Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin 9781442686939

Citation preview

INTO THE PAST The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin started making films in his back yard and on his kitchen table. Now his unique work, which relies heavily on such archaic means as black and white small-format cinematography and silent-film storytelling, premieres at major film festivals around the world and is avidly discussed in the critical press. Into the Past provides a complete and systematic critical commentary on each of Maddin’s feature films and shorts, from his 1986 debut film The Dead Father through to his highly successful 2008 full-length ‘docu-fantasia’ My Winnipeg. William Beard’s extensive analysis of Maddin’s narrative and aesthetic strategies, themes, influences, and underlying issues also examines the origins and production history of each film. Each of Maddin’s projects and collaborations showcase his gradual evolution as a filmmaker and his singular development of narrative forms. Beard’s close readings of these films illuminate, among other things, the profound ways in which Maddin’s art is founded in the past – both in the cultural past, and in his personal memory. william beard is a professor and Film Studies Program Director in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.

Little Guy, family photo reproduced in Maddin’s latest film, My Winnipeg.

Guy Maddin, credit title from Maddin’s first film, The Dead Father.

Into the Past The Cinema of Guy Maddin

W I LLI A M BEA R D

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4139-6 (cloth) isbn 978-1-4426-1066-8 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Beard, William, 1946– Into the past : the cinema of Guy Maddin / William Beard. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4139-6 (bound) isbn 978-1-4426-1066-8 (pbk.) 1. Maddin, Guy – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Motion picture producers and directors – Canada. I. Title. pn1998.3.m332b43 2010

791.4302′33092

c2010-901453-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi A Note on DVD Sources xiii Introduction

3

1 The Dead Father

16

2 Tales from the Gimli Hospital 3 Archangel 4 Careful

26

50 88

5 Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

127

6 Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

163

7 Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands 8 The Saddest Music in the World 9 Brand upon the Brain! 10 My Winnipeg Envoi

270

313

358

Appendix: The Short Films Notes 403 Bibliography 447 Index 459

361

232

192

This page intentionally left blank

List of Illustrations

My Winnipeg, family photo of Guy Maddin as a child in sailor suit (by permission of Paddlewheel Productions) ii The Dead Father, credit title for Guy Maddin as writer and director in uniform of naval officer (by permission of Extra Large Productions) ii The Dead Father, the dead father on the dinner table (by permission of Extra Large Productions) 19 Tales from the Gimli Hospital, credit screen for Extra Large Productions (by permission of Extra Large Productions) 28 Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Gunnar watching puppet show through opera glasses (by permission of Extra Large Productions) 35 Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Snjófridur as angel (by permission of Extra Large Productions) 39 Archangel, Teutonic leader with death’s-head hat (by permission of Ordnance Pictures), with inset from The War Illustrated 57 Archangel, Veronkha in The Illumination (by permission of Ordnance Pictures) 67 Archangel, Veronkha as warrior (by permission of Ordnance Pictures) 72 Archangel, Geza reunited with his father after death (by permission of Ordnance Pictures) 82 Archangel, Boles surrounded by fog (by permission of Ordnance Pictures) 86 Careful, the ghost of the Swanfeeder (by permission of The Greg & Tracy Film Ministry) 93 Careful, Johann and Grigorss as Romantic-painting silhouettes (by permission of The Greg & Tracy Film Ministry) 95

viii

List of Illustrations

Careful, Grigorss freezing to death in Klara’s cave (by permission of The Greg & Tracy Film Ministry) 101 Careful, Johann as Byronic hero (by permission of The Greg & Tracy Film Ministry) 115 Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, tableau of the death of Cain Ball (by permission of Marble Island Pictures) 131 Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, the assault on Cain Ball (by permission of Marble Island Pictures) 143 Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Juliana mesmerized by Dr Solti (by permission of Marble Island Pictures) 152 Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, the title screen introducing Dr Van Helsing (by permission of Vonnie Von Helmolt Film) 169 Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, ‘a little Max Ernst collage,’ the head of Lucy Westenra (by permission of Vonnie Von Helmolt Film and Bruce Monk) 170 Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, Lucy’s dance of possession (by permission of Vonnie Von Helmolt Film) 176 Cowards Bend the Knee, Guy discovers his girlfriend Veronica is pregnant (by permission of Guy Maddin) 205 Cowards Bend the Knee, Guy strangles Liliom to death as Meta looks on (by permission of Guy Maddin) 209 Cowards Bend the Knee, Meta has a cigarette while Dr Fusi performs an abortion on Veronica (by permission of Guy Maddin) 212 Cowards Bend the Knee, Guy Maddin of the Winnipeg Maroons, in an idealized portrait (by permission of Guy Maddin) 221 The Saddest Music in the World, the legless Lady Helen Port-Huntley (by permission of Rhombus Media) 237 The Saddest Music in the World, Chester in flames (by permission of Rhombus Media) 254 The Saddest Music in the World, Chester and Narcissa walking down the main street of Winnipeg (by permission of Rhombus Media) 257 The Saddest Music in the World, the image of Roderick’s dead son appears to him (by permission of Rhombus Media) 265 Brand upon the Brain!, Mother at her telescope-panopticon (by permission of The Film Company) 275 Brand upon the Brain!, the burning Father (by permission of The Film Company) 280 Brand upon the Brain!, Mother’s invitation into the bed of knives (by permission of The Film Company) 290

List of Illustrations

ix

Brand upon the Brain!, Wendy’s moonlike face of desire (by permission of The Film Company) 297 My Winnipeg, the all-seeing Savage mother looks through the window (by permission of Paddlewheel Productions) 319 My Winnipeg, the dead father’s face on the ice-surface of the dead Winnipeg Arena (by permission of Paddlewheel Productions) 340 My Winnipeg, Citizen Girl resurrects the Wolesley Elm (by permission of Paddlewheel Productions) 352 My Winnipeg, the little Guy asleep (by permission of Paddlewheel Productions) 356 The Heart of the World, Anna, State Scientist (by permission of the Toronto International Film Festival) 370 Sissy Boy Slap Party, a pile of sleeping children (by permission of Jody Shapiro) 376 Sombra Dolorosa, El Muerto finishes eating father (by permission of Jody Shapiro) 381 My Dad Is 100 Years Old, Isabella Rossellini talks to the movie of Ingrid Bergman (by permission of Spanky Productions) 393

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This book’s first and greatest debt is to Guy Maddin himself, who generously granted me many hours of interview and chat time over a period of four years, and answered dozens of free-floating questions in e-mails and telephone calls. I never felt at any time during this process that the filmmaker was trying to influence my thinking, or to cover up anything he had regarded as mistakes or misjudgments in his own career (just the reverse, in fact: he is the most self-critical of artists). His conversation is as uninhibited, eloquent, and thought-provoking as his films are, and nearly as funny. Scarcely less important has been the similar kind willingness of George Toles, Maddin’s collaborator, mentor, and friend, to sit and talk to me for hours at a time in sessions that I found not only informative and thought-provoking, but invariably diverting. My work would not have been possible without grants from my home institution, the University of Alberta, whose funding bodies gave me the opportunity to travel and conduct interviews, and furnished the means to acquire much invaluable research material, especially rare video materials. Nor could I have completed the project without a six-month sabbatical leave, and a further grant from the university’s Faculty of Arts of a one-course teaching release during another term. Thanks to Ritchard Findlay, Ethan Garber, Steve Gravestock, Geordie King, Greg Klymkiw, Guy Maddin, Isabella Rossellini, Jody Shapiro, and Vonnie Von Helmolt for their generous help in obtaining stills permissions, and to Jeff Solylo for his wonderful Archangel still and poster design that is the basis for this book’s cover. Thanks to graduate student research assistant Mary Chan, who provided exemplary bibliographical research and interview transcription, and to graduate students Tiffany O’Hearn and Amy Shirkie, who also

xii

Acknowledgments

helped to transcribe interviews. And special thanks to Rob Rimes, who helped greatly in the preparation of the index. Thanks also to my colleague and Department Chair Garrett Epp for his consistent support and for a great conversation about Sissy Boy Slap Party. And, as always, thanks to my wife Wendy, and my children Michael and Anne, for putting up with me during this time-consuming project and providing a bedrock of sanity under all endeavours. Perhaps I should thank my golden retriever Chloe, too, because dog-walks have proved to be great opportunities for rumination.

