vanishes forever into the cold blackness of the North Atlantic. Iris has an important function within Archangel’s various amnesia-based subplots. However, there is no more to Iris than that limited function. The film has no place for Iris the person, for the special love she and Boles shared, or for the particular contours of the tragedy that ruptured his heart. The film makes no mention of her secret bath-time games, during which she ministered to her body while joking with Boles through the louvers of the grill separating the tub room from the warmth of the kitchen hearth. In its eschewal of personal particularity and essence, the film makes no mention of her subsequent

36 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES illness, of the wasting of her body, or of the transformation of her girlish, albeit mole-flecked face into a rigid waxen mask. Boles’s “Goodbye, Iris,” the first line of the film, is a distant shadow of both her sharply defined personal presence and of the full-blooded and complete love she shared with Boles. Of course, Iris’s back story is of my own invention; it is an attempt to sketch a character that, even in her absence, bears some non-allegorical human traits. Of all the women in Maddin’s films, Iris, the Dead Wife, highlights the extent to which his treatment of women as archetypes prevents viewers from having a human relationship with them. Poor Iris, trapped in a bottle! The nature of his films’ families, and in particular, the ubiquity of incest, is also of interest. Again, Cowards provides a good starting point. Meta will not accept Guy as a lover until Guy has his own hands amputated and replaced with the hands of her dead father who, incidentally, was killed by her mother, Liliom. The ghost of Veronica, whose human shell died while literally crawling back to Guy, eventually marries Guy’s father. In the course of the film, we see both Guy’s and his father’s penises. His father’s is larger. Much, much larger. In Careful (992), Johann’s attempts to consummate his love for his mother, Zenaida, lead to him grilling his own lips with a red-hot poker. The mutual affection shared by Herr Trotta and his daughter, Sigleinde, leads to the Cinderella-like treatment of Klara. In Brand Upon the Brain! Mother clearly has sexual feelings for Guy Maddin (the character), as is evidenced by bouts of bottom-kissing. Again, even though incestuous drives have been regarded as universal by Freud and others, their repeated presence in Maddin’s films creates an implausibility-driven distance between the films’ characters and any audience that tries to react to the films as standard narratives.

Formal Distance: The Problems of Historicism, Aestheticism, and Ironicism So far, we have discussed the ways in which the narrative content of Maddin’s films can distance them from their audiences. It is time to move on to ways in which the formal properties of his films can reinforce this sense. In particular, we shall consider the problems of historicism, aestheticism, and ironicism. Absolutely everyone who views one of Maddin’s films for the first time is immediately struck by its look. Let us construe “look” fairly broadly, so that it contains camerawork, lighting, editing, art design and sets, costumes, pacing, the general gestural and vocal style(s) employed by the actors, the use of intertitles, general sonic atmosphere, accompanying music, the sound quality of that music, and so on. I do not mean that these properties of a film’s “look”

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are purely formal to the extent that they have no bearing on, or relationship with, the stories and characters of their films. Instead, they constitute a formal language that provides a vocabulary for the telling of those stories. So, when confronted with the full array of all these formal choices, how do these films strike a newcomer to Maddin’s films? I have heard several answers, including but not limited to “old-fashioned,” “slow,” “hard to understand,” “artsy,” “you’ve got to be kidding me” (although, strictly speaking, that is not an adjectival phrase), and “waste of taxpayers’ dollars” (a favourite of critics employing the medium of radio call-in shows). These people were not put off by the content of his films. To be sure, if they understood it as such, they would probably be offended by a scene in which a character fists his girlfriend’s mother, as in “Fisty,” Chapter Five of Cowards. However, the outer surface and style of delivery of the films prevent many viewers from wanting to, or even being able to, figure out what the content was. If anything counts as an alienating device between a film and many of its viewers, this is it. To this end, let us consider the Illumination scene from Archangel. At the setting of the sun, the inhabitants of Archangel and the various allied soldiers (“from the Congo, from Greece, from jewelled lands”; “turban, fez and kepi in the land of valour”) gather to stage tableaux depicting various allied victories over the beastly Huns. Boles, Veronkha, and Philbin are there. Philbin, a life-long amnesiac due to an unfortunate breast-feeding incident, perpetually thinks that it is his and Veronkha’s wedding day. Boles, who believes that Veronkha is his dead wife, Iris, forcefully defends her from Philbin’s advances. As Philbin falls to the ground, the master of ceremonies intones “Illluminate!”—whereupon everyone present lights his or her candle and basks in the warmth of the collective light. Veronkha is not Veronkha now: she is a statue whose headdress mirrors the confluence of candles around her. These few seconds of illumination are the most central and, well, illuminating moments of the film. Their coruscating beauty casts the story and characters into shadow; the narrative elements have become a scaffold erected for the purpose of getting the film to here, the moment of illumination. And, once we are here, there is no there. The ceremony is a thing made of light. At root, Archangel is not about its story. Archangel is about its deeply beautiful surfaces. It is about its gorgeous images, which in turn speak of the historical sources of their beauty. In addition to the Illumination scene, the film consists largely of set pieces, such as the Love Prologue, the battle scenes, the tour of darkness, and so on. The historically informed viewer is forced

38 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES to note the respects in which similar scenes (e.g., propaganda films, battles, and credit sequences) have been treated in films of the 920s and 930s. Were silhouettes used in the way that Maddin uses them in the battle scenes? What about his use of montage? What films are quoted by the skew-angled expressionist (by way of the Orthodox Church) sets? Where the Illumination scene forces us to focus on its beauty, other scenes force us to focus on their roots in the history of film. In either case, although the story is unfolding during these scenes, the viewer’s consciousness is primarily being directed to these aesthetic, historical, and technical elements, rather than to the story and its characters. These distancing elements may be unimportant. They are such objects of playful fascination that the viewer may never want to move on to the story. Archangel is wildly successful as a historico-aesthetic Easter-egg hunt. The joys of watching it involve our focus on finding the next brightly painted egg. As such, it seems beside the point to worry about the way in which it works as a standard narrative. Those who want to regard it as such are bound to be confused and dissatisfied. Archangel’s absurdist humour presents us with another potential source of disengagement, as exemplified in the following exchange between Boles and Baba about the proper treatment for Geza: boles: He may have worms… Have you tried feeding him a little horsehair? baba: Won’t the hair turn to eels in his stomach? boles: I hardly think so. [Picks a horsehair from his tunic and gives it to Geza.] Here, a few on your neck will keep goiter away, too. And I might add, the breath of a mare with foal on your little baby would clear up that whooping cough. The early films brim with absurdist moments, such as Careful’s flash-card training of prospective butlers (e.g., “Master has an occluded bowel”). Now, screwball moments within a film do not necessarily prevent it from forging an emotional connection between its story/characters and the audience. However, to the extent that these moments are multiplied and foregrounded, the connection is forestalled and perhaps even prevented altogether. Boles and Baba’s discussion of worms occurs early in a film in which the proportion of absurdist humour to plot decreases as the film progresses. To that extent, the film can come to engage the viewer on a direct level. On the other hand,

The Heart of His World 39

because The Saddest Music in the World (2003) maintains its wisecracking tone throughout, it never opens the doors to its characters.

Reducing the Distance: The Voyage Home We have been considering the ways in which Maddin’s characters, plots, and formal structuring devices serve to distance the viewer from his films. However, as we have seen, these features are primarily a problem for those viewers who approach his films as standard narratives. Those who require psychological realism, plausible characters portrayed in some detail, and situations with which they can identify will be totally unable to immerse themselves in Maddin’s films. On the other hand, those who are content with reading Maddin’s films as cinematically beautiful exercises in comic fabulism will regard them as successful in spite of a lack of emotional connection with them. Our problem, then, is to find a perspective according to which they connect with the viewer in spite of, or even because of, the features laid out earlier in this essay. I think that there is such a perspective. Viewed as dreams, or better, as nightmares, his films are emotionally immediate, compelling, and immersive. Furthermore, their dream-immediacy is at least partially due to those features responsible for narrative disengagement. Consider Mother in Brand Upon the Brain! Mother runs the Black Notch Orphanage, a converted lighthouse on Black Notch Island. There, she terrifies and oppresses the orphans, who are also the milch cows for a serum-of-youth that will eventually allow her to regress into infancy. She is constantly vigilant over her two children, Guy Maddin and Sis. She observes them from a revolving cockpit perched on top of the lighthouse: “Mother can read into her children’s hearts with her eyes ... But prefers to use a searchlight.” She ruthlessly suppresses Sis’s burgeoning sexuality while simultaneously engaging in a barely suppressed sexual relationship with Guy, one that involves her kissing Guy on the mouth and bare bottom. She also uses threats of suicide as a primary teaching aid. As a character, Mother is clearly over-the-top; were the top to be raised, she would be over that top as well. Again, a viewer who expects psychological and narratological plausibility will likely be puzzled and repelled by the film. However, like Cowards, Brand cries out not to be treated as a plausible narrative. Brand is clearly built upon elements taken from fairy tales, elements which include a largely absent father, a wicked (step)mother, all-seeing magicmirror-like devices, and the need for plucky children to escape via their wits

40 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES alone. Of course, it also makes use of tropes from more standard genres, such as juvenile fiction, but in order to maximize its effectiveness and internal coherence, the film should be viewed as something like a fairy tale. However, in viewing this and many of his other films as something like fairy tales, I don’t mean to say that they should be viewed as fairy tales. Instead, I think the films should be viewed as documentaries of recurring nightmares, where the nightmares are exaggerated extrapolations of thoughts that have repeatedly intruded on the subject’s consciousness during the day. First, although fairy tales often speak to what are regarded as “eternal” features of the human condition, the stories themselves are resolved. The children escape, the hunter kills the wolf, the witch is baked in an oven, and so on. Maddin’s films are unresolved, in that they usually centre on their protagonists’ inability to escape from patterns of their lives and behaviours that existed before the beginning of the films. In Archangel, the males cannot escape from their state of chronic amnesia; in Cowards, Guy (the character) cannot escape his pattern of unsuccessful relationships; and in Brand, Guy cannot escape the island. In other words, one is forever imprisoned by a state of mind largely established in one’s childhood. As an intertitle in Brand says, “All things will happen again.” Second, the films are often framed as dreams: Cowards follows upon a “headknock” suffered by Guy Maddin in Chapter One; Brand begins with a dreaming Guy Maddin, adrift as he approaches Black Notch Island; and so on. Third, the films rely on the sort of repetition characteristic of obsession. A repeated intertitle of Cowards is “The joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new!” Archangel crucially relies on a multiply retraced path given by a treasure map, as well as multiple bouts of amnesia. The repetition also extends to visual structure. Both Brand and Cowards contain short repeated visual phrases in which a hand reaches for a breast, only to be rejected. These instances point to lives in which progress is impossible, lives of obsessive never-to-be-satisfied longings. Nightmares, especially those that echo intrusive thoughts, consist of, or are at least remembered as, stark and disturbing images. Brand contains many shots in which Mother’s brightly lit face dissolves at the fringes into a largely black background. Her face is presented in great detail, while her surroundings are vague. Shots like this mirror the visual feel of nightmares and intrusive thoughts, as obsessions that suddenly and brilliantly strobe through one’s consciousness. Their blinding clarity hurls one’s normal day-to-day thoughts into an indistinct, darkened background. This is the chiaroscuro of obsession.

The Heart of His World 4

For the moment, suppose that the best way for the viewer to connect with Maddin’s films is to regard them as nightmares of obsession. As such, the effectiveness of individual films is inversely proportional to the amount of dialogue they contain. The most effective films—Brand, My Winnipeg, and Cowards—are silent. Careful, which is wordier, is less effective. The Saddest Music in the World and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997) aren’t even in the game. Spoken dialogue is a mediating device that blunts the force of nightmares and intrusive thoughts in general; it also fails to match the inner experience of nightmares, which work through long periods of silence punctuated by screams and repeated mantras. A nightmare works best when it forces one to constantly relive that moment of awful realization during which one’s fears and powerlessness are repeatedly experienced as if for the first time. Temporally extended conversations basically make such always-becomings of terror impossible. Therefore, the nightmare-of-obsession hypothesis is compelling because, not only does it open an emotional door to the viewer that would be otherwise blocked, but it also richly coheres with several features of Maddin’s films, especially the later ones. It also stresses and underlines the trajectory of his oeuvre. Tales from the Gimli Hospital, his earliest feature, is full of childlike wonder and beautiful moments of discovery characteristic of youth. It also contains a truly wonderful love story. Although Gunnar and Snjófridur are doomed, their love will survive their deaths. After that, the films progress through a fairly cold period in which Maddin seems unable to deal with intimate emotions. Finally, his films become more emotionally honest, but the emotions they reveal are far more pessimistic than those that provided the basis for Gimli Hospital. By the end of this sequence of films, the heart of Maddin’s world beats strongest in the land of silence, the land of dreams.

Why I May Be Fundamentally Wrong And then came My Winnipeg. Just as I was writing what I thought to be the final passage of this paper, My Winnipeg had its Winnipeg premiere at the nauseatingly renamed Burton Cummings Theatre. The event could not possibly have been more triumphant. At one time or another, every child who feels particularly mistreated imagines watching his own funeral, which would occur after his untimely and tragic death. At it, Mother wails, “Unjust tyrants, we should never have made him clean up his room!” She rends her hair and falls back into the arms of the other soccer moms; overcome by grief and guilt,

42 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES she lapses into a year-long coma. Misty, the family dog, whimpers softly as she lays her head down by his headstone. From there, she will never move, and food will have to be brought to her at the cemetery. Father, a heretofore withholding and distant figure in his son’s life, leaps into the open grave. He scrabbles at the coffin, yelling “Too soon! Too soon! Why, why, why?” He tries to eat some grave-soil in his lone and futile attempt at closeness. Jesus beams down from on high. He softly says, “Finally they all understand, bless them.” Or consider the standard Hollywood biopic of affirmation. When confronted with our hero’s novel brilliance, the doubters are adamantly resistant to the point of hostility. Unknowingly trapped and hidebound, they grumble and hiss: “But what you have composed is nothing more than barnyard noise,” “Your so-called cure would only prolong the agony of countless ill children,” or “Your hare-brained theories fly in the face of accepted scientific knowledge. You, sir, are living in a fantasy land of your own creation!” After tirelessly overcoming obstacle after obstacle, our hero presents his work to the relevant academy of those who had so contemptuously resisted him. They are thunderstruck. Suitably enlightened, they will now help to promote and disseminate what they had previously dismissed. The world is made a much better place. At the subsequent award ceremony, our hero is presented with the Medal of Superiority and the deed to a castle in which he can continue his work. His now-frail mother finally realizes that her hard life of toil and drudgery has not been in vain. His sweetheart, the daughter of Dr. Hoffel, who was initially his most powerful and vehement opponent, is overjoyed that their love can now be revealed and celebrated. As he presents the medal, once-proud Dr. Hoffel kneels before our hero and begs his forgiveness. Offstage, a choir of the children who had been rescued by the power of music, medicine, or science sweetly sings. Tumultuous applause. Fin. The fantasies I have just described will give you a bit of an idea of the local premiere of My Winnipeg. In front of an ecstatically appreciative crowd, Maddin had the floodlights trained upon his mother, at which point the crowd became even more ecstatic. This, his hometown audience, once a collection of doubters, awarded him the Medal of Superiority, Auteur Class. Unfortunately, no single person could play the role of the kneeling and contrite Dr. Hoffel. My Winnipeg, the film, is itself an act of affirmation. It is alone among his later films in its ability to find a way out of the pessimistic sense of stasis that dominated Cowards and Brand. It does so by replacing that stasis with a gentle acquiescence. The film traces Guy Maddin (the character) as he tries

The Heart of His World 43

without success to take a train out of Winnipeg. While he circles Winnipeg, he sleeps and dreams of his home city, the sleepwalking capital of the world, and the home of his family, once again dominated by Mother. Free of progress or even a narrative trajectory, his cyclical life is one of eternal return. However, the Maddin of My Winnipeg embraces his inability not to go home again. Winnipeg is a snow-covered downy blanket of nostalgia. Best to snuggle deep down under it while taking time only to remove the tacky accretions of the last forty years. He mourns the loss of the Winnipeg Jets and the Winnipeg Arena, but not his existence in toto. In Brand and Cowards, Guy Maddin’s cyclical life is a nightmarish prison. However, his My Winnipeg life and the life of his sleepy city are to be celebrated. He gives a voice to Mother and, in doing so, transforms her from Mother, the omniscient and omnipotent nightmare apparition of Brand, into a human being. She’s still pretty nasty, but at least she’s finite. As with the rest of My Winnipeg, the accomplishment resides in a transformation of his vision, rather than a mere change in the concrete manifestations of his life. But now the problem with my basic thesis should be clear. Given his previous films, it seems that the best way of viewing his films for the purposes of securing an emotional connection with them was a fabulistic one in which the films were nightmares of obsession. I think the thesis is increasingly adequate to the total sequence of the films leading up to My Winnipeg, but it does not fit My Winnipeg, which is also his most accessible and intimate film. The earlier films seemed to present an insoluble problem, which My Winnipeg subsequently solves. So much the worse for my argument; so much the better for Maddin, both as a filmmaker and as the protagonist of his actual life.

Notes . One must never forget that Maddin’s films are largely collaborations between Maddin and George Toles, the screenwriter for most of Maddin’s films. Therefore, my attribution of certain features to Maddin himself should rightly be to Maddin and Toles. I prefer the term “The Maddin-Toles Fusion,” a theoretical entity with the name of a 970s British prog-rock band.

FROM ARCHANGEL TO MANDRAGORA IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD: COLLABORATING WITH GUY MADDIN

george toles

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. —Elizabeth Bishop I have been warned—by myself as well as others—not to sound too academic as I try to discuss my work as a scriptwriter. My goal seems to be to impersonate a non-academic for this one occasion. I have had to make some difficult decisions, in keeping with the stereotype of how academics are thought to sound, on just how much of my customary stuffiness I can safely remove at this late stage from my voice. Without the stuffing, can I speak above a whisper? There are many good reasons not to know too much about how a story or script comes into being. One should simply feel grateful for those days when creative work of any sort is possible, and with sensible superstition leave the “whys” and “hows” curled up in the dark. Attending too lucidly or probingly to the creative process can jeopardize it, as so many artists have testified. It is frighteningly easy for any evolving narrative to perish under the weight of excessive premeditation or analytic control—the wrong kind of knowing. The imagination is like an oversensitive friend, who can regard any form of

From Archangel to Mandragora 45

inquiry into its secrets as a terrible slight, and who can go into hiding without any warning when it feels betrayed. So let me proceed here very gently, with the cunning and self-protective duplicity that seem preconditions for all discussions about how fictions are made. I’ll have nothing to say about the phantasmagoria that envelops me (or any other writer) whenever a story starts moving forward of its own volition. Instead I shall strive for the nervous waking state that follows every happy enchantment, when one is obliged to wonder if any of it works. A potential viewer starts assailing me with a host of well-thought-out worries about story sense and whether the characters are worth bothering with. The flimsy edifice of dream teeters dangerously, even in this faint breeze. I steel myself for a discussion of meaning, which always turns into a cold, abstract lump when considered apart from a flow of images and sounds. How I wish I could evade at least the inner sceptic, whose only recommendations are that I become more self-conscious and properly ashamed of myself. The end of the first act of Waiting for Godot suggests the remedy I’m looking for: estragon: Shall we go? vladimir: Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.)2 When I began collaborating with Guy Maddin, the method I used to trick myself to open up a different channel for what might be termed unprotected expression was to pretend that I was Guy when I wrote. The ideas and impulses that came to me were so much more deliciously unsavoury, unsightly, and extreme when I saw them swimming merrily up from Guy’s unconscious rather than my own. This simple but surprisingly effective form of self-deception helped all sorts of things I wasn’t ready to acknowledge in my own name get past the patrol dogs of my still hyperactive, lapsed Catholic sense of guilt. Over time, it became clear that few of my own sorry secrets (those, at least, not so well hidden as to be hidden from me) continued to demand protection from the Writer busily screening and sifting memories for good material. I also began to worry less about the consequences if the secrets marked “dangerous” not only slipped into a story but were recognized as my own belongings. I gradually realized that my own autobiography, which might reasonably strike outsiders as a small-town parade of unimpressive incidents, was (unmetamorphosed) a quickly used up source of material. A well-known, infected sliver of autobiography, however, when embellished by a literaturefuelled imagination, could often generate the kind of wayward story ideas that

46 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Guy favours. His only firm requirements are the following: Don’t you dare bore me—or yourself. Be willing to tell everything on yourself, but slantwise. We’ll call what we’re making fairy tales, to put all but the most inquisitive off the scent. Don’t be pretentious or you’ll wake up one morning and see Peter Greenaway peering back at you in the mirror. Never tell other people what you think they already know or would be willing to vote for. Why would you need (or want) a movie for that? Don’t plot or think in a straight line. Keep the dialogue fragrant, like honeyed wine. And finally, for God’s sake, get some comedy into it, but make sure the presentation is deadpan. (The jokes should be as uncoercive and mysterious as Buster Keaton’s face.) Comedy. Perhaps the best way to explain how Guy thinks about the comic in relation to other attitudes toward experience is to discuss a scene we both love from the Andrew Birkin film, The Cement Garden (992)—adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel. A mother of four children, who happens to be their only surviving relative, has just died after a long illness in the bedroom of her London home. Her three older children—a boy and girl in mid-to-late adolescence and a pre-adolescent girl—discover the body. In addition to the shock of her passing away so quietly, when no one was present to be a witness or offer even small gestures of comfort and assistance, the children instantly know (to their marrow) that they are completely on their own. They have no grown-up anywhere to turn to for consolation or protection. As soon as the mother’s death is reported to the proper authorities, the children will be divided up and no doubt sent to various foster homes, or worse. The two girls stand before the mother’s bed, weeping helplessly and hiding nothing of what they feel. The boy, perhaps envying their abandon, remains silent. Julie, the eldest child, decides to draw the bedsheet over her mother’s face, as though there might be a bit of protection in any available ritual. But no sooner has she tugged the sheet to this new position than her mother’s large bare feet are left uncovered at the other end. Noticing how grotesque and defenceless these bare feet look with no owner to be solicitous about them, Jack, the brother, draws the sheet back down to cover them, leaving her head exposed once more. The sister pulls the sheet forward a second time, in line with her original plan, then Jack a little more stubbornly yanks it away to honour his end of the corpse. A small tug-of-war commences, which reduces both of them to laughter. At this point, the fourth and youngest child, fouryear-old Tom, who still doesn’t know what’s happened to his mother, enters the bedroom and quite reasonably asks,

From Archangel to Mandragora 47

“What’s so funny?” When his question goes unanswered he announces, “I want Mum.” “She’s asleep. Look, you can see.” “Why were you laughing then? Anyway, she’s not asleep, were you Mum?” “She’s very asleep,” says the younger sister, at last finding a point of entry into her older siblings’ “mature” air of frivolity. Tom responds to the thickening atmosphere of secrecy and the sense that he is being unfairly left out of something by yelling his mother’s name as he tries to climb onto her bed. Jack grabs his wrists and tells him, “You can’t.” Persevering and fiercely sure of himself, Tom kicks his brother and breaks free of him. He leaps onto the bed and pulls back his mother’s bedsheet. Julie gently tries to extricate him from his mother’s unresponsive form. “No, no,” the boy squeals, holding fast to his mother’s nightgown sleeve. Julie pulls once more, causing the corpse to pitch forward sideways, almost woodenly. Her head—in its new, peculiar thingliness—strikes a bedside table, sending a clock and glass of water crashing to the floor. Mother’s head is now wedged between bed and table—and it is at this angle that Tom finally sees her and grasps that she is dead. I’d like to dwell on that bedsheet for a few moments, as a means of clarifying how comedy can insinuate itself into the most terrible situations imaginable, without reducing or belittling the horror (in the self-congratulatory fashion typical of so much black comedy). The sheet initially functions as an expression of the natural human desire to have a unified, meaningful emotion that will fit its occasion smoothly and immaculately, like the sky fits its reflection on a still mountain lake. When your mother dies, and you have felt close to her, you simply grieve at the loss, and the assumption is that the action of grief happens spontaneously. One doesn’t (or shouldn’t) need a mourning etiquette manual to instruct one in how to grieve persuasively. Character becomes action. That is to say, here is one of those powerful instances where one is what one does. The bereaved one weeps, or (only slightly less ambiguously) he goes into shock. But reality, however we care to define it or cautiously bracket it with scare quotes, rarely allows us a bedsheet—even in as clear a case as the death of a parent—that is exactly the right size for the emotional situation. Comedy is our response to the wrong-size sheet we have to make do with. At first we may convince ourselves that it is the right size, appearances notwithstanding; then we struggle to make it work, ignoring the

48 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES invincible limitation; then finally we are caught somehow in the recognition that the sheet won’t stretch—and at this point it is not only the “mother’s feet” that lie exposed but also something in us. The comedy that most appeals to me is the sort that relieves, then reinforces, the pain in a dramatic predicament. The “soft” comedy temptation, if you like, promises a release from the demands of too pressure-filled an emotional involvement with what is going on. But suppose the release is a false one: it is not an escape, after all. The laughter, which for a moment or two increases our freedom to manoeuvre in relation to some anxiety, actually serves to make the predicament worse. It is as though our decision (or need) to laugh just then brings harm to the character who hasn’t had our opportunity for defection but who instead continues to suffer. The mother’s body and puppet-like head, wedged between bed and nightstand, seem weirdly unable to register the absurdity of being so suddenly inanimate, and therefore present an amusing spectacle. But Tom is not amused. It is left to him to really discover, at the crest of our laugh, that this is what’s left of his mother. She’s dead, Tom, and your pushing at her has caused her head to bump and get stuck in that dreadful position. You’re too young to know any better, but still, how could you? The agony of his expression when the truth dawns on him is beyond question the real thing. His face is totally persuasive, but we are not on the beat with him. Our detour of laughter has left us behind somehow; we have to catch up. Comedy ideally is an elastic band firmly attached at one end to something troublingly messy. As the laugh pulls us away from the emotional mess (elastically) it also snaps us back: so we are returned full-force to Tom’s face, having become (in our brief absence) invisible collaborators in his misfortune, his bereftness. He is doubly bereft—because in our comic escape we have abandoned him. Guy is very interested in the sort of laugh that escapes from us without our quite meaning it, the laughter we would cancel or take back if we had a second chance. Overall, the scene from The Cement Garden creates what I take to be an exemplary form of comic impasse. The scene lacks a stable or normative figure whose responses we can comfortably share. Everyone connected to the scene—the characters, the audience, the writer, and the director—are equally on the hook, and the whole thing hinges on an imperative intimacy one would just as soon forgo. Guy has an aversion for jokes whose point seems to be the director’s ethical superiority to one or more characters’ behaviour. Satire’s “I know something that you don’t” posture, with its commitment to judgement

From Archangel to Mandragora 49

from above and assumption of correct answers always in the keeping of the morally healthy satirist, is anathema to Guy’s comic perspective. He likes to steer his scenes through murky moral waters, where our ethical compass can’t get a reading fast enough to let us decide what response we want. And, more important, he looks for situations where all the available perspectives on events (including his own) become suspect, where the mere fact of being present and gazing at something dirties you. An excellent example of this strategic “dirtying” can be found in Archangel (990), perhaps the least well known and, by common consent, most baffling of Guy’s films. Archangel is a part-talkie whose narrative continuity matches Dreyer’s Vampyr (932) for opaqueness, and whose soundtrack is so starved of background noise that one can almost hear the ever-present mist and snow. Words, when they are spoken, rub against the silence like the sighs, creaks, and groans of an old house on a windy night. There is no tautological sound in this world. Instead we have amnesia sound, right down to the din of cannon and mortar shells, which seem not only spatially somewhat distant but temporally far away too. I recall one of Guy’s notes on style for Archangel: sound should resemble, if possible, an ancient veteran’s flickering recollections of his youthful apprenticeship in battlefield atrocities. The old warrior is almost capable, at this remove, of tenderly shrouding his worst experiences in the vapour of nostalgia. But a thin, irritating scratching noise persists in this mental fog, as though an unknown animal were clawing against the back door of memory, trying to get in. The setting of the film is that remote northern place in snowy Russia named in the title, where Frankenstein and his melancholy monster completed their wild pas de deux in Mary Shelley’s novel. The time is the final days of the Russian chapter of World War I. In fact, the war is officially at an end here, but word hasn’t yet reached the beleaguered combatants who have improbably travelled to this remote outpost from a great many countries, large and small. The fighters we observe in action pursue their bellicose tasks with the kind of distraction they might bring to a factory or mining job. The still-present dangers to life and limb seem to be concealed in a general atmosphere of forgetfulness. In the course of a long, aimless struggle, war has become increasingly difficult to separate from other phenomena: it is simply the mental weather into which all of the characters march off to do their duty. A penumbral fog moves along with them, seemingly hatched from their collective trance, and it is common for the soldiers to mislay their domestic identities and private memories there. Occasional battle fever, pitched at the

50 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES same level as sexual fever, is the reward the characters hope for after so much tramping around and senseless waiting in the drizzle, mud, and snow. In the Archangel scene I shall be looking at, we are in the home of one of the female soldiers, Danchak, during a combat intermission. Her husband, Jannings, who is a sulking stay-at-home whenever there is war work to be done, is regarded by Danchak, their twelve-year-old son Geza, and everyone else who comes in contact with him during the movie as a coward because he can’t find the strength to go into battle. He has no ethical reasons for staying out of the conflict. He is quite simply terrified of being killed—and even he doesn’t see that as any kind of excuse for his unmanly derelictions. John Boles, a Canadian soldier (and amnesiac) billeted with this family, is the protagonist of the film. He tries to sympathize with his host’s fear of various male duties, but he cannot avoid regretting that the valorous Danchak is saddled with such a spineless mate. Here is the relevant portion of that scene: danchak catches her son geza pocketing a piece of satin thread from her sewing box as a souvenir. With considerable embarrassment and remorse, she commands the repentant child to return the stolen thread. After he does so she sets out, with tears in her eyes, to make matters right by buckling geza’s wrists to a special easel and then administering numerous blows with a switch to the boy’s back. The necessity of this flogging, though visibly upsetting to danchak, is nonetheless unquestioned by both parties. As the sounds of beating fill the air of the small cottage, jannings quakes in the corner. Tactfully averting his gaze from the scene of corporal punishment, boles quietly approaches jannings in an attempt to reason with him. boles: Isn’t it the man’s place to discipline a wayward child? jannings (knowing Boles is right): I’m sorry. jannings slinks out of the room, conscious that his fear of disciplining his son is linked to his larger fear of facing the enemy. geza: Please continue, mother. boles: I’m not used to seeing a woman do a man’s work. Do you mind? boles takes the cane from danchak and administers a good, Etonstyle flogging to geza. When he is done, boles offers his hand in a

From Archangel to Mandragora

gesture of forgiveness to the boy. geza looks up at boles through tearful eyes, and perhaps because of the moisture, boles appears to him in shimmering soft focus, as resplendent in his authority and military uniform as a god. (“Now, if he were my father…”) danchak, whose thoughts are flowing in a similar vein, though with a connubial emphasis, also sheds a few tears as she and geza embrace. boles: He’s a good lad. You should be proud of him. boles lights a cigarette, salutes the family and, spurs jingling brightly, departs the cottage for an evening excursion. How might a viewer’s feelings and judgements circulate and attempt to find closure in such an episode? The first thing to be said about the scene is that the characters are all in agreement about what the problem is and how to solve it. The cowering Jannings does not put forward an alternative point of view, and his total abjectness pretty much defeats a viewer’s desire to identify with him. Danchak does not enjoy caning her son but regards it as an inescapable duty if Geza is to turn out to be a responsible grown-up. Boles does intervene midway through the punishment but not to protest anything but the distressing fact that it is not the mother’s job to flog. Here is the scene’s peculiar comedy aperture. My guess is that most movie and tv spectators are sufficiently well trained by now in the ways of patriarchal oafishness that whenever they hear the phrase, “Isn’t this a man’s job?” they know they are confronting the familiar sound of historical prejudice. How foolish, for example, those frontier men are to doubt that Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, is the best damned sawbones in the West! Man’s job, indeed. A woman can cane her child every bit as well as a man, if not better. No, wait—caning is something that men do because they have been socially constructed to be vile and warlike. Women don’t (or shouldn’t) do it, but it’s not because they’re incapable. They don’t want to. But this boy—who is being whipped—looks up to his mother for doing what she would rather not do and assuming responsibility for the task shamefully neglected by deadbeat dad. Boles, with a hero’s self-possession, steps in at the last possible moment to save the situation, and perhaps our feelings are given one more twist at the sight of Danchak gratefully relinquishing the cane to the man who knows what the natural hierarchy is and how this thing is properly done. Boles takes no more pleasure in meting out the strokes than Danchak did. He is not a sadist. He performs the duty like Alan Ladd in Shane (953) helping

5

52 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES poor Van Heflin chop out that tree stump, while innocently aroused Jean Arthur (Heflin’s wife) smiles encouragingly behind them. Like a well-treated guest, Boles is willing to lend a hand with the household chores. The fact that Danchak is slightly thrilled at the sight of him so efficiently taking charge is as invisible to him as Jean Arthur’s response to Ladd’s body in action is to both parties in Shane. Movie characters have a remarkably well-developed capacity not to be privy to the thoughts that are legible on their faces if it is in the story’s interests to preserve their uncomplicated goodness. Turning at last to the willing victim of Boles’s gruesomely excessive punishment, is there not something truthful—at least not easily dismissible—in Geza’s tearful admiration of the superhuman authority figure introducing some much-needed clarity to his moral universe? It is at this moment that I, as the writer, find myself, piercingly, on the hook with the characters. I recall the complex mixture of pain and love I felt when my father offered me his hand after one of his spanking sessions. I found no anger in his expression, no evidence that he had gone out of control. I took his reluctant decision to resort to this uncommon mode of punishment as proof that there were firm rules in the world—all evidence of chaos notwithstanding—and that they made sense. My father gave every impression of knowing what the rules were, and part of what he was communicating through his blows was the desire that I become an equal sharer of this knowledge. He could imagine no better way of making the knowledge stick. Strangely, I felt more fully acknowledged by my father after these rare ceremonial summons to intimate violence than at most other times. I had succeeded in catching and holding his attention by my transgressions of household law in a more complete fashion than my usually vague, out-of-focus filial presence could manage. We had made contact through his authority, and I welcomed it, in spite of the stiff price. Frighteningly often, I go back to these moments when I search for tangible memory proofs of my father’s love for me. And though I believe, after failing in the same way myself as a father, that it is never right, never a good thing to physically discipline a child, I cannot rewrite my emotional history in keeping with this almost-too-late conviction, to make my experience simpler, less self-divided. Hence the scene from Archangel: laugh if you will. Maurice Sendak was once asked during a visit to Berkeley why he thought Shakespeare would be drawn to so puerile a story as The Winter’s Tale. “What’s going on there?” his questioner cheerfully called out. I found Sendak’s reply extremely suggestive. He touched upon something I’ve always wanted to

From Archangel to Mandragora 53

believe about the potential of certain kinds of fantasy for film, even at this late date. “It seems to me,” Sendak began, “[Shakespeare’s] hiding something extraordinarily important, perhaps. And you hide it best in a fairy tale. Maybe I say that because I want to do that. But I think it’s something too dangerous to talk about in a serious way, and so, paradoxically, you turn it on its head. Like some of the operas of Rossini, some of the operas of Mozart—comic operas that break your heart. He’s telling you something very sere and severe, and it’s kind of hidden in the fabric of this dopeyness.”3 I especially love the phrase: “something too dangerous to talk about in a serious way.” It instantly puts me in mind of Nabokov’s Lolita, where the reader’s task is in part to find the reality of the girl, Dolores Haze, at an imaginative level that Humbert’s voice works very hard to evade, in spite of the vast array of sexual/emotional/rhetorical optics he proposes for our consideration. Our wish to be serious about child molesting must find a means to coexist honestly with our amusement and enchantment. A straightforward attempt to oppose Humbert in a voice of offended virtue runs the risk of denying our own pleasure in the book’s aesthetic weave and in falsifying the nature of our disturbance. It is likely to be our too-slippery, unstable involvement with Humbert rather than Humbert himself that accounts for our sense of menace in the book. Sendak’s phrase also reminds me, at a much lower artistic altitude, of Guy Maddin’s Careful (992), where the fairy-tale structure strikes me, at any rate, not as a refusal of the darkness of the incest and repression theme but as an attempt to keep the fear that naturally dwells in this darkness from becoming too sanitized and manageable—and thus, mere pretense. Combining fairy tale with a comically extreme preoccupation with repression was a further move to ensure that the slopes of our chosen subject would have, in Guy’s phrase, “real avalanche potential.” If Careful can accurately be termed a “pro-repression” movie, it is not because of any nostalgia on our part for Victorian strictures, with all their suffocating weight of duty and obedience. We are not pining for the revival of laws that breed submissive minds and deformed libidos. However, Freud was surely right to insist that whatever level of sanity any of us manage to retain depends, to a large degree, on our capacity for repression. Without effective psychic blocking mechanisms, would there be anything but God and drugs to keep us from the grip of terminal depression, on the one hand, or psychotic rage on the other? The term “pro-repression” can perhaps most interestingly be applied to art itself: art’s necessary repression, if there is to be sufficient surprise and danger in the creative process, of its own deepest aims. I am almost persuaded that the