A Note on DVD Sources

I have used exclusively NTSC DVD sources throughout. For a number of the short films I have had access to Maddin’s own cuts of the films, which are sometimes longer than versions otherwise on view. Maddin has also generously provided his own video sources for stills. The DVD commentary tracks and documentary extras referred to in the text are taken from the following Region 1 NTSC issues: • Tales from the Gimli Hospital – Kino Video 2000 • Archangel – Zeitgeist Video 2002 (coupled with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) • Careful – Kino Video 2000 • Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity – Quickband/Warner Brothers 2000 (miscellaneous shorts anthology entitled ‘Short 2’) • Twilight of the Ice Nymphs – Zeitgeist Video 2002 (coupled with Archangel) • Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary – Zeitgeist Video 2004 • Cowards Bend the Knee – Zeitgeist Video 2004. • The Saddest Music in the World – TVA Films [Canada] 2004 • Brand Upon the Brain! – Criterion Collection 2008 • My Winnipeg – Seville 2008 In 2009, Zeitgeist Video released a new DVD transfer of Careful, accompanied by a new director’s commentary track, which I was not able to hear before publication.

This page intentionally left blank

INTO THE PAST The Cinema of Guy Maddin

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

The most eccentric of mainstream filmmakers (or the most accessible of avant-gardists). J. Hoberman1

Guy Maddin is one of the most interesting film directors in the world. His work is strictly unique – a description that cannot be applied to many film directors of whatever stature. Perhaps another filmmaker might be able imitate Maddin’s work, but his work, no matter how many influences and homages it may contain, resembles no one’s at all. The circumstances of his entry into the craft were unpropitious, and his first films (and not just his first ones) so strange and even ridiculous that people didn’t know what to make of them. There are still a lot of his viewers who can’t get past a jumble of descriptors: black-and-white quirky pastiche silent melodrama arcane outrageous silly irreverent bizarre-beyond-belief. Gradually he acquired champions, his work penetrated the world of festivals and cult movie venues, and he got a precarious foothold in the world of feature filmmaking, albeit of the oddest kind imaginable. Now his films are shown all over the world, and he has gained almost universal critical respect, including passionate bouquets thrown from some of the most discerning commentators across four continents. Still, I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me what I was working on, and when I told them ‘Guy Maddin,’ replied with: ‘Who?’ Screenings of Maddin’s films in non-festival venues have often been low in attendance and high in walkouts. Whatever kind of film these patrons thought they were going to see, clearly it was not the same one being greeted so enthusiastically by high-profile reviewers. Despite the amazingly wide com-

4

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

mercial distribution of The Saddest Music in the World and the surprising relative popularity of My Winnipeg, Maddin’s films remain the province of festival-goers, art-house denizens, cult devotees. Elements of Maddin His cinema can be described, but not classified. The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman delivered perhaps the best attempt in the characterization quoted above – one that Maddin himself is fond of repeating. Yet Maddin is really neither a mainstream filmmaker nor an avant-garde one. Let me try to triangulate (or polygonate) the phenomenon ‘Guy Maddin’ by listing some of the things he is: Autodidact Maddin did an undergraduate degree in economics, but after an unhappy time in a bank ended up working as a house painter for ten years, off and on, in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, he began to accumulate cultural interests. He fell in with staff members from the University of Manitoba’s Department of Literature, Theatre, and Film, in particular George Toles and Stephen Snyder. Snyder invited him to 16mm screenings, projected on the paint-cracked wall of his apartment living room, of whatever he happened to be teaching. These screenings would often also involve Maddin’s close friends Ian Handford, John Harvie, and Kyle McCulloch (a group christened ‘the Drones’ by Wodehouse-reading Handford and Harvie and compared by Maddin to Fellini’s vitelloni), as well as Toles, John Paizs, and others. During extended periods when Snyder was absent, Maddin would be left with free access to the apartment with its ‘great bohemian rancidness,’2 and whatever films were lying around, and this could result in the group doing things like watching Stroheim’s Foolish Wives a million times. Maddin sat in on some of Toles’ film classes as well, and there and in private conversations Toles opened up to him a vast landscape of world literature and cinema. In effect, he became Maddin’s mentor – and, later, his most important collaborator in providing scenario ideas and writing filmscripts. Toles is no average English professor, and the mostly off-the-books education Maddin received at his hands was anything but mainstream. Maddin’s copious reading engendered a desire to produce something himself, but although he would have liked to write, he felt that he lacked the gift. In the area of film, however, he had the local example of John Paizs and the institution of

Introduction

5

the Winnipeg Film Group which could furnish, most importantly, editing facilities. Paizs just went out and shot stuff on mini-budgets with local people and no distribution deals or anything like that, and managed to actually make movies. It was a suggestive spectacle. So Maddin too just made a couple of films. He didn’t know how to operate a camera, didn’t know how to edit, didn’t know how to do anything. Nevertheless, The Dead Father (1986) gradually accreted over a period of many months, and eventually got accepted at the Toronto Film Festival owing to the enthusiasm of a few members of the screening committee, notably Geoff Pevere. Then came Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), an intermediate-length film that eventually (again the gestation period was long) got expanded to something approaching a feature. A stranger film was never made – not even Eraserhead, which it replaced at New York’s Quad Cinema for midnight cult screenings that went on for a year. Maddin had begun to arrive. The main point here is that Maddin had no training in filmmaking, no real academic background, no connections outside of Winnipeg, no clear path to anything. He taught himself filmmaking a step at a time, over many years, and even now, at the height of his current mastery, the films he knows how to make (superbly) have about them something selftaught, something far outside the exigencies of any kind of commercial filmmaking. Early generations of Hollywood filmmakers had no formal training either, but they learned, rather like apprentices, by observing films being made. Maddin didn’t observe anything but books and completed movies: he worked deductively, backwards from effects to causes. Doubtless Maddin’s technical limitations are less severe than he is in the habit of implying, but it is for this reason that he has constantly referred to himself as a ‘garage-band’ filmmaker, somebody who doesn’t really have the technical ability to be a professional artist but might have something authentic and personal to say anyway. This condition compelled him to use the very simplest means and the very smallest resources, and (in the tradition of the garage-band ethic) it freed him and spurred him to let his imagination run as free and wild as he could. Silent-film lover Congregating with Snyder and Toles and the Drones turned out to have amazingly productive results for Maddin related to the idiosyncrasies of their tastes. Watching Foolish Wives and Murnau’s Sunrise multiple dozens of times may, from one standpoint, have been perverse and even patho-

6

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

logical behaviour, but together with his exposure to other films of the 1920s it did give Maddin an appreciation for the great aesthetic system of this once-grand, now-dead form of silent cinema in its highest era. More than an appreciation: an in-the-bones understanding – of its rhetoric, its narrative strategies, its landscape of heightened subject matter and heightened expression. Moreover, silent movies, even those made under rather elaborate studio conditions in the 1920s, were a gold mine of simple methods to create ambitious dramatic and emotional effects. Irised and vignetted shots are easy to achieve, and give instant access to a more elevated form of portraiture. Double exposures – in Maddin’s case conducted in the camera just as in pre-1920s cinema – not only allow an easy-as-pie entry into the realm of mental and spiritual events but are always-already poetic. Intertitles are powerful workhorse tools of narrative and character exposition that also slide easily into metaphor and poetic commentary. This entire plane of storytelling and visual realization is one that virtually all feature filmmaking has abandoned. Seeing Maddin’s early movies for the first time, say Gimli Hospital or Archangel (1990), and encountering there a detailed re-enactment of the narrative and poetic devices of silent cinema, simply produces astonishment. What a very unusual thing to be doing! And although there is a good deal of self-satire and mischievous despoliation in this work, there is also a transparent wish really to make these old forms once more eloquent. As well, the partial or total absence of dialogue, and certainly of direct sound, has the inestimable added benefit of making filmmaking cheaper, and greatly reduces the need to direct line readings. An additional attraction of this visual language is its oldness. Not only is oldness something desirable in itself to Maddin, but it also serves as a way of disguising and occluding his images in ways that make them more expressive for him. And this oldness is occurring in two separate time frames. The first is the historical frame of silent cinema, gone since the 1920s. The second is a mimicking of the historical frame of Maddin’s viewing experience of old films, seen in battered and multiple-generation 16mm prints that spoke their age in the scars of many trips through the projector and the black-halating overcontrast, graininess, and poor definition of serial duplication. So in Maddin’s films we find scratches, light leaks, simulated hairs in the projector gate, fog, heavy film grain, high contrast, fuzziness – all methods of image ‘degradation’ (Maddin’s word) that serve the dual purpose of obscuring the bare poverty of his production circumstances and technical address and of making new films that come into the world already bearing the marks of oldness

Introduction

7

and loving usage. This effect, however backward looking it may be, has the strong contrary flavour of modernist self-consciousness and indeed avant-gardness. Cinephile, bibliophile Maddin’s film enthusiasms are not confined to silent cinema. Early Hollywood sound films, especially ‘part-talkies,’ are a particular source of appeal. But he also loves, and reflects in his distorting mirror, early musicals, horror movies from the 1930s to the 1960s, film noir, and at least some branches of trash cinema. Whether these movies are good or bad according to the criteria of serious cineastes is irrelevant: Maddin, like many, many others, is perfectly capable of loving things because they are bad. But his taste for entertaining aesthetic failure cohabits with a deep admiration for genuine masters of the cinematic medium. Not only Stroheim, Murnau, and others from the silent era, but Vigo, Sternberg, Ophuls, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Renoir, even Carl Dreyer, the most austere and forbidding of directors. One of the things linking many of these deceased art-filmmakers is that they also were, or wanted to be, mainstream filmmakers – a thing that Maddin can only distantly contemplate. Maddin loves and is widely read in a whole range of older literature: the list of authors who have influenced or are referenced in his films comprises an astonishing range. A few examples: E.T.A. Hoffmann, Melville, Dostoevsky, Ruskin, Chekhov, Musil, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser, Geza Csáth, the Comte de Lautréamont, Knut Hamsun, Henry Green, and practically every French or Belgian Symbolist writer. When viewers try to compute the fact that the creator of so much low comedy and low-culture pastiche is also reflecting such aesthetic refinements, they gain a clue to his profound idiosyncrasy and odd complexity. Surrealist One of Maddin’s absolute touchstones is the 1930 Buñuel/Dali film L’Âge d’or, whose bizarre deadpan inappropriateness and anarchic sexual transgression wreak havoc in the context of a satirical extended narrative. The low-budget production base of first-generation Surrealism was something else that understandably spoke to this kitchen-table and backyard filmmaker: all you need is ideas! Maddin’s work is indisputably dreamlike, and sleepwalking, delirium, and amnesia are constant features of his work, together with a gleeful Surrealist desire to deliver

8

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

savage thrusts of perverse and destabilizing humour. Surrealism with a lower-case ‘s’ has become so generalized a term that it can be applied to some aspect of practically everything, but Maddin’s allegiance is to the original brand, and his brothers-in-arms among contemporary filmmakers are those from whom a similar descent can be traced – Jan Svankmajer, the Quay Brothers, the further reaches of David Lynch’s work. Avant-gardist As I said, Maddin is not an avant-garde filmmaker – at least not in the strict tradition that extends from Hans Richter and Jean Epstein to Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow. Maddin makes feature films with characters and plots, so unless you employ the loosest definition of the term his work is not avant-garde. This has not prevented the National Society of Film Critics in the United States – a distinguished body of leading mainstream reviewers – from twice giving Maddin films the award for Best Experimental Film. If Maddin is not an avant-garde filmmaker, still less is he an experimental filmmaker, an even more restrictive and purist category. The NSFC’s awards went to Archangel (a feature) and The Heart of the World (2000, a six-minute short). But clearly they wanted to give him something, and what else were they to do? Again, Maddin is unclassifiable. But someone walking into the middle of a Maddin movie might immediately think it was avant-garde because of its ‘degraded’ images, and (in his later work) its manically looping editing: these are things he does have in common with the ‘strict’ tradition. His low-budget dress-up productions also have affinities with earlier avant-garde quasi-narrative films from Man Ray to Kenneth Anger. Maddin’s aggressive and sometimes cheesy humour in no-money production circumstances can almost invoke the über-cheesiness of bargain-basement Kuchar Brothers films from the 1960s. None of these models, not even Anger’s, are very close to the Brakhage-Snow landscape. Could Maddin have links to the foundfootage (or ‘recycled images’)3 tradition in the avant-garde, even though he doesn’t use found footage but rather, as it were, manufactures his own in the form of imitations of cinematic image-making of long-dead forms? Looking at Maddin’s paraphrases of Lon Chaney’s The Penalty (1920), the Bela Lugosi B-shocker White Zombie (1932), or the early musical The King of Jazz (1930) can stir recollections of Joseph Cornell’s canonic Rose Hobart (1936), with its fetishized re-presentation of shots from the fairly trashy jungle melodrama East of Borneo (1931). An even closer

Introduction

9

resemblance exists to Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), both of which consist of assemblages of silent-era movie footage on nitrate stock that has suffered visible chemical decomposition. There is, I think, an important resonance here, especially to the achingly nostalgic Lyrical Nitrate. It is hard to imagine Maddin’s movies really at home in gallery settings (except for Cowards Bend the Knee [2003], which actually debuted as an only partially successful installation). In short, Maddin’s movies don’t send out the same high-modernist or serious-postmodernist signals that almost invariably attach to this kind of avant-garde cinema. Melodramatist One thing that separates Maddin decisively from almost any comfortable avant-garde catergorization is the way his work has espoused melodrama. ‘Melodrama’ is just as elastic and indefinite a term as ‘surrealist’ and ‘avant-garde.’ Maddin’s affiliation is not with the all-purpose melodrama that is, so to speak, the flour out of which so much movie and television bread is made, but rather with that distinct form which once dominated the stages of nineteenth-century theatres and the screens of early twentieth-century movie houses. Invoking here the hypertropisms of the Romantic drama of Schiller, Kleist, and Victor Hugo (Careful, 1992), there the noble idealisms of a Victorian or Belasco-like later nineteenthcentury theatre (Archangel), adapting Bram Stoker (Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, 2002), making Euripedes into a quasi-noir melodrama (Cowards Bend the Knee), or essaying a Grand Guignol family melodrama (Brand upon the Brain!, 2006), Maddin is at all times alive to the ways that his silent-cinema model is a natural carrier of the idealist transports and heightened clarity of feeling that are the gift of traditional melodrama. Sound-era movie melodrama – the kind that has received the bulk of attention in writing about film – tends to be strongly social in its subtextual meanings; and although Maddin loves Douglas Sirk as much as anybody, his own melodrama has no social commentary at all.(Perhaps it does have a kind of cultural commentary, however, or at least a symptomatology of a cultural condition, as I have suggested in an earlier essay.)4 The societies, the ideologies, that come back in Maddin’s resurrection of older forms of melodrama are dead. How can they then sustain any kind of social critique, particularly when their author has no aim whatever of recreating history with any accuracy or detachment? Maddin’s melodrama is as outmoded as the silent cinema that he paraphrases.

10

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Sensationalist It is a rare Maddin movie that does not feature a strangulation, an impalement, an amputation, a disembowelment, a decapitation, and/or some other form of physical atrocity. It is an even rarer one that does not contain some lurid sexual transgression (incest is a strong favourite) to go with copious equal-opportunity nudity and pathological levels of romantic betrayal. The violence is so extreme, and usually presented in such a low-tech manner, that its referentiality to cheap horror movies is hard to miss, while the sexual transgressions may likewise be seen as escalations in explicitness of elements already present in traditional melodrama. In any case, the effect is complex: self-parody and low-culture signifiers of sensationalism on the one hand, genuine queasiness and surreal disconnection on the other. Nudity and explicit sexual deviancies are always markers that the old forms of melodrama and silent film that Maddin paraphrases are being discordantly updated, and they add to the dissonant bitonalities of temporal idiom that are at the centre of his cinema. And however covered in ironies of exaggeration, these elements are still sharp enough to draw blood. Jokester Maddin is the first to realize, and the first to point out, how outmoded his models and his practice are. And the way he points it out is to direct an endless series of jokes at the silliness of old melodrama, silent cinema, naïve social attitudes, and personal idealisms. Their non-viability is marked by deliberate exaggeration, pastiche, and merciless guying (good word). He makes innocence into ultra-innocence and obsolete belief systems into ridiculous ones, and he also makes melodrama into a parody of itself by pushing every exaggeration and simplification innate to its method to the level of absurd caricature. For most of the length of Maddin’s artistic career, he has elaborately reconstructed these old forms because they can carry feelings and beliefs, and varieties of pure aesthetic expression, that are no longer possible in the contemporary environment. And then he directs a torrent of eggs and rotten vegetables at them to dramatize their impossibility. Maddin’s sense of humour is ubiquitous and virtuoso; it can be witty, delicate, affectionate, playful. But its most dangerous and destabilizing iteration is this scalding, puncturing attack on everything he himself appears to hold dear. Indeed, in many of his films it appears to be an attack on feeling itself, and in a way