54 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES only way for narrative art to approach anything consequential is by accepting the following intractable condition: that art can’t fully illuminate anything without falsifying or destroying it. Its triumph always comes in the tension between what is made manifest and what the Orphean activity of bringing this much of something “into the clear” forces back into the darkness. Whatever a story most desires to reveal or “say” must remain half-buried, tantalizingly out of reach. And if this is true of art, I think it is equally true of the inner life, where so much depends on a tactful relationship with one’s demons. Even our lifelong terrors and most private agonies can seem sadly diminished, and unconvincing, when we shine too much light on them. But bring back the night wood and they writhe once again with their former power. Quests in narratives typically begin like dreams, in which the quester knows neither the goal nor himself. The Russian folktale “Oom Razoom” explicates the situation nicely by assigning its average hero the rather daunting task of travelling to “I Know Not Where” to bring back “I Know Not What.” Often, however—and in movies especially, far too often—there is an impatience to exchange at the earliest possible opportunity this mournful or exhilarating initial disorientation for a kind of false centredness, which is usually a mimicry of some old-fashioned belief system that the story feigns allegiance to. The assumption seems to be that clarity is the basic requirement of both the quester’s game plan and effective narrative closure. Purposeful story movement onscreen begins, screenwriting handbooks tell us, at that point where the quester knows where she is going and why. At the end of her journey, she will have an accumulation of insights to consider, which add up to better self-knowledge (the sort that changes one’s life) and a sense of completion, in both the inner and outer world. What is one to do, however, if one believes that the most credible and intriguing questers are not decisive about goals but are, in effect, sleepwalkers? The fairy-tale method would, at first, seem to guarantee, more than any other genre, a familiar quest order, an easy symmetry of rewards and punishments, and a final, out-of-time fulfillment for the simple hero when he returns home. In fact, however, fairy tales can, with only the slightest bending, yield inscrutable spells that cannot be broken, pain that cannot be healed, and a persistent forgetting of lessons learned. They can give us a sense of having drifted dangerously close to places where everything familiar and dear has either been taken away for good or transformed beyond recognition. Surely adult and child alike know that in “Hansel and Gretel” there is something irreversible and death-laden

From Archangel to Mandragora 55

in the birds eating up Hansel’s path of bread crumbs; the parental decision to abandon their children in the woods not once but twice means (like a word so wounding it can never be unsaid) that Hansel and Gretel are truly lost there forever, whatever illusions of escape present themselves later. What fairy tales present as their centre of gravity is the renewable condition of being lost. Being lost is the price you pay for magic, and the magic can as easily increase your sense of not knowing where (and who) you are as lessen it. The characters in Careful have struck many viewers as lacking in internal definition. Perhaps another way of putting this is to call them weightless. They are weightless, when we first encounter them, to the extent that they are not required to think about what they believe or how they intend to live their lives. They are comfortably obedient. Even nature declares, by unmistakable signs, that being cautious and treading lightly and never making a loud noise is one’s only hope of survival. Nature and social indoctrination have but a single, wonderfully harmonized lesson to impart: keep the lid on. When, without warning, this inherited system fails the characters—when they wake up from it, as from a long, luxurious nap—they find in its place nothing but a sinister, unaccountable mood. From this time forward (though the characters’ awakenings are staggered), their only form of knowledge will be mood-knowledge. However a passing mood capriciously paints their emotional and mental landscape at a given moment is all they have to go by. And when a different mood arrives, like a frenzied twilight thunderstorm, their whole sense of themselves is yanked into the midst of it, and they make whatever logic and rationality they have at their disposal somehow serve and validate the new mood. Paradoxically, it is while the characters are filled with authoritative notions on how to behave and order their lives that they seem light as air. Once authority, which we normally think of as oppressively heavy, is taken away from them and quicksilver mood assumes the whole burden of knowledge, the characters appear to inhabit their thoughts and actions more substantially. In their former condition, they felt that those they were close to (family members, lovers, friends) shared with them an outlook, a set of values, a world view. It seemed that such kinship made their minds transparent to one another. With the fading of other sorts of clarity, the subjectivity of anyone else starts to appear frighteningly impenetrable. One can no longer take even small things for granted in any relationship. Usually, the decision to trust one’s instincts leads one to precisely the wrong conclusion or to a bizarrely foolish

56 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES course of action. Ah, what torment there is in the ever-balked need to know what someone else truly thinks and feels. The rapid turnabouts in the motives and mindsets of Johann, Grigorss, Klara, and Zenaida can seem purely comic, I suppose, if one regards one’s own mind as better protected than theirs against such drift and veering. But perhaps radical discontinuity of mood is as plausible and compelling an approach to character inwardness as any other. To Guy Maddin, every contemporary story that feels true is at bottom an amnesia story. And we needn’t limit the importance of the amnesia dimension to current narratives. Returning to Sendak for a moment, Guy and I share his delight that the Queen of Night in The Magic Flute, “who seems so remarkably sensuous and beautiful and mournful and suffering in Act One,” becomes inexplicably “as crazy as Leontes at the beginning of The Winter’s Tale in Act Two.”4 And in the same opera, it seems wholly fitting to Sendak that Tamino can love a young woman intensely one minute and then not talk to her for the rest of the opera. Our best fictional surrogates at the beginning of the twenty-first century are by no means emotionally dead or ironed out flat by postmodernist disavowals of selfhood—any more than the characters in The Magic Flute are. They can still be filled up like a water balloon with an obsession, a hope, a benevolent impulse. The trouble comes when they (or we) try to hold on to those foggy transitions between each sovereign mood. What captivated me just yesterday can abruptly lose its power of definition and in an instant be replaced by a gloomy indifference. If only I could find or remember the bridge that led me from the first condition to the second. As Robert Musil once wrote of the mood swings in Robert Walser’s prose: “the gravity of real conditions begins to drizzle along the thread” of every stray feeling.5 But if there is cause for melancholy here, there is something amusing as well in the prospect of so many mood daybreaks and the jaunty confidence with which one goes out to meet them, one’s memory strangely anaesthetized to all but the very latest news. Most of the time, viewers of Careful are encouraged to stand at a fair distance from the characters’ dilemmas. (Is there not something distasteful about too many emotional solicitors coming to one’s door in the course of a film?) Yet there are brief, crucial intervals where there is more direct pressure to feel something, at a personal depth. It’s like entering one of those precious mountain node spaces where the citizens of Tolzbad can safely give vent to long-stifled impulses. One can never be sure, of course, whether subtle breaks in the tone or dominant “voice” of a film will be emotionally audible. Many

From Archangel to Mandragora 57

of these “unguarded moments” in Careful have to do with Franz, the mute, paraplegic, all-but-forgotten eldest son who dwells helplessly in a foliage of cobwebs in the Bernholtz attic. He is visited early on by the blind ghost of his father, enjoining him to actions he cannot possibly perform and can barely understand. Quite late in the film, Franz is magically reconciled to his mother, who had incomprehensibly abandoned him to his utterly isolated domestic outpost at an early age. Soon after that, he is asked by his mother in a tender voice to watch her hang herself, as though it has somehow been the impossible act of forgiving him and trying to love him that has destroyed her. What made Franz seem the right figure to bring the film’s perhaps toowell-buried emotional life out in the open is that he has no voice, no capacity to act or injure, and no direct stake in the story’s events. It is almost as easy for the spectator to forget about him as it is for the other characters. Taken literally, his plight is extravagantly absurd. And yet his face consistently reflects suffering (compliant, bewildered suffering) in an unstylized way. He has just enough presence of mind to be forever in touch with his own anguish—in a manner that seems pure, since neither words nor action can discharge or falsify it. Careful is shy about making any emotional claims on the spectator where the nature of the petition can be clearly specified. At the end of the movie, Grigorss returns to his beloved Klara’s icy, furnished cave (originally designed by her as a lovers’ sanctuary for herself and her emotionally distant father). Having finally attained an isolation as pristine as Franz’s, Grigorss retires to a frozen bed and, while gazing blankly at the cave ceiling, releases a single tear. In the preternatural stillness, the tear sets off an echo when it lands on the stone floor that prompts a whole series of rebound echoes, gaining steadily in resonance and volume. The sound builds to the point where one last tiny avalanche is created, sealing Grigorss into the cave. No one but his mother’s consoling shade will be able to reach him there. She does arrive, however, bearing neither reproach nor any suggestion that things might be amiss. She tucks him in, checks his forehead for fever, and smiles at him, her face once more radiant with unconditional love, as he perishes in the cold. The scene strives for the wit of one of those densely knotted metaphysical love poems, a wit whose function is to hold the film’s last spasm of feeling in some sort of check. What does the scene express? I can’t say, but I know that it reminds me of a story Guy once told me about his blind, ninetyyear-old grandmother frailly singing “Happy Birthday” to his mother from her musty downstairs room. She had to lift her head to sing into a heating

58 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES duct so her voice would carry to the upstairs parlour where she guessed her daughter would be sitting. The warm air of the duct faintly carried the tune aloft, and Guy’s mother couldn’t be sure whether she was hearing or imagining this greeting from her parent’s dark, lonely anchorhold. I’d like to close with a description by William Gass, typically and satisfyingly baroque, of Robert Walser’s prose style. This description catches, better than anything I’ve ever read or managed to formulate for myself, the way that Careful might work in a world of ideal spectators and unimpeded communication from heart to heart: It is as if, holding in one’s hand a postcard painting, let us say, a pretty Swiss scene—perhaps an inn at the edge of a snowy village with the Alps (as they ought to be) above, blue lake below—one were in the same look to sense behind the little window with its painted pot the shadow of a weeping woman, while in the other room of the inn there was loneliness as cold as the window glass, cruelty in the severely scraped and shovelled walk, death in the depths of the lake, a cloud of callousness about the mountain peaks; and then with nary a word about what one had seen—about bitterness, sadness, deprivation, boredom, defeat, failure added to failure—yet having seen these things, sensed these things, felt them like a cinder in the shoe, one were nevertheless to write… an apparently pleasant description of the pretty Swiss inn on its pretty site, colours as bright as printed paint, surfaces as shiny and slick as ice, smoke as fixed and frozen in its coils as on the quarter-a-copy card, with its space for any message, provided the message is trite and true, gay and brief.6

Notes . Elizabeth Bishop, “The Man-Moth,” in The Complete Poems: 927–979 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 983). 2. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 954), 36. 3. Maurice Sendak, “Symposium: Sendak’s Rabbis, Mozart, and Shakespeare,” Threepenny Review 7, 2 (996): 35. 4. Ibid., 34. 5. Robert Musil, “The Stories of Robert Walser,” in Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses, ed. Mark Harmon (Hanover: University Press of New England, 985), 42. 6. William Gass, Finding a Form (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 996), 69–70.

GUY MADDIN’S DRACULA: VIRGINS, VAMPIRES, AND THE “THEATRE FILM”

milan pribisic

When Vonnie Von Helmolt, a Winnipeg film producer, saw Mark Godden’s 998 Royal Winnipeg Ballet production of Dracula, she fell in love with it. And she wanted everybody to see it. If coming to Winnipeg was not everyone’s number-one destination, and if touring still would not cut it for the masses, she turned to the pervasive mass medium that she worked for: television. She was not thinking of simply preserving the existing production by recording it with television cameras; she had in mind saving the fleeting live object of the stage production and doing it justice, while, at the same time, producing a film for television that would stand on its own merits. In his adaptation of the wellknown story, Godden focussed on sex, fear, and action—the fear of awakened female sexuality and a hunt by a bunch of male cuckolds for a strange count with an enormous sexual appetite for virgins. Von Helmolt knew she needed a visionary director who knew the craft and was able to construct a creative dialogue between different media languages and modes and styles of representation. And, as luck would have it, she didn’t even have to go far to find one: right there in Winnipeg, Guy Maddin, one of the contemporary film world’s most unique directors, made his headquarters. Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) interests me here as an example of the “theatre film” at its best. Béatrice Picon-Vallin describes theatre

60 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES film as an encounter between the two media that encourages dialogue between them and not their fusion, blending, or melting. The term itself avoids the negative connotations usually attached to the term “filmed theatre” (a mechanical, static recording of an existing stage show). Theatre film, as seen for example in works done by Peter Brook (Marat-Sade, 966) or Louis Malle (Vanya on 42nd Street, 994), is film that departs from a particular theatre production but keeps the stage performance both on the margins and at its centre. Instead of hiding its site of origin (the stage), theatre film openly exploits its hybrid nature and a relational dialectics found at the meeting point of the two different media. Theatre film, in Picon-Vallin’s words, serves as a double for the existing stage performance, but not so much in terms of faithfulness and equivalence; rather, it thrives on the productive tensions and new qualities and insights resulting from this encounter, from this ongoing process of giving different forms of media to the original source.2 Following both Picon-Vallin and a recent theorizing about adaptation done by Linda Hutcheon, in this chapter I discuss Maddin’s transfer of Mark Godden’s Dracula from stage to screen in a twofold manner—as a process of creative reinterpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality done by the adapter(s) and audiences alike; and as a product of an extensive, particular transcoding, understood as a recoding of the signs, conventions, and modes of engagement used in a theatre ballet production into a different set of modes, rules, and signs more appropriate for the medium of a television film that would receive wide arthouse theatrical distribution.3

Layering Dracula’s Cake In an interview for the Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope, Maddin claims how, early on, once he reluctantly embarked on this project with Von Helmolt, he decided “to make the most faithful adaptation of the novel ever made, with a strange exception that it is all being danced.”4 Maddin’s anxieties about making a film based on ballet, a form he was neither very familiar with nor much interested in, may have prompted him to at first remove himself (and his collaborator, editor, and associate director Deco Dawson) from the primary source of his film adaptation, Godden’s stage ballet, so that he could return to the original source for a modern icon of horror—that is, to Bram Stoker’s 897 novel. From the novel, Maddin picked his favourite themes, such as male jealousy and xenophobia in the face of liberated female sexuality, as well as his favourite episodes, looking forward to cinematically retelling them.5 “Episode” seems to

Guy Maddin’s Dracula 6

be the key word here, since Stoker’s Dracula is a long, multi-voiced narrative about the invasion of a foreign entity threatening the foundations of Victorian England: domestic bliss built on female purity and male dominance, and a bourgeois order dependant on the individual initiative of courageous, knowledgeable, bread-winning men. Stoker delivers this epistolary narrative through a compilation of different characters’ diary entries, newspaper clippings, police reports, and other documents—a sort of collage of voices and perspectives “placed in sequence,”6 which illuminates the mysterious and dangerous force infiltrating sacred English soil. Stoker, in fact, introduces the foreign threat on its own territory, which the English solicitor Jonathan Harker visits in search of expanding the British economic empire. It is young Harker’s diary and letters that give us the first glances and omens of Count Dracula and his ambivalent powers of the undead. Only after this prolonged introduction about Harker’s seduction by the count and his escape from Dracula Castle in Transylvania does the invasion of English soil, its land, and women begin. Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray (the latter of whom will later become Mrs. Jonathan Harker) are the count’s female victims once he has reached the English shore, and it is through their journals and letters that we get to see and define him. Other perspectives about the strange foreigner are provided by the men (all Westerners) protecting these women and England/the West: Lucy’s fiancé, Lord Godalming; two of her suitors, Dr. Seward and Mr. Quincey P. Morris, the latter an American from Texas; and a Dutchman, Dr. Van Helsing. It is the organized and coordinated defence enterprise of these men (with a little help from female secretary Mina) that results in failure of the nosferatu to encroach upon England. Dracula’s hasty return to his foreign homeland, where the vampire hunters follow him for a final battle and victory for the British Empire, is the site of Western values triumphantly retaining control over all foreign, impure, and disruptive forces and instincts, both from without and within. Most critics who discuss vampiric seduction in Stoker’s Dracula read the novel as primarily about the symbolic seduction of women (Lucy, Mina) and their “vampiric affinities,” perceiving Harker’s function in the narrative as a preface to this central theme.7 In his economic and “most faithful” adaptation of Stoker’s narrative, Maddin seems to follow this interpretation. The film starts with the first of Dracula’s female victims, Lucy, and her vampiric seduction/betrothal. Gone are Harker’s travels to Transylvania and the building of suspense about the count’s identity, since contemporary audiences perceive

62 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Dracula as a modern myth in no need of introduction and explication. After Lucy’s seduction and her rescue from the eternal damnation of the undead, the narrative swiftly moves to Mina, the nosferatu’s second female victim, and her seduction into uncleanliness. The film closes with the final duel between the devil and the vampire hunters. Maddin’s seventy-two-minute film is a tightly constructed skeleton of Stoker’s original narrative, delivering a set of familiar narrative signposts and clichés (sexual repression, female sexual transgression, damsels in distress, foreign threat, male jealousy, final duel between forces of good and evil, etc.) that move us simply because they have become part of the popular imagination and symbolic order, not unlike the workings of Greek myths. In the popular imagination that Maddin exploits here, Dracula is a visual stereotype of a threat coming from foreign, uncharted territory in order to terrorize the blissful, domestic realm. This threat is further imagined as occurring within evil’s archetypal attack upon the most “innocent” and “pure” element of domesticity’s sexual self, traditionally embodied as femaleness at its most vulnerable. The next stereotypical icon used is the figure (or two) of a native, righteous man who asserts his identity by protecting, by any means necessary, the homeland’s sacred property (its women) and territoriality. In a culture that forbids any contact between males outside of a business or familial context, the “traffic of women” between men necessarily leads to the mandatory “duel until sunrise” between good guys and bad guys, with good guys winning and taking as a reward the restored purity of their females (or even their diaries, as is the case with Van Helsing secretly keeping Mina’s journal for his own fantasies). Umberto Eco describes the use of common and intertextual frames, as he calls them, as a helpful tool for authors when they are not sure how to deal with the narrative. This may explain and support the suggestion that Maddin never really finished reading Stoker’s novel and was more interested in reworking the principal archetypes associated with the myth of Dracula, enabling, in Eco’s memorable phrasing, “the archetypes [to] hold a reunion” and celebrate their coming together.8 The trimming of Stoker’s original narrative to a few major themes and motifs seems to have already been in place in Godden’s adaptation of the novel for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. However, Godden’s narrative ballet, set to symphonic music by Gustav Mahler, tells the story in larger, more detailed strokes that feel less fragmented and streamlined than Maddin’s cinematic rendering. The stage ballet itself is just over two hours long and divided into two acts. Act One depicts Lucy’s response to Dracula’s advances, her willing

Guy Maddin’s Dracula 63

submission to the vampiric seduction, her suitors’ efforts to save her through blood transfusion, her death and reappearance as a vampire, and her second death. It is the dance of a sexually awakened female, in which sexual desire merges with a death wish, only for her purity to be salvaged by the honourable and selfless work of a few good men. Act Two starts with a merger of dance and “program notes” combining dance, pantomime, and voice-over in order to include (unlike Maddin’s film) Stoker’s introduction about Harker’s journey to Transylvania and the legend of the undead as a classical and folk archetype. The action then returns to the seduction of another female victim, Mina. A darker-haired version of Lucy, she is the archetypal English woman, but with a difference: she overcomes her status as victim to become one of the vampire hunters. She embodies victor and virtue.9 In both Godden’s and Maddin’s renderings, female innocence and the vampire’s threat to it are the centre of the narrative. The males are grouped together, functioning as a chorus of masculinity that is both destabilized and restored by the foreign threat to their females and their homeland. In these versions, Jonathan Harker becomes just one of the endangered young males, losing the prominence once given to his character in Stoker’s novel. Native manhood in its prime is disrupted by the infiltration of the foreign undead’s sexual prowess. While Stoker depicts this evil force of darkness as an old, pale, unappealing, but curiously strong and virile figure, both Godden and Maddin show the count as a racial Other (Zhang Wei-Qiang, a dancer of Chinese descent, plays Dracula in both the stage production and the film)—a young, attractive, and seductive presence. The only old male in their versions is Van Helsing, a “mad” scientist with a hidden passion for the virgins and innocence under attack. David Moroni’s iconic performance as the scientist is a magical embodiment of what Michel Foucault terms “the image of the imperial prude…emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.”0 Standing at the gates of the empire’s regime of power-knowledge-pleasure, Van Helsing’s mere presence, as well as his actions as leader of the vampire hunters, initiates and perpetuates the discourse on sex in which roles for domestic and foreign men and women are strictly prescribed, so that any deviation from them is promptly pursued and punished. To echo Foucault, the pleasure of the hunt and punishment of this “pornography of the morbid” hides behind the severity of national security under a foreign threat and “justifies the racisms of the state.” For the film adaptation of the ballet, Maddin also brings back into the narrative frame a character from the original novel, absent in the stage

64 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES production: Renfield, Dr. Seward’s most intense and fascinating patient, with his seemingly unreasonable behaviour that defies the sort of scientific, rational explanations being developed by Freudian psychoanalysis at the time of Stoker’s publication. Maddin employs his regular actor Brent Neale to play Renfield, and this is the only completely non-dancing role, shot mostly in dramatic, claustrophobic close-ups to register the proximity of “Master” Dracula and reinforce his power to contaminate and corrupt forces from within the empire.

Novel, Stage, Film Since its publication in 897, Stoker’s novel itself, not unlike its titular character, has had the life of the undead—the book has been continuously in print, adapted for the stage in different versions, introduced on the big screen in F.W. Murnau’s 922 film adaptation Nosferatu, immortalized by the Hollywood treatment starring Bela Lugosi, and trivialized by numberless populist, parodic, campy, and pornographic movie transformations. Dracula has been represented, to quote Maddin, “too many times.”2 Maddin starts by narrowing down his sources of narrative inspiration to two: Mark Godden’s ballet adaptation and Stoker’s original novel. In the process of filming his narrative take on these two Draculas, however, Maddin uses other intertextual frames, primarily those from the tradition of film, which further contribute to the notion of intermedia competence and literacy as one of the basic characteristics of the theatre film. From the very first shot of Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary—a close-up of a cross—it is obvious that Maddin is making a film based on an existing ballet performance, not just a mechanical recording of it. It takes Maddin six minutes to show a first dance movement performed by Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) and her maids after her initial encounter with the mysterious count. Maddin has talked about his project as “not just a ballet film…. I think of this, arrogantly, as a silent film, not a dance film.”3 There is, however, plenty of movement in the film, performed not only by the actors/dancers, but also by the camera; the musical movements of Mahler’s symphonies Nos. , 2, and 9; and the movement of the fog that allows the wave-like interplay of the visible and invisible. Editor Deco Dawson’s approximation of Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions”4 keeps images coming at us rapidly with their secrets, mysteries, and beauty, leaving us astonished and hungry for more, and even faster. In the context of movement, the film can be seen as transcoding a stage ballet into a kinetic dance of images, camera, bodies, and music.

Guy Maddin’s Dracula 65

Maddin’s choice of silent-movie aesthetics for a film based on a ballet adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel creates a circular movement through which three different media are brought together in order to expose and negotiate their similarities and differences. To tell the story of Dracula cinematically, shown previously as dance on the stage, implies finding a filmic code that shows and tells without spoken dialogue. If, in the early cinema before the introduction of the sound, the lack of heard, spoken dialogue was a restriction, it is now, in Maddin’s case, embraced as an aesthetic principle. The pantomime and stylized movements of silent-film actors fit organically with the ballet dancers now performing for the film camera. They are trained to show and emote the story only through body movements and facial expressions; as Maddin states, they dance with every fibre of their bodies.5 While the focus of the audience watching a stage production is on the whole body, silent cinema’s big discovery was close-ups of movie stars’ “big faces” that spoke more than a thousand words. In his theatre film, Maddin brings together stage and cinema for a dialogue that diminishes the shortcomings of each. We now have medium- and long-shot dance scenes of passion, fear, and madness combined with dancers’ close-ups to underline an emotion, dramatic moment, or shift in relationship. If this strategy cuts the amount of dance that was previously visible on stage, it certainly augments its suspenseful and dramatic impact on film by providing angles and sights impossible to see in a live performance. It also proves a great device for more clearly showcasing not only the dancers’ balletic craft, but their acting ability as well (already mentioned is David Moroni’s Van Helsing, but Tara Birtwhistle as Lucy delivers a performance that can stand comparisons with any of the greatest female stars of the silent-film era). Maddin’s bringing together of three media (novel, stage, film) exposes the different modes of audience engagement through which each operates: the novel tells the story, while stage and film show and tell. Since Western theatre’s appearance in its dramatic form in ancient Greece, the text (or telling of the drama) has often been perceived as its dominant element—from which the new medium of film, in a search for its own language, needed to detach. As Picon-Vallin shows in her discussion of the theatre film, this historical theatre/ film split, seen primarily as a text/image split, is slowly being abandoned in favour of a theoretical debate about theatre and film as different types of images—i.e., the theatre audio-visual image vs. the cinematic audio-visual image. Both of these contain a fundamental contradiction: a live, three-dimensional theatre audio-visual image is framed by the codes and conventions of the

66 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES medium that stands as a representation of the real; and a two-dimensional, “flattened” cinematic audio-visual image seduces by its recorded, realistic simulation of reality.6 In Maddin’s Dracula, Mahler’s symphonic work is the audio aspect of the stage ballet being cinematically captured. The lack of spoken dialogue takes Maddin back to the silent-film era and its predominantly pantomimed interpersonal exchanges between characters. The audio of the cinematic image consists of post-recorded sound effects sandwiched by Mahler’s music, thus paralleling the silent era’s playback operators and musical accompanists who delivered live added sound during the projection. Maddin’s retrograde move toward an early stage in the development of the filmic medium diminishes sound film’s simulative power to recreate the illusion of reality, while at the same time bringing back the more stylized representation of reality characteristic of the stage in general, and ballet in particular. Maddin’s further interventions upon silent movie images with digital editing and computer-generated effects7 are a jump into the present tense of image technologies (much like the way early avant-garde theories of montage have latterly influenced mtv-style music videos). These back-and-forth moves with styles and technologies complicate the process of pinpointing the nature of the images delivered, emphasizing their hybrid quality. Ultimately, this strategy proves to be quite appropriate and constructive in the dialogue between stage ballet and narrative cinema orchestrated by Maddin’s theatre film. To layer the different narrative streams, Maddin, like directors of silent films, uses intertitles and subtitles; some of them are his own comments (“Immigrants!!”), while some are quotes from the novel (“There are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely”). Introducing direct quotes from Stoker’s book also serves as a reminder of the original source for both ballet adapter Godden and film adapter Maddin. This move exposes the dialogic nature of the theatre film, wherein the steps in the process of transcoding from the original to the different adaptations are acknowledged and appreciated. Reading these phrases on the screen mimics the act of reading Stoker’s novel, as well as what the characters in it have been doing throughout the narrative (writing journal entries; sending and receiving letters and telegrams; organizing all of the different written and printed sources so that a coherent picture of the foreign threat may be built and used in the battle against it). In the ballet production, Godden uses similar devices, impure within the traditional ballet, such as projected text as a backdrop providing plot summary and a voice-over that

Guy Maddin’s Dracula 67

delivers an audible version of the text. Engaging the audience through a linear, sequential “telling” mode, these foreign elements belong to the culture of literacy and print; here, they intrude into the territory of media dominated by more immediate image technologies and theatre’s “showing” mode. This intrusion can thus be perceived as paralleling in reverse Stoker’s narrative about the undead’s attempts to infiltrate and pollute via seduction’s disruptive mastery over the symbolic order of the word/book, and over the logical coherence of a supposedly “pure” and moral Victorian England (which Foucault reminds us was premised upon “telling,” or rather, confessing, one’s sexuality).8 Another journey of adaptation can be traced through the transcoding of genre conventions from Stoker to Maddin’s Dracula via Godden. Stoker published Dracula (897) as part of the Gothic novel revival of the 880s and 890s, deriving its narrative core from vampire legends interwoven with a medieval atmosphere of mystery and terror (represented by all things foreign)—but adding a scientific, analytical frame (embodied by things and enterprises rooted in Victorian England) for seeking solutions to such problems. Fear and terror fight logic and faith, translating on the ballet stage into a danced battlefield of extreme passions where forces of gloom fight the legions of purity. Godden’s choice of Mahler’s dramatic, symbolic tonality (inspired by Romanticism) keeps fear and horror as points of departure, but also lets the dancers’ body movements and gesticulation follow the sound-world of the music, transforming the narrative into a story of pure love under attack by impure, morbid impulses. Mahler’s late music is often dominated by dualities, contrasts, conflicts, and a variety of moods (life-death, passion-resignation, progression-arrest, terror, irony, peaceful bliss, brazen calmness).9 His symphonic work is also characterized by a transfiguration of different genre conventions, and a play upon genre that gradually refutes the audience’s horizon of expectations.20 Perceived from this angle, Mahler’s music is intertextual and hybrid within the classical music tradition itself—thus fitting organically and contributing immensely to the dialogical and dialectical encounter between stage and film of which Maddin’s Dracula is a product. Maddin builds upon all of these genre sources and transmutations; his Dracula is a Gothic horror story set in Victorian England, recreated meticulously in the studio by his (not Godden’s) set designer Deanne Rhode, using ballet dancers as “perfect melodramatists”2 showing high drama of the human heart and blood in need of the containment and balance provided by reason and spiritual peace. Maddin’s use of Mahler is further complicated by his own admission that Dawson drew upon the “montage of

68 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES attractions” for editing the sound as well—mixing and layering, not unlike a dj, the different movements of Mahler’s music.22 This strategy produces new qualities and sounds, emphasizing the decisiveness of the “colour of the tone” and “physicality of instrumental sound”23 in Mahler’s music—thus balancing well with the silent movie’s black-and-white images and the hybridity of genre conventions and expectations. In the end, the tale of horror and melodrama of mind and body arrive together within the frames and codes of silent film, which Maddin uses as “the perfect stepping stone between the literal-minded movies of today and all other art forms, plastic or otherwise.”24 It is the silent film’s open form for different influences and varieties of interpretations that makes it so fascinating for Maddin, and so multi-purposeful for contemporary audiences.

Palimpsestuous Originality Maddin’s triumph with Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary in the context of the theatre film may tell us something significant about Maddin as film auteur. His acceptance of a commission to make a film for television based on an existing ballet production, which was an adaptation of a popular novel, points to the possible circular routes of inspiration that Maddin may have used less directly in his other films—looking to the past for literary inspiration, returning to modern-day Winnipeg, and settling down with his great love, silent movies. In search of its own aesthetics and language, silent film is a style and genre of filmmaking that openly carries its impurity and infancy on its sleeves; it was the in-between moment for the medium and its language, when other arts were still the primary sources of inspiration for filmmakers and when the medium began to take its first big steps. This in-between territory, this no man’s land, was a free-for-all space where imagination loosened the shackles of particular genre and/or medium conventions. This seems to be Maddin territory, too. His Dracula in particular, and his film oeuvre in general, are the work of a visionary director whose originality always already looks like an adaptation—that is, like it has been found somewhere else and reconstructed, rearranged, recast, and transformed. Maddin is an author in constant search of new modes of expression that cannot be found without going back to the same, the familiar. It is this dialectic of same and new that is at the heart of Maddin’s cinematic process. His Dracula finds Godden’s ballet, returns to Stoker’s novel, and revisits music videos alongside the history of early cinema; like an amateur home movie, it was shot on Super-8 and Bolex

Guy Maddin’s Dracula 69

cameras, but eventually spa-treated with digitally edited images and sounds, adding colours and filters to the “primitive” primary material. The traces of all these previous stops are visible in the finished, new product, making Maddin’s Dracula a postmodern pastiche and collage par excellence. His films and his originality turn out to always already be “palimpsestuous,”25 for in Maddin’s work we see all things he saw and remembered; we are taken on a ride, with his camera as a time machine; we discover layers, resonances, and repetitions with subtle differences. Maddin’s intertextual competence becomes our own, and through this sharing we become aware of our own time, the passing of it, and the remembrances that remain. It is a mutual discovery of the world’s treasures by a child (Maddin), in the company of other children (his audiences), who grew up but never stopped wondering and being astonished.

Notes . According to a 200 CBC Canada Now segment, included on the Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD (Zeitgeist Films, 2004). 2. Béatrice Picon-Vallin, “Passages, Intérferences, Hybridations: Le Filme de théâtre,” Theatre Research International 26, 2 (200): 90–98, see in particular pp. 95–97. 3. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6–9; 6–8; and 22–27. 4. Maddin, interview by Mark Peranson, “Count of the Dance: Guy Maddin on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary,” Cinema Scope, March 2002, 9. It is curious, to say the least, that Maddin is after the most faithful adaptation of the novel that he, according to different sources, either “read pretty carefully and picked up my favourite episodes” (according to Maddin’s audio commentary on the Zeitgeist Films DVD of Dracula), or “hated… it’s boring and I only read the first half of it” (Maddin, interview by William Beard, Conversations with Guy Maddin [Edmonton: Metro Cinema Society, 2007], 8; reprinted in this volume [255]). There seems to be a sort of self-projection and resonance with the figure of Dracula himself at work here, as exemplified in a 2004 interview with Maddin: “I do feel a bit like Dracula in Winnipeg. I’m safe, but can travel abroad and suck up all sorts of ideas from other filmmakers—both dead and undead. Then I can come back here and hoard these tropes and cinematic devices…. And I sit here in almost eternal darkness all winter long and try to make these dead things live” (Maddin, interview by Marie Losier and Richard Porton, “The Pleasures of Melancholy: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Cineaste, Summer 2004, 25). 5. Maddin, audio commentary on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD. 6. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Brooke Allen (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 4. 7. For a recent summary of criticism on Stoker’s Dracula, consult Dejan Kuzmanovic, “Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37, 2 (2009).

70 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES 8. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 986), 97–2; see in particular pp. 208–09. 9. Dr. Elizabeth Miller, “Dracula,” Dracula’s Homepage, 2005, http://www.ucs.mun. ca/~emiller/ballet98.html; and Royal Winnipeg Ballet, “Dracula Study Guide,” Royal Winnipeg Ballet, http://www.rwb.org/season/dracula.html. 0. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 980), 3. . Ibid., 54. 2. Maddin, CBC Radio One interview on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD. 3. Maddin, audio commentary on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD. 4. The term “montage of attractions” was coined in the 920s by Russian filmmaker Sergei M. Eisenstein to describe a collisional assemblage of “attractions,” or stimuli produced upon spectators by art in general, and the new cinematic art in particular. For critical and historical interpretation of the concept, see, for example, the chapter “Eisenstein’s Aesthetics,” in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 3rd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 972), 9–73; in particular pp. 29–36. 5. Maddin, audio commentary on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD. 6. Picon-Vallin, “Passages,” 93. 7. For example, approximately 80 percent of the shots were digitally reframed, making it perhaps “the most digitally driven movie ever made in Canada,” according to Maddin, “Count of the Dance,” . 8. Foucault, History, 63–67. For a discussion of seduction as mastery over the symbolic universe, see Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 990), 8. 9. See, for example, Vera Micznik, “The Farewell Story of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” 9th-Century Music 20, 2 (996): 44–66; James Buhler, ‘“Breakthrough’ as Critique of Form: The Finale of Mahler’s First Symphony,” 9th-Century Music 20, 2 (996): 25–43. 20. Vera Micznik, “Mahler and ‘The Power of Genre,’” Journal of Musicology 2, 2 (994): 7–5. 2. Maddin, CBC Radio One interview on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary DVD. 22. Ibid. 23. Karen Painter, “The Sensuality of Timbre: Responses to Mahler and Modernity at the ‘Fin de siècle,’” 9th-Century Music 8, 3 (995): 236–256. 24. Maddin, “Count of the Dance,” 6. 25. Quoted in Hutcheon, Theory, 6.

DEMENTED ENCHANTMENTS: MADDIN’S DIS-EASED HEART

dana cooley

The most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spots where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. —Walter Benjamin What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. —Walter Benjamin2

72 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES We’ll call what we’re making fairy tales, to put all but the most inquisitive off the scent. —George Toles3

Old and New Grainy and scratched film stock, jittery intertitles, exaggerated gestures, stylized sets, and “worn” soundtracks—Guy Maddin’s use of these elements to elicit an early cinema aesthetic is obvious in all his films. Perhaps less readily discernable are the striking parallels between his cinematic concerns and Walter Benjamin’s passionate defence of film. Maddin’s films, I am arguing, perform, often in startling ways, the principles and promises of film which Benjamin spoke of so eloquently in the first half of the twentieth century. Those terms seem so remarkably prophetic of Maddin that I want to begin by very briefly noting some of Benjamin’s views. For Benjamin, film’s potential was going increasingly unexploited; the early (and nearly absolute) commercialization of the medium meant that its “revolutionary” possibilities were passed over in favour of safe, established practices. Crucial to Benjamin’s thinking about film was an understanding of its materiality and its unique properties. Here was a medium that captured an uncanny likeness and, further, reanimated that object, brought it back to life. Through the process of editing, the captured clips were further fragmented, then sutured to reconstruct a new narrative, a “new” version of reality, one that slipped the constraints of the “real” world and demanded a new mode of perception. It is especially illuminating, then, to read Maddin’s works through Benjamin, for Maddin adeptly exploits the very resources which Benjamin paradoxically identified as the “forgotten futures” of film, a term by which he would seem to mean the unrealized outcomes of what film was or could be. In his strange and rich films, Maddin astutely manipulates the possibilities latent within the medium which, for Benjamin, it was imperative to press into service. Speaking of cinema’s unrealized or abandoned prospects, Maddin laments, “There’s just an amazing wealth of stuff that people had forgotten about or didn’t even seem to love or know or care to know about.”4 Maddin’s concern becomes manifest when he exploits old filmic approaches and techniques. His work steals from the modes and devices of pre-dialogue cinema and early sound film, and from the genre of melodrama, but he reinvents them in a highly personal filmic language. It is crucial to note that Maddin is not sentimentally trying to reproduce early cinema, nor is he seeking to pass

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off a master forgery which would dupe us into believing that he has produced the “real thing.” Rather, he shows himself to be interested in filmic devices which quickly became outmoded and virtually obsolete with the advent of synchronized sound technology—devices which, adapted, could be put to good use in his own time.5 For Maddin, the “forgotten futures” of film are a repository of possibilities. In the unused and unvalued promises of film’s history, he says, “Everything seem[s] ready to move forward, at any moment, back into the time of its heyday.”6 A daring filmmaker would paradoxically make advances in form by pursuing regressions in practice. As a result, the densely textured frames of Maddin’s films have squeezed out any trace of realism and they everywhere overflow with artifice. Even the dialogue is rendered odd, if not suspect, as the actors deliver purposefully stilted, awkward lines. For example, in a scene from Maddin’s Careful (992), after Johann, a butler-in-training, has asked Klara’s father for her hand in marriage, the two young lovers bid each other good night: klara: I thought I’d die. johann: Your eyes are so blue. klara: Johann! Watch your tongue! johann: It’s true. You’re as fresh and sound as a rose. klara: Oh Johann! The magic that binds me to you! The breathless and declamatory voices, so susceptible to extravagance and even cliché, show how little beholden Maddin is to realist conventions. Later, in similar mode, after an incestuous night, Johann’s mother bizarrely calls to him: “Johann! Johann! You better put your name on your new toothbrush before an accident happens.” We are brought into the comical and the surprising: what species of magic would depend on attaching a name to a toothbrush? Maddin’s stagy dialogue, rather than functioning as conversation, often verges on caption—a brief summation one might find “beneath an allegorical engraving.”7 The abstraction found in the characters’ “dialogue” is exploited in other ways in Maddin’s works as well. All of his films show a patina of wear that evokes early film. Marked with scratches that would indicate repeated projections (and presumably much attention, possibly even love), the intertitles which Maddin often employs jitter (spelled out in letters that appear fuzzy

74 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES around the edges, ostensibly because they have blurred over time), as if the sprockets of the film have been worn and no longer run smoothly through the projector. The films flagrantly bear signs of the abandoned, the worn, and the archaic. The intertitles Maddin so fondly inserts serve not only to call into play an early cinema aesthetic; they also enable him to further explore filmic possibilities that were available before the foreclosure brought to them with the advent of synced dialogue. Maddin exploits the level of generality at which the intertitle functions (notably, in Cowards Bend the Knee [2003], where Maddin has removed all dialogue). In revisiting the conventions of early cinema, he plays with the possibilities of signification within the text and its juxtaposition with the image. His use of intertitles deliberately opens opportunities for misunderstanding and misinterpretation. In this way, his audience experiences something of the situations that his characters—inevitably forgetful and bewildered—find themselves in. The soundtrack, too, with its pops and hisses, helps to enforce the aged feel of these films. Maddin’s desire to work with film as “a kid on the first day of kindergarten with a new box of crayons”8 is also apparent in his willingness to use (or at least to elicit the look of) outdated techniques such as handtinted film. For example, in Archangel (990), a mostly black and white film, he somewhat surprisingly colours two sequences. In a scene towards the end of the film, when the Huns attack young Geza and the boy’s father Jannings in their family house, Maddin tints the stock a fiery orangey-red (or, again, at least achieves the appearance of early coloured film), which emphasizes the bloody violence that the scene depicts. Maddin contrasts these “hot” scenes with the battlefield sequence, which he has coloured a Prussian blue, accentuating the cold, numbing effects of the war. His use of cinematography also lends itself to the feeling of a production that survives from an earlier time. Hand-held shots and soft focus help establish the impression that these are films that came about before the arrival of contemporary technologies that contribute to the production of flawless, transparent cinema. The deliberately stagy scenes that Maddin composes as tableaux vivants remind the viewer of pre-dialogue film with its dependency on (often extravagant) gesture and staging to convey the narrative. Cowards Bend the Knee, for example, becomes an homage to the importance of hand gestures in pre-dialogue film. And in Archangel, Maddin actually works the genre of the tableau vivant into his narrative, staging an absurd and darkly humorous “Illumination” which depicts scenes from famous battles.

Demented Enchantments 75

Baroque Plunderings and Wanderings As I have stressed, Maddin’s work exploits the registers of film which Benjamin saw as overlooked and cast aside in favour of movies that delivered coherent, realist narratives, and that therefore seldom put audiences into crisis or uncertainty in their understanding of what they were watching. However, Maddin’s films are not mere illustrations of Benjamin’s theories on film. Far from it. Rather, I would argue that Maddin’s forays into the forgotten realms of film exquisitely perform Benjamin’s hopes for the medium, fusing form and content, theory and practice. One of film’s disregarded possibilities that Benjamin identified, which Maddin happily resurrects, can be traced back to a baroque heritage that celebrates a sentient experience and engages the spectator in an analogic reading, one which necessitates a “getting lost” in its labyrinthine structure. The (neo)baroque eschews any easy or singular reading in favour of an open-ended structure that permits a multitude of possible outcomes. In their contrived complexity, (neo)baroque films invite us to engage in self-reflexive play. Maddin, in his refusal to deliver an easily understood narrative in a transparent style, thus aligns himself with the baroque.9 The pleasure Maddin takes and gives in his work is, in part, that of the exhibitionist. He engages in what Tom Gunning, theorizing about modes of delivery and reception in early cinema, has called a “cinema of attractions,” which celebrates constructedness.0 A cinema of attractions self-consciously displays its structure in order to rupture transparency and undo “naturalness”—the attributes on which narrative-driven cinema usually depends. Engaging the wonder and curiosity of the spectator through a display of virtuosity, a cinema of attractions invites an active engagement from that same viewer in following associations, bridging juxtapositions, and constructing relationships amongst disparate fragments. Shunning a linear narrative that would make a movie easily understood, a cinema of attractions in full mode as confrontational display relies on the spectator to move beyond the frame and to draw upon his or her imagination to comprehend the nature and effect of its moving images and associated sounds. A cinema of attraction plays off possibility, refusing any singular or stable reading. Its baroque heritage, one which favours open, permeable structures, is especially evident in Maddin’s films. His strange worlds of obvious artifice offer no closure; these peculiar tales provide no “happily ever after.” Inasmuch as Maddin’s work seeks to recuperate ways of telling and ways of knowing that have almost fallen from cinematic memory, it creates an odd

76 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES originality; we sense—disquietingly perhaps—that these are images we’ve seen before, but not quite. The quirky, disturbing, and ironically humorous worlds that Maddin, “laureate of Futurepast,”2 creates come to us from dreams, float into our awareness from old movies and anecdotes we seem vaguely to remember, but can’t quite place. We don’t know when or where exactly—can’t quite put our finger on it. Maddin’s films, like a needle on an old lp, skitter over memory, tease us into a place where we’re not sure of our own recollections. It is as if these films create the memory that we forgot we never had, just as Maddin himself admits to remaking movies that he has never seen or have never existed.3

Playing with Sorrow The (neo)baroque’s ostentatious display of its structure is celebrated at the expense of contained, comprehensive, and solemn meaning. However, the very artifice that displaces the certainty and clarity of meaning attributed to traditional narrative (with its introduction, crisis, and resolution) also enables the (neo)baroque to interrogate the mundane. Shunning the dominant models and traditions that work off “important” or “noteworthy” events and characters, (neo)baroque forms are well situated to address the everyday, which is largely devoid of dramatic crises and earth-shattering resolutions. The largely forgotten importance of the baroque Trauerspiel (literally “sorrow play”), a dramatic form popular in eighteenth-century Germany, is just such a mode of representation. It is also remarkably anticipatory of Maddin’s cinema, for the Trauerspiel, at its heart, is concerned with the “tiny, fragile human body.”4 These are plays involving the modest measures of everyday people, rather than the gods and heroes of high tragedy; the Trauerspiel takes uneventful moments in history as its object, not classical myth or the large arc of historical teleology.5 Many critics and theorists, despite sympathies for the underdog, are still wary of a perceived sullying of “serious” art.6 Little wonder, for the contamination of the proper by the common throws established and time-honoured boundaries into question. The objection such figures would raise, then, is this: the artifice and self-consciousness of the (neo)baroque means that it is not concerned with understanding the world, not in any significant or evident way at least.7 The baroque Trauerspiel, however, is troubled with human existence; it is a presentation of the cruelty and suffering in the world, often using the absurd in order to make life bearable or intelligible.8 True, the Trauerspiel

Demented Enchantments 7 7

is not interested in notions of the transcendent, but it is firmly rooted in the mortality of things and people. What could be more “real”? The Trauerspiel, fraught with postlapsarian angst, is designed to present the world as ruin.9 As such, it offers “plays for the mournful.”20 Working in the allegorical mode so favoured in the baroque, the Trauerspiel displays a world laid to waste, making it a form that, despite its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century roots, lends itself well to a critique of our postmodern world. It also lends itself to an understanding of what it is that Maddin is doing.2 All of Maddin’s films, I would argue, function in an allegorical way, deliberately exploiting established narratives and genres to address a range of issues. However, Maddin often makes the abstract of allegory literal. In Sombra Dolorosa (2004), for example, he literalizes our fear of mortality. In order to save her grief-stricken daughter from suicide, Widow Paramo (herself in mourning for the recently deceased husband/father) must take on “El Muerto” (the Eater of Souls, Death himself) and, quite literally, fight for life. Playing off cultural clichés and cinematic conventions, Maddin sets up a wresting match between Death and the mourning widow. This short film refers to larger issues—death, grief, mortality—to be sure, but by actualizing the themes he is working with, Maddin effectively draws our attention to the odd nature of many of our beliefs and customs. Our awareness of the strangeness of convention is furthered by Maddin’s tongue-in-cheek references to Mexican culture: the lucha libre match (a form of entertainment popular in Mexico), sombrero-clad mariachis, traditional black mourning weeds—are all obvious stereotypes of what constitutes “Mexican.” Here again, Maddin isn’t interested in putting together an “authentic” depiction; rather, his quotations of cultural practices are offered up for our examination. As a result, Maddin’s pastiches become grotesque in their excess, larger than life. And in that exaggeration, Maddin asks us—requires us, really—to consider the supposed innocence of most representation. It is not difficult to recognize Maddin’s films, with their darkly ironic humour, as belonging to the baroque tradition of the Trauerspiel. His strange and strangely humorous filmic worlds are suffused with the “irresistible decay”22 of a bereft and bankrupt world. His feature-length films, as well as his shorter works, are all tinted with a melancholic longing. Often suffering from mistaken identity or amnesia, the inhabitants of his mournful tales glide about in a somnambulistic state, lamenting their vaguely defined or indefinable loss, fumbling for some comfort or direction.

78 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES

Sensible Superstitions Given the emotionally maimed and physically stunted condition of his characters, we could certainly read Maddin’s films as textbook examples of Freudian repression.23 Yet this seems a too-easy tack, and one that would not account for their effects. Maddin’s sumptuous and claustrophobic worlds flaunt their flaws; there is no recovery or redemption in them, nor even an apparent desire for such an outcome. He makes no apologies for the “primitive” aesthetic he exploits, nor do his characters seem eager to move out of their neuroses. I would like to propose an alternate reading of Maddin’s Trauerspiels, one that positions these films as closer to fairy tales, with their cautionary wisdom, than to psychoanalytical case studies. Freud often turned to fairy tales, such as E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, finding their dreamlike structure a fruitful source of explanation for human behaviour. As the quote that opens this essay indicates, Benjamin himself saw parallels between film’s capability to expose the world to us in new ways and Freud’s theories of the unconscious. However, Benjamin’s interest in psychoanalysis was, I believe, largely that of the sceptic. Instead he preferred to employ some of Freud’s theories (the notion of a latent world, for example) metaphorically to understand and articulate the ways in which modernity was eroding memory and yet simultaneously creating new representations. Again, Benjamin’s affinity with the fairy tale, like the Trauerspiel, is one that is rooted in a historical materialist approach, rather than in the belief in the eternal, transcendental psychic states favoured by Freud and his followers. Maddin’s filmmaking obviously adopts a position which queries the history and material of his medium. Further, I believe that Maddin, like Benjamin, is more interested in exploiting the metaphorical possibilities found in the language of psychoanalysis and the narrative structure of the fairy tale than reproducing a tautology. Maddin’s mourning, for example, belongs more to the genre of ostentatious melodrama than to the melancholia of psychoanalytic rationalization. His affiliation with melodrama is unsurprising: as a filmic genre it has generally been maligned, accused of being too emotional, too excessive, and thusly reduced to the lesser category of “women’s films,” “weepies,” or the more contemporary “chick flick.” Maddin makes use of melodrama’s baroque tendencies to rupture repression, to turn the ordinary inside-out. Like the Trauerspiel and many forms of melodrama, the fairy tale also addresses the everyday; these are stories that—before their sanitization for a bourgeois audience in the seventeenth century by such

left: Einar (Kyle McCulloch) and Gunnar (Michael Gottli) hone their bark fish cutting skills in Tales From the Gimli Hospital (988). right: An unfortunate patient (Stephen Snyder) succumbs to disease in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). photos by guy maddin.

Gunnar (Michael Gottli) watches Snjófridur (Angela Heck) undress in Tales from the Gimli Hospital. (988). photo by guy maddin.

left: Cameo by Maddin as a doctor in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988). photo by guy maddin. right: Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) and Philbin (Ari Cohen) fly away to their honeymoon in Archangel (990). photo by jeff solylo.

Perpetually dazed amnesiac Lt. Boles (Kyle McCulloch) in Archangel (990). photo by jeff solylo.

Boles (Kyle McCulloch) salutes the sleepy battlefield’s fallen troops in Archangel (990). photo by jeff solylo.

Boles (Kyle McCulloch) and Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) ride off into the dreamscape of Archangel (990). photo by guy maddin.

Johann (Brent Neale) prepares for incest with his sleeping mother Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska) in Careful (992). photo by jeff solylo.

Klara (Sarah Neville) and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) in Careful (992). photo by jeff solylo.

Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) peers into the abyss in Careful (992). photo by jeff solylo.

Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch) tries to resist his mother’s (Gosia Dobrowolska) charms in Careful (992). photo by jeff solylo.

Keller (Jim Keller) and Caelum (Caelum Vatnsdal) transfixed by the distraught Berenice (Brandy Bayes) in The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity (995). photo by jeff solylo.

Anna (Leslie Bais) in The Heart of the World (2000) exhibits Maddin’s use of 920s-style exaggerated expressions, ominous close-ups, and stylized makeup. photo by guy maddin.

Osip (Caelum Vatnsdal) sacrifices himself as the passion play Christ in The Heart of the World (2000). photo by guy maddin.

Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) gives herself to the vampire (Zhang Wei-Qiang) in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). photo by bruce monk; courtesy vonnie von helmolt film.

Maddin directs David Moroni (as Dr. Van Helsing) during the shooting of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). photo by bruce monk; courtesy vonnie von helmolt film.

Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) menaced by evil forces in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). photo by bruce monk; courtesy vonnie von helmolt film.

Mina (CindyMarie Small) wards away the undead threat in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). photo by bruce monk; courtesy vonnie von helmolt film.

Guy Maddin on the set of The Saddest Music in the World (2003). photo by jody shapiro; courtesy of rhombus media.

Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) addresses the crowd in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). photo by jody shapiro; courtesy of rhombus media.

The reunited Kent family performs together in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). photo by jody shapiro; courtesy of rhombus media.

Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) grants a visit with Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). photo by jody shapiro; courtesy of rhombus media.

Guy (Darcy Fehr) consoles Veronica (Amy Stewart) in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). photo by guy maddin.

Dr. Fusi (Louis Negin) performs the ill-fated abortion in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). photo by guy maddin.

Meta (Melissa Dionisio) manhandles the hapless Guy (Darcy Fehr) in Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). photo by guy maddin.

Mother (Ann Savage) embraces the ersatz Cameron (Brendan Cade) at the end of My Winnipeg (2007). photo by jody shapiro.

Mother (Ann Savage) with the Maddin family surrogates in My Winnipeg (2007). photo by jody shapiro.

Lovers (Erica Rintoul and Rob Thomson) stroll among the frozen horse heads in My Winnipeg (2007), incorporating sadness into their days. photo by jody shapiro.

Demented Enchantments 79

recorders as Charles Perault and, later, in the nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm—allegorically expressed the suffering and pain, accident and misadventure, that were commonplace hardships for most people. However, they also provided a means of dreaming one’s way out of the plight of labour and loss, often through fantastic plots, outrageous events, and extravagant characters. Significantly, the fairy tale is a structure that gives voice to that which is often left unspoken, being either too painful or fanciful to discuss. The marvellous and frightening framework provided by the fairy tale serves Maddin well. In a way that Benjamin would surely appreciate, Maddin’s films drag secrets out into the open, magnify the oddities of the everyday. Further, they remind us of the strangeness of memory and the filmic medium itself. In doing so, they refute the accusation that the (neo)baroque has severed itself from any reference to, or concern with, the larger world. His films perform an uneasy balancing act, engaging in what Maddin’s collaborator George Toles, referring to the scriptwriting approach the pair employ, has called “a sensible superstition”; for in these worlds of bizarre, unexplained, and inexplicable events, the uncanny has become the norm.24

Forgetful Hauntings To draw out some of these aspects in more detail, I would like to turn to Archangel and Cowards Bend the Knee. As I have mentioned, between the fairy tale and psychoanalysis, there are similarities to be found: both deal with the secret and the hidden; both circulate around the uncanny, that odd state between familiarity and strangeness. Therefore, although I am not interested in pursuing a Freudian reading of Maddin’s films, I find the idea of the uncanny a productive one, one that isn’t necessarily or absolutely reduced to psychoanalysis, as the term’s common usage in literature and pop culture would attest to. As Christine Buci-Glucksmann, John Berger, and others have argued, the uncanny, as Other, has been almost invariably tethered to the feminine, a “state” or territory that has long been regarded as outside, or ex-centric to the (male) norm.25 Archangel is everywhere imbued with this disconcerting femininity—as, I would argue, are all of Maddin’s films.26 From the start, the film is marked by loss. The opening sequence introduces us to Lieutenant Boles on a ship on his way to the town of Archangel; he has lost his leg and his love. The ship’s captain is busily confiscating and jettisoning contraband. We see him throw overboard a bottle of alcohol which one of the passengers has been carrying. He then seizes a vessel from Boles (one uncannily similar in design

80 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES to the bottle of spirits), which turns out to be the urn holding the ashes of Boles’s dead lover, Iris. The captain also hurls the urn over the side. Already in this brief scene there is a conflation of lost body parts, lost love, and lost spirits. In pursuit of its melancholic theme, the action dredges up notions of the double—severings, partings, hauntings, intoxication, and (mis)recognition. As a result, Maddin sets up an equation between (the possession or lack of) sight, mobility, memory, tactility, love, and a coherent self. Archangel’s aesthetic enforces the sense of forfeiture and longing that plague the film’s characters. The dreamlike world that Maddin has created through the use of early cinematic language renders this strange narrative even more peculiar. For example, the heightened contrast in the largely black and white frames, and the use of silhouettes evoking a tradition of shadow puppets, effectively stress the “unreal” nature of the film, on a diegetic level and the filmic medium itself. In Archangel, as in all of his films, Maddin refuses to let the materiality of film fade into the background. And so he emphasizes the texture of each frame; he won’t let us forget that we are watching and listening to a representation that has been captured by a recording device (and that, in any case, has already been shaped by earlier representations and techniques). In emphasizing the wear and tear, the process of aging inherent in all representation (and in all memory), he asks us to reconsider the seeming transparency of film (and the memories we hold as “true”). His movies ask us to review the ways in which we can so readily accept the medium as a window onto a reality that willingly effaces any traces of its own making. In magnifying the artifice of film, Maddin won’t let the viewer settle into an easy reception of his works. Archangel demonstrates this complicated relationship: an ever-present uncanniness lurks just below the surface, resulting in a troubling state of “overriding uncertainty,”27 a condition which the inhabitants of Archangel (and Maddin’s viewers) find themselves anxiously attempting to negotiate. Maddin’s intricate tale of faulty memories, forgetfulness, mistaken identities, and uncertain love provides a complex meditation on some of the unsettling qualities of human nature. As a site, his Archangel is a disturbingly quiet, almost muted world, despite the war that still rages dismayingly in the background because no one has yet told the inhabitants that peace has been declared. The somnambulistic state that the characters occupy magnifies the fragility of their memories and their identities; they are seemingly unaware of what goes on around them, and ignorant of, or confused by, the relationships

Demented Enchantments 8

they have with others. Troublingly, the Lethean habitants of Archangel often seem not to know even who they themselves are. The heightened artifice of Archangel emphasizes the slippery nature of memory; in literalizing the abstract of allegory, Maddin’s tale repeatedly reminds us of how the mutability of our remembrances can erase events and convince us of occurrences. The postmodern world is for Maddin, or at least in Maddin’s time, haunted by the spectre of lost futures. Whereas death in pre-modern times occupied a public place in the community, uniting people in mourning, by the era of modernity, dying had ceased to be a communal event. People now die alone, in silence, unable to pass on wisdom, or memories, from their deathbeds. Benjamin comments on the fact that “It used to be that there was not a single house, hardly a single room, in which someone had not once died…. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death.”28 With the sanitization and clinicalization of death, we, the modern “dry dwellers of eternity,”29 are lamentably no longer touched by death-bed traces of the past. Occupying spaces bereft of any marks of death, we are no longer haunted by the past, no longer bothered with the histories of the ordinary and the everyday. The poet Earle Birney, grieving the absence of a literary tradition in Canada, once wrote of his fellow citizens that “It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.”30 Maddin too is concerned with Canadians’ inability or unwillingness to honour the mundane and local. Speaking of the lack of interest and respect that Canadians have for their folk heroes, he muses that “for some reason, Canadians look through the wrong end of the telescope and make them smaller than life.”3 He attempts to address the poverty of experience that results from an ignorance of the past; through film, a ghostly mimicking of memory, he lets the “dead” speak to us. In Archangel—an unstable and confounding place—even death is uncertain. Picking their way through a battlefield strewn with corpses, Boles and Danchuk (the mother of the boy, Geza, whom he has helped save) pause over a body. As Boles reaches down to close the soldier’s eyes, the soldier inexplicably “wakes,” looks for his gun, and walks away. Boles and Danchuk proceed to another corpse. Boles touches the corpse on the back and she too wakes, as if summoned by supernatural powers from the netherworld, and heads off. The third body he touches does not move. Boles flips him over, and sees rivulets of blood frozen on his face. Boles, as if in benediction, in ceremony of death, in the formal language that characterizes so much of Maddin’s dialogue, tenderly says to the corpse, “Sleep, brother. Sleep forever.”

82 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES In the frozen and forgotten Archangel, the dead are asleep and the sleeping are mistaken for the dead. The highly stylized sets portraying the battlefield (as well as the town itself) further this sense of Archangel as an oneiric place. Maddin’s depiction of Archangel resembles the staging of a school play; there is a charming naïveté and lack of pretense to the sets he has constructed. The resulting incongruity between the seeming innocence of this world and the suffering of its inhabitants keeps the viewer’s reception of the narrative offbalance. The apparent ambivalence that the melodramatic characters display towards their plight is further complicated by the highly artificial nature of their filmic world. Archangel is a world wrapped in perpetual darkness, a Hades shut off from the sun; we never see daylight—an effect enforced by the deep shadows created through Maddin’s use of high-contrast black and white film. But what of the soldiers that get up and walk away? Have they forgotten they are alive? Were they merely battle fatigued and needing to rest? Maddin’s cinema, preferring the mysterious and the inexplicable, is of a kind that does not seek to answer such questions. Whatever the case, the soldier’s life (or lack of life) is a netherworld of shadow, a world of the dead—for in this cold, snowy landscape, these are people living with war, and those still alive, grown numb from death, are left to mourn their lost loves. Danchuk tells Boles that ghosts wander the battlefields, leaving omens that help soldiers to safety. It is well to recall that, according to Benjamin, ghosts, like allegories, come to us from “the realm of mourning.”32 They have an intimate connection with those who grieve, he says, with “those who ponder over signs and over the future.”33 Since the process of grieving reconnects us with what we have lost touch with, an allegorical reading invests “dead” things with new life, rekindling something of the actuality that these ruins once contained; the petrified past can become an “object of knowledge” through which to better understand the present.34

Autobiographical Seances Maddin’s films certainly assume a melancholic epistemology. Perhaps the most poignant example of these sorrowful investigations is his film Cowards Bend the Knee, in which he has powerfully, blatantly, and painfully, it would seem, dredged up his own memories, which he screens in a bizarre tale of incest, revenge, and forgetfulness. He has even named his main character “Guy Maddin” and has stated that the film is unequivocally an autobiog-

Demented Enchantments 83

raphy.35 However, autobiography is not always limited to the individual in question. For Benjamin, for instance, autobiography is concerned with space and the moments in time that stick with us and shape our identities, and, in their sutured tellings, take on an allegorical role36—in effect, the self presented in autobiography being a product more of accretion than essence. However much such detail might be based in “fact,” Maddin’s films—certainly Cowards—function in this aggregate and allegorical way. Their personal basis provides a vehicle to speak of larger issues; Maddin’s memories become proxies for collective remembrances and the way we remember in general. His personal recollections become a structure that allows him to sneak up on issues; they become a cunning ruse, like those strategies employed by the heroes and heroines of fairy tales, to address the unstable nature of all memory and the state of amnesia that prevails in our world. In another blurring of reality and fiction in Cowards, Maddin bestows on the character of a murdered father his (real) father’s name—Chas. The tangle of nervous associations between on-screen characters and the real-life father and son points powerfully to Michael Taussig’s related concern that we too readily dismiss the forces of similarity through our glib use of terms such as “identity” and “representation.”37 It is tempting to read Maddin’s filmic reconstructions of memories as a means to investigate his relationships with figures, now dead or lost, who deeply matter to him. For Maddin, however, these reenactments do not function as purgings, a way to banish the ghosts that haunt him. I believe Maddin is quite at home with his nagging spirits, and has no desire to see them abandon him. In fact, I would argue that, for Maddin, film acts more as a seance than an exorcism. As both preservation and renovation of history, film functions as a site where he can conduct a dialogue with the past and construct alternate versions to what has “actually” happened. Interestingly, and not without accident, connections are to be found between early cinema and spiritualism. One of cinema’s precursors—the magic lantern—was used to produce what were once seen as effective apparitions and spirit visitations. Early photography, too, was pressed into service in an effort to record those from “the other side.” Speaking more generally of photography’s special effect, Garrett Stewart has wryly observed that, though death may still mean the end of biological life, now, with the invention of the camera, it is never any longer quite over.38 And, of course, the magical cinema of Georges Méliès shared with the seance the magician’s techniques of illusion and sleight of hand, the fascination with apparition and movement of light.

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Allegories of Astonishment Benjamin astutely observed that, in the resonance of allegory, “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”39 And, in an echo of his statement, Jeffery Mehlman says this of the uncanny: “what is unheimlich about the unheimlich is that absolutely anything can be unheimlich.”40 Allegory, in its insistent capacity to speak of what is not actually present, in its calling up of what is hidden, is itself uncanny. Arguably, all representation addresses the absent, points us to what is not literally there in the pages, on the screen, in our memory. With allegory, however, this unhinging is emphatically foregrounded and the absence more acute. In an allegorical reading, the world is already a construction—something that stands in for and represents something else. Allegory, as a means of communication, of representation, is crucial because it gives us a way of reading the world that has its roots in what Bryan S. Turner identifies as “the forgotten and obscured past of modernity— the baroque.”4 Significantly, it provides an opening for something “other.” Maddin’s Archangel, as I would argue for all of his films, is an allegory for memory, loss, and grieving as processes that haunt human existence. The characters in this film are constantly forgetting or on the verge of forgetting their loved ones. They misrecognize and mistake, perhaps even wilfully at times, in order to align the past with present wishes. Through the afflicted world of Archangel, Maddin exhibits memory’s integral role in keeping love alive. For in Archangel, people and events simply cease to be when someone forgets their existence. Given the precarious and perennially new world of Maddin’s films, his characters occupy what seems to be a perpetual state of amazement. Dazed, meandering over the flickering screens that Maddin creates in homage to his filmic roots, the characters are constantly so startled by scenes, so shocked by revelations, that they can’t quite seem to figure out why their experiences would be so jarring, nor recall what has brought them to their present state. They cannot remember but they are constantly bewildered, or on the threshold of amazement and uncertainty, perhaps precisely because they cannot recall and so must at every moment meet the world so unknowingly, so without the reassurance of foreknowledge and familiarity. Maddin’s viewers also hover in a liminal space. Like spirits ourselves, we slip between worlds, slide in and out of his films. Our focus flips between Maddin’s evasive plots and his handsome haptic screen; always readjusting and reassessing, we too are made to perform something of the tremulous nature of memory. Further, in this to-ing and fro-ing between narrative and

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materiality, we overtly experience the marvellous and disruptive qualities of the filmic medium foregrounded by a cinema of attractions. Tom Gunning has proposed that early cinema amazed spectators not because of some naive suspension of disbelief, or a mistaking of the screened image for reality, but because of the fact that the cinematic apparatus itself caused images to move: it was the creation of the illusion of motion that was so astonishing.42 The machine at work, what it did—that was the marvel. In Archangel, the movement, the life that continues, in surprise, despite the pain and sorrow that the characters feel, is what is confounding. It is as if the determination to carry on—at the cost of self-deception, if necessary—dumbfounds even the characters themselves.43 That sense of muted and muffled memory is reinforced throughout Archangel as snow slowly sifts to the ground. Maddin has created a fairytale world of magic and mystery, becoming all the more hermetic as it (shot mostly with tight framing) takes on a claustrophobic air. He shuns traditional establishing shots; from the start, we are right “there” in Archangel, implicated in the characters’ actions and irresponsible behaviours as they anxiously remind us of our own fumblings, failures, and forgetfulness. Maddin has created a microcosm of demented enchantment; this squeezed, snowy environment comes to feel like a snow globe, one of those sealed worlds of wonder that swirl in shaken blizzards. (Viewers might think here of the scene from The Wizard of Oz [939] where Glinda the Good Witch of the North waves her wand and flakes fall on Dorothy and her entourage who have collapsed into sleep in the poppy fields poisoned by the Wicked Witch of the West who watches through her crystal ball. Archangel shares the fairy-tale feel of The Wizard of Oz, but broods more openly, offers little recompense to its characters. In Archangel the snow serves to induce sleep, not to wake its citizens from their stupor. Here snow endlessly falls, layer after layer, compressed into a glacial core that slowly spreads, grinding its way over time, polishing memory smooth.) That Archangel should evoke memories of a cheap plastic toy is as unsurprising as it is appropriate. Maddin draws again and again upon the material of popular culture, and in this regard as well he seems almost to have fulfilled Benjamin’s wishes for a legitimate cinema. Film, for Benjamin, was the medium that struck a balance between kitsch and art, making cinema such a popular attraction. Speaking of the political significance of film, Benjamin seems to suggest that although the medium itself was largely and increasingly

86 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES positioned as a commodity, it was this very condition which allowed it to reach the everyday person. It also paradoxically enabled the popular to sustain its effects; as commodity, it can never entirely satiate—unlike the work of art, which, for Benjamin, can appear complete and sufficient. Benjamin tells us that film therefore “burns or sears without providing the ‘heart’s ease’ which qualifies art for consumption.”44 It is not so much what the commodity “says,” as its ability to affect; the commodity, like allegory, works off association.45 The distorted reflection of a neon sign in a “fiery pool… in the asphalt”46 holds more sway for Benjamin than the actual object itself. Unabashedly kitsch, Maddin’s obsessive and neurotic “autobiographies” give us discomfortingly intimate glimpses into the bizarre nature of our selves. His quirky stories take us out of the world we habitually live in, multiplying and amplifying the uncanny, and animating the darkly humorous aspects of our day-to-day lives. Their “primitive” style moves us out of the realm of most contemporary film, challenging our ingrained viewing patterns and our unspoken presuppositions about what film should or could be. His films, both in their often “unpalatable” themes and “unacceptable” formats, aren’t easily digested. They linger with us, spirits from another world, causing us disquiet. Like Proust’s tea-bloated biscuit, Maddin’s films are swollen with ills and longings. We gorge upon the sumptuous tactility of the frames he lays out for us, yet we cannot fully ingest the tangled space he so carefully cobbles together from scraps of memory. The worlds he creates—small, strange embers of artifice—enflame our hearts and burn in our throats.

Notes . Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, eds. Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 999), 50. 2. Walter Benjamin, “This Space for Rent,” One-Way Street (London: Verso, 979), 89. 3. George Toles, “From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Backyard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin,” in A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 200), 32–322; reprinted in this volume (46). 4. Guy Maddin, interview by Andrea Meyer, “Melodrama as a Way of Life: Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini Talk About ‘Saddest Music,’” indieWIRE, 9 February 2005, http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_040503maddin.html. 5. As early as 923, “sound movies” (synced image and sound) were already being screened, and, with further technological developments, “talkies” had taken over the movie industry by the 930s.

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6. Guy Maddin, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003), 87. 7. In discussing the German dramatic form of the Trauerspiel, Benjamin explains that often the dialogue sounds as if it were a caption “beneath an allegorical engraving”—an effect that is certainly echoed in Maddin’s own extremely stylized dialogue. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 96. 8. Guy Maddin, interviewed in “Melodrama as a Way of Life.” 9. See Will Straw’s essay “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful” where he makes a similar claim, elegantly observing that Maddin’s films have “their antecedents in the improbable contrivances and baroque cosmologies of early melodrama,” in Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 5 Canadian Films, ed. Gene Walz (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 309; reprinted in this volume (62). 0. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 990), 56–62. . Ibid., 57. 2. Robert Enright, “Far From the Maddin Crowd: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Border Crossings, July 990, 35. 3. Maddin, interview by James Quandt, “Purple Majesty: James Quandt Talks with Guy Maddin,” Artforum International, Summer 2003, 206. 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 44. 5. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 62. 6. See, for example, Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 99); and Jeff Nuttall, Art and the Degradation of Awareness (London: Calder Publications, 200). 7. Cubitt, Cinema Effect, 242. 8. George Steiner, introduction to Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 24. 9. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 235. 20. Ibid., 9. 2. Provocatively, Benjamin tells us: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 78). Maddin, I am arguing, exploits both the abstract and concrete which Benjamin identifies in allegory. The range of possible meanings that Maddin lets his tales tell, and his deliberate use of a “ruined” aesthetic, produce films that excavate and play with associations and assumptions. 22. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 78. 23. The examples of damage and repression are many: The Saddest Music in the World (2003) features a beer baroness whose amputated legs have been replaced with beerfilled glass ones; the characters of Archangel are also missing limbs in addition to suffering from amnesia; and in Careful, an entire village must repress any outbursts

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24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 3. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

to avoid being buried by an avalanche, to cite but a few instances. Even Maddin’s decision to work with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet on Dracula (2002) makes sense given the cast of “the living dead” that its narrative works with. Toles, “From Archangel to Mandragora,” 39; reprinted in this volume (44). Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage Publications, 994). John Berger, in his book Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books for British Broadcasting Corporation, 972), has argued that women, due to the patriarchal system, are positioned from the start as split in two, and therefore always accompanied by their own images. Women, Berger proposes, occupy the strange position of being both surveyors and the surveyed. Although Berger does not tie this doubled state to the uncanny, I believe that in perpetually watching themselves as Other, as separate from themselves, we could understand women, with their ghostly shadows, as always already haunted. The term “ex-centric” I have borrowed from Linda Hutcheon, who uses it to establish a territory which acknowledges one’s implication in the dominant, yet permits a simultaneous critique of that very system (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction [London: Routledge, 988], 35 and 67–69). In an interview with James Quandt, Maddin gives credence to this assumption, stating that cowardice “just feels like the male state of mind somehow. In the battles of the heart, men are cowards” (“Purple Majesty,” 59). Tom Gunning, “Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the-Century,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, eds. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, asst. ed. Brad Seawell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 46. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 5. Ibid. Earle Birney, “Can. Lit.,” in The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse, eds. F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith (Toronto: Macmillan, 967), 6. Guy Maddin, interview by Jeremy O’Kasick, “Canadian Cult Hero Guy Maddin: ‘I Have Plenty of Sadness In Reserve,’” indieWIRE, 9 February 2005, http://www. indiewire.com/people/people_04027maddin.html. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 93. Ibid. Ibid., 82. See, for example, “Purple Majesty,” 59. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 63. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 993), 2. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 999), x. See also Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, in which he observes the uncanny nature of the photograph (both there and not there). Musing on a photo of a condemned man, for instance, Barthes remarks that “He is dead and he is going to die” (Camera Lucida [London: Vintage, 993], 95). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 75.