Introduction

11

that often seems involuntary and uncontrollable. It is a powerful imp of the perverse that is at work – but what is the nature of that perverse? Maddin and his co-author George Toles poke fun at the hopes, fears, joys, and sufferings of their characters, and they also poke fun at their own film insofar as it is condemned to express these things. Maddin is trying to sustain an almost self-cancelling project: to advance this ethic (of obsolete narrative, character, and cinema), and also to underline its impossibility. This is perhaps a hard thing for viewers to take in, certainly at first sight. Postmodern The entire cocktail of contradictions comprised by all the previous headings makes Maddin a postmodern artist. The sense that he is combining such incommensurables as quotation and re-creation, naïve narrative and avant-gardism, lyricism and sensationalism, innocence and derisive scepticism, the highest and the lowest artistic models, the highest and lowest economic production models marks him in this way. Even the sense that he is manipulating contradictory forms as a way of dealing with the blockage of any kind of direct expression in our culture, and especially of any kind of elevated idealism or lyricism, shows him as a creator who both reflects and tries to resist the fragmentation and scepticism of our era, and hence a variety of postmodern artist. Historical quotation or pastiche, explicitly ‘retro’ elements, are widespread in postmodern art, and they are far more extensively deployed in Maddin’s cinema than usual. For Maddin, though, the intention and the effect are very different from the detachment that usually marks these modes. He does feel distance from this old cultural material, but with him there is a nostalgia that infuses the situation with longing and sadness that are quite unlike the norm. This whole topic, really, is a subject for a broader kind of cultural analysis than I will be undertaking here. But the recognition of Maddin as postmodern, and in a way as martyred by postmodernity like the rest of us, is, I think, part of the instinctive response of his devotees that sees him as a sophisticated and relevant artist of the moment, rather than simply a diverting one. Child at play The notion of play is something important in much postmodern art, and Maddin’s cinema is playful on multiple planes. It plays with older

12

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

forms, it plays with viewers’ expectations and experience, it plays selfconscious games with its own discourse. But there is an even more basic sense of the term that applies to Maddin’s work. It is a kind of primitive, sometimes almost totemistic, playing with his materials almost exactly as a child would play with its toys. In Tales from the Gimli Hospital Maddin is playing with his family’s, and his region’s, Icelandic past, putting together settings and stories from an actual tome of historical memories called The Gimli Saga. In Archangel he is dressing his sets and his characters with fantasies inspired by the World War I picture books that he leafed through constantly as a child. His literary and cinematic consumption has furnished him with similar subjects for play. The inner child, who is the first imaginer and the first player, and who survives robustly in the adult creator, reimagines and plays with these materials from culture and history encountered both in childhood and later. These resulting fictional worlds, all of them fantastic in one way or another, have only a distant and coincidental relation to the real world or any other primary source of inspiration. All of them bear a resemblance, rather, to dollhouse or (Maddin’s word) sandbox worlds where the imaginer is playing with the toys he has imagined and then fashioned in a relatively home-made way. It is a process that continues right through his most recent work, where however its primary materials are no longer historical culture of one kind or another but now his own life, and particularly his childhood and young adulthood. So in Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand upon the Brain!, this feeling of play – with toylike iterations of the hockey heroes of his youth (in Cowards) or of his parents (in Brand) – remains present, but now with greater substance and more forthright power. Maddin’s progress The study that follows examines each of Maddin’s feature films in chronological order, one film to a chapter. At the end of the volume, after a very brief conclusion (Envoi), there is a large Appendix, in effect an additional chapter, that covers all of Maddin’s extant short films, also in chronological order. Although all of these chapters convey some information about project origins and production circumstances, their main activity is to provide extensive close readings of the films. In each case I provide a description of the film’s content and an analysis of themes, narrative forms, literary and filmic influences, and cinematic techniques, in a fashion intended to be orderly and consistent from chapter to chapter. I also provide a running account of persistences, metamorphoses,

Introduction

13

and departures in both content and style. What the long curve of this trajectory reveals is a slow growth and transformation in the filmmaker’s range and treatment of subject matter and a slow development and then a sudden alteration in his visual language. The account of technique and style in Maddin’s cinema finds him beginning as a kind of primitivist working in 16mm and taking up the earlycinema methods of long takes, simple shot assembly, reductive low-key lighting, and elementary special effects. That is certainly not the whole story of his early filmmaking apparatus, which elaborately mimics silentfilm and avant-garde qualities as well, but those qualities of it are an essential component. As his budgets grow and the range of his projects expands, he experiments with more elaborate techniques, including colour and even 35mm film. But the most profound and rapidly implemented change occurs around the turn of the millennium, in the realm of editing. Without leaving behind his avant-retro practices, his cinema becomes plastic and kinetic, constantly in motion with micro-editing and changes of speed. Since these visual techniques are only very glancingly compatible with spoken dialogue, Maddin’s latest films are if anything even more inseparable from silent cinema than their predecessors, although their pace draws them in a direction very different from the long-take, mise-en-scène style of his models Stroheim and Murnau. The movement to a much faster editing tempo now finds a definitive technical basis in digital editing techniques, though Maddin has continued to shoot almost everything on film in all of his longer projects. Meanwhile, after having an unpleasant experience with 35mm, he has retreated to the smaller, more malleable 16mm and eventually even 8mm gauges. We find him in recent years capitalizing on the tiny size and weight of 8mm cameras to begin a regime of hand-held, multi-camera shooting that mixes perfectly with that infinitely mobile digital editing and allows a cinema so fluid and ever-changing that mentally reconstructing its shooting is an almost impossible task – a style, in short, that is in many ways at a polar opposite to the one he started with. The business of accounting for the evolutions of meaning and affect in Maddin’s films is a denser and more complex undertaking. It is fascinating to watch his development as an artist from this perspective. The wrestling match between pastiche and nostalgia, between the embodiment of his narrative material in toy structures to be played with mockingly or affectionately and the embattled wish to extract some kind of authentic emotion from it is probably the main line here. The toy structures of Archangel and Careful stage value systems of an obvious absurdity that are

14

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

caricatures of nineteenth-century idealist worldviews, full of repression and false consciousness but also containing something precious that a contemporary Western outlook is decisively cut off from. Maddin’s struggles to quarry genuine feelings of aspiration and loss from these environments are in effect iterations of his artist’s struggle to find an expression for his own feelings. As these chapters move in detail through his films, they recount this evolution of expressive vehicles. The most recent, and most important, development has been the arrival at a more direct channel of expression, less gnarled and hedged around with self-deriding sarcasm. There was always the sense that Maddin’s art was intensely personal, and anyone reading his published writing – especially as collected in From the Atelier Tovar (2003) – will understand its deep roots in childhood experience and memory. (Just how profoundly this is true is something that has become more and more evident to me as I have worked on this project, and is reflected in the title of my book.) Maddin’s first film, The Dead Father, drew directly on autobiographical material for its content, and there is nothing at all obstructed about its expression. But the grand trek that followed, through the fantasy realms of Old Gimli, northern Russia in 1919, the early nineteenth-century Swiss Alps, the Symbolist fantasy-land of Mandragora, and Bram Stoker’s fin-de-siècle Europe, removes him from that primary ground, and establishes the self-described ‘sandbox play’ of this phase of his art. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (for a host of reasons) and Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (because it is a film version of an existing stage production) draw him to the furthest distance from his personal memories. It is at this point that Maddin turns back to the fertile ground that is the essential source of his art: his own past, and especially his own childhood. The Saddest Music in the World (2004) is only personal in this way by virtue of its Winnipeg setting, but his other three most recent features – Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand upon the Brain!, and My Winnipeg (2007) – have such a strong basis in private memory and experience that the director has called them ‘the Me Trilogy.’ They have extended his oneiric, self-mocking, garage-band avant-gardist retro cinema into the very place of its origin. In the first two of these films Maddin’s ‘memorism’ is so heavily disguised that the untutored viewer is quite unable to recognize the life of a person any more actual than the people in Archangel or Careful, while the buffet table of My Winnipeg contains a whole lot of items that have little to do with a particular autobiography. But for Maddin the creator, these disguises and distractions are insignificant, and the return to his own life has had the effect of clearing away obstacles, liberating feeling, and producing

Introduction

15

a species of unproblematically expressive cinema that represents a new and rather inspiring phase of his work – as stylistically exuberant as ever, but now speaking more directly and eloquently. The arc of this transformation from a landscape of pastiche-laden hyperartifice to a landscape of ecstatic recollection and anguished confession describes, then, Maddin’s progress of feeling and expression from its beginnings until the time of writing (2008). He is an artist in the prime of his creative life, so the present study can only be a partial one. It is quite possible that with ‘the Me Trilogy’ Maddin has completed some kind of purgation – a very fruitful one artistically – and that he will now move forward to new models, strategies, and subject matter. I console myself with the thought that the cutoff point of this not-exactly-slim volume falls at least at a watershed moment of Maddin’s art, one that has seen it rise to new heights.