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40. Jeffery Mehlman, quoted by Nicholas Royle in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 32 n. 46. 4. This quotation is taken from Bryan S. Turner’s introduction to Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, 7. 42. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 995), 4–33. 43. This delusion is played out by the characters’ creators too, as George Toles has noted. Speaking of the importance of maintaining the spark of magic that gives life to a narrative, Toles states that self-deception is a necessary state for creating a compelling work of fiction (see Toles, “From Archangel to Mandragora,” 39). 44. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 999), 396 [K3a, ]. 45. Interestingly, the etymology of allegory itself is an intertwining of commodity and association. The word “allegory” comes from the Greek “allos” (“other”) and “agora” (“gathering place”). Traditionally the marketplace provided a space to gather and exchange news. Its functionality could obscure clandestine encounters in times of trouble: under the guise of going about one’s daily business, subversives could surreptitiously carry on a conversation under the noses of the authorities. This mode of communication, where one thing comes to stand for something else, came to be known as “allegorical” (Etymologically Speaking, http://www.westegg. com/etymology/). 46. Benjamin, “This Space for Rent,” One-Way Street, 89.

DESIRE IN BONDAGE: GUY MADDIN’S CAREFUL

darrell varga

The blind father tumbles to his death over a cinematic cliff designed by Freud. Guy Maddin’s 992 feature Careful is a film about Oedipal desire, incest, and revenge in the alpine village of Tolzbad, a precariously imagined assemblage of cottages with windows draped in heavy sheepskin and labyrinthine doorways angled and folded upon themselves, making penetration both foreboding and enticing. The heavy window coverings dampen the escape of sound into the open air outside the homes. All means of expression are muffled; the gramophone horn is plugged with rags just as animal vocal cords are severed. Characters must walk carefully through the projected shadows of this film; a wrong step may send them plunging to their death or scatter debris along the path, in turn causing a burst of sound and the release of an avalanche crushing the entire village. We are told early in the film, “The slightest sound… or any false moves by anyone can trigger these deadly landslides and sweep all into oblivion.” One cannot step freely here, or disrupt the ordered path of discourse without severe consequences. These consequences are both necessary and terrifying, as Eric Blondel says of reading Nietzsche as a rupture that “throw[s] us into a labyrinth from which no one emerges unscathed.” This disruptive process is a necessary fall from the bondage of individuation as it is entwined in the delimited

Desire in Bondage 9

discourses of family and society. For Nietzsche, the possibility of art emerges with the crossing over into the abyss: “For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bonds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed.”2 It is this shifting engagement with rapture and lethargy that is Careful. The Nietzschean performance act of interpretation as mastery is not a process of situating the work of art within a prescribed system of codes but a willingness to break free of instrumentality in the embrace of endless plurality. The work of art itself remains an object of uncontainable excess. Thus the process of thinking about art is a thinking through to existence. For Blondel, “It is through interpretation that the world becomes infinite and interpretation becomes interminable,” a space of possibility and madness.3 With the Nietzschean abolishment of the world to the realm of murky shadows, what remains is the process of unfolding, of the unfixed play of metaphor. This serious play is enacted in Maddin’s film and is (I hope) reflected in my interpretation. In Careful, the father’s blindness and fall is a symptom of what is called the Unheimlich, the uncanny. Freud associates the uncanny with a residue of primitive thinking, with the fear of blindness as a veiled fear of castration, “with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead.”4 Indeed, the father does return to caution against his son’s desire for mother. In Maddin’s film, desire bubbles just under the Apollonian surface of authority and regimentation, urging the gaze toward the abyss and then demanding a cautionary lament for that which is repressed, that which is the uncanny. Robert DeWalt makes this link between the setting for Careful and the world that gave form to psychoanalysis: “The world of social relation is the one that produced Freud—the collapsing empire of Austria-Hungary with its labyrinthine bureaucracies and exquisite distinctions of caste, a world with an ornate and precariously balanced hierarchy held together by a Byzantine code of protocol and propriety. Deference is its principal ethic, circumspection its governing manner. It is, in short, a stifling world of taboo in which desire is repressed and diverted to disturbing effect.”5 The film begins with a young boy lifting the lid off of an oozing cauldron bubbling on the stove and the stern narrator Herr Trotta’s warning of caution, to be careful, to not get too close. The villagers live in the shadow of the consequences of unheeded warnings. It is too late to hear the warning against

92 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES holding a baby’s face next to an open pin, for the father’s castrating fall into blindness occurs very early in the film. Herr Trotta explains: “When clutched to its mother’s bosom, a baby in Tolzbad once lost an eye when a carelessly unpinned broach pierced right through the baby’s eyelid. As if infected with this carelessness, the same baby by then a grown swan feeder lost his other eye when he got too close to a clock. Caution is not enough for the blind; it wasn’t long before the swan feeder too heard the long sound of the wind [his plunge into death].” This relentless caution against noise is followed by the discovery of a safe, if hidden, place for acoustic excess. Herr Trotta uncovers these mountain nodes: “Rare and extremely hard to find places, quirks of the mountain ranges, where all sounds sent out are perfectly cancelled by their own echoes.” In this sanctuary there is permissible space for handclapping, punishment, feast, festival, and flirtation—that is to say, desire: “No dangerous noises can escape to unleash the crushing mass of snow.” In these sanctuaries the desire of expression can be met, but never with the assurance of absolute safety; for the unrestrained dissonance of a passing flock of geese leads the villagers to duck and cover lest the unbridled excess of nature trigger another avalanche. Maddin’s cinematic design and storytelling style disavow the instrumentalist and social-realist tendency in much of Canadian film. The obliviously artificial locations deliberately lack recognizable and naturalistic spatial coherence. This disavowal of the conventions of narrative is a shedding of the baggage of the unified coherent subject situated within an empirically defined space in favour of a Nietzschean truth in art unrestrained by the social. Coherent narrative action is exchanged for an excess of desire within the frame and toward the unfolding image itself, a desire which is both bubbling over and concealed. That which is non-mimetic, that which is musical (whether in the form of sound or image) in Maddin’s film manifests as will. And the will, for Nietzsche, is “the opposite of the aesthetic, purely contemplative, and passive frame of mind.”6 The interlaced sculptural and music-like images in his films suggest the Apollonian and Dionysian duality upon which art depends, according to Nietzsche—the dream world in which we may glimpse the gods and face the depths of intoxication, of forgetfulness, of forgetting the self. An earlier film, Archangel (990), takes forgetfulness as its very premise.7 Soldiers of the Great War, suffering amnesia, continue the fighting, forgetting that the war has ended and even which side they are on. Maddin’s films collapse the

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distance required by contemplation for the sake of carnivalesque madness as, for Nietzsche, the work of art offers release in the face of despair: “At the very climax of joy there sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss.”8 The body as exterior bulwark against the social serves as the medium of interpretation and the very site of desire. The body ages, grows fat, grows bent and withered, in a process of change which, as site of interpretation, disavows fixity in history. The weak body craves the order and assurance of faith, of system, but the desiring body craves to break free from the limits of culture. The metaphor of the body is deployed as a move toward self-awareness rather than to figure the literal body as text. Art affirms life in spite of the suffering of the skin. Art emerges not from language but from the body and is performed on the body in an intoxication of frenzy. This affirmation of art does not occur in mere mimesis and beauty, as Nietzsche says: It is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual. For it is only in particular examples of such annihilation that we see clearly the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence, as it were, behind the principium individuationis, the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and despite all annihilation. The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation.9 John Sallis explains Nietzschean aesthetics as an entry onto the abyss, a celebratory unhinging of the door of Platonism, a move beyond the limits of Western philosophy: “Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are marked as crossings that move beyond the everyday: to the world of beautiful images over which Apollo presides; or to the self-oblivion of the ecstatic state, as in the descent to Hades, as in crossing, in that direction, the river Lethe.”0 In the underworld, dead souls may drink the water of the Lethe so to forget mortality, to abolish memory of a past life. The sacrifice of memory, of history, achieves an imaginary space free of limits, free of the tight restraints of temporal order, like the temporary retreat to acoustic neutrality in Careful. This imaginary space—for Nietzsche, the space of tragedy—the site of disclosure,

94 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES of forming and effacing in the process of art a performance which is always an inscribed double: enactment and, following Sallis, crossing out. Careful stages a climactic crossing of swords, a duel, between Tolzbad’s Übermensch Count Knotkers and young Grigorss in defence of the honour (and legitimation) of father and for the love (incestuous or otherwise) of mother. The notion of duality permeates much of the film. The film tells a story of the love between mother and son. There are two sons attending butler school (and another living in the attic). Likewise, there are two fathers: the blind ghost, who lost sight in both his eyes by the carelessness of his own two hands, and Count Knotkers, also seeking mother’s love. While there is but one mother, there is a spare father, the narrator Herr Trotta. He has two daughters, Klara and Sigleinde (none to spare), both competing for his attention. With the suggestion of incest between Herr Trotta and Sigleinde, the latter acts a perverse double role: daughter and surrogate wife. In Tolzbad, the dead are killed twice, just to be sure, to protect the order of the inner sanctum of the home against the writhing chaos of dangerous nature. Sallis explains the effect of the repetition of the double: “The doubling has the effect of exceeding the limits that determine the generational order of the individuals, transgressing and disrupting those limits while, as the very condition of the disruptive transgression, reinstating that order, leaving it intact in the very production of indeterminacy. Monstrosity as indeterminate dyad. Also, of course, as the Dionysian.” The appearance of the double is not posited as an either/or but as interconnection of distance and proximity and, in the film, as a playful blurring of identities. Sallis’s “disruptive transgression” evokes the Freudian erasure of the distinction between imagination and reality in the sublime. As Freud writes, “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”2 Careful, like all of Maddin’s oeuvre, is bubbling over with excess and incommensurability, with a disorder of bliss and regret. My interest is not to untangle the narrative threads, but rather to suggest how the process of cinematic entanglement draws us over the abyss, through and over the folds of the body, through an excess, a revealing of desire realized for Grigorss even as his breath is choked into stillness in the icy mountains of the film’s conclusion. Living high in the mountains of Tolzbad leaves many of the film’s characters short of breath. Mother gasps for breath due to a hairball in her throat—she begins to cough when Grigorss asks why Franz is kept in the attic, choking on

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the repressed memory of her husband. Later, following the gasping struggle of the duel, Grigorss yawns repeatedly in search of the breath of thin air with which to express his passion when, high in a gondola, Klara tells him that she is “not chaste” due to her own father’s mouth-breathing advances. For Nietzsche, the regular breathing of mere appearance that is the Apollonian is transformed in the ecstatic gasping sounds of the Dionysian festival: “how in these strains all of nature’s excess in pleasure, in grief, and knowledge become audible even in piercing shrieks… the muses of the arts of ‘illusion’ paled before an art that, in its intoxication, spoke the truth.”3 This release is a redemption from the banality of the everyday, a release which is simultaneously holding us in terror over the abyss. For Nietzsche, the performative act of excess disrupts the act of naming excess as such, veiling the disciplinary function of knowledge. Sallis describes the logic of excess as not merely a crude but ultimately resolvable dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian; rather, as a process of writing and erasure which forces forth the work of art out of disruption: “What Dionysian revelation reveals is not a ground of determination but the dissolution of ground and of determination.”4 Existence is instead justified as artistic projection. The horror and absurdity of existence is tamed (for an instant but never entirely) by the sublime art, by the fear and regret which emerges in the unveiling, in the coming forth of knowledge. Maddin’s films are literally shot through veils, are about the fact of veiling, are decidedly not a narrative trajectory toward the unveiling of meaning. Images abound of the maternal bed draped in translucent fabric through which the desirous boy must penetrate, and in which he inevitably becomes entangled. Maddin’s first feature film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988), performs many of its scenes as shadow plays on an outstretched bedsheet, and the subsequent Archangel is shot through the near-continuous downpour of potato-flake simulated snow and is, like Careful, veiled with the dusting of an over-cranked fog machine. Characters move through the haze while being caught up in its blinding gust, a kind of weave about which Nietzsche questions the simultaneous tension and dissonance: “Will the net of art, even if it is called religion or science, that is spread over existence be woven even more tightly and delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds in the restless, barbarous, chaotic whirl that now calls itself the present?”5 George Toles, Maddin’s co-screenwriter, discusses the terror of unveiling in an essay on scenes of humiliation in film: “The camera takes us to the edge of what we can bear to witness of another’s writhing in shame, then answers

96 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES our need for a reprieve, providing some sort of image protection or veiling… born of the childhood anxiety that nothing is sufficiently yours to keep hidden from a strong, adult gaze.”6 Guy Maddin’s films play seriously on the sharp edges of our own shattered consciousness, not through literal representation, but by enacting the desire to lift the veil, to confront the sublime, while the recurring circular and doubling metaphors gesture toward our own terror of this unveiling, the terror of absolute nakedness. This confrontation provides metaphysical comfort, as Nietzsche explains: “Art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the terrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.”7 Toles argues that the cinematic shroud attracts our gaze by inviting our own exposure through identification. Here, disavowal is necessarily linked with avowal, with a kind of freedom made possible only through the terror of one’s own visibility. The image expresses not the mere appearance of the outside world, but the truth of our own self, our own signification in chains. The chains of bondage in the Tolzbad butler school are likewise forged by willed humiliation.8 Here, prospective menservants are trained to suppress self-expression; Frau Teacher disciplines their walking so that it is silent; the folding of table napkins is mastered while blindfolded; coffee is poured without an offensive dribble, lest the hot fluid be splashed back in the student’s face by the strict disciplinarian. The student butlers learn to erase the self from the chambers of their masters, to become appendages to the functionality of the household, to embrace their own live burial for the sake of maintenance of order and propriety, to fulfill desire in the eternal longing of chastity. They embrace the uncanny erasure of the distinction between imagination and reality, the terror of being buried alive. This terror is, for Freud, a return to the womb: “To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness—the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.”9 The unwanted child Franz, the unwashed brother, remains in the womb-like attic because his mother has no warmth for him. He is too much his father’s son; she could not feed him at her breast because he smells too much like her husband, the castrated father whose stench of desire “still lives in this house, unsatisfied.”

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The rule of discipline is maintained by the unfulfilling of desire. The father appears to Franz in order to warn of Johann’s desire for mother, a desire that must be kept in bondage if the family is to be preserved, however dubious a goal. Familial propriety is maintained not only by ensuring father’s unrequited longing, but to disrupt mother’s urges as well. Desire is kept in bondage; the fast beat of the heart is feared to trigger another avalanche. We hear instead the sound of father’s heart described as “dripping like a leaky tap ever since they punctured it.” Early in the film we see images of children bound tightly in rope-work, their mouths stuffed with ball gags, until such time as they can freely repress the risk of unbridled sound and play. Play is kept manifest in the mind by its containment in bondage. Johann, whose erratic behaviour is excused as “mountain fever,”20 imagines, with both fear and desire, sleeping with his young lover Klara and awakening to find himself in mother’s embrace. Later he feigns illness to break away from the rigours of butler school for the sake of peering through the cracks in the wall at mother in the bath. He disavows the regime of servile order and instead extends the needs of the body to the careful brewing of a love potion, which he feeds to mother in her glass of milk. The sound of drinking lies heavily on the soundtrack as if to encourage another avalanche (or eruption of sorts) and to give rise to steamy excess over the mountaintops and the furious flapping of the flag of Tolzbad. The release of these desires of course torments the young man’s engorged spirit and leads to his self-mutilation. His hands, dirty with the desire for mother’s body, are severed with the very same garden shears he uses to clip open her dress. The mouth that so lovingly caressed the breast he once fed on is wilfully burned with a hot coal. He leaps into the abyss, with his final words “Mother, forgive me” echoing over the mountaintops. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, his death is tragic: “A tragic death is an ironic immortality, ironic from an excess of determinacy. The tragic death is overdetermined—that is the actual expression of the hero’s guilt.”2 The mother who did not mourn her dead husband and forbade his approach to her body now mourns the (father’s) son who dared gaze upon her breast. The film explores the comic-tragic tension of the playing out of the will of the body over the abyss. Nietzschean critique is a labour of the body, a will to power. It is through the body that meaning can be grasped beyond the fixed level of tactical discourse, according to Blondel: “Perhaps the body and life can be grasped, less as signifieds than through an interpretive signifying whose locus is the text.”22 He later explains: “The body is therefore

98 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES an intermediary space between the absolute plural of the world’s chaos and the absolute simplification of the intellect…. Nietzsche, therefore, intends not to reduce the intellect to the body, but in presenting the body as a ‘plurality of intellects,’ to reveal the radical nature of plurality.”23 Here, nature is posited as lack to be filled with the (bodily) labour of desire. This struggle for power is one of overcoming the culturally bound ideological limits of expression. The body is not a locus of predetermined beauty. Nietzsche posits the appeal of the tragic thusly: “It is precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself.”24 Tragedy as a pessimistic image of life is imagined against the decadence of science, rationality, and utilitarianism. For Nietzsche, these are symptoms of a decline in strength, of the fragmentation of the mortal body. At the conclusion of Careful, fragmentation dissolves as Grigorss is joined by the sterile ghosts of his parents as he freezes to stillness, a caught moment like when the celluloid jams in the gate of the projector and dissolves beautifully on screen. There is a vastness in Maddin’s work evoking a play of signifiers upon the entire landscape of cinematic history; images suggest themselves as reincarnations of past cinematic spectacles, as if looking cautiously over the shoulder to the burden of formal history, and to offer themselves as redemption for lost and forgotten styles. Many commentators have noted Maddin’s affection for the murky days of cinema in between silence and sound, and for the strange hues of the first colour pictures. It is equally important to consider the echoes of hazy late-night television movie signals from the days before Maddin’s (and my) hometown of Winnipeg was wired for cable.25 In an essay on Careful, Will Straw indicates its gestures to minor film forms and inconsistency with the fashion of campiness in contemporary film and with prevailing Canadian film criticism: “Maddin’s work has little to do with Hollywood or any other major villain in the drama of Canadian cultural dependency. The Icelandic saga, the Soviet montage film, and the Bavarian mountain melodrama are all almost as minor as Canadian film itself. It is almost as if, by rewriting the history of movies so as to privilege these minor, marginal movements, Maddin has helped to create a new constellation of styles and schools in which Canadian cinema itself might occupy a place.”26A cinema of vastness and containment, of the infinite and the terrifying, Maddin’s is a cinema of the sublime in its disruption of the harmony of the ideal image. This vastness is, however, projected into the claustrophobic closets of repressed desire. For Jean-François Lyotard, the indeterminacy of

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unrepresentable vastness and an absolute of thought gives rise to suffering: “A kind of cleavage within the subject between what can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented. But this pain engenders a pleasure, in fact a double pleasure: the impotence of the imagination attests a contrario to an imagination striving to forgive even that which cannot be figured.”27 Lyotard, following Nietzsche, posits the work of art as momentary relief from the terror of inadequacy in the face of the sublime. The means of encountering the sublime is not to formulate conceptual or semiological systems, but through metaphor, a pattern that recalls Maddin’s disavowal of realism. As Blondel explains of Nietzsche: “Metaphor would then be an imaginary, and not a speculative, synthesis, making it possible to have a body thinking, that is, both a body that thinks and an interpretive thinking that thinks about the body.”28 Maddin’s cinematic bodies are made wretched with desire, made blind and limp by neglect or stupidity. For instance, in his film, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997), the wheezing first hand at the ostrich farm, Cain Ball (played by Frank Gorshin, “The Riddler” from the original Batman television series) shouts the origins of his own impotence in over-thetop cornball seriousness in response to questions of love and beauty: “What do I know? I’m a gelding, remember! Who ripped his manhood open on a chair nail half a century ago.” In the same movie, the not-quite-powerful Dr. Solti is made to walk with a limp after coming too close to the statue of Venus, about which he has lustful thoughts, and which fell on him as he advanced his desires. This comic bodily suffering occurs not at the Dionysian moment of limitlessness, of death, at the crossing over into the abyss, but is instead an impediment to Dionysian loss of self, a kind of bondage which in turn engages desire all the more. Twilight begins with a character journeying home after being released from prison. On the ship voyage he risks return by performing a theft in service of a woman’s affection, thus enacting the repetition of various stages of emotional bondage to which he submits throughout the movie, like the brother inhabiting the attic in Careful, frozen in the silence of paralysis, like Nietzsche frozen in thought for the last decade of his life. What Nietzsche configured in a kind of music we long to hear and which moves us beyond hearing, is, in the condition of postmodernity, realized in certain manifestations of the cinema. Film, the bigger-than-life spectacle, bigger even than Nietzsche’s Wagner, is the figuration of ecstasy, an imaginary projection dependent on the suspension of disbelief and the attachment of the extremes of pleasure and terror to characters realized as shadows on the wall. In Greek tragedy, behind every masked character there is understood to be

200 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES a god. This desire for masks continues with the fetish of the bigger-than-life image. Not all film, certainly, may realize tragic ecstasy; perhaps it may be found only in fragments of any given film. Who knows? There is an epic seriousness to the tongue-in-cheek earnestness with which Maddin digs through the ruins of cinematic history to restore the sheen to a discarded form. We know that the characters are make-believe players amidst cardboard props, potato-flake snow, and plenty of fog, yet they evoke an important desire for the imaginary could-have-been of cinema, and they elicit empathy for the characters’ own encounters with love, pain, and desire, however ridiculously staged. Who has not realized that acts of love and revenge are as comic as they are weighed heavily with seriousness? Will Straw situates Maddin’s references to film history as unlike the prevailing contemporary tendency to glib style: “Profoundly grounded in film history, these films [Maddin’s and those of fellow Winnipegger and influence on Maddin, John Paizs] nevertheless resist the precocious marshalling of insider references typical of so many upstart schools, from the French New Wave to post-Tarantino independent American cinema. The Winnipeg films are ambitious in their painstaking reconstruction of lost or minor filmic styles, yet endearingly free of provocative displays of auteurist bravura.”29 Maddin’s avoidance of the tropes of literal realism recalls Nietzsche’s assertion that music striving for mere imitation cannot be tragic: “We observe that in the poetry of the folk song, language is strained to the utmost that it might imitate music.”30 The potential for the making of tragic music in the cinema is not through the visual depiction of tragic circumstances and characters, but in the playful abstractions of the ordering of the natural so to defy mere visual inscription. Our ability to make meaning out of the unfolding cinematic frames requires the ability of recognition in the present (where space is cleared for recognition by a wilful dislodging of the past) and a striving for connection with those frames that have come before (which have been forgotten), to make meaning through a navigation of metaphysical constellations. As Benjamin famously notes: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”3 Guy Maddin’s Careful, formed in a web of bondage to desire, obligation, and distraction, follows Nietzsche’s turn to art in the hope of uncovering a truth uncolonized by language; it recognizes the limits of knowledge and the loss of absolutes against which thought and action can be measured. Here, thinking about the tragic, whether in the form

Desire in Bondage 20

of music or as fleeting shadows on a screen, is a way to make space for art beyond the borders of measure and thus defy the terrible objectification and detachment of instrumental (non)thinking.

Notes I am grateful to Will Straw for allowing me access to his essay “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful,” and to Professor Steven Levine, York University (retired), for his thoughts on Nietzsche and the discourse of the sublime in contemporary continental philosophy. This chapter was originally written while I was a graduate student at the time supported in part with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. . Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Séan Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 99), . 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 967), 59. 3. Blondel, Nietzsche, 244. 4. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Freud Volume 4: Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin Freud Library, 985), 370. 5. Robert DeWalt, “Play It Again, Sigmund: A Careful Inquiry into Guy Maddin’s Tabooland,” Border Crossings, May 993, 0. 6. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 55. 7. A premise likewise constructed as a personality trait of the filmmaker: “Forgetfulness was the dominant tenor of my life; I forget the most painfully embarrassing things, important things about myself…. I’ve noticed in other people tendencies to forget they’re married or forget they have children or forget they have any responsibilities. I could fit rather snugly into all of those categories.” See “Far From the Maddin Crowd: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” interview by Robert Enright, Border Crossings, Summer 990, 38. 8. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 40. 9. Ibid., 04. 0. John Sallis, Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 99), 5. . Ibid., 78. 2. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 367. 3. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 46. 4. Sallis, Crossings, 58. 5. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 98. 6. George Toles, “This May Hurt a Little: The Art of Humiliation in Film,” Film Quarterly 48, 4 (Summer 995): 3. This essay does not directly refer to Maddin’s films. 7. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 60. 8. Yes, Tolzbad is a play on the name Toles.

202 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES 9. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 366. 20. After a long speech steeped in sexual metaphors relating to the shape and depth of the mountain ranges, Herr Trotta declares: “[There is] something terrible about mountains… [the] fearful passage of the wind is etched in the very stone, like a scream that never ends.” 2. Walter Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings Volume : 93– 926, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 996), 56. 22. Blondel, Nietzsche, 29. 23. Ibid., 207. 24. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 4. 25. In personal discussions, Maddin has referred, however ironically, to the childhood pleasures of television viewing where the broadcast signal drifted in and out of sharpness, at times erased entirely by snow. In some ways, the use of fog and Vaseline on the lens reflects this experience of image ambiguity. 26. Will Straw, “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful,” in Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 5 Canadian Films, ed. Gene Walz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 32–33; reprinted in this volume (65). 27. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 989), 203. 28. Blondel, Nietzsche, 239. 29. Straw, “Reinhabiting,” 305; reprinted in this volume (57). 30. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 53. 3. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 968), 255.

HIT WITH A WRECKING BALL, TICKLED WITH A FEATHER: GESTURE, DEIXIS, AND THE BAROQUE CINEMA OF GUY MADDIN

saige walton

Above all it is the… provocative quality of the gesture which is baroque. —Walter Benjamin We must reject that prejudice which makes “inner realities” out of love, hate, or anger, leaving them accessible to one single witness: the person who feels them. Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another’s consciousness: they are types of behaviour or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside. They exist on this face or in those gestures, not hidden behind them. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty Like the fleeting spectres, zombies, and ghostly phantasms who haunt the living in Guy Maddin’s cinema, the baroque has “shadowed ghostlike around much recent thought.” As a number of contemporary theorists of the baroque and neo-baroque (Gilles Deleuze, Mieke Bal, Angela Ndalianis, Norman M. Klein, Lois Parkinson Zamora) all attest, the baroque is not simply a cultural phantom of the past. As an aesthetic and critical concept, the baroque radiates well beyond its historic and geographic inception in seventeenthcentury Europe, where spectacular cultural production was harnessed to

204 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES meet the ends of the church/absolutist state.2 Once expanded along transhistoric and transnational lines, the baroque reveals a startling affinity with the cinema in particular, which has proven especially amenable to a baroque delight in illusion and sensual display.3 That said, whenever the designation “baroque” is called upon in the cinema, it tends to be reduced to a phenomenologically vague epithet for films that veer towards the visually spectacular. The continued conflation of the baroque with vision alone does little to capture the embodied reciprocity of this aesthetic.4 Similarly, current criticism has not addressed the sensual significance of Maddin’s films, a significance that I believe resides not only in the figurative bodies of his on-screen characters, but in the expressive body of the cinema and the density of our lived flesh off-screen. Rather than anaemically restricting the baroque to the visual, then, this essay foregrounds the presentational sensuality of the baroque and argues for its ongoing relevance to the work of the Winnipeg filmmaker. Concentrating on Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and its companion piece, Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)—the first two instalments of what Maddin has dubbed his personal “me” trilogy—I draw upon baroque theory, phenomenological philosophies of gesture and the body, and notions of deixis to consider how Maddin reprises the face-to-face aesthetics of the baroque. Deixis (a rhetorical term, meaning to “point out” or “pointing”) refers to the “orientational” features of language, which have contextual reference points to time, space, and the speaking event between interlocutors.5 Baroque “facing” produces a correlative relationship between the real and the representational, aesthetic space and our own viewing space, “pointing at the viewer in a relation to space that is not incorporative but dialogic” in its reciprocal embodiment.6 In Cowards and Brand, Maddin reignites the presentational sensuality of the baroque by privileging the expressive surface of body and film through gesture and self-conscious display. In the process, he invites—rather than a detached, intellectual distance—a phenomenological proximity between film and viewer, what I term the “feeling of deixis.”

Baroque Sensation and Affective Artifice: “Too much for Guy!!” Originally designed as a peephole installation for the Power Plant Gallery in Toronto, Cowards Bend the Knee is Maddin’s homage to the revenge-themed opera of Elektra (Richard Strauss, 909) and the silent Weimar classic, The Hands of Orlac (Robert Wiene, 924).7 “Guy Maddin,” the heartbreaking Winnipeg

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Maroon, abandons his girlfriend Veronica when he meets the beautiful Meta, with her fingers in the sugar bowl. Meta, obsessed with her own murdered father, tries to graft his severed hands onto Guy, coaxing him into vengeance. After a faked transplant, Guy commits mass murder only to discover that he has performed these acts with his own hands. When Guy wants to leave Meta for Veronica’s ghost, he is spurned for his own father, while jealous Meta orchestrates the amputation of Guy’s real hands.8 A coward to the end, the ultimate home of the handless Guy will be alongside other similarly “petrified” men inside a wax museum atop the Winnipeg Arena. This is a sanctuary for cowards, for “husbands afraid to face the burdens—nay, the terrors—of living with wives and families.” Inspired by Grand Guignol plays and set within a lighthouse, Brand Upon the Brain! fuses its familial melodrama to vampiric and cannibalistic strains of horror.9 House painter “Guy Maddin” returns to his childhood home on Black Notch Island, ready to apply two new coats of paint to the lighthouse, once an orphanage run by his parents. Here, the adult Guy is assailed by poignant memories of his childhood (“amidst it all Guy revisits his youth”); of his Mother’s alert, puritanical watch over her children (for Mother uses the lighthouse’s searchlight to “read into her children’s hearts”); of epic familial battles between Mother and Sis; and the ardour of first love, as young Guy falls for Wendy Hale (half of a harp-playing brother-and-sister teen detective team, the Light Bulb Kids). There to investigate the mysterious holes in the heads of the orphans, Wendy (crossdressing as her brother, Chance) falls in love with Sis while young Guy pines for Wendy—an obsession that has clearly haunted Guy throughout his life as phantom versions of Wendy appear to him on the island. As past and present images collide, we discover how Mother and mad-scientist Father were harvesting “nectar” from the skull/spinal cords of the orphans to retain the vibrancy of youth, cannibalizing their own family until the ascension of Sis and Wendy sends them (and young Guy) into exile. Reunited with his elderly parents, the adult Guy rediscovers his love for Mother, only to be distracted by yet another apparition of Wendy. As Mother dies and the ghosts of his past finally melt away, Guy finds himself alone. Lovingly anachronistic, sensually arresting, and sometimes laughout-loud hilarious, Cowards and Brand exemplify Maddin’s fervour for creating arch, hyper-melodramatic reinventions of silent-era cinema, fuelled by the fragments of his autobiography.0 Of more particular interest to me, however, is how Maddin reprises the presentational sensuality of the baroque.

206 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES According to art historian John Rupert Martin, the baroque is an aesthetic that has long been dedicated to the representation and elicitation of “extreme states of feeling.” During the seventeenth century, graphic forms of “fleshand-blood realism” called upon the “experience of the senses” to somatically stir the body of the beholder.2 More recently, in her book The Inordinate Eye, Lois Parkinson Zamora has detailed the ways in which the historic baroque made its artistic overtures to the “senses and emotions of the viewer… evoking an internal, personal response” within the body of the beholder; flesh, blood, and feeling were the baroque’s principal means of “bringing the beholder into mystical communion with [an otherwise] disembodied divinity.”3 She writes: “Figures in ecstasy, figures in extremis… lend themselves naturally to arresting artistic depiction… Christ’s passion, Mary’s mourning, the martyrdom of saints, penitential castigations, purgatory: such scenes were designed to encourage the beholder to experience empathically the suffering of these figures, and thus share in their transcendence… [The baroque] call to visualize the invisible, and to visualize oneself doing so, led viewers to an increasingly self-conscious relationship with the physical bodies of Christ, the Virgin, and the martyred saints, and with their own sensory experience.”4 In short, it was the goal of the historic baroque to bring the formerly invisible domain of the divine, the limitless, and the intangible firmly back down to earth, making such abstractions physically “accessible to the faithful as beings of flesh and blood” in visible, tangible, and sensually concrete terms.5 Little wonder, then, that Zamora would go so far as to claim that “explicit physical depiction is, in many ways, a [b]aroque invention.”6 That baroque inheritance continues in the extremes of subjective feeling that preoccupy Maddin. As with the “aerophone” invention in Brand that communicates when “feelings are running high” through love or rage, these films are entrenched in the hyperbole of baroque physicality and feeling—the longing of aching hearts, states of passion and mourning, nectar-crazed blood/love lust, brain-induced fever and murderous delirium. Maddin’s characters often find themselves literally overcome by the intensity of their emotions: Mother in Brand is “determined to age backwards… to become a little girl again, even a baby” through nightly nectar-fixes, but her body physically ages when she is inconsolable with rage; when Sis can bear the harvest of nectar no more, her body snaps from rag-doll submission into twitching convulsions as she kills Father. Young Guy has his senses “overheated by fever” from the events that he has witnessed, succumbing to repeated fits of dizziness and swooning—the

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latter being a baroque trope in its own right, indicative of a “passion that results from the feeling of being overpowered.”7 Steven Shaviro has also underscored the affective importance of Maddin’s later work. Although he does not specifically connect Maddin to the baroque, he observes how “everything Maddin does works to express how the events of the film[s] might feel, or make us feel, rather than what is actually happening.”8 The intentionally laboured anachronism of Cowards, with its array of “Victorian-via-silent-film postures and acting techniques” enhances the “general atmosphere of delirium” that accompanies its rendition of the Orlac and Elektra stories.9 Brand contains little-to-no narrative progression, preferring instead to stage “passages of dread, suspense, and anticipation,” as evident in its subtitling as “A Remembrance in 2 Chapters.”20 While Brand lacks a linear or “classical” progression (we are, after all, told how “everything that happens will happen again”), its arabesques of melodrama, horror, and Oedipal desire, and constant transitions between past and present add to a palpable “feel… of lurching seasickness, and of nightmarish repetitions from which we (like the protagonist) are unable to awaken or escape.”2 In an earlier essay on Maddin, Shaviro claims that his movies (Twilight of the Nymphs, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful) use camp as a “shortcut to radical aestheticism.”22 Maddin’s images are deemed gorgeous but “entirely non-functional” (they “have nothing beyond themselves to express”) and linked to the artifice of camp; the “ludicrousness” of camp provides the filmmaker with a superficial cover for the “depth” of emotion on display and feelings that might otherwise “dare not speak their name.” If couched as camp, though, the blatantly over-the-top nature of feeling in Maddin can only evoke our laughter, as “feelings come to seem like unreal poses… we are always laughing at the characters rather than crying along with them.”23 As the title of this essay suggests, however, I view the conjunction of seemingly contradictory physical states/ideas as highly characteristic of Maddin. As Maddin himself has put it, his cinema seeks to elicit from us a “mix of seemingly mutually exclusive feelings… that hybrid feeling of being hit with a wrecking ball while being tickled with a feather.”24 Similarly, it has long been a baroque convention to create contact or coupling between divergent ideas. For instance, in the tradition of the historic baroque conceit (the coincidentia oppositorum), what occurs is a conjunction of “opposites in aesthetic structures that neither homogenize nor destroy difference” but hold “oppositions open in order to generate expressive energy.”25 Put simply, it is “coexisting,

208 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES complementary oppositions, not mutual exclusion [that] are the structural bases” of baroque expression.26 In this sense, then, we need to recognize “camp” as something of a misleading sensibility for the conjunctions at work in Maddin (and a tag that the filmmaker also refutes).27 Camp taps into the artifice of Maddin’s films, as well as their hilarity, but it is premised on a phenomenological distance from the self-conscious display. So, while Shaviro finds himself affectively absorbed by the sheer beauty of Maddin’s cinema (“pulled into a state of ravishment”), camp initiates the pathway to “a new kind of alienation effect… our distance from the spectacle.… I am distanced by the film’s flagrant display of phoniness.”28 If, as I would claim, Maddin’s cinema truly thrives upon baroque hybridity (in fusing wrecking ball/feather), then an awareness of its savvy artifice can exist alongside our sensorial engagement. In alluding to the affective register that marks Cowards and Brand, Shaviro has similarly shifted to consider how artifice and display can function as “direct enablers of emotion.”29 While I fully agree with Shaviro’s sentiment that Maddin can and does elicit varying states of feeling from us (above and beyond laughter), the baroque connotations of intertwining sensation with self-awareness need to be teased out. The trait that Shaviro labels Maddin’s “self-conscious obviousness”30 (an obviousness in which display spurs feeling) already possesses a long-standing aesthetic legacy—that of the baroque, in which artifice and affect are intimately conjoined. In his 934 essay “What is Baroque?” Erwin Panofsky aptly characterizes the baroque as an intensification of subjective feeling, combined with a heightened theatricality of those physical states. Anticipating how Maddin’s critics have struggled to reconcile his collision of melodramatic intensity and selfconscious parody, Panofksy describes how the “feeling of [b]aroque figures” has been perceived as lacking “genuineness and sincerity… that these figures displayed theatrical poses… they did not ‘mean it.’”3 By contrast, Panofsky regards baroque feeling as concrete and palpable, even as it expresses a self-aware and “intense consciousness” in the arts:32 “The feeling of [b]aroque people is perfectly genuine.… They not only feel, but are also aware of their own feelings. While their hearts are quivering with emotion, their consciousness stands aloof and ‘knows’.… The experience of so many conflicts and dualisms between emotion and reflection, lust and pain, devoutness and voluptuousness had led to a kind of awakening… a new consciousness.”33 Such self-reflexive appeals to the body are fundamental to Maddin—not only in terms of his baroque presentation of extreme emotional states (in characters that clearly “know” themselves