1

The Dead Father (1986)

It was something that just seemed so pure. It’s a pure dream. There’s nothing in it that isn’t directly channelled through this experience of loss, and his deep connection with this father who was never there but always hovering around the edges ... There’s something so dirt-basic to dreaming in grief and living in grief, and the letting-go process ... I’ve always been amazed that anyone needs to have that film explained to them. It’s lucid, that’s exactly how it is. The father who is dead and not quite resigned to being dead. It’s perfect. – George Toles1

Maddin’s first film is twenty-five minutes long and is a quite wonderful debut. In a manner predictive of many things to come, it uses the simplest of elements to conjure up a filmic environment that is at once alertly inventive, surreally shocking, and endearingly homemade, selfmocking, and eerily poetic. It announces itself immediately as nested in the cinematic past: the opening credit sequence features a meticulous copy of silent and early-sound movie title cards (one for each actor, all introduced in costume and named as themselves and as the characters they play); meanwhile on the soundtrack we hear the crunchy, restricted-range main title music from The Public Enemy (1931). Later on there is liberal use of low-key quasi-expressionist or noirish photography, and there are further soundtrack interventions from Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and from classical music and opera. Perhaps even more clearly than in anything else of Maddin’s one can see immediately how the film has turned its limitations (of budget, of production equipment and materials, of filmmaking expertise) into virtues through repeated

The Dead Father

17

transformative acts of imagination. Every primitive strategy of the soundtrack, every drastically simplified lighting set-up, every rough simplification of action, every continuity disruption – all are metamorphosed into acts of conscious creative will, so that shortcomings which would disable another film are transmuted into an array of witty and original stylistic gestures. The source for the film was primarily a series of dreams Maddin had had over many years about his father, who had died of a stroke at the age of fifty-nine in 1977 when Guy was twenty-one years old. Maddin told Caelum Vatnsdal: In my dreams, my father hadn’t died ... he’d found a better family to go live with. In some dreams the family was just across town, and in other versions he’d gone to Minneapolis. He was usually just coming back to the house to pick up a shaving kit or a newspaper he’d forgotten or something, and he would usually agree to stay for five or ten minutes. During the course of the dreams I would try to get him to stay longer, try and get him to love me more. I tried to impress him with how great our family was so that he would want to stay and not abandon us again. He never stayed. Not in one of the hundreds of these dreams I had did he ever stay. By the end of the dream he either died again or his health failed so badly that he had to go away, or he just got mad and left.2

Much of this is recognizable in the film, though there are many added surreal touches, and the final ‘eating the father’ catharsis is developed to express what kind of radical measures might be necessary to resolve the tensions causing the dreams. A particular inspiration for how such events might be artistically reimagined came from the story ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,’ by Maddin’s adored Bruno Schulz,3 which also features a son talking to a dead father. Maddin had seen from the example of other avant-garde and local filmmakers (notably John Paizs) that it was possible just to pick up a camera and make a film, and that is what he did here. The project, though, was actually about three years in the making, with shots picked up one at a time, and the principal roles taken by Maddin’s bosom buddy John Harvie (as the Son and narrator) and family acquaintance Dr Dan Snidal, Associate Dean of Medicine at the University of Manitoba (as the Dead Father).4 The budget, as nearly as Maddin can recall, was around $5,000.5 When the film was accepted for the 1985 Toronto Film Festival, attracting the favourable attentions of key TFF adjudicators such as Piers Handling and Geoff Pevere, it was

18

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the first step up the ladder for this completely inexperienced autodidact filmmaker. Events of the film The film is intermittently narrated by ‘the Son’ (I will use the character names given in the introductory titles), and the bare bones of the events that he guides us through are as follows. The narrator’s father has died, and he is looking back now at the events of ‘that summer’ wherein the death was followed by a number of strange reappearances of the Father: ‘it became apparent that my father wasn’t quite dead in the traditional sense – brief recoveries became quite common.’ A shot of the Widow (Margaret Ann MacLeod) preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the Daughter and Little Girl 1 is extended by a pan across that reveals the dead Father laid out on the dining room table, with the two girls obliviously playing cards inches from his head. The Son sits in his bedroom working on a model kite when his attention is caught by a sinister gesturing shadow on the wall like something from Dreyer’s Vampyr; behind him through the window we see what he cannot – his Father in shirt and shorts knocking at the window and obviously annoyed that the Son is not attending to him. The Widow climbs into bed at night, and nestles down to sleep as the camera pans across to show her dead husband lying next to her. At a certain point the Dead Father just exits the house and walks out of the yard, presumably because of the failure of his family to meet his requirements. ‘We both knew where he was going,’ says the narrator, referring to a previously mentioned neighbour woman with a ‘mania for cleanliness.’ ‘Why did he prefer that address to his old one with us?’ What seems to be a flashback takes us back to the night when the Son found the Father collapsed on the sidewalk in front of their house. Somehow he is gotten into his bedroom, where the Widow appeals to the Son to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The Son attempts this desperately before shying away in disgust, after which the Father turns over onto his side and dies. The Son runs into the dark backyard and falls into a foetal-position sleep, from which he is awakened in the morning by the sound of a lawnmower and the sight of his father in golf shirt and short pants mowing the lawn and giving him orders to do things (‘awake ten seconds and I was already following orders’). The Son is given the task of, apparently, squiring Little Girl 2 to school. (This girl seems to be the Son’s little sister, though Maddin himself had no younger siblings.) ‘But,’ he narrates, ‘during those forgetful days, how could I have been

The Dead Father

19

The Dead Father on the dinner table, card game in session.

expected to complete any task?’ – and he somehow misplaces her. Although the girl is recovered unharmed, the parents are angry at the Son, and the Father looks at him irately and then once more leaves the house for the other address. At last the Son decides he must exorcise this disruptive presence. In dead of night he marches out into the backyard with a shovel and flashlight. He moves past a whole array of family corpses lying there above-ground to the spot where the Father is resting lightly covered with leaves. Producing a large spoon, he pushes up the Father’s shirt and proceeds to dig chunks of flesh out of the Father’s abdomen and consume them convulsively, over cries of pain and angry looks from the corpse who has once again woken up. Now the Father has apparently understood that the situation cannot continue. He leads the Son up to the attic, where they sit side by side looking at family photo albums, with the Father pointing out interesting items and perhaps recalling the original occasions. Finally he lies down in an old chest in the attic, and

20

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

is sealed up there. The film ends with two long shots of the Son who has remained sitting in the attic with the photo albums. The Maddin tone The opening credits are charming and disconcerting, and it is worth paying some detailed attention to them because they strike a distinctive tone that is to persist throughout Maddin’s cinema. With the very first image there is a strong period flavour in the black and white photograph of the prow of a big steamship (the Lockport), emerging from a set of drawn proscenium theatre curtains and surmounted by the corporate label ‘Extra Large Productions’6 and the Roman-numeralled date, MCMLXXXV, while on the soundtrack we hear three sepulchral blasts of a ship’s foghorn and some gull sounds. The image of a large steamer coming through theatre curtains is absurd and delightful, almost reminiscent of the way the most extravagant and impossible Busby Berkeley musical numbers are explicitly ‘placed’ on a theatrical stage. Then the imitation of silent film introductory titles7 immediately conveys a fondness not only for an era in cinema that is anything but current, but for a concomitant world of feeling. The Hollywood silent credits Maddin is replicating are marked by an innocence and artless good will, and also a creative environment that allows for a degree of ‘baring the device’ self-conciousness (characters in costume being introduced as actors) that is somehow also disarmingly naïve and transparent. Maddin’s film combines the replication of this silent film practice with the additional aura – also happy to present itself as naïve – of a children’s dress-up entertainment, of him and his friends having fun. In this context there is also the welcome opportunity for ingenuous self-promotion, as in the first of the personnel introductions, featuring Maddin himself in naval uniform and officer’s cap, smiling at the camera and offering a salute, with the words ‘written & directed by Guy Maddin.’ The charm of the sequence is produced by a recognition of the gulf between, on the one hand, the innocence and un-self-consciousness of the silent-cinema model, with its sense of guileless certainty and selfconfidence and its complete pastness, and on the other, its actual existence in the present-day postmodern world where self-consciousness and irony are all-pervasive, and where the production itself is quite aware of and happy to broadcast its own poverty and amateur status. Thus, the title ‘Filmed on location at Loni Beach and in Extra Large studios at Lockport’ conveys a dusty grandeur that goes appealingly with the fact