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to be feeling), but in his deliberate appeals to the techno-body of the cinema, as it enables the image and its history to come into being. Cowards and Brand deliberately emulate the iconic styles and conventions of the silent era, especially melodrama of the twenties, all shot though with the luminous flickering of working on or blowing up Super-8 stock.34 These films are couched in Maddin’s usual high-contrast black and white cinematography, coloured tints (or unexpected bursts of colour), blurred intertitles, asynchronous sound, minimal dialogue, musical accompaniment, elliptical editing, and a rhythmic alteration of early cinema devices (such as irises, dissolves, peephole cut-outs, and framed inserts). As Shaviro and Jason Woloski note, however, an encounter with Maddin is not akin to how silent-era film looked or felt at the time in which it was made.35 Rather, Maddin gives us the impression of aging prints, screened anew but dense with (simulated) information about their historic and materialistic being. By adding audio hum and ambient crackle to the soundtrack, playing upon asynchronous matches between sound and image, removing actual pieces of film from a shot to create elliptical jumps, and endowing his images with highly textural effects that imply accumulated surface grain and scratches, Maddin mimics the projected wear and tear of his own imaginative and perennially “timeless” silent-movie past. The artifice that defines Maddin’s cinema is compounded by his playful tinkering with the melodrama (already a “self-conscious” genre, as Shaviro and William Beard detail).36 But while the tableau scenes, the exaggerated postures, laden makeup, and mannered acting styles of his actors recall stage and silent melodrama, “pantomime was never so exaggerated in actual silent films as it is in Maddin’s parodies. Nor were D.W. Griffith’s own melodramas ever quite so ‘melodramatic’ as Maddin’s simulations of them are.”37 If Maddin reactivates silent melodrama, it comes replete with outlandish plot twists, love triangles multiplied to become love polyhedrons, inter-generic fusions with horror, and Freudian/psychosexual motifs that run the gamut from amputated bodily parts and corporeal disfigurement to bizarre fetishes (“the summons of the Ice Breast”), Oedipal scenarios, and incest fantasies galore. Maddin is forever reminding “the viewer that what they are watching belongs in neither the past nor the present, but seems to exist in a sort of limbo state, as a hybrid of elements, a decaying past made unnaturally fresh again.”38 A baroque merger of affect and artifice or sensation and self-awareness takes place in Maddin’s cinema. According to Norman Klein, the baroque typifies “artifice [as it] invades the natural,” a “contrapuntal form of story,” for

20 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES “the audience senses, as if by miracle, how the natural and artificial merge and divide.”39 As the action of Cowards moves between the Winnipeg Arena, a cemetery, and the Black Silhouette—all flagrantly artificial sets—nature is revealed as emphatically artificial within Maddin’s films. Much of Brand is shot outdoors, on the beaches of Puget Sound, but it invokes artifice by revelling in the course of film history. The mask of Wendy/Chance recalls the silent (vampire) serials of Louis Feuillade; Mother gnaws at Neddie’s flesh in a ghoulish reprisal of the cannibalistic zombies of Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 968); the nightly shadows that Father casts evoke the expressionistic claws of the vampire in Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 922). The influence of Luis Buñuel is everywhere: the foot of the statue in L’Âge d’Or (930) becomes a return to “the foot of the beloved” with phantom Wendy; the famous razor slashing of Un Chien Andalou (929) is remembered in the image of a knife superimposed onto the eye of young Guy. Clearly, we are supposed to acknowledge the artificial or staged nature of Maddin’s cinema. It makes no pretense at being a verisimilitude of our silentmovie past. Poised between the historic weight of the past and the affective tumults of the present, Maddin invokes a silent-movie era that has been forged out of the accumulated layering of film history, quasi-autobiography, and subjective memory. As with the baroque, our “sensing the fake” or hearing the whir of the machinery behind the illusion becomes a sign of virtuosic glory, a reprisal of artifice as it invades the natural that is no less affective in its impact upon the viewer.40

Baroque Gesture and Feeling Deixis: “Guy’s fevered brain…his panting, aching breast!” Both Cowards and Brand couple presentational effects and allusions to film history with the sway of bodily affect. These films reveal a baroque impetus, bringing the (invisible, intangible) “abstractions” of internal feeling or memory to the (visible, tangible, sensuous) surface. In point of fact, I would contend that Maddin’s use of the expressive surface is one of his most typically baroque concerns. In his seminal study of the baroque in 95, Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin was the first to remark upon its interest in capturing the specific “quality of surfaces”; that the baroque wilfully “relishes the kind of surface, the different skin of things.”4 For Wölfflin, stylized drapery happens to be the signature of baroque art and its love of the textured surface. The highly textural illusions of the historic baroque revel in the sensuous materiality

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of surfaces: in rich materials and luscious forms, the appearance of a supplely moving exterior to church facades and architectural columns, the eminently textural effects of flesh/fabric, and a foregrounding of pliable surfaces, such as when cold, hard marble can create the impression of soft, yielding skin.42 For philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the baroque is aesthetically emblematized by the evocative figure of the “fold.” According to Deleuze, the baroque refers to a transhistoric operative function or trait—that of the “fold,” a charged conceptual metaphor for the baroque’s manner of conceiving/expressing the world as movement, dynamism, and interconnection.43 To quote Deleuze: any baroque “conception of matter, in philosophy as in science or in art, has to go up to that point, to a texturology… matter is a buoyant surface, a structure endowed with an organic fabric.”44 As elaborated by Wölfflin and Deleuze, the “fold” synopsizes both the sensuous materiality and movement of the baroque and its pronounced aesthetic interconnections between structures.45 The Deleuzian “fold” is suggestive of how wrecking ball and feather, inside and outside, surface and depth, affect and artifice might not be oppositional structures for Maddin, but aesthetically intertwined, even entangled, just as they are for the baroque. Unfortunately, perceived tensions between (bodily) surface and (emotive) depth have hindered the sensual appreciation of Maddin’s cinema. As Shaviro puts it, there exists an “almost literal too-muchness,” a “hysterical over-fullness” and “over-plenitude” to Maddin—so much so that a “Freudian depth-psychology reading… would make no sense… the Freudian motifs are right there in front of us… there is no sense in looking for a hidden, latent meaning behind them.”46 Given the fact that all emotional/psychic content is almost hyper-visible and lying brazenly upon the “surface” of his films, critics have hesitated as to how or where to locate their emotional resonance in a concrete manner—as if their artificial surface belies “genuinely” sensual effects. Sensation is either situated in purely figurative terms (by lodging emotion within his protagonists or the melodrama) or diffused through interpretative frameworks that imply a literal distancing effect, where ironic parody, kitsch, or camp short-circuits larger somatic empathy in favour of unbridled laughter.47 By contrast, I would propose that gesture, motion, and physicality might be as much a potent source of meaning for Maddin as any generic/stylistic affiliation, and that the baroque sensuality of his films occurs, on-screen and off, through the embodiment shared by both a film and its viewer.

22 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Yet to be considered in the context of Maddin’s work is how feeling “may be extended to the surface of our own body… to its interminglings with other surfaces and the surfaces of others”48—including, I would add, the surface of the film itself. And while a reading of Maddin’s films in terms of Freudian depth psychology might make no sense, a sustained focus upon their baroquesurface sensuality certainly does. On this front, Elena del Río’s description of the more “performative” bodies of melodrama holds true for the (baroque) presentational sensuality that I am arguing for in Maddin: “the performing body in the cinema may speak louder or more truthfully than the dialogue that overlays the performance. In fact, cinematic gesture and movement are more likely to ‘speak’ the truth of the subject when they are not blocked by the censoring mechanisms of a rational or realist language—whether this may occur in a silent image or in one that preserves its own difference from… spoken words.”49 Here, del Río hints at the ways in which subjective feeling can and does register upon the outwardly visible or expressive body, crystallizing its sensual meanings within non-verbal forms. Arguably, even as Maddin eschews any semblance of realism (or, more appropriately, calls up the flesh-and-blood realism of the baroque), he speaks the “truth” of the body by locating feeling upon the sensuous surface. Gesture, too, is a phenomenon of the surface. According to phenomenological philosophy, embodiment is always lived in its reversible subjective and objective modalities; as a perceiving, visual subject in the world and as a visibly expressive object in that world for others. Our internal perception has its flipside, where it is made available and significant to others. As the externalized result of the manifold ways in which we carry ourselves in and through the world, our “being gestures. The lived-body projects and performs its perceptual perspective and situation and bears meaning into the world as the expression of that situation.”50 How phenomenology understands the inherent significance of the body and its gestures can lend us great insight into the importance of the expressive surface for Maddin and the baroque. There is “not a gesture, even one which is the outcome of habit and absent-mindedness, which has not some meaning,” according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, including those gestures that we unintentionally adopt in relation to particular situations (hunger, fatigue, boredom, arousal), and which, though involuntary, are still imbued with meaning and express “a definite position in relation to the situation.”5 Gesture, then, functions as a richly embodied “symbol in the most general sense. It transforms feelings, intentions, and the ‘bodiless’ reality of thoughts

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into images of motion. It lends them sensory form.”52 It is for good reason that Walter Benjamin was to latch onto the gesture, and specifically the “provocative quality” of the gesture, as a baroque trait.53 Martin writes that the “sensualization of experience had its subjective as well as its objective side” during the historic baroque; as he details it, the “portrayal of the inner life of man suddenly came to the fore in the early seventeenth-century” because of a burgeoning interest in what the pre-moderns understood as the “passions of the soul.”54 Because the baroque seeks to reveal or present the internal dynamics of emotion, it translates “the realm of the general and abstract into that of immediate, sensuous, and concrete experience.”55 Through corporeal display (gesture, movement, telltale looks, facial aspects), the baroque communicates the subjectively “invisible” or “abstract” interiority of feeling to its beholder.56 Similarly, Maddin’s cinema privileges the expressive surface to incarnate the “abstract” interiority of feeling. United in their presentational sensuality—in Bal’s words, their shared “depth of the surface [and of] reaching skin-deep”57—Maddin and the baroque partake in highly gestural displays of emotion. Here, the surface is the depth of emotion insofar as feeling is displayed outwardly as movement, gesture, and comportment. Nowhere is Maddin’s attention to gesture more evident than in Cowards Bend the Knee. As William Beard notes, a focus on hands is simply everywhere in this film: its various chapters are titled according to the actions of the hands therein (“A squeeze of the hand,” “Upon a pile of hockey gloves,” “The blue hands of vengeance,” “Hands off!”), while repeat close-ups and inserts of hands function, metonymically, as stand-ins for characters and their emotional states, where the “part symbolizes the whole.”58 We witness images of hands that are pinned to the floor in lust, fists that clench and unclench in anger, fingers that fumble in their furtive caress, hands that visibly shake with jealousy, vengeance, or murderous intent. The film opens with a chromatic switch between its black and white cinematography and the blue tinting of its subtitle, “The Blue Hands.” These shifts in colour continue as the insert of a man’s hand appears, splaying open and then closing; the blue tones recur throughout, especially after the “transplant.” These blue-tinted flashes cue us into the dream-like atmosphere of The Hands of Orlac, recalling German expressionist techniques of externalizing emotion through body, surface, and setting.59 Writing of The Hands of Orlac, Ruth Goldberg describes how Orlac’s struggle with his diabolical hands is revealed

24 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES to us as bodily movement. As Orlac twists and turns in a bizarre, expressionistic ballet, the “rules established by the expressionist artist for the formation of space [are] equally valid for the human body… the inner rhythm of a character’s life is transposed into his gestures.”60 Whereas Orlac’s internal conflict must be danced out, Maddin channels the subjective anguish/trauma of Guy into the gestural significance of the hand and the expressive surface of the film itself, as if its perceptions were being “coloured” by the grief/sadness that is to ensue from Guy. Cowards is devoted to “hands… and bad relationships,” quips Maddin.6 In its quasi-autobiographical take on the cowardice that inheres within relationships and the terror of breaking up with our former sweethearts, the Orlac story provides Maddin with a perfect vehicle for his baroque revisitation of its horror of hands. As Goldberg suggests, the “true” horror of the Orlac story lies in “how we become monstrous to ourselves.”62 It comes as no surprise that the film’s main concern—cowardice—is transferred from the realm of subjective feeling to the hand. The hands of Guy kill, they embarrass him with unrestrained desires, they actively betray others; just like Orlac, Guy is “unsure of who he is or what evil he is capable of.”63 Indeed, cowardice itself is crystallized in Guy’s repeated breaking of the implied gestural connections between hands: in the stop-start, staccato repetitions of a handshake that is broken off between Guy and his father (when he promises to visit his dying mother but never does) and the gesture of his holding Veronica’s hand on the abortion table, only to drop it when Meta walks into the room (“The joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new!”). The “invisibility” of subjective feeling gets poured into the exaggerated gestures, overly emotive facial expressions, or postures of the body; in addition, Maddin makes use of exterior stylizations of the body (visible wounds or markings) to convey the internal disturbances or psychoses of his characters. Orphan Neddie of Brand, for example, is a tiny “bundle of nervous tics,” the result of an unfortunate accident involving his little brother and an electrified teddy bear; Liliom, the scheming murderer, adulterer, and proprietor of the Black Silhouette, clutches at her withered claw of a hand in Cowards. Even Sis’s usurping of Mother’s role as tyrannical head of the nectar harvest in Brand is an act that is as prefigured by their shared birthmarks of Rumania (“charms just asking to be enjoyed”) as it is by the lurching gestures that connect them in re-enacting the violence of Mother’s birth.64 “The meaning of a gesture… is not behind it,” says Merleau-Ponty; “it is intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture.… It is

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arrayed all over the gesture itself” and reciprocated by our own bodies in turn as we grasp the sensual and intersubjective import of the gesture.65 In considering how the “structure of the world” that is outlined by Maddin’s highly gestural cinema might be that of the baroque, we cannot cling to subjectivist accounts of emotion—as if feelings were closed off in their own introspective reality or a privately experienced space. Likewise, for phenomenology, emotions are “living meanings” that are secreted through the external manifestations of gesture, movement, and bodily comportment.66 As with the baroque of Maddin, emotions are not hidden away inside the “abstraction” of interior depths; they are instead sensuously communicated as “variation[s] in our relations with the others and the world which is expressed in our bodily attitude.”67 In Cowards especially, Maddin cuts between different bodily gestures to heighten the divergence of the emotive display. As the Winnipeg Maroons lift their hockey gloves, hands, and sticks in the air in victory over their recent game, Veronica, “in trouble,” lowers her hands to her stomach, massages her temples, or raises a hand to her forehead in anxious anticipation. Guy and Meta’s amorous encounter in the Maroons dressing room moves at a delirious, breakneck speed; “meanwhile,” we glimpse flashes of Veronica, bleeding and slowly crawling across the arena in search of “her Guy.” Maddin alternates between close-ups of the ardent hands of Guy casting a shadow across Meta’s naked flesh and Veronica’s last solitary g(r)asp on the ice, her fingers unfurling as she dies. In phenomenological terms, we could say that it is my body that understands the fevered gestural tempo of Guy and Meta’s love/lust (as it is expressed as a rapid-fire montage of hands, arms, faces, breasts, and inserts of fingers in mouths), just as it comprehends the sadness of Veronica’s lonely gestures on the ice. “It is through my body that I understand other people,” Merleau-Ponty claims, “just as it is through my body that I understand ‘things,’” and likewise through the dynamics of the body that I enact and understand emotion.68 Such sensuous understandings are not a conscious or intellectual effort to grasp gestural meaning. Rather, they occur at the pre-reflective level of the body, through corporeal modes of intelligence. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “The sense of the gesture… is not given but understood… recaptured by an act on the spectator’s part. The whole difficulty is to conceive of this act clearly without confusing it with a cognitive operation. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body, and mine [theirs]… the powers of my body adjust themselves to it and overlap it… there is a mutual confirmation between myself and

26 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES others.”69 Gestural significance is enacted between bodies, as a face-to-face encounter expressing one emotive flesh to that of another. Furthermore, this gestural exchange does not necessitate an “intellectual” remove for us to discern the emotional expressions of the body. Merleau-Ponty provides us with a cogent example of how, when faced with an angry gesture, we never read anger “as a psychic fact hidden behind the gesture… [t]he gesture does not make me think of anger; it is anger itself.”70 Phenomenology would similarly hold that I grasp the “sorrow in your weeping, the regret in your apology, or the delight in your laughter, just as… I can see the confidence in your stance, the gaiety in your step… or feel the love in your caress” because I have lived and performed these bodily attitudes myself.7 This is where, I believe, the notion of deixis assumes a special critical force in arguing for the sensual proximity of Maddin’s cinema. While deixis is a term that is derived from linguistics (meaning “to show forth, point, display, bring to light, hail, exhibit, reveal, to greet by means of word or form”), both Susan Stewart and Mieke Bal use it to invoke the feeling of a correlative relationship (I/you) between bodies.72 Furthermore, both Stewart and Bal connect the feeling of deixis to the embodied effects of the baroque, in light of the latter’s presentational sensuality and its aesthetic correlation between bodies.73 In baroque experiences, the subject and object of representation address or “face” each other in charged corporeal encounters that play upon the self-reflexive acknowledgement of a shared physicality. In this “traffic of images between inside and out,” writes Bal, the body of the beholder is addressed by deictic gestures and “sends back, so to speak, the images that enter it from without… this time accompanied by [their own] affective ‘commentary’ or ‘feeling.’”74 Cowards and Brand contain all manner of deictic gestures, from self-reflexively pointing out film history, revelling in their own virtuosic artifice, or sharing humorous asides to the viewer (“Oh, I wish there was a keyhole that I could look through!” mocks the narrator of Brand as Sis closes the door on us). Maddin’s intertitles announce their own hyperbole through bold type and exclamation points, or compound what his presentation of the body already shows: a small insert of Veronica’s pensive face appears in Cowards as the intertitles tell us that she is “waiting.” Peppered into the delirious editing and constantly moving shots (extreme close-ups, zooms, the vertiginous fragmentation and repetition of images, sudden jump-cuts, elliptical editing, alternating temporal speeds) that are quintessential Maddin, scenes can work as a suspended deictic moment that quell the frantic pace. Consider the memorable “frontal” displays

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in Cowards: its inserts of a half-naked Meta in the snow, holding her father’s severed, blue-stained hands (stained from his “lovely hair-dyes”) out to us; or the triptych presentation of Guy and Veronica, sandwiched between images of the hockey players, calling our attention to their slow gestures amidst the kinetic energy of the game. Similarly, Maddin will often introduce his characters to us through a frontal display of their body/face, or emphasize their direct looks out at the camera. In Brand, the adult Guy repeatedly turns from painting the wall of the lighthouse to move his facial profile out to the camera—as if hoping to catch one of his phantoms in our space, before they suddenly flit away. Maddin’s deixis not only greets us “by means of words or form”; it creates the impression of an embodied permeability between on- and off-screen space, between the aesthetic and experiential planes. Gesture, movement, and bodily bearing all “point” to the interiority of feeling and function as demonstrative revelations of the emotions as they are corporeally exhibited on the surface. The bodily expression of emotion is also a type of deixis, an indicative gesture that is shared between bodies, whether that be in terms of one body encountering another in the world or the density of our own flesh as it meets that of the cinema. Interestingly, in the one essay he devoted to film, Merleau-Ponty argues that, just as emotions cannot be confined to “inner realities” for us, neither can they be so delimited in the cinema. For “the movies… dizziness, pleasure, grief, love, and hate are ways of behaving,” he astutely writes, indicating how cinema channels the sensuality of meaning into its own expressive attitude and purposeful movements.75 In this respect, I consider it noteworthy how Bal and Stewart are careful to emphasize the fact that deixis occurs in more than singularly visual terms. According to Bal, deixis indicates how we come to feel ourselves inhabit space; similarly, Stewart insists that deixis connotes more than a visual dimension, as it involves our apprehension by “touch or motion.”76 The feeling of deixis needs to be placed “within,” “on,” or “at” the site of the body which includes its “proprioceptive basis… the muscular system as well as the space around the body, the space within which it ‘fits’ as within a skin.”77 In terms of Maddin, then, we need to consider how sensual significance is not confined to his on-screen characters—that gestural displays of emotion belong to the expressive qualities of the films themselves. For instance, Cowards conveys tangible panic/fear when Veronica enters the Black Silhouette, as evident in the claustrophobic, darting movements of the camera as it focuses on the buzzing actions of the salon; a sense of spatial disorientation continues

28 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES through the blurred depictions of Veronica’s terrified face alongside images of hands hoisting her onto the abortion table and ominous inserts of Dr. Fusi readying his surgical tools. In Brand, the film switches from stealthy, quiet movements as Wendy/Chance investigates the heads of the orphans into a visible start of shock as it focuses on the nectar-hole in the back of Sis’s neck with a sudden close-up. The act of becoming “smitten” with another is also emotively conveyed through the film’s attention to detail that occurs upon first meeting Wendy: it alternates between young Guy’s rapturous, upturned face and a minutiae of detailing, as if lingering over a lover’s body. The inserts of Wendy’s hands on the harp, her smiling face, her mouth, her eyes, all express the “profound joy” of falling in love, as young Guy’s “loneliness and fear dissolve into the music.” Even the disjointed, internal tides of remembrance that are the film’s main focus—of “Guy Maddin… swirling around in his little dreams, his little memories”—are sensuously expressed in the repeat imagery and sounds of the island’s lashing waves, as is a sense of mourning and loss in repeated, stark silhouettes of adult Guy alone on the Black Notch beach. The constant dissolves of images between past and present and the gestural swirl of Guy’s paintbrush on the lighthouse wall echo the cadence and rhythm of Brand itself, as if the film were racing to keep up with the stops and starts of the flow of subjective memory. In the movements, gestures, and comportments of his films, Maddin’s presentational display of emotion solicits a carnal density of meaning that we pre-reflectively recognize and respond to in kind. For Stewart, deixis resonates with any presentational or face-to-face aesthetic—where we attend to the specific “time and space of apprehension, the mutuality, reciprocity, or nonreciprocity of relations between positions and perspectives.”78 In this light, deixis is wedded to the experiential “thisness” of any artwork, emerging in space and time and through its relations between bodies.79 Deixis is highly appropriate, then, for gauging the “profound sense of intimacy and affect” that stems from face-to-face forms: the “now” of their address, the “here” of the space in which that occurs, the “I” of the speaker/film, and the “you” of the listener/viewer.80 And it is that sensuous correlation or yoking together of bodies—the inside and the outside of the aesthetic experience—that is the hallmark of the baroque, in its spatial organization and affective impact. Indeed, as Zamora so aptly observes, the highly “theatrical personages in [b]aroque art and sculpture… reach out towards the viewer with gestures that seem to represent [a] desire for connection and continuity” with the beholder.8 In its face-to-face address, its

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pointed gestures, and its presentational sensuality, the baroque correlates the “inside” of its aesthetic plane with the “outside” experiential plane, merging real and fictive space to incorporate the beholder as “an active participant in the spatial-psychological field of the work of art” at the level of the body.82 This heightened continuum is what Martin calls the effect of “co-extensive space” in the historic baroque age, what Angela Ndalianis refers to as the perceptual “collapse of the representational frame” in her discussion of neo-baroque film/media, and what I invoke as the feeling of deixis in the cinema of Guy Maddin.83

Guy’s Remembrance: “The Past! The Past!” For Maddin, the events of the past are unreachable, trapped behind the peepholes of time and encased in a silent-movie past, decades thick. And yet, the past is not wholly confined to a fixed temporal juncture; rather, it continues to ricochet within the present in the affective throws of remembrance, both personal and filmic. Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! might not look to the divine sagas of the historic baroque, yet they reveal a profoundly baroque interest in bringing the “abstractions” of interior feeling or subjective memory into a sensuous relation with the beholder. As such, Maddin’s cinema demands a suitably baroque and ambient aesthetics of embodiment—one in which feeling is not limited to hidden, interior depths, but displayed upon the expressive surface of body and film, for physicality occurs both on-screen and off. Attending to the sensual significance of Maddin’s cinema means recognizing a correlative relationship between film and viewer, the many ways in which “the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies,” as Vivian Sobchack elegantly reasons, for “in order for us to understand movies figurally, we first make literal sense of them.”84 Conjoining wrecking ball and feather, affect and artifice, surface and depth, the inside and the outside, the baroque cinema of Guy Maddin addresses our feeling flesh. His are deictic gestures to which our bodies decisively respond.

Notes . Timothy Hampton, “Introduction: Baroques,” Yale French Studies 80 (99): 2. 2. All these theorists address the baroque as a transhistoric/transnational concept in which its aesthetic tropes recur or contemporary culture can recall the perceptual, aesthetic, and philosophical modalities that were typified by the seventeenth century.

220 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES 3. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 82. 4. For a gloss on the range of directors/films labelled baroque, see Ndalianis, NeoBaroque, 9–0. 5. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 50. My Winnipeg (2007), a quasi-documentary of Maddin’s hometown, closes the trilogy. 6. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 999), 38. 7. This film spurred a virtual sub-genre of horror in its own right, in the story of a set of murderous hands that are grafted onto the arms of an innocent man and assume a life of their own. Ruth Goldberg suggests that the origins of its possessed hands lie in “The Tale of the Three Army Surgeons,” a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Maddin has also remarked on his love of silent melodrama, German expressionism, and the silent horror films of Lon Chaney/Tod Browning in their connections to macabre fairy tales: “I like those old Lon Chaney movies… I love melodrama, but I also like fairy tales. They’re all kissing cousins.” See Ruth Goldberg, “Of mad love, alien hands, and the film under your skin,” Kinoeye 2, 4 (2002), http://www. kinoeye.org/02/04/goldberg04.php; and Guy Maddin, interview by William Beard, “Conversations with Guy Maddin,” 9– August 2005, http://iceberg.arts.ualberta. ca/filmstudies/Maddin%2005%20interview.html; reprinted in this volume (254). 8. The Unknown (Tod Browning, 927) provides an obvious source of inspiration for the film’s real, attempted, and imagined amputation of hands. Lon Chaney plays a criminal posing as an armless knife-thrower in a gypsy circus, who later volunteers to have his arms surgically amputated because the woman he loves cannot bear to be touched. 9. Guy Maddin, interview by David Church, “Dissecting the Branded Brain: An Interview with Guy Maddin,” Offscreen 0,  (January 2006), http://www.offscreen. com/biblio/phile/essays/branded_brain. 0. Maddin is known for repeatedly telling stories about himself and his family. Cowards retreads the settings of his childhood, such as the Winnipeg Arena, where his father, Chas (also the name of Meta’s father), managed the local ice-hockey team; the beauty parlour (Lil’s Beauty Shop) where his mother and aunt worked is reprised as the Black Silhouette Salon (beauty parlour by day, bordello by night), run by Liliom. In terms of Brand, Maddin had once worked as a house painter, while the tensions between Mother and Sis were inspired by quarrels between his mother and teenage sister. See Maddin, interviewed in “Dissecting the Branded Brain”; and David Church, “Ode to a Nectarite Harvest: On Brand Upon the Brain!” Bright Lights Film Journal 58 (2007), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/58/58brain. html. . John Rupert Martin, Baroque (London: A. Lane, 977), 3. 2. Ibid., 54. 3. Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 30 and 35. 4. Ibid., 30–3. 5. Martin, Baroque, 54 and 04. 6. Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 30.

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7. Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London: Continuum, 2004), 29. The baroque is often associated with sensations of dizziness or vertigo. According to Deleuze, it falls “prey to the giddiness of minute perceptions… reach[ing] presence in illusion, in vanishment, in swooning, or by converting illusion into presence.” See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 993), 25. 8. Steven Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!,” The Pinocchio Theory, http://www.shaviro. com/Blog/?p=589. 9. Steven Shaviro, “Guy Maddin,” The Pinocchio Theory, http://www.shaviro.com/ Blog/?p=307. 20. Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!” 2. Ibid. 22. Steven Shaviro, “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin,” in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 980, eds. William Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 27; reprinted in this volume (72). 23. Ibid., 27; Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!” 24. Maddin, interviewed in “Dissecting the Branded Brain.” 25. Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 46. For further information on the literary tradition of the “baroque conceit,” specifically in relation to Cuban writers such as Alejo Carpentier or the poet Octavio Paz, see Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 46–47. 26. Ibid., 47. 27. Maddin himself has intimated as much, claiming that “I can’t even define irony. I just know it’s used as a distancing device in films. I’m careful not to be too distant.” See Maddin, interviewed in “Conversations with Guy Maddin.” 28. Shaviro, “Fire and Ice,” 27. 29. Ibid., 27; Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!” 30. Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!” 3. Erwin Panofsky, “What is Baroque?” in Erwin Panofsky: Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 995), 75. 32. Ibid., 45. 33. Ibid., 75. 34. Maddin alludes to not only silent cinema but its transition into sound, where the first adaptations to sound yielded a jarring mix between visual fluidity and scenes of scratchy dialogue. See Darren O’Donoghue, “Particles of Illusion: Guy Maddin and his Precursors,” Senses of Cinema 32 (2004), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/04/32/guy_maddin_precursors.html. 35. Shaviro, “Fire and Ice,” 28; Jason Woloski, “Guy Maddin,” Senses of Cinema (2003), http://www.sensesof cinema.com/contents/directors/o3/maddin.html. 36. On the connections between Maddin and melodrama, see Shaviro, “Fire and Ice,” 26–27; and William Beard, “Maddin and Melodrama,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 4, 2 (2005): 2–7; reprinted in this volume (72 and 79–95, respectively). 37. Shaviro, “Fire and Ice,” 28. 38. Woloski, “Guy Maddin.” 39. Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York: New Press, 2004), 3 and 40.

222 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES 40. Ibid., 3. 4. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dove, 932), 27 and 38. 42. Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 73; Wölfflin, Principles, 62; Martin, Baroque, 48–50. 43. Deleuze, The Fold, 3 and 34–35; Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 267. In the baroque age, mastering drapery/folds was a necessary stage in the artist’s apprenticeship. It was considered to be a form of technical/artistic virtuosity in the rendering of light, shade, movement, and texture, and “allied to the study of nature, but a composed nature, an artificial nature, as it were,” yet another instance of the affective artifice that typifies the baroque (see Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 267). 44. Deleuze, The Fold, 5; italics added. 45. Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 255. 46. Shaviro, “Brand Upon the Brain!” 47. Ibid. On the primary location of emotion within Maddin’s characters, see Woloski; on the figurative sensuality of melodrama, see Beard, “Maddin and Melodrama”; and on the tensions between kitsch/irony and affective sincerity in Maddin, see Adam Hart, “The Private Guy Maddin,” Senses of Cinema 32 (2004), http://www. sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/32/guy_maddin_private.html. 48. Susan Cataldi, Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space (Albany: State University of New York Press, 993), 28. 49. Elena del Río, “Between Brecht and Artaud: Choreographing Affect in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 3, 2 (2005): 68. 50. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 992), 4. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge Classics, 2004), xx–xxi. 52. Yvette Biró, quoted in Vivian Sobchack, “The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 2, 3 (990): 22; italics added. 53. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso Press, 998), 83. 54. Martin, Baroque, 3 and 73. For a gloss on the subject of the “passions” as a psychology of the soul in relation to the baroque, see Martin, Baroque, 73–8. 55. Ibid., 32. 56. Ibid., 73. The historic baroque is considered to be the privileged age of portraiture— of Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Velázquez, where gesture, vehement facial expression, and the frontality of the body endow the image with a powerful sense of physical presence (see Martin, Baroque, 9). 57. Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 27. 58. See the interview “Conversations with Guy Maddin.” In said interview, Maddin discusses how the images of hands crowding this film were inspired by watching the Royal Winnipeg Ballet dancers and silent cinema, where physical gesture can be more “visible than facial features… you’ve got to use every fibre of your body” to convey feeling.

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59. Obviously, the act of externalizing emotion through body and setting belongs to a number of longstanding traditions that have come to inform Maddin, including nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, silent cinema, German expressionism, opera, pantomime, and dance. This essay, however, concentrates on the baroque implications of the filmmaker. See Beard, “Maddin and Melodrama,” for a summation of the range of influences on Maddin. 60. Lotte Eisner, quoted in Goldberg, “Of mad love”; italics added. 6. Maddin, interviewed in “Conversations with Guy Maddin.” 62. Goldberg, “Of mad love”; italics in original. 63. Ibid. 64. Crippled or horrific markings upon the exterior of the body are the well-worn traits of “Brothers Grimm, Lon Chaney, Tod Browning country… outward injury is the visible artifact of some sort of emotional injury…a real old melodramatic device,” according to Maddin, interviewed in “Dissecting the Branded Brain.” 65. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 26; italics added. 66. Cataldi, Emotion, 92–94. 67. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology” in Sense and NonSense, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 964), 52–53. 68. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 26. 69. Ibid., 25; italics added. 70. Ibid., 24; italics in original. 7. Cataldi, Emotion, 93–94. 72. Stewart, Poetry, 50; Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 5–53. 73. In her bodily conception of deixis, Bal cites how “baroque artworks place the depicted scene in the viewer’s presence,” and that these “deictic images” demand a bodily and spatially grounded semiotics, without the reductive detour of language (52). 74. Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 52. 75. Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” 58; italics added. 76. Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 5; Stewart, Poetry, 50. 77. Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 52. 78. Stewart, Poetry, 56. 79. Ibid., 54. 80. Ibid., 46–54. 8. Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 255. 82. Martin, Baroque, 4. 83. Martin, Baroque, 55; Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque, 52. 84. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 59–60; italics in original.

“I’M NOT AN AMERICAN, I’M A NYMPHOMANIAC”: PERVERTING THE NATION IN GUY MADDIN’S THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

lee easton and kelly hewson

“It’s set in Winnipeg.” “The contestants slide into a vat of beer.” “There’s a hockey game and the requisite ice and snow.” “One of the actors is from Kids in the Hall.” “The Canadian entry in the contest is lame.” It is hardly news to film scholars that the question of what constitutes a national cinema is a perplexing and well-documented one. When in the position, as we were, of teaching separate sections of an introductory film course with an obligatory “national” segment, Kelly selected a film which she hoped would complicate the relationship between film and nation and unsettle those viewing habits which drive many of us to extract some national essence out of a cinematic product. As the comments comprising the epigraph indicate, those viewing habits are hard to break. The initial responses of Kelly’s students to Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (2003) referred to familiar signifiers of “Canada”: a city within it; its drinking and sporting preferences; the weather; a comedy troupe who became famous outside the nation; and that hackneyed but lingering sentiment regarding the inferiority of our

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cultural products. Lee meanwhile used the film as a way to highlight the compendium of film techniques from which Maddin draws to tell his story. The Saddest Music in the World got the penultimate slot in his fourteen-week course, and on their response exercises, his students astutely noted the following: the director’s allusions to Nanook of the North (922) and National Film Board documentaries, his use of iris shots, and the mobilization of German expressionist techniques. While we felt Maddin’s film reflected our particular aims in our individual sections of the film course effectively, both of us were intrigued by the effluence of questions it raised. Why, for instance, was the film so overtly Freudian in a postmodern world? Surely the filmmaker wasn’t just playing with Oedipus for lack of better models; Canadian literature and film are replete with them. Further, why does Maddin deploy the tropes of nation only to undercut them with parody? Indeed, satire and laughter are central ways that writers have come to grips with their lives in a difficult geography, but Maddin’s approach opens up more than a discussion about Winnipeg’s notoriously difficult winters. Reflecting on these questions, we realized that neither we nor our students had recognized the provocative effects of Maddin’s ironic treatment of those signifiers of nation. Some student research uncovered an interview in which Maddin declared Canadians “crappy mythologizers,” so we understood him to be indicating the limits of the familiar, serviceable, but ultimately uninspiring nation-identifying myths we were so quick to recognize.2 And we all agreed The Saddest Music in the World challenges simplistic notions of “nation” through its slightly absurd premise—that any one “nation” possesses the capacity to produce the saddest music in the world. But what took a while to sink in was how intimately linked this challenge was to the familial story at the film’s core. Although we concur with David Church’s assertion that Maddin’s focus on generational conflict in The Saddest Music in the World allows him to examine “the ways in which Canadian national identity is shaped, often in opposition to an American identity built upon capitalism and imperialism,”3 we want to argue further that Maddin’s work tends on one hand to provide what he believes Canadians most lack—a worthy national mythos—while on the other hand questioning the very foundations—nation, white masculinity, and heterosexuality—upon which such a mythos might be based. To be sure, such a doubled approach can be positioned as postmodern, in that it both asserts and questions fixed notions, but Jason Morgan’s concept of “perversion chic,” drawing on work by Kaja Silverman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is a

226 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES better fit. Morgan aligns perversion (carefully, and with reservations) with queer theory and holds that perversion “allegorizes and displaces difference within hegemony, thus working paradoxically to uphold and undermine the discursive foundations of the nation.”4 More importantly and central to our concerns, perversion aligns (albeit uneasily) with queer theory’s focus on the unsettling power of sex and sexuality. The Saddest Music in the World, we contend, illustrates Maddin’s perverse vision. So, like Church, we focus on the Kent family and its various relationships to national identities, but we start our inquiry with the observation by queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner that “heterosexual culture achieves much of its metacultural intelligibility through the ideologies of intimacy”5 and, in particular, their point that a complex set of sexual practices “get confused in heterosexual culture with the love plot of intimacy and familialism that signifies belonging to a society in a deep and normal way.”6 Moreover, as M. Jacqui Alexander has shown in relation to some Caribbean nations, “the archetypal source of state legitimation is anchored in the heterosexual family, the form of family crucial in the state’s view to the founding of the nation.”7 While The Saddest Music in the World does offer the image of the heterosexual nuclear family as an ideal, it is also the constructed intelligibility of that heterosexual nuclear family and the national belonging it presumably engenders that Maddin undermines and problematizes. Through his rendering of the Oedipal drama between Chester and his father Fyodor, a drama that is damaging to Helen, who loses her legs to its plot, Maddin shows its deadly consequences for men and the women over whose bodies men fight.8 As a counter to the Oedipal narrative, we examine two women in the film whose roles have been largely neglected in favour of interpreting the struggles of Chester Kent. Both Narcissa and Lady Port-Huntley (and especially her beer legs) offer important correctives to and criticisms of heterosexuality, white masculinities, and the idea of nation they produce. Seen from this perspective, Maddin’s idiosyncratic blending of genres and film styles is an important feature of his work. As David Pike astutely notes, similar to other Canadian filmmakers, Maddin “promiscuously blend[s] popular genres without regard for a unified form,” but crucially, his films are “neither parodic nor straight” (italics added).9 The result is a film that, among other things, complicates the relationships not only between film and nation but between nation and family, relationships produced through intersecting structures of gender and (hetero)sexuality.

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Family, Nation, and Heterosexuality: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” We do not mean that national heterosexuality is anything like a simple monoculture. Hegemonies are nothing if not elastic alliances, involving dispersed and contradictory strategies for self-maintenance and reproduction. —Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner0 Through a series of flashbacks Maddin portrays an idealized Edwardian family playing beautiful music together for the mother’s enjoyment. This originary moment of the film’s action is crucial. In these vignettes, we see the figures of Fyodor Kent and his wife as exemplars of what Michel Foucault regards as the role of the heterosexual couple in Victorian culture: “The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak.” Chester’s memories of his familial patterns of intimacy remind us that by the 920s the relationship between heterosexuality and family had been forged. John D’Emilio writes, “among the white middle class, the ideology surrounding the family described it as the means through which men and women formed satisfying, mutually enhancing relationships and created an environment that nurtured children. The family became the setting for a ‘personal life,’ sharply distinguished and disconnected from the public world of work and production.”2 Elsewhere, Mary Louise Adams outlines how this shift to the nuclear family was accompanied by the notion of “companionate marriages, opposite-sex unions based on emotional intimacy and sexual satisfaction for both genders.”3 Roderick’s marriage to Narcissa reflects and underscores the ideal of the heterosexual family as the source of mutually satisfying relationships. However, a mother’s and a child’s sudden death disrupts the family idylls, shattering these memories of apparent perfection. Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia helps explain how each man, through a depressive reaction, deals with the mother’s loss. But Maddin extends Freud to suggest that the men’s adoption of national identities acts as a source of repair. In the lead-up to the saddest music in the world competition, for instance, Chester declares himself America’s representative. Meanwhile Fyodor Kent arrives at Lady Port-Huntley’s boardroom-cum-boudoir decked out in early Canadian

228 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES army attire and begs her to let him represent Canada. And Roderick, like many Canadians with a “world” of ethnicities from which to draw, assumes the Serbian identity of Gavrillo the Great, whose sadness is captured in the emblematic widow’s veil he wears over his face. When mother is gone, it seems, a motherland becomes a source of selfhood and sustenance. While Maddin suggests that love of country might (inadequately) substitute for maternal love, the provocative positioning of Lady Helen Port-Huntley’s musical contest as both an allegory of national identity and a replay of the family romance questions the efficacy of this arrangement. The perversity of the contest is established quickly when Chester gains admittance to talk to Helen and she defiantly recounts the story of how she lost her legs to Fyodor’s drunken attempts to rescue her from the car accident. This retelling of the “accident,” which can be psychoanalytically construed as Fyodor’s symbolic castration of Helen as a warning to Chester for encroaching on the father’s woman, is followed quickly by the scene where Chester and Fyodor renew their rivalry for Helen’s love. As noted above, this competition is now cast in terms of nation: Chester performs the American; Fyodor is the Canadian; and Lady Helen Port-Huntley is ambiguous, although her name suggests British aristocracy. All three are, to use Morgan’s term, perverse figures because they cannot be kept to one singular identity: Chester is actually Canadian and Fyodor is originally Serbian.4 The crypto-British Helen Port-Huntley speaks with a “foreign” accent, and while she is framed at one point in the film as the Statue of Liberty, she is living in Canada and owns a Canadian beer company that plans to make its fortune by selling liquor to Americans after Prohibition.5 In terms of identity, these characters are fluid, non-essential, and performative, all of which are very queer things indeed. By mixing the tropes of nation and family romance, Maddin puts the institution of heterosexuality, along with the forms of gender and national identity it produces, at the centre of his perverse vision. In Freud’s version of the Oedipal narrative, the boy resolves his Oedipal desire for the mother by repressing that desire, identifying with the father and taking another (safer) woman as a love object. But Chester does neither: he repudiates the Law of the (Canadian) Father and chooses a new identity as an American, a national identity his father detests. Moreover, when Chester returns to Canada, he replays the scenario, choosing this time to bed a woman claimed by his brother, the amnesiac Narcissa. In terms of the two lead male characters, Maddin’s film suggests that both Chester and Fyodor ultimately embody

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faux-Canadian identities, whose apparent solidity is belied by emptiness at the core. Chester’s identity is based on American hucksterism and Fyodor’s on a hyper-patriotism incurred through imperialist and nationalist wars. Both options seem to be identities taken on by numbed Canadians who have lost the empire family from which they were born and which they nostalgically and incestuously seek to recreate. Nostalgic attempts to regain this heteropatriarchal structure lead to repetition compulsions which always injure the woman who is caught in the middle of the Oedipal fight. Significantly, only Roderick, the cross-dressing Gavrillo the Great, escapes the destruction and experiences reconciliation with his lost wife. The key to this reconciliation is Roderick’s acceptance of sadness, a recognition of the loss of a perfect family life, and, not incidentally, his inverting of gender norms. Finally, there is another level of critique here. Chester’s death and indeed the fire at the film’s conclusion suggest that Maddin’s film is also a critique of heteropatriarchy, the complex set of practices and structures that privilege heterosexuality and the patriarchal family on which the construction of nation rests. The film suggests that as long as we remain connected to the immature fixation with things American while attempting to impress Mother England, attempts to provide a suitable Canadian mythos are doomed to endless repetition. The new heterosexual family, the film implies, will be one based on the queer of the world—cross-gender dressed, nymphomaniac, disabled—fleeing the fires of capitalism, imperialism, and Oedipal rage.

Unsettling National Identity: “I’m NOT an American, I’m a nymphomaniac.” Nymphomania—noun; an “abnormal excess desire” which is specific to a female. If the primary male characters are unworthy models for a national identity, where then does Maddin posit a more positive alternative conception of nation and concomitant supporting forms of identity? Consider Narcissa’s arresting statement to Fyodor Kent upon boarding a trolley car he’s driving: “I’m not an American, I’m a nymphomaniac.” What appears as a quick throwaway line of humorous dialogue is, upon inspection, far more complicated. For example, while her disclaimer connects to Kent’s nationalist identity and perspective—it is Narcissa’s claim that she is not American, after all, that is her passport onto the trolley car—her casual declaration also positions her implicitly in ways that many Canadians often identify themselves—as not

230 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES American. This Kent recognizes. After all, it affirms his hyper-nationalist construction of identity that appears derived as much from anti-American habits as it is from his experience in the battles of World War I. Generally considered to have performed a consolidating function, these Canadian battles separated us from the British and culminated in Canada taking its prideful place on the world stage at Versailles. As long as Narcissa does not have “the stink of an American,” she is let on the trolley car. Ironically, though, Kent doesn’t recognize that Narcissa’s statement claims an identity premised on excessive, promiscuous, and disruptive female desire rather than geography, politics, or history. Her self-identification as a nymphomaniac draws attention to a term with an uncanny connection to gender, desire, and nation. Although nominally history-less because of her trauma-induced amnesia, Narcissa nevertheless embodies a condition with a rich and pejorative history. Nymphomania as a term denotes abnormal or excessive female desires that fall outside the norms of acceptable passion. Initially, symptoms included excessive masturbation or desires for sex beyond those normally ascribed to men. Nymphomania was thought the product of physical defects, but by the end of the nineteenth century, concurrent with other shifts in understanding sexuality, “nymphomania came to be seen as a personal, but still physical, trait rather than a defect of the reproductive organs. Instead of ‘having’ nymphomania, one ‘was’ one.”6 In short, Narcissa’s declaration reminds us of the shift in the later 800s that increasingly viewed sexual acts as a sign of a specific kind of person—a “species” in Foucault’s terms.7 Later, Freudian theories offered new guises for the nymphomaniac— the hypersexual working girl (immigrant and native working class) and the masculinized “new woman.”8 In declaring herself a nymphomaniac, then, Narcissa lays ironic claim to her immigrant Serbian identity and her supposed hypersexual appetite. In doing so, she draws attention to the hierarchy that privileges monogamous reproductive heterosexual sex and a “normal” sexual female appetite. She places herself on the outer limits of Gayle Rubin’s “charmed circle of sex.”9 In so doing, she takes up what is typically considered a perverse subject position and infuses it with power and mobility. And yet, having declared herself a subject of a boundary-less queer nation, Narcissa makes equal claim, at least metonymically, to a Canadian origin. In an uncanny coincidence that perhaps Fyodor unconsciously intuits when he accepts Narcissa’s declaration, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term “nymphomania” emerges in 867, the year “Canada” is born, politically

“I’m Not an American, I’m a Nymphomaniac” 23

at least, in a voluntary confederation of ex-centric colonies. What to make of such a coincidence? At first blush, Maddin seems intent on reminding viewers that Winnipeg, where the movie is set, and Canada are indeed at the outer limits, not only of desire but of geography. The conceit that dolorous Winnipeg could in the dirty thirties host an international contest of the scope Lady Port-Huntley intends is both an excessively defiant statement of identity and a joke of grandiose proportions. In Maddin’s mythos, Canada is like the nymphomaniac: excessive, abnormal, and hypersexual, best personified by the immigrant and native working classes and the new woman, Lady Port-Huntley. Maddin presses on. That no one, either in our classes or in our review of criticism on the film, saw Maddin’s veritable parade of ex-centrics—a Canadian masquerading as a Serbian, cross-dressed in a widow’s veil and hat to signal his state of mourning for his dead child and lost spouse; an amnesiac who takes counsel from her tapeworm; a double amputee with a bad wig who keeps her boy toy at her side to “service” her upon request—as remarkable speaks precisely to the way that heterosexual culture has naturalized and normalized its provisional alliances.20 Certainly the fact that the parade wasn’t seen as odd is a result of Maddin’s success in establishing a surreal world where anything is expected. Still, these perverse figures whose appearances defy reading their specific identity in any one way directs our spectating towards the queer—with viewers oscillating as much as some of the characters do. The film’s focus on the margins of sexuality works to unpack the myth of a seamless heterosexual monoculture and the ideas of nation that it supports. The fact that many of us missed this in our first viewing is not so much a fault as a symptom of the problems that confront any critical approach that wants to go beyond the specific concept of nation, especially when that nation, as we have identified, is so connected to heterosexual norms of intimacy and family.

Lady Port-Huntley “Bessie, what’s a nympho—a nympho-something?” asked Jenny. “That’s somebody,” offered Agnes, “who’s built like a man and a woman at the same time.” “No; that’s a ‘morphodike,’” said Bessie. —Oxford English Dictionary2

232 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES An amputee, a sex kitten, a high-functioning businesswoman—a stark contrast to the passive figure of mére Kent. Cold, sad, calculating yet vulnerable, Lady Port-Huntley is a complicated and powerful figure within the film, a fact Maddin visually iterates at the outset of the competition with a shot that places her in the centre of a web. Damaged physically by the Oedipal rivalry, Lady Port-Huntley has been “accidentally” disabled by Dr. Kent. According to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, the disabled body and the female body are both considered “abnormal” within patriarchal able-bodied society.22 (It is patriarchal power, after all, only slightly diluted by Kent’s alcoholism, that precipitates the botched amputation which leaves Helen legless, and, one would typically assume, disempowered.) But in another perverse twist, Maddin portrays the “disabled,” “in-between,” scandalous body as more potent than any: in no way is Lady Port-Huntley’s sexuality or industry compromised by her physical incapacity. Even before she dons her newfound legs, Port-Huntley’s life as a double amputee does not quell her desire. In her supposedly castrated state, she becomes even more phallic. In a blatant example of sexual harassment, for example, her assistant Teddy, who has a wife and two beautiful children but whose job it is to make Lady Port-Huntley “sing in the seesaw whenever [she] asks him… just to keep his job,” is kept in his robe (often a sign of homosexuality in 950s movies), ready to service her in addition to the paid work he does. Indeed, her aggressive sexual desires remind us of Jonathan Ned Katz’s contention that “heterosexual” as a term initially named a person who had excessive desire for the opposite sex.23 As is evident from the foregoing, Lady Port-Huntley is, for all intents and purposes, the masculinized new woman that Freudian theory identified as a nymphomaniac.24 In another uncanny coincidence, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “nymphomaniac” links it with a neologism, “morphodike,” a term the author suggests denotes a person who is “built like a man and a woman at the same time,” or as we might say today, an intersexed subject. And Port-Huntley is nothing if not like a man and woman at the same time. Shot like Lady Marlene in her man/woman phase, she becomes, visually, a “morphodike.” Interestingly, Maddin refers to Isabella Rossellini’s acting capabilities this uncanny way: “Every now and then she morphs into her mother [Ingrid Bergman] and she drags [emphasis added] behind decades of film history as well.”25 Rossellini and the character she embodies shift the gender relations of institutionalized heterosexuality, “performing” masculinity on several fronts. Lady Port-Huntley not only owns the brewery and sells

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the beer, she governs the extra-domestic resources and labour by sponsoring the contest and employing manservants and an orchestra. Significantly, the morphodike can imply the shifting nature of desire between same and opposite sexes. In a giddily grotesque yet delicate attempt at repair and repentance, Dr. Kent presents Helen with his special prosthetics—a pair of glass legs filled with beer. The fullness of Maddin’s perversity is on offer here. On one hand, Helen owes her newfound mobility to a man, but she is now free of Teddy (and he of her). Consider too the already problematic question of her national identity. Swathed like the Statue of Liberty, Lady Port-Huntley is also now “filled” with the quintessential Canadian signifier, beer, but beer produced from the brewery she owns, into which the contestants must slide. But if beer is the quintessential symbol for “Canadian,” it is equally connected to masculinity and heterosexuality (not to mention homosociality). Those beer ads that run on hockey nights are particular inscriptions of Canadian white masculinity whose heterosexuality is guaranteed by the presence of women. Insofar as Lady Port-Huntley represents the national body and is now, with her glass legs, beer incarnate, there is no longer containment. Trans-figured into a subject who resists any one reading, her scandalous beer-legged body defies the binaries of Canadian/American, man/woman, hetero/homo, abled/disabled. She is both and neither. For a short moment, Helen Port-Huntley, the morphodike, becomes monstrous and must be defeated, if not destroyed.

Genre and Gender: “It’s all in the details!” While it is possible to leave this analysis at the level of narrative tropes, Maddin’s style and characteristic borrowing from wildly different film genres and styles is central to the perverse tale we have so far told. Maddin characteristically attends to filmic details both big and small, pushes them to the limit and sometimes over the top. His style draws upon what he himself calls “primitivism,” a deliberate return to the early techniques and narratives of cinema, not surprising for an artist whose goal appears to be, at least in The Saddest Music in the World, to provide a counter-narrative of Canada’s birth as a nation. For example, the liberal intercuts of mock documentary footage of Americans listening in Plattsburg, Ohio, to the saddest music contest on radio, the shots of a Winnipeg pub filled with working-class folks, or cutaways to cheering throngs of spectators invoke not only the heritage of John Grierson’s National Film Board documentaries so central to Canadian film but

234 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES the whole tradition of newsreels. Characteristically, these images assert their Canadian-ness while at the same time critique them through parody, a move which aligns Maddin with other Canadian filmmakers who have attempted to subvert and rewrite the dominant white and heteronormative history of Canadian film. Similarly, the couple who cavalierly comment on the contest as if they were cbc announcers earnestly assessing skaters’ triple Salchows and double lutzes alludes to another set of Canadian cultural practices around winter and ice. As the host burbles after we are told the Siamese flutist has blinded his birds to make them more poignant, “It’s all in the details!” It is not only in terms of style that Maddin engages in questioning the connections among nation, sexuality, and gender. Elsewhere, Maddin has been identified as a director who works through a “distanced but passionate appropriation” of American film genres.26 Nowhere is this more evident than in The Saddest Music in the World, where he draws on the American genres of melodrama and the musical. Although a genre for which Maddin has a particular fondness, melodrama here is significant in its connection to the themes of nation, family, and love. Just as Douglas Sirk’s melodramas of the 950s questioned and subverted the status quo of American race, gender, and class relations, Maddin similarly uses melodrama to shape his critique of existing Canadian national mythologies and to elucidate the dangers of the Freudian family romance. What is particularly interesting, however, is the conscious blurring and blending of genre and gender. Maddin’s positioning of men within melodrama, a genre film studies traditionally regards as female,27 inverts them and spectacularizes the Oedipal roots of nation and gender. Male melodrama, of course, exists in both comic books and World Wrestling Entertainment spectacles, but these use melodrama to heighten the phallic masculinity on offer in those media. In contrast, Maddin places the men in a feminized genre to heighten the very femininity that they fear and wish to destroy—see Fyodor’s parapraxis. Maddin, then, crosses gender and genre in this movie and does so in way that queers white heteromasculinity. As we noted earlier, it is only Roderick who outwardly if not inwardly accepts a masculine femininity. This perhaps explains what we felt was a surprising revelation: Maddin’s claim that The Saddest Music in the World is a musical, a genre deeply imbricated in the idea of the nation. As Jane Feuer argues, the musical is a utopic vision of the American nation that endeavours to give the viewer the sensation of what she suggests it would “feel like to be free.”28 This allegory of

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the American nation also works to interpellate (at least partially, as we have argued elsewhere29) the Canadian audience, which the us motion-picture industry considers a major component of its domestic market. This idealized community of the musical, however, excludes sexual others through its straight view of the world, even while it promotes heterosexuality as the route to freedom.30 The link to heterosexuality is important here for its connection to nation and gender identities: “The Hollywood musical hails or recruits spectators to take part in an American dream of courtship, marriage, and consumer culture. The plot usually concerns the white heterosexual couple— Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney—who perform the rituals of the imagined American community: the attraction of boy-girl opposites, their union in marriage, and their success as measured by their buying power in a consumer culture.”3 The key musical element in Maddin’s film is the contest, and while it does “recruit spectators to take part in the American dream of… consumer culture” with its 25,000 prize, it also does something else. Numerous commentators have identified and explored how the contest can be understood as an allegory of cultural imperialism, the exploitation of the so-called Third World by the First, and as symbolic of the greed of capitalism.32 We purport that the contest can also be understood as a social and economic space created for cosmopolitan spectacle. Much has been made of the casting of the musicians for Lady Port-Huntley’s contest, but it bears repeating here: Maddin cast his national musicians from actual groups who were in Winnipeg performing at a folk music festival. What this means is that the stereotypical quality of the national groups’ musical numbers is not as parodic as we might think, and/or the groups think they have to be parodic to distinguish and make a spectacle of themselves. But neither can they be considered as entirely authentic or real since they are presented in the imaginary of the musical. Moreover, in making all the nations of the world participate in the contest, Maddin refutes American claims to the musical as “its” genre.

Towards a Perverse Canadian Nation So what then do we make of Maddin’s work? First, its ironic and perverse style exaggerates the structures of family and nation to the limit that the institution of heterosexuality itself can be seen to be an excess. The perversity of the various familial conflicts, rooted in the Oedipal narrative, push the normalizing narratives of heterosexuality to the point where its absurdities and inadequacies become part of his critique. With the straight, Oedipally challenged,

236 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES able-bodied men destroyed in the collapse of the brewery at the film’s end, Maddin leaves us with an ex-centric trio of “alternative corporealities” often occluded or elided in the dominant heteronormative narratives of familial love and patterns of intimacy.33 When we turn our attention to the film’s excessive and perverted others—the nymphomaniac, the cross-dresser, and the morphodike—we note that they all escape. They have survived the fires of the Oedipal conflagration that has demolished the very stage of the saddest music in the world contest. The film’s melodramatic ending nevertheless allows viewers to imagine desires, bodies, energies, and stories that challenge traditionally bound heterosexual communities. This is then the second level of Maddin’s perversity: The Saddest Music in the World creates excesses that cannot be contained by the conventional symbols of nation that we and our students noted initially. On the contrary, the nymphomania, amnesia, melancholy, and melodrama that pervade the film—its excesses, so to speak—underline the banality of the Canadian mythos as it is stereotypically understood. Ironically, then, and in order to posit a more potent myth, Maddin creates not just a national “Canadian” film (although, admittedly, it is nationalist) but a post-national one in which past forms of nation and other possibilities of conceptualizing nation come together and collide.34 Aligned with the queer insistence on being here, and on being a nation, the post-national text resists, as Maddin’s film does, any easy conceptualization of nation.

Notes . Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction (New York: Routledge, 989), 99. 2. Guy Maddin, interview by Jeremy O’Kasick, “Canadian Cult Hero Guy Maddin: ‘I Have Plenty of Sadness in Reserve,’” indieWIRE, 7 February 2004, http://www. indiewire.com/people/people_04027maddin.html. 3. David Church, “Brief Notes on Canadian Identity in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World,” Offscreen 0,  (2006), http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/phile/ essay/saddest_music/. 4. Jason Morgan, “‘Do You Ever Get Tired of Being a Professional Faggot?’: Perversion Chic, Queer Nationalism, and English Canadian Cinema,” Confluence ,  (2000). 5. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public” in Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, eds. Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (New York: Blackwell, 2003), 72. These modes of familial intimacy are also intimately (!) connected to capitalism. As John D’Emilio noted some time ago, “ideologically, capitalism drives people into heterosexual families: each generation comes of age having internalized heterosexist models of intimacy and personal relationships”

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6. 7. 8.

9. 0. . 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 20. 2. 22.

(“Capitalism and Gay Identity” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin [New York: Routledge, 993], 480). Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 73. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (Autumn 994): 20. Dr. Fyodor Kent and Helen Port-Huntley were dating but she was also attracted to Chester, with whom she had sex at every occasion. Feeling cuckolded by Chester and Helen’s illicit relationship, Fyodor turned to drink and began to wear his Canadian army uniform. Driving home in an ice storm after a day out, Chester and Helen see Fyodor as he tries to stop them on the road. Helen, giving Chester oral sex, lifts her head so he fails to see his father in time and swerves to avoid hitting him. The car overturns, trapping Helen in the wreckage which rests on her left leg. Fyodor Kent, drunk but determined, takes out his medical bag and begins to cut Helen’s leg but in fact amputates the wrong one, necessitating the loss of both legs. David L. Pike, “Across the Great Divide: Canadian Popular Cinema in the 2st Century,” Bright Lights Film Journal 56 (2007), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/56/ canada.htm. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 72. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume : An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 980), 3. D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” 469. Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 997), 9. For further discussion of the connection between un-fixed identities and gaze theory, see Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, “The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing,” in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, eds. Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London: Routledge, 995), 3–56. This story is one that resonates in Canadian mythology regarding the allegations made toward several of Canada’s wealthiest families and the relationship between their wealth and liquor. See Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 990), or, if you prefer non-fiction, Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 975). Nancy M. Theriot, “Gender and Medicine in Nineteenth Century America,” NWSA Journal 5, 2 (2003): 47. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43. Theoriot, “Gender and Medicine,” 47. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 993), 3. See Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 72. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “nymphomaniac.” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 997).

238 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES 23. Adams, Trouble with Normal, 8. 24. Theoriot, “Gender and Medicine,” 47. 25. Skye Sherwin, “The Saddest Music in the World Interview,” BBC Collective, http:// www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A2608887. 26. Pike, “Across the Great Divide.” 27. Kenneth Mackinnon, “Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story,” Journal of Gender Studies 2, 3 (2003): 25–36. 28. Cited in Christopher Gittings, “Activism and Aesthetics: The Work of John Greyson,” in Great Canadian Film Directors, ed. George Melnyk (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007), 88. 29. Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson, “The Emergent and the Cosmopolitan: A Case Study of Student Responses to Haggis’s Crash and Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World,” delivered at the 32nd Annual Conference on Film and Literature at the University of Southern Florida, Tallahassee, January 2007. 30. Christopher Gittings, “Zero Patience, Genre, Difference, and Ideology: Singing and Dancing in the Queer Nation,” Cinema Journal 4, 4 (200): 30. 3. Ibid. 32. Representative commentary includes Church, “Brief Notes on Canadian Identity.” 33. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006). McRuer speaks in terms of “alternative corporealities.” 34. See Peter Dickenson, Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 999). As Dickenson notes, the postnational text “situates itself in a not-so-distant imperial past and an increasingly corporate future” (37).

CONVERSATIONS WITH GUY MADDIN

interview by william beard

The following text is excerpted from a series of discussions with Guy Maddin on 9– August 2005 at his home in Winnipeg. william beard: Can you trace back to why you feel you need to use degraded images, or why they are beautiful? guy maddin: I can’t remember the exact order of everything, but somewhere along the line, I started sitting in on these film classes taught by George [Toles] or my friend Steve [Snyder] or some other film professors. This was the prevideo days, and they were just showing degraded 6-mm prints that had usually been bootlegged by this guy. I never met him, but I just knew he was the man who bootlegged. Usually if you rented a movie from any legitimate place, you’d run it over to him to get it copied. So quite often what I was watching was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. beard: So you were actually into dupes of dupes? maddin: I didn’t know it was a copy of a copy of a copy. And sometimes a copy of something with scratches on it, or a copy of something with dirt on it that hadn’t been cleaned, so the dirt would really build up in layers. But since the movies themselves were so great, whenever I saw something that looked like

240 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES that, I would go, “This stands a better chance of looking great than something that just looks like a 982 movie.” It was simple. If something looked that way I’d go, “There’s a better chance of my enjoying this.” Pretty soon the condition of them became inseparable. A lot of times I enjoyed, as if seeing the movie for the first time, restored pictures. But just as often I’m horribly disappointed, if it’s restored, that the mystery is gone. All I’m seeing is someone mincing around in too much makeup. I really missed the occasional water spot or flicker, and I wanted to see a little less lipstick. (But believe me, I’ve put on lipstick myself.) It was just changing the mood; the dynamics of the movie were all upset. There was too much clarity, in a way. beard: I’m going to quote a little passage now from The Child Without Qualities [an unfilmed autobiographical treatment from Maddin’s book From the Atelier Tovar] where you talk about the Child’s affection for old, used toys. You even mention a bit about your toys being beaten up: What vigorous and loving play these toys and couches and radios had been submitted to before the child without qualities had entered the world. Now, as a result, a residue of better quality seemed to sit on everything in the deserted house. The house held a dormancy, a potential to divulge what it held for his family before. Every object in it was full and ready to discharge its payload of history. That’s beautiful, but also I want to connect it to your fondness for degraded images and the notion that maybe— maddin: Everything was already degraded in my world when I was born. My house…everything in it. beard: The notion that there was love involved there somewhere also, not just casual misuse. maddin: You have to assume that when a movie’s being watched, and therefore degraded, someone’s loved it. beard: Why would you dupe it if you didn’t want to make a copy of it because you loved it so much? maddin: I always assumed that all those movies, if they’re not loved now, at least were loved at one time. beard: The notion of degradation as a kind of love bruise.

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maddin: Yeah, that’s it. That they had been handled a lot before. beard: This raises for me the question of the Ur-text with respect to your films. Does a Guy Maddin film lose something, or is it actually better, if you make a dupe of it? maddin: I always say it’s better. beard: I don’t think it is, but I’m of the opposite school of thinking. You want the author’s degradation in there, as opposed to something that’s accidental. maddin: I remember the thrill that one of my movies got commercials. I was absolutely tickled. I think it was Tales from the Gimli Hospital. The cbc put it on and put some commercials in. And they were real paying sponsors, too. By the time Archangel made it on tv, they were just psas and rants for other cbc shows. One time I was even channel surfing and caught an old, degraded, black and white image—now, not all of Archangel is degraded, I wish it were—and I just went, “Oh, what’s this? That looks good. Oh, it’s my movie. No wonder it looks good.” There is a love bruise in the degradation, but I also see a lot of the stuff as some sort of doorway, some kind of obstacle to me enjoying or getting at the thing. When you’re watching an old Busby Berkeley movie, there’s something about the way those women are choreographed that’s kind of sloppy and loose, and it makes you feel like the women are loose. And they definitely are beautiful in a way that no one appreciates anymore. But you can’t get at them because they’re cavorting through a doorway that’s decades thick and you’re just looking at them through a keyhole. No matter how loose they are, they’re just not for you. With degradation, you’re looking at love things, but you just can’t go back in time and get them. *

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beard: What do you think about being put in a class with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers? maddin: I have to say that—and I guess most experimental films have this problem—I’m not experimenting. I had a bunch of things that I set out to accomplish and tried to do. I wasn’t just fucking around. beard: Experimental films are going to show in art galleries, cinematheques, or if they get very big, at little art houses. That has sort of been the main home for your films, at least until Saddest Music. But I don’t actually agree with that classification of your work as avant-garde and experimental. Maybe I have

242 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES too narrow a notion of the avant-garde or experimental filmmaker (e.g., Stan Brakhage or Michael Snow). I would say that you’re basically unclassifiable, which is maybe why they put you in that class. maddin: I’m strangely a populist. My favourite movies are movies that aren’t that accessible to everybody, but that’s because they’re not interested in watching old pictures. They’re movies that were nominated for Academy Awards in the thirties. I’m kind of a hoi polloi fella. But I’m very lucky to have found a niche for myself. Jim Hoberman described me as the most experimental mainstream filmmaker, or the most mainstream experimental filmmaker, depending on where your tastes are situated. I was kind of delighted by that description because he’s a pretty astute viewer, and I think he could tell at some level that I just want to make a connection with the audience. *

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beard: Obviously, silent melodrama is attractive to you, and you’ve called it not so much “exaggerated life” as “uninhibited life.” maddin: Right—as [drama scholar] Eric Bentley says. He had one of his chapters on melodrama that was really useful in helping me solidify for myself what I was only vaguely aware of doing. In waking civilized society, we’re not allowed to grab just anyone after whom we’re lusting; we’re not allowed to just wail out whenever we feel sad without raising a few eyebrows; we’re not allowed to hit anybody we’re angry at—but in your dream life, you can do all those things, if you’re lucky. You can have some pretty lusty dreams with people you’ve just met or people you’re not allowed to. beard: So it’s also closer to unconscious life. maddin: Yeah, we all have to admit something honest in our dreams. They’re coming solely from us—our fears, anxieties, and desires—and so in dreams, we do get to cry out loud, we do get to grab anyone or hit anyone we want. You could describe dreams as an exaggeration of real life, but I would find it more useful to call them an uninhibiting of real life. It’s good melodrama when it’s working the same way as dreams. beard: As a filmmaker or artist, if you’re looking to tap into that realm of feeling or impulse, then would you want to stay away from a more documentary realism? The world as we normally see it is inhibited in that way. Everybody walks around in a state of inhibition.

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maddin: Sure, except for criminals and children and psychopaths. So you get to be childish and paranoid and whatever in films, and all these feelings are more darkly sketched out for you by melodrama, so they’re more easily recognizable to yourself and other viewers. beard: Melodrama is a very embattled term, but I think melodrama, as you understand it, is a sense of exaggeration, a sense of immediately going to the limit in terms of the tone in which it’s pitched and the kinds of activities and behaviour— maddin: That are literally shown, yeah. beard: I can understand the attractions of that for a filmmaker in terms of grabbing an audience’s attention. maddin: Or in the beginning, if you don’t feel that you have enough subtle control over plot or over your actors, you can use to your advantage a tendency that inexperienced actors have to heighten everything, and just embed them in a script where they can help darken the outlines of the urges. Every story is more or less melodramatic. beard: There’s also an aspect of contemporary attitudes towards melodrama which is very condescending or critical. maddin: Yeah, it’s a very derogatory term. beard: The derogatory view of melodrama also seems present in your melodramas at some level, through exaggerations which can no longer be processed without irony by viewers. maddin: I always feel sort of on guard. I’m doing something that I’m kind of ashamed of, and then covering myself by making it obvious that I’m aware of doing it. I’ve tried to have that safety net removed by going for more unironic moments. There’s just something in the tone of the movies that enables people to laugh at them instead of giving in to them, but that’s fine as long as I’m engaging with them somehow. Douglas Sirk has that going for him, too. So many people enjoy him for what I feel are the wrong reasons, but at least they’re enjoying the show. beard: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. But I think when you open Gimli Hospital, for example, as soon as the viewer begins to process what’s going on, a sense of the absurd or the ridiculous is immediately evident. In Archangel, which is actually a pretty sober film a lot of the time, there is a mocking quality in Boles’s

244 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES wooden leg and a number of different moments. It seems that you start off on the foot of irony or pastiche—even of ridicule—and then try to claw your way back somehow over the course of the film. maddin: I was emboldened by Sirk, but even more so by Josef von Sternberg. These guys were my gods at the time I was making those movies. Sternberg was making movies in the earliest days of talking pictures, when the rules and vocabulary for filmmaking hadn’t been set yet. He was making his own stories in his own way. He manages to get stuff that some people can enjoy at a pure camp level and other people can enjoy ironically, but his movies are all emotional. There’s nothing lost if someone just decides to see something as a pretty movie or as a piece of kitsch, as long as it’s entertaining and engaging them. I just hope I have the same respect/fear of irony that he does, or just the right soft touch with it. That’s what I’m going for. I’m willing to be primitive and clumsy around a camera and around actors—even sometimes pretty freewheeling and elliptical around a script—but it’s in certain touches of tone and in my handling of irony that I’m overcautious to the extreme. It’s not that I’m copying von Sternberg. I never could in a million years. An Olympic runner isn’t copying the sprinter who holds a world record; they’re actually going after the achievement. Everyone in the world except one usually fails to reach the standard. But I’m a very competitive person, going after these standards that have always filled me. beard: Well, if Sternberg is operating with Paramount Studios, million-dollar soundstages, Marlene Dietrich, and every technical refinement known to cinema at that point, and you’re filming with a 6-mm camera in a warehouse in Winnipeg, there has to be some way to cover that gap. Irony is one of the tools that you’re using to do that. maddin: I can’t even define irony. I just know the way that it’s used as a distancing device in films. I’m careful not to be too distant. beard: That’s another Sternberg connection in my mind. With your work, there’s this kind of underwater delivery of these strange, hypnotic lines of dialogue. maddin: There’s no other way to deliver the lines that George writes. There’s a music in his dialogue that unites lousy actor and great on the same playing field—a subaquatic playing field. beard: When people start laughing at one of your films, and your films are very funny—

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maddin: Started happening around the year 2000, by the way. It was a little slow to understand. beard: People didn’t understand in Gimli Hospital when Kyle McCulloch squeezes the fish oil on his hair? maddin: Yes, a couple of people laughed during that. Some maybe laughed out of embarrassment for me…I’m not too sure. It seemed like more people were picking things up and having a chuckle in Cowards Bend the Knee and Saddest Music in the World. They seem to have figured out they have permission to laugh and not feel so bad for me. beard: So people were just stunned and baffled. maddin: Or embarrassed or dying to figure out a way to get out of the theatre without my seeing them. beard: It seems to me that you’re trying to do something very complicated in your films, and that is to hold ridicule and serious feelings right next to each other. The scene that pops into mind right now is in Careful, where horrendous earth-shaking events are taking place in the little gondola car and they’re yawning right through that scene. One can find all sorts of similar examples like it in your work. maddin: Well, other movies sometimes gamble and it pays off for them. I’m too frightened to ever appear to be soliciting for laughter or emotions. Besides, in real life, they’re kind of conjoined sometimes in the strangest ways. *

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beard: What can silent film do that sound film can’t do? maddin: It just instantly seems more stylized, and therefore capable of a universality that sound films have to fight harder to get somehow. When you have a man and a woman in love in a silent movie, it seems to be about all men and women for some reason, no matter how specific the details of their love become. It seems to me that once you remove the voices, you’re no longer listening to specific things that are beside the point. In the better movies, the intertitles tend to talk only about the most essential things, and filmmakers try to keep the intertitles to a minimum, whereas contemporary movies have two hours’ worth of dialogue to come up with.