The Dead Father

21

that Loni Beach is a part of the Manitoba resort town of Gimli (population less than 2,000) and that Lockport is a nearby community that is even smaller. The Public Enemy main title music, a bizarrely dramatic orchestration of the song ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,’ comes from the adjacent but nevertheless different cinematic world of early sound films. What is startling about these imitations and quotations is how vivid they are, and how reckless of any overt justification. But the mood of the film shifts abruptly as the narrative begins (accompanied by another dramatic chunk from the Public Enemy music track). Although silent cinema will continue to be present by virtue of the almost complete absence of spoken dialogue and the consequent necessity for a pantomimic acting style, what we now find is not the sunny openness of the Hollywood-model title sequence, but another world altogether – a darker and more anxious mood even in humorous moments, and, visually, an alternation of unadorned home-movie-like documentary footage with other sequences in a strongly chiaroscuro expressionist or noirish photographic style. Surrealism, expressionism At this beginning of the film proper, we find ourselves immediately in surrealist territory, whether of the trivial comic variety represented by photographs of the paws of the family dog and of the attempts of the woman next door to keep them clean, or in the deeper and more resonant vein exemplified by the body on the dinner table and in the matrimonial bed. The aesthetic engine of the whole film – and of much of Maddin’s cinema to come – may be said to be a continual surprising juxtaposition of jarringly different elements, swerving not only between documentary and expressionism in visual style, but between violently differing moods: the self-mocking and the eerie, the tragic and the petty, the horrifying and the ridiculous. Much of the time, indeed, the film does not oscillate between these poles but presents them simultaneously, as with the early example of the corpse lying unacknowledged in the middle of a banally domestic scene involving peanut butter sandwiches and children playing cards. Similar juxtapositions occur in the film’s musical quotations as well. The sections from The Public Enemy are strange and slightly jarring, but no more so than the subsequent appearance of ‘Brangäne’s Watch’ from Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, or a Dick Powell / Ruby Keeler dialogue clip and part of a song from 42nd Street (1933), or sections of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto and a Liszt tone

22

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

poem, or a stomping baritone-and-chorus number by Cole Porter featuring Nelson Eddy from Rosalie (1937). Throughout the horror-filled narrative of family grief, of a dead man who doesn’t realize he is dead and keeps reappearing, the incongruous tone of mundane desires and petty grievances keeps resurfacing. The dead Father’s presence doesn’t necessarily inspire overwhelming dread: instead, his momentary approval of the Son’s model kite causes a surge of fatuous pleasure, or his anger at the Son’s failure in babysitting gives rise to lip-biting resentment. All this might seem simply like satire or mockery if it weren’t for the genuinely uncanny events and the dark foreboding of much of their presentation – in short, if it weren’t for the simultaneous presence of their opposite. The commonplace and the traumatic sit side by side (indeed literally so in most of the Father’s scenes), exerting their equal and opposite pulls in a relation that may be classically surreal or textbook postmodern, but whose tone and presentation are quite unique. The images in The Dead Father are without the severe processing or ‘degradation’ that Maddin would usually subject his photography to in his later films. Indeed, it is fascinating to see how the uninflected documentary ordinariness of many of the sequences does nothing to interfere with the strangeness of the film’s project (the reverse, if anything) – prompting speculations as to what might pop up in Maddin’s cinema if he were to revert to this unbombarded naturalness of representation. But most of the film is, in fact, given over to a form of low-key photography that might be broadly called expressionist. To be sure it is often a cheesy, lesser-Karloff-horror-movie brand of expressionism, with ultrasimplified uni-directional lighting that yields high-contrast images of unrefined potency. But cheap high contrast has paid dividends in many realms, from early avant-garde cinema to Night of the Living Dead, and in The Dead Father the world of black shadows and glaring light that sculpts the powerful corrugated face of the Dead Father, or the patrivore Son’s trembling mouth with flesh-loaded spoon poised for consumption, once again produces an effect that bears the simultaneous marks of amateur poverty and poetic power. And in combination with the film’s extensive use of dissolves, it does help to create a visual environment in some ways not a million miles away from that of Murnau or Stroheim. Sound and music The soundtrack of The Dead Father is just as creative as the image track, and just as indicative of Maddin’s style. The aural fragments from Holly-

The Dead Father

23

wood films of the 1930s give us sound that has distortion and compressed range and dynamics, and also the warmth, immediacy, and ‘punch’ of early electrical recordings. At the same time, the voices of Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, and Nelson Eddy, like their dialogue and lyrics, clearly emanate from a time long ago. As Powell blithely skates through ‘Say I know a bundle of humanity / She’s about so high / And I’m just driven to insanity / When she passes by,’ or Eddy with male chorus booms out ‘To love / Or not to love / That is the question / To decide,’ we are confronted with pathways of cultural expression for feeling that are so much more simple and untroubled than those available to Maddin’s confused, suffering hero (the grotesque echo of Hamlet in Eddy’s number is particularly apt when the Son is also troubled by his father’s ghost). Also very evident, of course, is the absurdity to the modern eye of 42nd Street and Rosalie, of these uncomplicated feelings and the emptyheaded directness of their expression. But what is just as striking is a marvelling sense that attitudes could once be so simple and easy, together with an envy of this unencumberedness that rises in this context of grief and confusion and absurdity to a kind of pathos. When ‘Brangäne’s Watch’ appears, it is in Kirsten Flagstad’s 1941 recording, not anything more up to date; and the sudden presence of this profound, sensually ravishing music also introduces an old dimension whose conduits of feeling are not blocked and tainted as Maddin’s characters’ are, where grief and yearning can receive a powerful, unfettered expression. Maddin relishes the sonic restriction and the background noise of these recordings, as he relishes the limitations of the photographic style, and, even more precisely, as he will soon relish the project of inflicting his own footage with noise, damage, and ‘degradation’ of all kinds. And the oldness of the technology is always related to the oldness of feeling, of cultural and artistic possibilities. Sound editing in The Dead Father follows the same path. Like the quality of the sound it is crude in a technical sense, with jarring transitions, unrefined cross-fades, and an emphasis on disruption and imperfection rather than any attempt to smooth joins or conceal breaks. But its juxtapositions are startling. One fine, simple example: the orchestral introduction to ‘Brangäne’s Watch’ is first heard as the narrator is talking about the aftermath of the Father’s death (sympathy cards, well-wishers greeting the Son in the street), and the singer’s voice enters as the scene moves indoors, to the peanut butter sandwiches and the body on the table. But when the film moves back outdoors to the Son the music ceases with brutal abruptness, only to reappear equally brutally when the scene cuts back to the

24

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

domestic interior. In short, the music here is now being treated as though it were diegetic – that is, originating inside the scene itself, as a radio or record being played – but it has already been demonstrated not to be that, but instead extra-diegetic, like any movie score. The harsh wrenching off and on of this supremely beautiful music is merely the demonstration in another dimension of the film’s fractured relationship with a wholehearted cultural expression. Later, after the Father’s departure to the neighbour woman’s house, the Wagner again appears, but this time it is succeeded by a long stretch of 78rpm empty-groove noise, this noise becoming now a new ‘musical’ accompaniment, much more avant-garde in style, expressive of grating absence. The brutal fragmentations and disruptions of all the older musical artefacts demonstrate the presence of a detached modernist or avant-garde sensibility coexisting with the idealist nostalgia which prompted the choice of exactly these musical selections in the first place. The resulting state of aesthetic conflict is a highly characteristic Maddin posture. The same philosophy is found in the film’s presentation of narration, dialogue, and sound effects. The not very extensive narration is spoken in expressionless, diarylike form, with, again, a quite unsophisticated recording technique. Dialogue is much sparser yet – a few words only, never synched with an image of a speaking mouth. There is, however, a considerable array of sound effects, often accompanying scenes where people are obviously speaking and yet their voices do not register on the soundtrack. As with everything else in the film, Maddin here manipulates the limitations of his technical base to positive aesthetic effect. Shooting without direct sound is so much less complicated and cheaper than shooting with it, and post-synching voice-over and sound effects much easier and cheaper than dialogue. For a filmmaker already in love with silent cinema, it is a lightning solution to both technical and aesthetic questions to make a silent film with voice-over narration and sound effects – and a music track. It is piquant to hear the blaring sound of a power lawnmower running right through a scene in which the Father, his mouth moving, is silently telling a whole lot of things to the Son, or to see him utter a long string of silent remarks before leaving the room accompanied by the sound as well as the image of the door shutting behind him. This selective bursting into isolated moments of what seems like ‘live’ sound never loses its pleasing arbitrariness. And the whole situation in which we hear the Son’s inner voice (in the voice-over) but no one else’s, and meaningless sounds made by objects but not dialogue is merely further evidence of the condition of fractured understanding,