246 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES beard: The best intertitles—it’s a fantastic art. maddin: They can do all the things that great dialogue can do. I also love the part-talkie because that will have people running down the street and you don’t even hear their footsteps. You can see them running; you don’t need to hear it. Then it will include just the sound of a horn honking and then a gun going off, but you don’t hear anyone falling. It’s selective sound—just the way when you’re painting you choose your brushstrokes wisely, when you’re writing you choose your words wisely, you choose your sounds wisely. I like to leave out and to isolate a lot of sounds. The part-talkie does that, obviously. Those were technical limitations, but they were also because the art form was new and a lot of people knew what they were doing by leaving out sound. It created more dreamlike effects. Ever since film was invented, there’s been a strong gravity pull from the public to make it literal-minded. But then, thank God, there are artists every now and then that pull it away from that. It’s a continual pendulum swing. In the last few years, I’ve been trying to get my movies to make musical sense, in the way melodramas do. They can make absolutely no literal sense, but I want the images to somehow take the same shortcuts that music does. Music goes directly to your heart—it bypasses your brain. I’ve been thinking about the Greek roots “melos” and “drama,” and how ancient Greek melodrama or melodramatic poetries were always highly subjective. And subjectivity, when you’re talking about the emotion of a story, is the only thing that matters, anyway. So I always want to get more and more music welded not just to the images, but to the actual stories on the page. *

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beard: Turning to particular things about particular films, I loved your first film, The Dead Father. Despite your obvious consciousness of how much you didn’t know when you made it, it still works very well in my view. It has a kind of simple, unselfconscious surrealism that looks completely easy and natural. It has the effect of being more straightforward than the films that come afterwards. maddin: I really felt the only way to make anything that stood any chance of lasting would be to be as honest as possible. I just literally tried to put on the screen some feelings I’d had in my dreams about those desertion feelings you get when a loved one dies. None of the episodes were from any of the almost

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nightly dreams I had about my own dead father at around the time I was making the movie, but I suppose I could have just borrowed stuff from those dreams. One thing I took was this sense that he kept coming back and was very eager to leave again, for a better family or a better something else. I don’t think I got that feeling across to anybody, but I started discovering accidental effects along the way. It’s just as well that I didn’t succeed. beard: In light of your later work, one of the most fascinating things about looking at The Dead Father for me is to have an example of what a Guy Maddin film might look like that was photographed in a relatively documentary fashion, set in the present day, and unfolded without elaborate artificial sets and costumes. Can you see yourself ever returning to that mode? maddin: If I could figure out a way of getting a kind of atmosphere that I like, I’d love to break free of one style and find another. I still think in terms of stories. [On early movies] George wrote all the dialogue because we needed the dialogue in time for shooting and he had a knack for it, a special tone. The voice-overs were more a manifestation of the need to repair all the things that went wrong when you’re shooting. You put together your montages and then you have to write the voice-overs as a complementary track to achieve what the images don’t quite achieve. I would always be careful to write those, and it was fun because I could manner them as much as George, but they didn’t have to do all the work that dialogue does. beard: The Dead Father is your first film and you already have zombieism, cannibalism…actually, incestuous cannibalism— maddin: Although my girlfriend, shortly after, ate her own father’s ashes. beard: That’s not the same thing as eating them before they’ve been cooked. maddin: That’s true. beard: So there’s already this kind of quasi-hysterical element, or you might just call it something from horror movies. maddin: Well, right from the first time that I picked up a camera, I was thinking along the lines of the shortcuts the surrealists were able to get through intentionally illogical combinations of things. I wanted to take something that was truly felt, and then just use kind of illogical, hysterical episodes to make a connection with an audience. I’m always making serious attempts to make connections with audiences. I just haven’t ever succeeded in the same way that

248 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES I’ve attempted—except for maybe Heart of the World. It’s the only movie I’ve made that turned out exactly as I planned. *

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beard: Tales from the Gimli Hospital—your first essay in mythologizing Winnipeg. Can you remember actually having the idea of “Why don’t I make an epic in my own hometown?” maddin: When I first started out, as my reaction against Canadian cinema, I thought I would never, ever mention Canada in any of my movies. beard: And since then you have never not mentioned it. maddin: I went out of my way to describe the setting when I was writing the voice-over for Dead Father. I think I called the setting “the Dominion of Forgetfulness,” but I meant the hegemony of forgetfulness. But the movie was lucky enough to get written up a little bit, and people started talking about Canada being the Dominion of Forgetfulness. I was just determined to shake the dust of this crummy country off my boots. But my friend Ian Handford, with whom I was painting houses at the time, really wanted to make a movie about Gimli. There was this book around, Gimli Saga, and I realized that there was a lot of original material in these great myths of settlers’ first days that seemed very dark and bleak to the point of being funny—a really modern sensibility in this century-old story. There’s just something in my Icelandic relatives that was always so humourlessly determined to trace back our genealogies and recount tales of privation in the most serious tones all the time. beard: Exactly what part of your family is Icelandic? maddin: My mother’s side. My mother and her sister, Aunt Lil, and my grandmother all spoke Icelandic. My dad was of Scottish-Irish ancestry. Just Canadian, really. Didn’t speak Icelandic. So it was a real gynocracy that we grew up in. beard: I liked the idea of using little theatre stages looked at through opera glasses as a form of anaesthesia. That’s just so witty and graceful and funny. maddin: It’s actually a historical fact, and one of the few things I encountered in Gimli Saga. When the patients were dying of the smallpox epidemic or whatever, certain nurses or volunteers would put on little puppet shows.

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beard: To distract them. It also gives rise to the idea of cinema as an anaesthetic. maddin: Of course. You can always forget your troubles in a theatre for a couple of hours. beard: During the big fight at the end of film, you have this indigestible mixture of cultural strands, plus all the extra levels of framing narration. Were you experiencing the urge to throw in everything including the kitchen sink at that point? maddin: It must have felt like it to people not in the know, but I was stubbornly trying to be true to Gimli itself, and Gimli is a weird amalgam. Every year there’s the Islendingadagurinn [“Icelandic Days”] celebration. It’s such a pathetic celebration that it has to recruit highland pipe bands from the Khartoum Lodge. So the parade is at least 90 percent Shriners, which aren’t Icelandic at all. But the Glima wrestling [in the movie] was authentic. I didn’t know it was authentic because I’d only seen one still picture of two Icelanders holding onto each other’s rear ends, but when I saw a demonstration of real Glima wrestling about five years later, I was astonished to see that it was exactly what I had filmed. I just thought, two men that are so jealous of each other over a woman that’s already been removed from the mathematical formula are left with only a species of homosexual admiration for each other—because enmity and admiration go hand in hand. I had been cuckolded by a girl and she had cuckolded another guy with me, so there was a love triangle quickly set up. I remember always wanting to attack this guy and he always wanted to attack me, but I started noticing that he was actually defending me when people made personal attacks on me, and I was defending him. We felt that it was unfair if other people were attacking; we wanted each other for ourselves. And that did seem strangely homosexual, even though there was no physical desire to get into his pants. It just felt that that species of homosexual rivalry could only be expressed through traditional Icelandic Glima wrestling, and that it would have to turn into something where, when you’re using a euphemism to fill in the blanks (the way Ernst Lubitsch always did with a closed door), you could only have two bagpipers sucking on bagpipes to sort of fill in the gaps about what happens after the fight’s over. *

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250 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES beard: The Illumination scene is a wonderful scene in Archangel, with all these tableaux and the didactic, patriotic aspect of things. It seems to look forward to The Saddest Music in the World, with the public spectacle and the international brigade and the announcer. maddin: Since I feel like I never made Archangel as good as I wanted, I’ve been trying to remake it over and over again. I was so charmed when John Harvie told me about these Illuminations, and then by coincidence I started reading about them in fiction. They have to be melodramatic because you have to strike heightened postures to make yourself into a human painting. beard: Not only heightened postures, but heightened moral oppositions, right? Good guys and bad guys, much more so than in the film where you don’t actually have very clear divisions between good guys and bad guys (unlike classic melodrama). maddin: I’m too much of a film noir buff to ever have a simple villain, and the protagonists in films noirs are never such great guys, anyway. That’s where the Chekhov comes in—I’m just thrilled by the fact that even his protagonists are morally weak. beard: What about the Canadian flag and the Canadian content in Archangel? The grenade with “Gott strafe Kanada” on it, which, as you said, gets a laugh even from German audiences…. maddin: I can’t imagine Germans caring enough about Canadians to write that on a grenade. beard: That’s exactly the point I was going to make. You tell a story on the film’s dvd commentary about how Germans in your audience were asking whether you hated Germans or not, whereas your Canadian viewers are going to feel flattered that the Europeans include Canada. Nice to see Canadian content there, anyway. maddin: Yeah, I got a chance to improve upon the Canadian flag. I just thought the Canada flag should have a more sinister, veiny leaf. It’s a chance to redesign, to reconfigure my country a little bit, which I guess is what the movies are doing anyway. beard: Strangulation by intestine. Explain that a little. maddin: I just wanted the father to be a coward, so I thought he should be rendered literally gutless. But then there should be some sort of redemption,

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something heroic. He should use his guts for something since they’re there. beard: But for me, the propinquity of those two things next to each other—the ludicrousness of strangling somebody with your sausage intestines, and then this very sentimental transfiguration and redemption in a higher realm where things are finally made right for everybody—and the fact that it is emotionally moving in an ironic way, that’s kind of your cinema in a nutshell. maddin: If I could figure out a way of really doing that, it would be great. *

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beard: Careful is your first film in colour, but as the movie gets more intense and dramatically forceful, you more or less revert to monochrome. It seems to me that multi-colour is the enemy of intensity for you. This eggshell quality of two-strip Technicolor seems too fragile for what’s going on at the end of the movie. It becomes, in my mind, a kind of pledge or sign of seriousness when the duel takes place in monochrome, for example. maddin: I certainly didn’t trust at that time my knowledge of how colour works psychologically. I’ve had many purely pleasurable, undistracted experiences with rich tonings of black and white things. I thought, toward the end, to maybe just keep it Sturm-und-Drang-ishly dark. It just seems that once you had to get down to business, it was black and white. Time to go for some nice tone. beard: There’s a real horror-movie element in Careful with the burning your lips away and slicing your fingers off and that kind of Grand Guignol quality. maddin: Ever since I heard the term “Grand Guignol”—someone explained to me that there was this theatre in Paris that used to put on these bloody horror shows—I just loved the idea of it. I thought, what a great idea. And I know it doesn’t mix with everything, but I was just going to insist on putting it in anyway. beard: There’s actually a false happy ending in Careful, where Grigorss is reconciled to his new father and Zenaida is reconciled to her son. There is a moment of serenity there, and then Klara just moves in and sweeps them all over the edge. maddin: So many times I’ve found peace in my life, only to have it pointed out that I’m behaving in a cowardly fashion, that there is no nobility in such

252 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES a peace and it’s time to whack the hornet’s nest again. The next thing I know, everything is horrible again. I’m not saying that that’s what women do. It’s what mates do to each other. beard: I can’t remember if I heard you or George describing Careful as both pro-repression and pro-incest. You can’t be pro-incest and pro-repression. maddin: I went and shot it and the pro-incest thing kind of got lost. I think it ended up being that, whenever anyone did act on their impulses, they were punished in an Old Testament fashion instantly. So it ended up being a pro-repression movie, and I ended up marketing it that way in my speaking engagements, saying “Let’s clean up our big messy bedroom here, start throwing everything back in the closet, closing the closet doors.” Some people took me to task because obviously there are lots of pained people hiding in closets who feel a lot better once they come out of them. But I glibly say “Get back in the closet.” The closet suggests illicitness; illicitness suggests pleasure. Try the closet—it’s not so bad. *

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beard: You were reluctant to use 35-mm for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and you haven’t used it since. maddin: I don’t like its lack of portability. We were getting fourteen shots a day when I was used to getting one hundred a day. beard: That’s amazing, by the way. maddin: [Ice Nymphs] was the first time I’d actually tried to adapt a script that was already finished. I felt a commitment to keep the script the way it was, and there weren’t little personal things to go on. I thought I’d had trouble with my films getting a sort of knockout punch at the end, and I thought this movie had a nice ending. Unfortunately, it’s so hermetic that most people weren’t sticking around for the ending, anyway. There are very few things that I can be sure of what I’m doing, so I usually try to stay within them and to grow slowly. George made a beautiful script to listen to, but a very difficult one for me to do properly. I just wasn’t ready for it. I think at that time I should have gone for something more sensational and more zany or whatever. Before, I was always the ringleader of a one-man band of mischief-makers. I was making a pro-incest movie or a pro-war movie or a slag-your-own-Icelandic-relatives movie. In this one, I just couldn’t attach myself to any mischievous plan and the 35-mm made it just look….

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beard: It didn’t feel personal enough for you. maddin: No. It looked pretty and artificial, but in a way that didn’t really matter to me much. About the only thing anyone ever said nice about the movie repeatedly was that it looked very beautiful. That’s what people say when they have nothing else to say about a movie, so I don’t even consider it a big compliment. It was also the first script where I had no idea what kind of setting to give it. George had written it set on a sheep farm in Iceland, and maybe I should have kept it Norse and sparse. I’d been visiting Gustave Moreau’s museum in Paris, and I thought I’d try to make it more nineteenth-century decadent because this language isn’t very sparse. beard: Another thing that’s a first in this film is the fact that you were using performers that were known to a wider audience. I find it a little disconcerting that as professional and wonderfully skilled as these actors are, they do represent a departure from the kind of somnambulistic acting style which goes so well with your earlier films. maddin: I tried so hard to get Nigel Whitmey, the lead actor, to sleepwalk because there are scenes where he’s sleep-hunting and just stunned with the usual Archangel delirium of not knowing which girl to be with and which one’s really there and whether she really loves him or not. I just asked him to be delirious, but he could not get delirium. He came from rada [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art], where delirium was something internalized and I was dealing with expressionist actors all the time. beard: You remember those molecule models you used to play with in high school—you know, stick an oxygen onto a carbon? You can get that sense of a three-dimensional model of characters in relation to each other in almost all of your films. Is that something that you just kind of drifted into, or is it something that comes from George? maddin: I like to do it. I like to know the relationship of everyone. There were two people that virtually never saw each other in that movie: Pascale Bussières and Alice Krige. They were at opposite ends of the molecule. I noticed halfway through that the movie was structured like Gilligan’s Island—exactly the same number of characters and sort of the same kind of people. But that’s when I realized that Gilligan’s Island is modelled on The Tempest, and George was thinking more along the lines of The Tempest than Gilligan’s Island.

254 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES beard: We’ve got another wooden leg here and another self-mutilation (a guy shoots himself in the foot). It’s just one of a whole procession of mutilations, amputations. Where is that stuff coming from? maddin: I like those old Lon Chaney movies and you know I love melodrama, but I also like fairy tales. They’re all kissing cousins: surrealism, fairy tales, and melodrama. These are little allegories of disability where someone’s inner wounds are shown expressionistically, outwardly. So I’m comfortable with things like that. *

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beard: For The Heart of the World, you were obviously in your Soviet phase. maddin: Deco Dawson, with whom I’d been hanging out the previous year, was really getting off on the Soviet stuff, so I was rewatching some and he was making dubs of Soviet films for me. We realized we were getting goose bumps and boners from watching the way Eisenstein uses those jump-cuts or redundant cuts where the person sits down five times in micro-montage. When you’re editing film physically, quite often after you’ve been delirious for a while, you cut the head off a shot, cut the tail off, and throw out the meat by accident. All you’ve got left is the stuff you didn’t want—but you join that together and all of a sudden there’s an exciting jump cut and the rejects are actually far better than what you would have kept had you been more wakeful. So we just called these “bite cuts,” because it’s where you bite the shot that you want right out of the movie and keep what’s left instead. beard: How does Anna heal the heart of the world, and how does it lead to Kino? maddin: I don’t know. I was trying to get into the spirit of propaganda. Those always require a leap of faith; all the “isms” require a leap of faith. That one sort of reminded me a bit, from first-year Marxism back in university, that one would no longer be alienated from one’s work and all this sort of crap. It sort of omitted the fact that there’s such thing as jealousy and desire. beard: Humanity has not been perfected yet. maddin: Yeah. So I liked the propagandistic suggestion that someone could just give up all earthly pleasures of the flesh if she’s stymied by indecision in a love triangle or love quadrangle; and that she should just give up money, the

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plutocrat, and save the world by producing, ironically, its biggest opiate since religion. Actually, it was just an excuse for a new creation myth of cinema. *

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beard: I think Dracula is your most straightforwardly beautiful movie, in the sense that it’s the most directly lyrical. It’s also obviously a very different kind of production for you because you’re a metteur-en-scène here as well as an auteur, or even instead of an auteur—but it’s very far from being anything like what I’ve seen in terms of a film version of a stage production. maddin: I didn’t want to make one of those, nor did the choreographer, nor did the dancers. [In preparation for filming the movie,] Mark Godden, the choreographer, arranged for a performance for me. He held me by the nape of the neck while I walked around with a video camera. I just moved in amongst all the dancers on the stage, and then every now and then he would pull me out of the way if a ballet dancer was going to come kicking through. I quickly got bored with just documenting it, so I would go in for close-ups. Far from being insulted that their dancing bodies were being removed from their heads, the dancers were actually enjoying the close-ups and doing a lot of work with their faces and fingers that reminded me of the great, expressionist silent-movie actors. I kept finding myself returning to the hands and then back up to the faces for ways of capturing expression. And now and then I would feel guilty and move back for the full-body things. When there was a lot of action going on, you could feel the dance floor give a little bit beneath you. You could hear them exhaling, gasping, leotards ripping, panties shredding, muscles tearing. So even stuff that would look symmetrical to the people in the expensive and cheap seats was total chaos to a camera right in the middle of it. And that’s dance as dancers know it. beard: And that’s why they don’t like dance films. maddin: Yeah, they’re boring. That would be like reminding them that they’re going to have to retire some day and sit in the house, you know? So I got lots of gripes from dance purists about it, but I didn’t get any gripes from dancers. Besides, we’d decided to make it a silent movie that just happened to have dancing in it, rather than a dance film. I didn’t really like the style [of Bram Stoker’s novel]. It’s boring and I only ever read the first half of it, but it was enough for me to get what the book was really about: the way men propagandize against women who make them jealous, creating a monstrous perfect

256 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES man that they measure themselves against, spending all their time trying to expunge him from even the daydreams of the women that they want to boink. You could remove Dracula from the formula and the women would still dance romantic, sexy, horny pas de deux by themselves, off on little autoerotic reveries; and the men would still be jealous that their women were even thinking of other men. So it was kind of fun just to film it as a silent movie, trying to keep the narrative focus a little more than the stage ballet did, because stage ballet has a captive audience; no one can walk out. beard: Ballet can do all kinds of fantastic things, but it’s not a natural medium for narrative. maddin: I just decided that I would have intertitle cards inserted now and then to help people get back on board, to reassert narrative clarity. We amputated certain chunks of the ballet to fit it into the seventy-five-minute time slot we needed, because it was made for television. That’s why I especially felt the need to keep the narrative clear, because people have very itchy remote-control fingers and would change it the instant they got lost or things got too abstract. beard: You spoke of not having the best experience with the script of Twilight because you weren’t there at the beginning of it, but then along comes Dracula, where you had no involvement in the initial imagining of the thing. maddin: What was really lucky for me there is that, when I read the book (bad as I think that it is), it was my autobiography. Those jealous vampire hunters and Van Helsing; I’ve felt all those things during my great, disastrous romantic campaigns. I understood those people completely. beard: You understood both the gorgeous girl and the person pounding the stake into her chest. maddin: I have been on both sides of that stake, and haven’t decided whether it’s better to give than receive. beard: There does seem to be a coincidence in the arrival of Deco Dawson, in the sense that the pacing and editing of both Heart of the World and Dracula feel quite different. maddin: I want to give Deco a lot of credit, but I won’t give him credit for that. During Q and A on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, I was saying, “I now pledge that all my films from now on will be fast.” And I haven’t been able to keep the promise entirely, but I’ve tried my best. So Heart of the World was designed to

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be that fast. Deco ended up working on Heart of the World accidentally—and thank God he did—but then I knew exactly what he could bring to Dracula. He was exactly the right editor (and co-shooter) for the movie. *

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beard: It feels like there’s something new and really good happening in your work [around the time of Dracula] and that may have to do with the ability to just freely work without a verbal script. maddin: By the time it came to shoot Cowards Bend the Knee, there was, as with Dracula, something that already existed (my autobiography), but it wasn’t choreographed yet. So I just assembled all the actors together to tell them what they were going to do for the next two or three minutes: “Okay, you’re going to perform an abortion here” and this and that. And then I was just capturing something that had already sort of happened. beard: Yeah, except that it’s unrecognizable. Anybody could tell that Dracula was an adaptation of an existing ballet, however transformed it was. But if you took a complete stranger and sat him down in front of Cowards Bend the Knee, I’m sure he would not leap up and say, “This is obviously somebody’s autobiography.” maddin: It’s a story about hands standing in for the man—The Hands of Orlac and Electra and all of those things—so I was trying to just keep things moving, which really came in handy when cutting it because even the intertitle cards are handheld and there’s always some sort of movement. And there’s non-stop music and things like that. It was a combination of everything that I was sort of hoping would work. beard: That represented a really different kind of filmmaking. maddin: Yeah, it’s kind of the opposite of my early films. If you look at Gimli Hospital and then at this, it might be clear that it’s made by the same person, but they’re very dissimilar, I think. beard: Technically they don’t look an awful lot alike. Cowards feels to me like a complete and finished work, a mature work. maddin: I worked pretty hard on the script. In a weird way, I just kept taking notes while I was in a relationship quite similar to it. (I’d been in a number

258 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES of bad relationships.) Normally, treatments are five pages long, but my treatment was a hundred pages long. There was so much autobiographical detail in there that it was getting kind of big. I shortened it to fourteen pages and thought I could make the whole thing fourteen minutes long, but it ended up getting longer and totally failed as an installation. It was physically impossible to watch that long stuff through a little peephole. beard: It’s intriguing to read these accounts of how you had to crouch down in order to look at it, so you were inflicting physical punishment on your viewers. maddin: I’m not too thrilled about inflicting physical punishment. I’ve already inflicted enough mental punishment on viewers to add physical punishment. One after another, people were emerging from that room with faces contorted in agony from the peepholes. There was a quirk in the air conditioning; it was blowing air into people’s eyes. I finally pled with the gallery for permission to show it as a single-channel thing, and they were nice enough to let me do it. beard: You toyed with a number of different titles, but could have called it Crime and Punishment because it’s all about how your stand-in commits moral crimes and ends up punished with humiliation and amputation and castration and impotence and petrifaction. maddin: He gets exactly what he deserves. I ended up doing things in these bad relationships where I was literally ending friendships and blaming my girlfriend for it, when in fact it was my own cowardice that prevented me from standing up to someone who was putting a strain on dear, precious friendships. beard: The opening of the film is very striking, in the sense that you’ve got a drop of sperm on a microscope slide. maddin: It came from a two-shot that I wanted of Guy Maddin and his pregnant girlfriend in the foreground talking about a pregnancy and an abortion, and I wanted the players in the background to be squiggling around like little sperm. So I did the shot, but they don’t really look like sperm. I decided to just literalize that metaphor by having Dr. Fusi look into a microscope and find them there. beard: The power of the father is very strong in the film. He’s up there commentating.

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maddin: Well, you don’t really know whose sperm it is. beard: The whole film comes from that glob of sperm. I find it a potent idea. maddin: I never even really asked myself whose sperm it was. I just filmed my own hand against the Winnipeg Arena ice. beard: Why is Meta always combing Guy’s hair? It seems kind of maternal, as well as possessive and also very erotic. It’s a gesture of “Okay, I have to make you do something terrible, so now I’ll do this thing you can’t resist.” maddin: Yeah, I’m not too sure what was going on there. But it seems to me that you get into relationships now and then where it’s just easier to give over your entire appearance to another person. You don’t really have much choice with a person like that, so you might as well like it. You pretty much love anything in the early days of a relationship. beard: What is the ice breast? What part of your unconscious threw this up? maddin: I needed an ice block. I just wanted the father and this ghost to get it on, like in Turgenev’s First Love where the protagonist loses out in a romantic rivalry to his father. The father would have to be pretty cold to steal the first love away from his son, and maybe this ghost got off on being cold…so I knew there had to be some sort of ice block. When I went to make the ice block the night before, I realized all I had was a big plastic salad bowl. So I filled it full of water and it froze, and when I flipped it over, it just looked like a breast. beard: It’s clearly Oedipal, the rivalry between the son and the father for the girl, even if it is the girl who’s already been rejected by the son. Literature and cinema are full of scenes where where’s this terrifying, castrating father figure, but I can’t think of one that does a better number on his son than in Cowards Bend the Knee. It’s just amazing when you actually have a scene of father and son in the washroom, and the son looks over and his father has this intimidatingly large sexual organ. maddin: I got a male prostitute to come over and pee in my bathtub while I filmed his penis. I focussed my camera on that and he lightly spritzed my camera and my face with urine while peeing into my bathtub. I didn’t have enough room in my bathtub to backlight the urine so that it would show up, so he could have just flopped his dinky around to the same effect—but no, he had

260 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES to pee into the bathtub and I had to rinse it out afterwards and wash my face about a hundred times. My biggest regret in my filmmaking career is not filming that prostitute’s penis in slow motion so it would have that Moby Dick heft to it. George Toles told me that he and his dad used to cross swords over the toilet, which meant they would both pee at the same time, send their fuming rails out in opposite directions, and make an x. I guess it’s very bonding, but I would never do that with my dad. I would just see him sort of groggily make his way to the can at the end of the hall in the middle of the night in nothing but a t-shirt sort of half-pulled down over vaguely shadowed somethings. I was going to write in a sword-crossing scene, but I didn’t know how. beard: You’ve got a dedication at the end: “For Dad and Aunt Lil.” maddin: A bit sappy, maybe. As distorted as my depictions of my Aunt Lil and my father were, I made it quite clear that I loved them dearly. I cringe a bit whenever I see the dedication, but I realized it was really necessary at the time. beard: I don’t think you should cringe. I don’t think that anybody is insulted by that film, unless maybe it’s whoever the original Meta is. maddin: There was a really pretty girl in New York at its premiere there, the kind of girl you dream of having at your movies when you first pick up a camera as a kid. She asked the first question. She just said, “Why did you make the movie so mean? Is your outlook on romance really so cynical?” I got about halfway through my answer when she just got up and left. beard: It was a rhetorical question, it turned out. maddin: I thought I really had finally nailed a demographic that’s been so elusive to me, but I make movies that are mostly for boys, I guess. And film noir is mostly a boy’s thing—not that [Cowards] is a film noir, but there’s a film noir attitude in there. I tend to see films noirs as movies where the protagonist very early on makes some sort of moral decision that’s the wrong one, and the rest of the story trajectory looks like a luge run into an open grave. So I was going for noir, but it was anachronistic and blurry noir. I was just trying to explain to her that, in doing my take on the genre, things were a little more nihilistic than usual. Of course, if I was really being honest, all my films are like that. beard: Meta’s not a classic femme fatale, anyway, because she’s got her own insanity that she’s carrying around, which is not “How can I prey on this

Conversations with Guy Maddin 26

helpless male?” but this thing to do with daddy. Guy is exactly like poor Grigorss in Careful who just gets into the slipstream of someone else’s Oedipal problem. maddin: That girl was too young, and will always be too young, to realize what relationships do and what she’s probably doing in them herself. Most people don’t have much self-knowledge, and she was pretty enough to be destroying a lot of people the way little kids tear wings off flies. I’m sure without recognizing it, she’s in her own version of Cowards Bend the Knee right now. *

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beard: To me, there’s this kind of a curve in your work, in the sense that it’s a movement towards colour and then away from colour. Twilight obviously represented a certain kind of apex or extreme of using colour (and using 35-mm). When you get to The Saddest Music in the World, there isn’t a film where the image is such a challenge to the viewer as it is in that film, which is ironic because that’s the film that’s by far got the most distribution. maddin: Yeah, it’s very smudgy. beard: Very blurred, very grainy—aggressively so, really. Obviously, that was deliberate. maddin: To a degree. I think what made it even more grainy was the Super-6 was coming back looking so clear. It has a crystal shutter that’s timed so perfectly, it’s almost digital, as opposed to the shutter of a regular 6-mm camera, which is more analogue and irregular, I guess, on a subconscious level. So we did this thing called push processing, where you just change the sa and then leave it in the bath longer and it makes the grain really big. I also broke it up another way. I shot and transferred it at eighteen frames per second. I didn’t anticipate that you can’t just transfer eighteen frames onto films twenty-four frames per second; you have to duplicate every third frame. It creates a weird movement, and watching it on video is different than watching it on film. So that satisfied me, but then I realized later, when I finally got a chance to see it on the big screen, the grain on the push process was huge. And that’s the stuff everyone thinks was Super-8. beard: You say in your dvd commentary that “I was intentionally turning my dial towards American film.”

262 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES maddin: Yeah, after he saw it, [co-writer Kazuo Ishiguro] said, “Congratulations, you’ve moved on from expressionism to your first American film.” I think he might have been referring to a sort of protagonist who is actually a protagonist. Canadian protagonists just sit back and let things happen to them. We made a conscious effort to have a protagonist who went out and grabbed things. beard: And look what happens to him. maddin: Yeah, exactly. And that’s classic film noir. We were using as models Ace in the Hole, the Billy Wilder picture, and Yankee Doodle Dandy with Jimmy Cagney. Those guys are in these masterful films as a sacred unit of measure against which we can compare our own modest project and try to keep the protagonist greedy and selfish and forward moving as much as possible. beard: Except that he comes out looking like the paperback hero of a Canadian movie, so to speak. Because there are all these Canadian movies about Canadians who pretend to be American, or try to behave as if they are American, and then disastrous things always overcome them. maddin: Well, I am a Canadian. What do I know about America? beard: You’re probably, possibly to your sorrow, going to read about this film as being an allegory of making films in Canada or being a Canadian artist. maddin: Once you start to have characters representing various countries, it’s an allegory whether you want it to be or not. I’ve had people ask me if Isabella Rossellini’s glass legs were the World Trade towers. beard: That’s a good one, isn’t it? Although you don’t have any actual Americans in it. maddin: No. There are no such things as Americans. They’re in the melting pot. In the 930s, you know, everyone’s an immigrant, at least in Warner Bros. pictures. beard: I like the fact that they’re all Canadians. Roderick is pretending to be a Serb, you know…. maddin: There are so many Canadians like that, who have retro-embraced their ethnicity without ever having set foot in the country of choice. beard: Well, it’s the problem of what it is to be Canadian anyway. That’s a subject for another conversation, probably. There’s a beautiful scene in the train—

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Roderick’s first scene in the train, with the raindrops on the window, and the very Murnau-esque appearance in a raindrop or a teardrop of this idealized family tableau of him and his wife and his son. Which of course immediately dissolves—he stands up and moves away almost immediately— maddin: That’s about as long as our family ever was together. beard: What I recalled was the similar moment at the end of Careful where poor doomed Grigorss is in the cave, and his mother and father and himself are sort of being projected into the back of the cave. This idea of an ideal family moment—or some kind of idealized, if-I-could-only-get-back-to-this moment where it was just me and mommy and daddy—is always associated with catastrophe. And you’ve got more Oedipal struggle in this film, again with the father and son both going after the same woman, both damaging the same woman, and being damaged in return. maddin: At least I’ve started to acknowledge that you actually hurt people when you get involved with them. beard: But this comes after Careful where there’s a couple triangles of that kind, and after Cowards Bend the Knee where the same thing is happening. Obviously there’s something resonating there, something that’s fertile with you. maddin: I haven’t had much luck with relationships. beard: It doesn’t seem a matter of having no luck with relationships. It seems to me this very Freudian sense of the other generation somehow still being there, still having a very active part in the way that your relationships aren’t going. maddin: You haven’t spent a weekend at my cottage…. beard: Roderick’s usual performance of “The Song Is You” on the cello is this very heartfelt, romantic, Pablo Casals type of performance, and the renditions are interiorized. It’s a kind of private communion with these feelings. And then when we get to his moments of full realization and anger later in the film—and of course the final contest where he’s coming out with these eldritch, almost post-Webern screechings and howlings that break the legs of Lady Port-Huntley—is that any kind of comment on different kinds of art? It’s like, “It’s more authentic art; it breaks things!”

264 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES maddin: I just wanted this agony to be less something that he’s proud of. He seems to be this agony artist. He’s vain about it, so I wanted him to be more out of control. beard: The great moment in the film, which I didn’t quite connect with the first time I saw the film but I feel that I have since, is Chester’s last real moment of emotional breakthrough and connection with his own feelings. Immediately he has to be stabbed in the gut with multiple shards of glass in order to make this kind of breakthrough, but at that point, he staggers out and there’s a little smile that appears on his face. Structurally speaking, it’s also the moment when he’s finally able to connect with his own— maddin: George and I were going for that moment from the beginning and I’m not sure I built to it properly, but we did the best we could in editing. There were so many narrative threads to tie up that we couldn’t tie them up simultaneously. But I wanted that to be the most important one, for Chester has, through his music and everything he did, repressed every whit of sadness and then finally has to acknowledge it. beard: And to remember this traumatic primal scene of mom dying over the keyboard. maddin: I think that could have been executed better—but still, that was the moment I was going for. beard: It’s the defeat of amnesia in your work. That’s a big moment for you, right? maddin: And Maria de Medeiros, same thing. She has to remember. And the pleasure of coming out of your amnesiac trance—the reward, the happy ending—is you get to acknowledge a dead child. beard: Well, there isn’t any happy ending. As in Letter From an Unknown Woman. What happens is that, after that, you have to die. maddin: I love that movie. It’s a cruelly hilarious movie in its own way. beard: What strikes me is how the heroine empowers herself through her own self-abnegation. She just basically does things for herself: she leaves home by herself, she goes off, she manages this relationship—the relationship actually works better because it’s never occurred. maddin: I think that’s my whole relationship with the world, actually. I think

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my whole relationship with the world is entirely imagined and made up and that’s why I’m on bad terms with it half the time. beard: My interpretation of Saddest Music is that it seems like a kind of allegory of your creative dilemma, in the sense that the irony and the parody in your work seems somehow the equivalent of the showbiz defences that Chester Kent has, and you also have to work your way through to your sadness in your work. The film seems like a good little model of your filmmaking. maddin: That’s not so bad. I don’t think you need to force that so much. beard: You’ve got the Canadian-Canadian (Fyodor), the American-Canadian (Chester), and the European-Canadian (Roderick). It’s beautiful. It’s actually all the subject positions available to a Canadian artist in certain ways. It’s interesting that Fyodor’s song, “The Red Maple Leaves,” is overtly Canadian, overtly sad, and it just bombs. maddin: For a Canadian audience, for one thing. beard: Of course, the judge is a little bit embittered with respect to this candidate…. maddin: Eh, he’s up against Africans. What are you supposed to do? beard: And the Canadian audience, who you’d think would be cheering for the Canadian contestant… it reminded me of the Olympics, you know, the Canadian who finishes twelfth. Well, we’re stoical about that. maddin: We’re used to being eliminated in the first possible round.