The Dead Father

25

communicational breakdown, and blockages of feeling that characterize the basic situation of loss and sorrow. The film’s use of sound, then, is performing the same kind of work as the high-art/kitsch-popular musical fragments that are ripped from context and juxtaposed, the radically different photographic styles that are interspersed, and the jarring continuity shifts that sometimes even alternate daytime and night-time shots within the same scene: all expressing a disjunctive, stuttering, unstable sensibility that is prey to mutually inimical and completely unreconcilable emotions. The first reaction to so much in the film is laughter – this is mock-epic, mock-sorrowful, mock-dramatic, even mock-traumatic. But what is mocked is also preserved, in a way protected by the mockery. The innocence of the silent-film titles, the drama of the quasi-expressionist photography, the strong appeal of the musical fragments, and at last the grief and suffering of the characters are all alive under their bell jars of ridiculous impossibility, protected from the vacuum of scepticism that is our own condition. It is noteworthy as well that in Maddin’s first film we already have zombieism and cannibalism – elements from ‘low’ horror movies, but put to the service of a project that has, essentially, no cinematic genre affiliations whatever, and again operating in a way that is somehow ironic and serious. The Dead Father, like almost every one of Maddin’s films to come, is impossible to classify. To return to the judgment (quoted in the epigraph) rendered by Maddin’s mentor and future collaborator George Toles, the film manages seemingly without effort to find a clear path to the lucid expression of a psychic truth. Maddin’s subsequent films would take much more circuitous routes, and develop far more baroque incrustations, in their means of expression. Not until his most recent films, specifically ‘the Me Trilogy’ of Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand upon the Brain!, and My Winnipeg, would Maddin return to something comparably direct.

2

Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988)

I had this atmosphere in my head, kind of like someone whacking a tuning fork on a table, and it just left me with this pitch. And I knew it was a tone that didn’t exist in any other movie: whether it would be good or bad, it wouldn’t be like any other movie at least. And that emboldened me to make the picture, I knew I could create a picture that had its own tone. – Guy Maddin1

Tales from the Gimli Hospital was the film that first brought Guy Maddin’s name to the outside world. The Dead Father showed singular and striking qualities, but its length made it undistributable, so hardly anyone saw it. By contrast the 72-minute Tales from the Gimli Hospital managed to get shown – indeed to play at weekend midnight screenings for more than a year at the Quad Cinema in New York’s Greenwich Village2 – and inaugurated the stream of reviews and interviews that would install and keep Maddin’s work in the consciousness of devotees of alternative cinema. The film is slowly paced and cheaply made, but even before it overcomes and then recuperates these potential drawbacks, it has set viewers hopping with a blitzkrieg of strange elements bizarrely combined. Its marriage of pastiche and parody with horrific elements and a visual style of expressionist intensity reminded many commentators of David Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead (1978), and gave rise to Maddin’s occasional appellation of ‘the Canadian David Lynch.’ Erudite reviewers were also quick to identify the presence of elements from earlier cinema that Maddin was recycling and reimagining, and to name many of them: silent melodrama, Weimar-era Expressionism, early musicals, 1930s horror films,

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

27

Sternberg, Murnau, even Dreyer. The opening credits and first scenes of the film create a deliberately archaic tone, and many subsequent elements do evoke particular filmmakers or historical moments, but this aura of museum-cinema is quickly transformed into something even stranger and more challenging by Maddin’s constant, manic drive to heterogeneity. Virtually every pose struck, or mode of rhetoric adopted, by the film is either combined or closely juxtaposed with something else that doesn’t fit, and the jarring contrasts produced by this method leave the viewer in a constant state of mild shock, or delighted provocation, or perhaps annoyed puzzlement – but in any case, in a state of stimulation. A wish to ‘mythologize’ his home environment led to the idea of sending up the Norse-legendary aspects of Manitoba’s New Iceland. (The continuing project of local self-mythologizing was to culminate ultimately in The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg.) Maddin managed to get a $20,000 grant from the Manitoba Arts Council, and he spent that and a little money he inherited from his Aunt Lil shooting Gimli Hospital,3 turning the former beauty salon run by his aunt and his mother into the movie’s principal set, covered in straw and feathers and furnished with wooden-slat beds that look as though they came from a concentration camp. It was shot in black and white (with a few tinted sequences) on Maddin’s light-leaking 16mm Bolex camera. The leisurely production schedule, albeit less glacial than that of The Dead Father, once more allowed Maddin to put things together one scene, or one shot, at a time, and although in later years he had to become accustomed to much more condensed shoots, he always looked back with fondness at the ability he had in this early work to put his films together like hobby projects whose completion schedules were basically non-existent. To begin ... Again we see The Dead Father’s company credit card – Extra Large Productions, the steamship Lockport plowing out from behind proscenium theatre curtains, with the Roman-numeralled date and the foghorn on the soundtrack. Then comes the movie’s title card, ‘tales from the gimli hospital’ in archaic letters over a photo, lit from either side in strong chiaroscuro against a black background, of a female figure in outline. A strip of gauze is also seen in arabesque to the right. Then come, again as in The Dead Father, individual title cards introducing the characters by name and epithet (‘Einar the Lonely’ ‘His Friend, Gunnar,’ etc.) over medium

28

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Credit screen for Tales from the Gimli Hospital. The steamer, Lockport, is named for a hamlet on the Red River between Winnipeg and Gimli.

close-up of each in turn. When the credits are finished we are presented with a slightly battered-looking postcardlike shot of a mountain, with the following poem (composed by Maddin) in archaic lettering: O Mount Askja! Your Eruptions have put us in Boats and sent us to scar new Lands. But from across the celibate Ocean you cast your nets and haul us back to your smouldering bosom! The action Gimli, Manitoba, the present day. Well, it’s supposed to be the present day but you might not understand that because the characters’ costumes

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

29

are strange (an older woman wearing an elaborate ceremonial headdress that is clearly of historical provenance – belonging to the Icelandic Fjallkona 4), and the setting hardly looks contemporary, with its stylized, simply constructed sets and props, its expressionist/noir lighting, and its positioning at the conclusion of a sweeping crane shot that has descended from a celestial realm full of angels. Gliding past a sign that says ‘Gimli Hospital’ and peeping in through a large square-paned window, the camera discovers a family scene: a haggard, sweat-drenched woman in a hospital bed, a man who makes a gesture of violent dismissal and leaves, the woman’s two young children (a girl and a boy), and their grandmother, or ‘Amma’ (Margaret Anne MacLeod), who decides to distract them from this terrible circumstance by telling them stories about ‘a Gimli we no longer know.’ At this point the film moves into its principal narrative, which the story told by the Amma. It is ‘the story of Einar the Lonely and his friend Gunnar.’ Briefly, Einar (Kyle McCulloch), like many other Gimli-ites (though they almost all seem to be male), is stricken by the pestilence5 and taken to the quarantine station, where he and the other victims are ministered to by a bevy of young – very young – nurses.6 While recovering here he gets to know Gunnar (Michael Gottli), the patient in the next bed who, notwithstanding his corpulence, has made a big hit with the nurses on account of his lively storytelling gifts and his clever ability to carve fish shapes out of birch bark. Einar suffers jealousy at this spectacle, and his own attempts to attract the nurses’ attention are failures. Then one day Gunnar asks for the loan of Einar’s fish shears, and when Einar passes him a rather elaborately decorated pair, Gunnar is startled, and tells him the story of his meeting, courtship, and marriage with the beautiful Snjófridur (Angela Heck), whom he found unconscious on the beach one day. But after she had nursed Gunnar through the early stages of the pestilence, she caught it herself. When she shows Gunnar the lesions on her naked torso, he turns away and she falls dead. ‘I killed her,’ says Gunnar in despair. This story prompts Einar to tell his own tale (‘O Gunnar, I too have a bad fish in my net’): how wandering one night he came across the body of a young woman raised on an Indian burial platform and stole the gifts and tokens buried with her, including the shears: ‘I don’t know what made me do it ... My head was very dizzy with the ebony moonbeams of that black night. And Gunnar – I say it with shame – from that young girl that night I took more than just tokens.’ But now it transpires that this violated corpse was that of Snjófridur, whom Gunnar’s Indian friend John Ramsay (Don Hewak) laid to