GUY MADDIN FILMOGRAPHY

Short Films The Dead Father (986) Mauve Decade (989) BBB (lost, 989) Tyro (990) Indigo High-Hatters (lost, 99) The Pomps of Satan (993) Sea Beggars (994) The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity (a.k.a. Odilon Redon) (995) Sissy-Boy Slap-Party (lost, 995) The Hands of Ida (lost, tv episode, 995) Imperial Orgies (996) The Hoyden (998) The Cock Crew (999) Maldoror: Tygers (999) Hospital Fragment (999) Fleshpots of Antiquity (2000) The Heart of the World (2000) It’s a Wonderful Life (Sparklehorse music video, 200) Fancy, Fancy Being Rich (2002) Sissy-Boy Slap-Party (remake, 2004) A Trip to the Orphanage (2004) Sombra Dolorosa (2004) Fuseboy (2005) Rooster Workbook (2005) Zookeeper Workbook (2005) Chimney Workbook (2005)

Selected Bibliography 267

My Dad is 00 Years Old (2005) Nude Caboose (2006) Odin’s Shield Maiden (2007) Spanky – To the Pier and Back (2007) Berlin (2008) It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today (2008) Collage Party (2008) Footsteps (2008) Glorious (2008) Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair (2009) Night Mayor (2009)

Feature Films Tales from the Gimli Hospital (988) Archangel (990) Careful (992) Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (997) Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) The Saddest Music in the World (2003) Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) My Winnipeg (2007) Keyhole (forthcoming, 200)

Films on Guy Maddin Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (dir. Noam Gonick, 997)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Robert. “Guy Maddin.” Film Comment, March–April 1998, 63–67. Austin-Smith, Brenda. “Strange Frontiers: Twenty Years of Manitoba Feature Film.” In Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm, eds. André Loiselle and Tom McSorley. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2006. Binning, Cheryl. “Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary: The Making of a Dance Film.” Take One, March/April 2002, 15–17. Church, David. “Brief Notes on Canadian Identity in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World.” Offscreen 10, 1 (January 2006). http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/phile/essays/saddest_music1/. _____. “Ode to a Nectarite Harvest: On Brand Upon the Brain!” Bright Lights Film Journal 58 (November 2007). http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/58/58brain.html. Curti, Roberto. “Transplant, Consumption, Death, or: Disease, Pathology, and Decay in Guy Maddin’s Cinema.” Offscreen 8, 9 (September 2004). http://www.horschamp. qc.ca/new_offscreen/maddin_curti.html. DeWalt, Robert. “Play It Again, Sigmund: A Careful Inquiry into Guy Maddin’s Tabooland.” Border Crossings, May 1993, 9–11. Enright, Robert. “Infinitude.” Border Crossings, April 1995, 5–6. Enright, Robert, and Guy Maddin. “City Report: Winnipeg.” frieze, March 2006, 144–151. Godwin, K. George. “Far from the Maddin Crowd: Thirty Years of the Winnipeg Film Group.” Cinema Scope, Fall 2004, 14–18. Gonick, Noam. “Happy Ever After.” Interview by Guy Maddin. The Village Voice, 23–29 January 2002. Hart, Adam. “The Private Guy Maddin.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July–September 2004). http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/32/guy_maddin_private.html. Hébert, Gilles, ed. Dislocations: Winnipeg Film Group. Regina: Dunlop Art Gallery, 1995. Hill, Derek. “King of Twilight: The Films of Guy Maddin.” The Third Alternative, Autumn 2002, 40–44. Hirschberg, Erin. “The Making of My Dad is 100 Years Old.” Cinema Scope, Fall 2005. http:// www.cinema-scope.com/cs24/spo_hirschberg_diary.htm. Holm, D.K. Independent Cinema. Harpenden, UK: Kamera Books, 2008. Jones, Alan. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Maddin World!” Cinefantastique, June 1991, 44–45 and 61. Leach, Jim. Film in Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Selected Bibliography 269

Maddin, Guy. “Adventures in Maddinland.” Interview by Robert Enright. Modern Painters, Autumn 2003, 86–89. _____. “Brand Upon the Brain! Director Guy Maddin.” Interview by Brian Brooks. indieWIRE, 9 May 2007. http://www.indiewire.com/people/2007/05/indiewire_inter_71.html. _____. “Bully for Bollywood’s Musical Melodramas!” Cinema Scope, Fall 2002, 21–22. _____. “Canadian Cult Hero Guy Maddin: ‘I Have Plenty of Sadness in Reserve.’” Interview by Jeremy O’Kasick. indieWIRE, 17 February 2004. http://www.indiewire. com/people/people_040217maddin.html. _____. “Cinemnesis.” Film Comment, July/August 2001, 79. _____. Conversations with Guy Maddin. Interview by William Beard. Metro Cinema Publications. Edmonton: Metro Cinema Society, 2007. _____. “Count of the Dance: Guy Maddin on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.” Interview by Mark Peranson. Cinema Scope, March 2002, 5–11. _____. Cowards Bend the Knee. Edited by Philip Monk. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. _____. “Death in Winnipeg.” The Village Voice, 30 January–6 February 2001. _____. “Dissecting the Branded Brain: An Interview with Guy Maddin.” Interview by David Church. Offscreen 10, 1 (January 2006). http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/ phile/essays/branded_brain. _____. “Everyone Needs a Sailor Friend.” Film Comment, May/June 2007, 36–39. _____. “Far from the Maddin Crowd: An Interview with Guy Maddin.” Interview by Robert Enright. Border Crossings, July 1990, 33–41. _____. “Far from the Maddin Crowd: Guy Maddin Interviewed.” Interview by Alan Jones. In Shock Xpress: The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema, Vol. 1, ed. Stefan Jaworzyn. London: Titan Books, 1991. _____. “Fever Dreams and Funeral Scenes: Succumbing to Gravity on Garbage Hill.” The Village Voice, 22–28 March 2004. _____. From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings. Edited by Jason McBride. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003. _____. “Guy Maddin.” Interview by Andy Battaglia. The Onion A.V. Club, 17 May 2007. http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/guy_maddin. _____. “Guy Maddin.” Interview by Noel Murray. The Onion A.V. Club, 19 May 2004. http://www.avclub.com/content/node/23029. _____. “Guy Maddin.” Interview by Peter Vesuwalla. Glove 1 (2007): 14–19. _____. “Guy Maddin on Brand Upon the Brain!” Interview by R. Emmet Sweeney. IFC News, 30 April 2007. http://ifc.com/news/article?aId=19651. _____. “Guy Maddin’s The Brand Upon the Brain: An Autobiography of My House.” Border Crossings, November 2005, 56. _____. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Medea?” Cinema Scope, Summer 2003, 80. _____. “In Conversation with Guy Maddin: On the Sad, Sad Music of My Life.” Interview with Marc Glassman. Montage, Fall 2003, 10–15. _____. “The Lon Chaney Collection.” Cinema Scope, Winter 2003, 65–67.

270 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES _____. “Maddin’s World.” Interview by Craig Burnett. Contemporary, June 2004. http:// www.contemporary-magazine.com/interview63.htm. _____. “Mamoo, the Tropist! Rouben Mamoulian’s Paramount Years.” Cinema Scope, Spring 2004, 10–15. _____. My Winnipeg. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009. _____. “Obsessions into Light: An Interview with Guy Maddin.” Interview by Jason Horsley. Cineaste, Fall 2008, 47–49. _____. “The Pleasures of Melancholy: An Interview with Guy Maddin.” Interview by Marie Losier and Richard Porton. Cineaste, Summer 2004, 18–25. _____. “Purple Majesty: James Quandt Talks with Guy Maddin.” Interview by James Quandt. Artforum International, Summer 2003, 156–161 and 206. _____. “Sad Songs Say So Much.” The Village Voice, 7–13 May 2003. _____. “The Saddest Diary in the World Wraps Up in a Torrent of Tears.” The Village Voice, 26 April–2 May 2004. _____. “The Song Was You.” The Believer, June 2004, 14 and 94. _____. “The Stop Smiling Interview with Guy Maddin.” Interview by José Teodoro. Stop Smiling, Fall 2007, 86–89. _____. “Tales from the Gimli Hospital: The Original Script.” Cinema Scope, Fall 2004, 41–43. _____. “To the Lighthouse: The Making of Brand Upon the Brain!” Cinema Scope, Fall 2006, 45–47. _____. “Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.” The Village Voice, 2–8 March 2004. _____. “Very Lush and Full of Ostriches.” The Village Voice, 1–7 August 2001. _____. “Wait Until Dark.” The Village Voice, 5–11 April 2004. _____. “The Womb is Barren.” Montage, Winter 2001. _____. “You Give Me Fever.” The Village Voice, 12–18 June 2002. Maddin, Guy, and George Toles. “The Music Men: Guy Maddin and George Toles on The Saddest Music in the World.” Interview by Jason McBride. Cinema Scope, Fall 2003, 5–12. Maddin, Guy, and Isabella Rossellini. “Melodrama as a Way of Life: Guy Maddin and Isabella Rossellini Talk About Saddest Music.” Interview by Andrea Meyer. indieWIRE, 3 May 2004. http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_040503maddin.html. Maddin, Guy, and Mark Godden. “Telling the Dancer from the Dancing Film: Set Pieces from Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.” Interview by Robert Enright. Border Crossings, November 2001, 54–65. Masterson, Donald. Review of From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings. American Review of Canadian Studies 36, 4 (2006): 652–655. McBride, Jason. “The Secret Sharer: Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.” Cinema Scope, Fall 2007. http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs32/feat_mcbride_winnipeg.html. McSorley, Tom. “In the Hour of Twilight: Guy Maddin Gets Melodramatic in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.” Take One, Fall 1997, 12–16.

Selected Bibliography 27 

Melnyk, George. One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Monk, Katherine. Weird Sex and Snowshoes and Other Canadian Film Phenomena. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002. O’Donoghue, Darragh. “Particles of Illusion: Guy Maddin and His Precursors.” Senses of Cinema 32 (July–September 2004). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/32/guy_maddin_precursors.html. Peranson, Mark. “A Festival Crucifixion: The Heart of the World.” Cinema Scope, Fall 2000, 45–46. _____. “The Mouthwash of the Past.” The Believer, August 2003, 39–52. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Rossellini, Isabella. “Elettra is My Middle Name: Guy Maddin Interviews Isabella Rossellini.” Interview by Guy Maddin. Cinema Scope, Fall 2005, 20–24. _____. In the Name of the Father, the Daughter, and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2006. _____. “Isabella Rossellini: Close to the Maddin Crowd.” Interview by Robert Enright. Border Crossings, May 2003, 44–52. Seguin, Denis. “Winnipeg, Mon Amour.” The Walrus, January/February 2008. http://www. walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.02-film-guy-maddin-my-winnipeg/. Semley, John. “From Big Snow to Big Sadness: The Repatriation of Canadian Cultural Identity in the Films of Guy Maddin.” CineAction 73/74 (2008): 32–37. Toles, George. A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. _____. “Remystifying Movies: George Toles in Conversation with Jeffrey Crouse.” Interview by Jeffrey Crouse. Film International 6, 3 (2008): 10–25. Toles, George, and Guy Maddin. “Dikemaster’s Daughter.” Border Crossings, Fall 1997, 34–41. Totaro, Donato. “Guy Maddin: Tales from a Maverick’s Diary.” Offscreen 8, 9 (September 2004). http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/maddin_intro.html. Vatnsdal, Caelum. Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2000. _____. “The Mad Fear Nothing: On the Set of Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World.” Border Crossings, August 2000, 18–24. Vesuwalla, Peter. “Guy Maddin Directs Isabella Rossellini in The Saddest Music in the World.” Take One, September-December 2003, 13–17. Waugh, Thomas. The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. White, Kenneth. “Forget Your Desire: The Cinema of Guy Maddin.” Millennium Film Journal 45/46 (Fall 2006): 133–139. Woloski, Jason. “Guy Maddin.” Senses of Cinema (2003). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/directors/03/maddin.html.

CONTRIBUTORS

William Beard is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he has taught film studies since 1978. He is the author of Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood and The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, and co-editor of North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980. He has recently written a number of book chapters on the films of Atom Egoyan, and is now nearing completion of a monograph on the cinema of Guy Maddin. David Church is a PhD student in Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where he studies horror films, cult films, and disability in film. He has contributed to Disability Studies Quarterly, Film Quarterly, The Encyclopedia of American Disability History, Offscreen, Senses of Cinema, and several other publications. Dana Cooley’s work, in both theory and practice, is generally concerned with “the everyday,” and interrogates the relationships among communication technologies, memory, identity, and private/public space. Her two main research strands—expanded cinema and psychogeography—coalesce in “locative media.” This emergent and varied territory makes use of mobile technologies to explore our relationship to the urban environment. Locative media fuses her interests in mapping, the “cinematic city,” spatialization of narrative, and an interactive, haptic experience by actualizing cartographic practice and involving the participant in active urban exploration. Key to both her scholarly and artistic work is an emphasis on the potential for challenging the dominant narratives of consumer culture through the subversive use of popular media and public space. Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson work at Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta. Lee is chair of the English department and teaches the graphic novel, film studies, and communication theory. Kelly teaches postcolonial literature, film studies, and composition, and serves as the English department’s coordinator of its literary events, arts, and film studies committee. They enjoy a rich writing and teaching partnership from which they have produced work on reading representations of race in American and Canadian films; cosmopolitanism and film; reparative reading; tropes of cross-dressing in Caribbean fiction; and, most recently, theories of affect and transformative pedagogies. Donald Masterson is an associate professor of English and Cinema Studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. He has been pursuing an interest in Canadian literature and film for a number of years. He has published articles on the work of Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand, Robert Lepage, and Guy Maddin.

Notes on Contributors 273

He has recently developed a class in contemporary Canadian cinema. Currently, he is completing a book on Ireland’s war of independence, wherein film will be a significant part of the study. Carl Matheson is a professor in and head of the Philosophy department at the University of Manitoba. He has published mainly in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and the philosophy of art. He and Ben Caplan are currently working on a series of papers in the ontology of music. He became friends with Guy Maddin through a conversation in 1985 that centred on the starting line-up of the 1969 Chicago Cubs, a conversation in which Randy Hundley’s Strat-O-Matic Baseball card played a vital role. His Gimli nickname is “Pickerel Cheeks.” Geoff Pevere is a former movie critic for the Toronto Star, which currently engages him to read books. In 1985, he was working for the Toronto International Film Festival when he came across a mysterious package containing the first short film by a certain Guy Maddin. History ensued. David L. Pike teaches literature and film at American University. His most recent books are Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945, and Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001, both from Cornell University Press. He is co-editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, and has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban literature, culture, and film. He is currently writing a history of Canadian cinema since 1980, to be published by Wallflower Press, and a study of subterranean settings in film. Milan Pribisic worked as a journalist and theatre and film critic in the former Yugoslavia before coming to the us. He teaches in the School of Communication at Loyola University, Chicago, works as a freelance dramaturge in the Chicago theatre land, and researches in the areas of intermedia dialogism, adaptation studies, and queer representations. He contributed to the anthology Novi Holivud (New Hollywood), published in 2002 by Clio Press in Belgrade, Serbia. Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. His books include Connected, Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society (2003) and Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009). He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog. Stephen Snyder received a PhD in Renaissance Studies from the University of Florida (1975) and worked in their Film Studies program. He studied and made films at the San Francisco Art Institute for two years, and has been part of the Film Studies program at the University of Manitoba since 1976. As well, he has been active in the Winnipeg Film Group since 1976 as a photographer and actor, appearing in Jeff Solylo’s films, East of Euclid and Latent Greatness. He has published books on Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and other European filmmakers. Will Straw is a professor within the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 1950s America, the forthcoming Popular Music: Scenes and Sensibilities, and over seventy articles on film, music, and popular culture. He is completing a book on tabloid newspaper culture in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. George Toles is a distinguished professor of English and chair of Film Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of

274 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Film. For more than twenty years, he has been the screenwriting collaborator of Guy Maddin. Among his recent credits are The Saddest Music in the World (co-screenplay), Brand Upon the Brain! (co-writer), and My Winnipeg (dialogue). He has also written the original story and co-authored the screenplay for Neil Burns’s Edison and Leo (2008), Canada’s first feature length stop-animation film. Darrell Varga has a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University (Toronto) and is Canada Research Chair in Contemporary Film and Media Studies at nscad University (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the co-editor of Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and editor of Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2008). His current research is on concepts of region in Canadian cinema and in the context of globalization. Dr. Saige Walton teaches in the Screen Studies Program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She recently completed her PhD dissertation, “Cinema’s Baroque Flesh,” which examines embodied experiences of the baroque in art and film. She has published on the baroque qualities of genre in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and cult television in Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion (2004). Her writings on the baroque, the senses, genre, and film history have appeared in Senses of Cinema, ARTLINK, Screening the Past, and Metro. In addition to revising her dissertation for publication, she is currently working on an international book project that examines specific archival collections of pre-cinematic and early cinema phenomena and embodied perception in film and media. She is also an assistant curator with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

INDEX

A

Ace in the Hole 262 Adams, Mary Louise 227 Âge d’Or, L’ 119–20, 210 Alexander, M. Jacqui 226 All That Heaven Allows 93n6 Altman, Robert 113 Ames, Eric 73 amnesia 7–9, 15–16, 20, 40, 51, 55, 59, 64, 75, 85, 91, 111, 124–25, 135, 137, 140, 149–50, 156, 177, 183, 187n23, 192, 228, 230–31, 236, 264 Anthology Film Archives 99 Archangel 8, 20, 29, 49, 51, 55, 59–60, 62–64, 67, 70, 73, 75, 79, 85, 90, 92, 106, 110–11, 113, 123–27, 130, 135, 137–38, 140, 149–52, 174, 179–82, 184–85, 187n23, 192, 195, 241, 243, 250–51, 253 Arnold, Martin 13 Arthur, Jean 152 Astaire, Fred 235

B

Bacall, Lauren 93n6 Bal, Mieke 203, 213, 216–17, 223n73 Baluk, Ulana 119 Barenholtz, Ben 59 baroque art 21–22, 61–62, 175–79, 184, 187n9, 203–19, 219n2, 220n4, 221n17, 222n43, 222n54, 222n56, 223n59, 223n73 Barthes, Roland 188n38 Batman (TV series) 199 Baudelaire, Charles 98 Beckett, Samuel 102 Benjamin, Walter 21, 114, 171–72, 175, 178–79, 181–86, 187n7, 187n21, 197, 200, 203, 213 Bentley, Eric 242 Berger, John 179, 188n25 Bergfilm (mountain film) 9, 26, 32, 62, 65–66, 73, 83, 106, 113, 198

Bergman, Ingmar 39, 54, 129 Bergman, Ingrid 232 Berkeley, Busby 92, 120–22, 241 Berlant, Lauren 226–27 Berlin International Film Festival 105 Birkin, Andrew 146 Birney, Earle 181 Birtwhistle, Tara 164–65 Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The 93n7 Blade Runner 74 Blondel, Eric 190–91, 197, 199 Blue Light, The 32 Borges, Jorge Luis 106 Brakhage, Stan 242 Brand Upon the Brain! xii, 6, 8, 13, 15–16, 22, 23n4, 25n45, 27–28, 35, 41–45, 46n9, 47n23, 84, 100, 110, 121, 126–28, 134, 136, 139–43, 204–10, 214, 216–19, 220n10 Breathless 104 Bresson, Robert 54 Brook, Peter 160 Brooks, Peter 89 Browning, Tod 87, 89, 220n7–8, 223n64 Bruto, El 120 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 179 Buñuel, Luis 2, 5, 20, 28, 56, 119–21, 126, 131, 210 Burns, Gary 105 Burroughs, Jackie 52, 60 Burton, Tim 83 Bussières, Pascale 76, 100, 253

C

Cade, Brendan 45 Cage, John 41 Cagney, James 38, 92, 262 camp 10–11, 19, 22, 35, 68, 70–72, 80, 92, 94n19, 97, 99, 103, 108, 118n45, 164, 198, 207–08, 211, 244 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 234, 241

276 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Careful 4, 9, 18, 22, 25n35, 26, 29–33, 49–52, 56–58, 60–68, 70, 73–75, 83, 85–86, 100, 104, 106, 109–111, 123, 126, 136, 138, 153, 155–58, 173, 187n23, 190–201, 207, 245, 251–52, 261, 263 Carpentier, Alejo 221n25 Casals, Pablo 263 Cassavetes, John 58 Cement Garden, The 146–48 Chaney, Lon 87, 89, 220n7–8, 223n64, 254 Chaplin, Charlie 108, 120, 129 Chekhov, Anton 250 Chien Andalou, Un 120, 210 Child Without Qualities, The 1, 4, 23n4, 86, 101, 105, 109, 115, 240 Chimney Workbook 13 City Lights 120, 129 Cobweb, The 81, 89 Coen Brothers 83 Cohen, Ari 124 Colacello, Bob 61 constructivism 13, 102, 115 Cornell, Joseph 99 Cowards Bend the Knee xii, 8, 13, 15–16, 22, 23n4, 25n35, 41, 79, 84–85, 90, 99– 101, 110–11, 113, 129, 134, 136–37, 139–43, 174, 179, 182–83, 204–05, 207–10, 213–17, 219, 220n10, 245, 257–61, 263 Cox, Paul 60 Crawford, Joan 112 Cremaster cycle 111 Crime and Punishment 258 Crime Wave 68 Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, The 120 Cronenberg, David xiii, 52–54, 62, 105, 111 Crosby, Bing 121 cultism 11, 29, 48, 59, 72, 100, 104, 112–13 Curle, Howard 119

D

Dadaism 20, 102–03 Dawson, Deco 13, 160, 164, 167, 254, 256–57 Day, Doris 100, 103 Dead Father, The 4–5, 8, 28, 46n8, 48, 50, 55, 59, 84, 89, 110, 124, 246–48 Deleuze, Gilles 75, 203, 211, 221n17 Del Río, Elena 212 D’Emilio, John 227, 236n5 Demme, Jonathan 113 Derrida, Jacques 24n25 Detour 117n19 DeWalt, Robert 191 Dickenson, Peter 238n34 Dietrich, Marlene 232, 244

Dishonoured 118n38 Disney, Walt 108 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 98 Dracula (1931 film) 164 Dracula (novel) 14, 21, 97, 160–64, 166–68, 169n4, 255–56 Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary xii, 14, 21, 97, 159–69, 188n23, 255–57 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 5, 54, 112, 149 Dubrowolska, Gosia 60 Duvall, Shelley 77, 130 Dykemaster’s Daughter, The 12, 25n36, 113

E

East of Borneo 99 Eco, Umberto 162 Egoyan, Atom 28, 32, 52–53, 100–01, 105 Eisenstein, Sergei 2, 36, 90, 112, 115, 164, 170n14, 254 El 120 Electra (play) 15, 101, 257 Elektra (opera) 204, 207 Elsaesser, Thomas 71, 81, 88 Entity, The 99 Eraserhead 59 Exotica 100 expressionism 6, 87, 115, 138, 210, 213–14, 220n7, 223n59, 225, 253–55, 262 Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity, The (Odilon Redon) 108, 126 Eyolfson, Lillian (“Aunt Lil”) 3, 23n11, 30, 84, 98, 103, 106, 129, 220n10, 248, 260

F

Fairbanks, Douglas 112 fairy tales 7, 15, 18, 21, 30, 62, 64, 87, 113, 139–40, 146, 153–55, 172, 178–79, 183, 185, 220n7, 254 Fanck, Arnold 32 Far From Heaven 88, 113 Farrelly Brothers 98 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 61, 71, 82, 93n7 Feininger, Oskar 112 Fellini, Federico 128 Feuer, Jane 234 Feuillade, Louis 99, 210 Fin du Monde, La 13–14 First Love 259 Fleck, Patrice 119, 131 Fleischer, Max 108 Footlight Parade 38, 92 Foster, Hal 66 Foucault, Michel 163, 167, 227, 230 400 Blows, The 103 Fox and His Friends 93n7 Frankenstein 43, 149 French new wave 58, 98, 103, 105, 200

Index 27 7

Freud, Sigmund 107, 122, 131, 153, 178, 190–91, 194, 196, 227–28 Friedrich, Caspar David 62 Fuller, Graham 62 Fuseboy 13

G

Gance, Abel 2, 13, 87, 108, 115 Garland, Judy 235 Garland–Thomson, Rosemarie 232 Gass, William 158 Gilligan’s Island 253 Gillmor, Don 60–61 Gimli Saga 24n15, 120, 248 Godard, Jean-Luc 104, 123, 131 Godden, Mark 21, 159–60, 162–64, 166–68, 255 Godwin, K. George 104 Goin’ Down the Road 91 Goldberg, Ruth 213–14, 220n7 Gonick, Noam 94n13, 99 Gorshin, Frank 77, 199 Gottli, Michael 51, 75, 122 Gould, Glenn xiii Grand Guignol 89–90, 205, 251 Greenaway, Peter 146 Grierson, John 233 Griffith, D.W. 73, 82–83, 93n6, 209 Grimm, Brothers 62, 179, 220n7, 223n64 Grodal, Torben 82 Gunning, Tom 71, 89–90, 107, 175, 185 Gurdebeke, John 13 Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight 94n13, 116n3

H

Handford, Ian 120, 248 Hands of Ida, The 9 Hands of Orlac, The 15, 204, 207, 213–14, 257 Harvie, John 96, 116n3, 124, 250 Hatton, Rondo 122 Hawks, Howard 112 Haynes, Todd 97 Heart of the World, The xii, 13, 35–37, 45, 104–05, 111, 115–16, 118n41, 127– 28, 130, 248, 254, 256–57 Heath, Terry 65 Heflin, Van 152 Heston, Charlton 112 Hobart, Rose 103 Hoberman, J. 49, 60, 62, 242 Hoffman, E.T.A. 178 Hollywood cinema, classical 5, 18–20, 65, 81, 87–89, 91, 97, 111–12, 115–16, 118n38, 118n45, 164, 198, 234–35, 262

Home from the Hill 81 Horton, Robert 62 Hospital Fragment 25n35 Hudson, Rock 93n6 Hughes, Howard 112 Hutcheon, Linda 65, 160, 188n25

I

Ibsen, Henrik 52 I Love a Man in Uniform 91 Imitation of Life 93n6 In a Year of 13 Moons 93n7 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 113 I Only Want You to Love Me 93n7 irony 9–11, 15, 17, 19–20, 24n29, 27–28, 34, 40, 53, 65, 76, 80–82, 89–92, 93n6–7, 97, 101, 110, 113, 136, 167, 177, 197, 211, 221n27, 222n47, 225, 230, 235–36, 243–44, 251, 265 Ishiguro, Kazuo 14, 37, 262

J

Johnson, Chris 123 Joyce, James 106 Juha 73

K

Kafka, Franz 98, 102, 106 Katz, Jonathan Ned 232 Kaufman, Philip 113 Kaurismäki, Aki 73 Keaton, Buster 108–09, 146 Keightley, Keir 66 Keohane, Kieran 65 Khanjian, Arsinée 101 Kids in the Hall 224 Kipling, Rudyard 109 Kirshner, Mia 101 Klein, Norman M. 203, 209 Klymkiw, Greg 14, 57, 119, 131 Krige, Alice 72, 253 Kuchar, George 112

L

Lacan, Jacques 20, 125 L.A. Confidential 113 Ladd, Alan 151 Lang, Fritz 115, 129 Last Night 91 Laurel and Hardy 108 Lauzon, Jean-Claude 47n18, 64, 118n38 Lawton, Ben 120 Leary, Timothy 51 Leave Her to Heaven 118n38 Leech Woman, The 127 Léolo 47n18, 64 Letter From an Unknown Woman 264 Liliom 129

278 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Lil’s Beauty Shop 3, 15, 60, 84–85, 87, 103, 129, 220n10 Lipsett, Arthur 118n38 Lolita 153 Long Day’s Journey Into Night 63 Long Goodbye, The 113 Love-Chaunt in the Chimney 13 Lubitsch, Ernst 249 Luckett, Moya 11 Lugosi, Bela 164 Lynch, David 2, 53, 59, 88 Lyotard, Jean-François 198–99 Lys, Lya 119–20

M

Maddin, Cameron 3–4, 18, 27, 30–31, 34, 44–45, 86 Maddin, Chas xi, 3–4, 23n11, 28–30, 44–45, 84, 86, 104, 183, 220n10, 247, 260 Maddin, Herdis 3–4, 25n45, 32, 35, 44–45, 60, 84, 102, 117n19, 142, 157–58, 220n10, 248 Maddin, Janet 3–4, 25n45, 220n10 Maddin, Ross 3 Magic Flute, The 156 Magnificent Ambersons 60 Magnolia 88 Mahler, Gustav 162, 164, 166–68 Malle, Louis 160 Manchurian Candidate, The 113 Marat-Sade 160 Margaret’s Museum 91 Martin, John Rupert 206, 213, 219 Marx Brothers 40 Marx, Groucho 38 Marykuca, Kathy 126 McBride, Jason 117n8 McCulloch, Kyle 50–52, 75, 120, 122, 124, 245 McDonald, Bruce 52 McEwan, Ian 146 McKellar, Don 101 McRuer, Robert 238n33 Medeiros, Maria de 98, 264 Mehlman, Jeffery 184 Méliès, Georges 107, 183 Melnyk, George 39, 106 melodrama 2, 5, 8–11, 13–14, 18–19, 24n29, 25n32, 25n45, 30, 34, 36, 62, 64–66, 70–71, 73–75, 78–83, 86–92, 93n6, 94n10, 94n19, 95n23, 97, 100, 108–09, 111–14, 116, 167–68, 172, 178, 182, 187n9, 198, 205, 207–09, 211–12, 220n7, 222n47, 223n59, 234, 236, 242–43, 246, 250, 254 Melville, Herman 13 Merhige, E. Elias 112

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 203, 212, 214–17 Metropolis 115 Milano, Alyssa 103, 111 Minassian, Marie-Josée 65 Minnelli, Vicente 81 modernism 19–20, 61, 75, 96–98, 101–02, 105–10, 112, 114–16 Modot, Gaston 119–20 Monk, Claire 60 Monroe, Marilyn 100 Moore, Michael 105 Moreau, Gustave 253 Morgan, Jason 225–26, 228 Moroni, David 163, 165 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 153 Müller, Mathias 13 Mulvey, Laura 81 Murnau, F.W. 112, 115, 164, 210, 263 Musil, Robert 7, 23n4, 156 My Dad is 100 Years Old xii My Winnipeg xii, xiii, 4, 8, 16, 23n4, 31, 43–45, 84, 100, 104, 106–07, 110–13, 115–16, 117n16, 117n19, 126, 128, 130, 133, 141–43, 220n5

N

Nabokov, Vladimir 153 Nanook of the North 225 National Film Board of Canada 48, 225, 233 National Society of Film Critics (US) 60 Ndalianis, Angela 203, 219 Neale, Brent 25n35, 52, 164 neo-realism, Italian 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 128, 190–93, 195–200 Night of the Hunter, The 108 Night of the Living Dead 210 Nosferatu 112, 115, 164, 210 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 81, 88

O

Obsession of Billie Botski, The 58 O’Donoghue, Darragh 42, 47n26 101 Dalmations 108 Ordet 108

P

Paizs, John 5, 58, 65–66, 68, 119, 131, 200 Panofsky, Erwin 208 Paperback Hero 91 Paz, Octavio 221n25 Peranson, Mark 14 Perault, Charles 179 Persona 129 Picon-Vallin, Béatrice 159–60, 165 Poe, Edgar Allan 38, 108

Index 279

postmodernism 2, 9, 19–20, 34, 49, 54, 57, 65, 74, 82, 87–88, 92, 94n10, 97, 110–11, 156, 169, 177, 181, 199, 225 Potemkin 112 Power Plant, The (gallery) 100, 204 primitivism 5, 12, 17, 20, 23n12, 97, 102–03, 169, 178, 186, 233, 244 Proust, Marcel 102, 107, 186 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 115

Q

Quandt, James 115 Quay, Brothers 46n3, 109

R

Ramones, The 97, 103 Ray, Man 28 Ray, Nicholas 81 Redon, Odilon 108 Rembrandt van Rijn 222n56 Reiniger, Lotte 107–08 Rhode, Deanne 167 Richards, Denise 99, 103 Riefenstahl, Leni 32, 74, 115 Road to Salina 99 Robinson, Mary Jane 119 Rogers, Ginger 235 romanticism 30, 63, 87, 97–98, 167 Romero, George A. 210 Rooney, Mickey 235 Rooster Workbook 13 Rossellini, Isabella 37, 98, 232, 262 Rossini, Gioachino 153 Roue, La 108 Royal Winnipeg Ballet 14, 97, 159, 162, 188n23, 222n58 Rubens, Peter Paul 222n56 Rubin, Gayle 230

S

Sacks, Oliver 124 Saddest Music in the World, The xii, 4, 14–15, 18, 22, 27, 31, 35, 37–41, 79, 89, 91–92, 98, 100, 105, 113, 139, 141, 187n23, 224–36, 241, 245, 250, 261–65 Sallis, John 193–95 Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass 46n8 Savage, Ann 117n19 Scarpetta, Guy 61 Schaber, Bennet 36, 46n2 Schulz, Bruno 7, 28, 46n3, 46n8, 102, 109 Scorsese, Martin 60 SCTV 62 Sea Beggars 25n36 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 33, 225 Seinfeld 88

Selznick, David 112 Sendak, Maurice 152–53 Seuss, Dr. 62 Shadow of the Vampire 112 Shakespeare, William 152–53, 156 Shane 151–52 Shaviro, Steven 19, 22, 24n25, 24n30, 80, 82–83, 94n19, 99, 207–09, 211 Shelley, Mary 149 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 40 Shklovsky, Victor 34 silent cinema xi, 5, 10, 14, 21, 28, 41, 53, 58–61, 64, 66, 71, 73, 75, 79–80, 82–83, 86–87, 96, 107–09, 114, 141, 164–68, 204–05, 207, 209–10, 219, 220n7, 221n34, 222n58, 223n59, 242, 245, 255–56 Silverman, Kaja 225 Sirk, Douglas 2, 10, 71, 81–82, 88, 93n6, 234, 243–44 Sissy-Boy Slap-Party 99 Slater, Philip 122 Snow, Michael xiii, 106, 242 Snyder, Stephen 5, 20, 83, 119, 123, 239 Sobchack, Vivian 219 Sombra Dolorosa 177 Some Came Running 81 Soviet Montage 13, 25n46, 36, 65, 87, 115, 164, 167–68, 170n14, 198, 254 Spielberg, Steven 88 Star Wars 74 Stella Dallas 81 Stewart, Garrett 183 Stewart, Susan 66, 216–18 Stoker, Bram 14, 97, 160–64, 166–68, 255 Stopkewich, Lynne 105 Strange Illusion 118n38 Strauss, Richard 204 Straw, Will 18, 21, 83, 118n45, 187n9, 198, 200 Streetcar Named Desire, A 63 Street of Crocodiles, The 46n3, 109 Super Size Me 105 surrealism 5, 20, 23n12, 25n46, 28, 37, 59–62, 65, 98, 102–03, 107, 113, 131, 231, 246–47, 254 Sviridov, Georgy 115 Sweet Hereafter, The 32 Szoke, Donna 121

T

Tales from the Gimli Hospital 5–6, 14, 20, 29, 48, 50, 55, 57, 59–62, 67, 70, 73, 75, 79, 84–85, 88, 90, 105–106, 110, 113, 120–24, 134, 141, 195, 207, 241, 243, 245, 248–49, 257 Tarantino, Quentin 2, 58, 74, 83, 97–98, 104, 200

280 PLAYING WITH MEMORIES Tarkovsky, Andrei 53 Tarnation 105 Taussig, Michael 183 Telefilm Canada 12, 95n23 Tempest, The 253 That Obscure Object of Desire 120 Thomson, R.H. 76 Three Stooges, The 40 Toles, George 2, 5, 12–14, 18, 21, 26–32, 34–35, 37–47, 63–64, 80, 83, 85, 87, 90–91, 119, 124, 126, 143n1, 172, 179, 189n43, 195–96, 239, 244, 247, 252–53, 260 Toles, Tom 31, 38, 42 Toronto International Film Festival 13–14, 48–49, 59 Truffaut, François 103 Tscherkassky, Peter 99 Turgenev, Ivan 259 Turner, Bryan S. 184 Turner, Lana 93n6 Twilight of the Ice Nymphs xii, 9, 12–13, 19, 35, 63, 70, 72, 75–77, 85, 96, 100, 104–05, 113, 130, 141, 199, 207, 252–54, 256, 261 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me 88

U

Ulmer, Edgar G. 117n19 Ulysses 106 Undercover Brother 99 Unknown, The 220n8

V

Vampyr 149 Van Dyck, Anthony 222n56 Vanya on 42nd Street 160 Vatnsdal, Caelum 94n13, 95n23 Velázquez, Diego 222n56 Vertigo 110, 126 Vertov, Dziga 115 Vigo, Jean 2 Viridiana 120 Von Helmolt, Vonnie 159–60 Von Sternberg, Josef 2, 83, 126, 244 Von Stroheim, Erich 28, 83

Von Sydow, Max 39 Von Trier, Lars 2

W

Wagner, Richard 62, 199 Waiting for Godot 145 Walking from Munich to Berlin 112 Walser, Robert 7, 156, 158 Warhol, Andy 61 Warner, Michael 226–27 Way Down East 81 Webern, Anton 263 Wedding in White 91 Wei-Qiang, Zhang 163 Welles, Orson 60, 75 Whale, James 53 What’s My Line? 40 White, Ed 115 Whitmey, Nigel 253 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 63 Wiene, Robert 204 Wilde, Oscar 72, 99 Wilder, Billy 262 Willemen, Paul 23n2 Winnipeg Arena 3, 15, 84–85, 87, 94n15, 101, 103, 117n16, 142, 205, 210, 215, 220n10, 259 Winnipeg Film Group xii, 5, 58, 104 Winnipeg Maroons xi, 3–4, 84, 101, 111, 134, 215, 220n10 Winter’s Tale, The 152, 156 Wizard of Oz, The 118n34, 185 Wölfflin, Heinrich 210–11 Woloski, Jason 209 Wood, Edward D. 53 Worsley, Gump 101 Written on the Wind 89, 93n6, 118n38

Y

Yankee Doodle Dandy 262

Z

Zamora, Lois Parkinson 203, 206, 218 Zookeeper Workbook 13