30

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

rest in the traditional Aboriginal way, despite Gunnar’s fever-weakened protest: ‘John, John, why do you make this when you should be making the hole in the ground?’ Gunnar cries out to his fellow patient: ‘Einar, you took my presents! You took my Snjófridur! You took her goodness! It is gone! And it is never coming back!’ At this point a fire breaks out on the roof of the hospital, and a man puts it out with pails of milk7 that drips through onto Gunnar’s face, blinding him. Attentive nurses hurry to black out the lenses of his eyeglasses with paint. After a nocturnal burial of a plague victim (a blackfaced minstrel who has spent his every minute on screen mugging, grinning, and rolling his eyes),8 and a scene inspired by Dostoevsky’s story ‘The Eternal Husband’ in which Gunnar appears in dead of night at Einar’s bedside and traces incisionlike patterns on his bare abdomen with the shears, the film is ready for its extended grand climax. It is a giddy and frankly incomprehensible bouillabaisse of elements. Einar staggers from the hospital and crawls through the woods where he sees a bearded man in a top hat and frock coat delivering a torch-light address in high-pitched Icelandic to a group of citizens. Magenta-tinted images of the feverish watching Einar are now interspersed with a tableau of an extravagantly dressed woodland goddess attended by little girl ballet dancers, the effect like some production number from an early musical. Meanwhile these scenes are intercut with shots of blind Gunnar stumbling around with outstretched hands like a caricature of Karloff in a Frankenstein movie, encountering a group of little girls playing ‘hide and seek’ and being tormented by double-exposed images of the shears, Einar, and Snjófridur, and mocking laughter, and Einar’s voice repeating his name.9 In the DVD commentary Maddin explains all of this. The bearded man in the top hat is Canada’s governor general in 1874, Lord Dufferin, who negotiated with and gave assistance to the community of New Iceland (though why he is speaking Icelandic, and in a most un-governor-general-like tone, is not elucidated). Einar, in his ‘randiness-fever,’ hallucinates that Lord Dufferin is the alluring ‘Fish Princess.’ Gunnar’s peregrinations and mental suffering are part of a ‘jealousy-fever’: ‘I’m cross-cutting between two states of mind, Gunnar’s jealousy-fever, and Einar’s randiness-fever. And I guess Einar’s randiness-fever is magenta-toned, and Gunnar’s jealousyfever isn’t. So I thought that was enough to keep things clear, but I guess cross-cutting between two points of view, neither of which is real or reliable, proved a bit too narratively taxing, even for me.’ Both men end up in a field, also inexplicably occupied by a Shriners Highland Pipe Band, and proceed to engage in an epic battle of Glima

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

31

Wrestling – a grotesque if traditional form of encounter in which the two wrestlers grasp each other by the buttocks and lift each other up in turn until one grows too exhausted to continue.10 As this desperate contest begins, the pipers break into sonorous, heroic cry, and the men grapple with each other so fiercely that their trousers are torn to shreds and their naked buttocks begin to bleed. The battle ends in mutual collapse, with each contestant crawling off. In an epilogue, the recovered Einar is back at his smokehouse, where he is visited by a recovered Gunnar (no blindness now) with a new fiancée on his arm. They greet Einar in friendly fashion, and as they walk away down the beach into the distance, the music tells us that this is their happy ending. In its conventional (though silent-cinema-dated) feeling, it could be this movie’s happy ending too. But it is not: ‘Einar the Lonely’ is left in the same resentful, petulant solitude in which he began, and the epilogue must of course take us back to a scene of death and loss. Finally the film returns to the Gimli Hospital, where during the telling of the story the children’s mother has died. The following dialogue ensues: amma: She’s gone to heaven, children. girl: Will she be coming back? amma: No, but she’ll be watching over you day and night. girl: Will you be our mother now? amma: No. But I’ll visit you, if your father lets me. girl: What’s heaven like, Amma? amma: Heaven? Well now, if you’ll be good, I think I feel a story coming on ... And the film ends as the camera inverts its film-opening beginning, moving out of the window, past the hospital sign, and up through a collection of blurred white images to a realm where we see a giant-winged angel. The concluding title then comes up, reading ‘Endi.’ The mixture Tales from the Gimli Hospital hits the viewer with an even more outrageous collection of incompatibilities than The Dead Father. It would be accurate to describe the film’s basic form as mock-epic, but both of its components – its epic model and the nature of its mockery – are highly idiosyncratic to say the least. The particular realm of heroic legend chosen

32

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

is itself a severely diminished one. The Norse Eddas and Viking history have an authentically mythic resonance; Icelandic migration to Manitoba in the nineteenth century can perhaps claim some small element of heroic pioneer saga-narrative, but nothing approaching the millenniaold grandeur of Norse myth. And yet it is the language and posture of Norse mythology that is echoed in Icelandic-Canadian ethnic cultural celebration, and repeatedly invoked throughout the film. In his DVD commentary, Maddin describes present-day Gimli: Gimli, Manitoba, Canada, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, about an hour’s drive north of Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba, is, by the 20th century, a little, touristy town, vaguely Icelandic heritage, population 2,000 – but around 1874 was a ludicrously primitive Icelandic-Canadian fishing settlement ... in what was then known as New Iceland ... Modern Gimli ... is a town of strip malls, and it’s slowly evolving into a slightly slicker, touristy thing, but has a lot of, like I say, malls, and hardwares and video stores that pay homage to its roots by just calling itself ‘Viking Pharmacy’ or ‘Viking Sports Shack.’

Icelanders fleeing the volcanic eruptions of Mount Askja (as referred to in the opening poem) arrived in the unsettled country in some numbers in 1874, but the size of the community was quickly diminished by a smallpox epidemic and a number of other setbacks.11 The hardiness of the remaining small community is attested by the survival of and pride in Icelandic ethnicity that remains to this day in and around Gimli. A signal example is the 1975 publication by the Gimli Women’s League of Gimli Saga, a tome of 798 pages that assembles recollections and family stories of the community’s history going back to its foundation (and which formed a partial inspiration for the film). Maddin, Icelandic on his mother’s side, has a curious attitude to this strong, severe, yet antiheroically tiny and limited local self-mythology. There is an inescapable discordance between the majesty of Norse archetypes and the primitiveness and smallness of the Gimli settlement and its subsequent preservation of heritage. When he encountered their stories himself as a child, Maddin relates, I guess whenever I heard about my ancestors they always had impossibleto-remember names (Elfa Egilsdottir, Snjolej Snigbogasson, etcetera), and they always seemed to be going through such terrible hardships [...] I found their stories, told with the singularly humourless aspect that most Icelandic stories seemed to have on the surface, to be incredibly funny [...] Just sit-

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

33

ting around the family and not particularly listening to these dead serious Icelandic stories just presented such dark and tragic tones, and gave to me the same kind of delight the super-empurpled dialogues of Greek tragedies gives to me.12

So Maddin presents us with a community struck down by an epidemic, but affecting a population which sleeps covered in dirt and conducts medical operations with incredibly crude implements; and he presents a kind of epic love triangle whose two males are emotionally petty and badly overweight respectively, and whose female is the posthumous victim of a casual necrophilic rape. At one end of the film the opening poem and the Fjallkona-clad storyteller are to some degree taking the mickey out of the Icelandic-legend project, while at the other the epic buttock-grabbing duel accompanied by a Black Watch-like Shriners Pipe Band is doing the same thing even more emphatically. And of course the whole placement of an epic narrative in Gimli, Manitoba, has a kind of ipso facto anti-heroic quality. But any kind of uncomplicated reading of this mock-epic is derailed immediately by a dizzy confusion about historical period. It is not at all clear that the action of the Amma’s story is supposed to be set in 1874, because almost the first thing we see at its beginning is a montage of Gimli inhabitants waking up and going outdoors to the beach, set to smooth popular band music of the 1920s (and a tenor of the time pleasantly crooning the DeSylva / Brown / Henderson song ‘I’m a dreamer, aren’t we all?’), with all the females clad in flapperlike costumes from the Jazz Age. It is clearly an homage to musical montage sequences of early Hollywood sound films, but it sits in surreal contrast to the primitive fishing village around it. As Einar exits his little smokehouse and sees all the pulchritude, he reaches for a fish nailed to its outside wall and quickly squeezes a large viscous glop of oil from its innards onto his head as a pomade. ‘Einar the Lonely’ is his epithet, but though this name bears the aura of a legendary hero, we begin to discover right away that this epic loneliness is pretty much indistinguishable from the kind of poor success with women that any contemporary putz might have. The goings-on at the hospital introduce equally discordant notes for any viewer trying to get a fix on a possible period or social environment. The kohl-eyed nurses, in addition to loose shifts over bare shoulders, wear low-wimpled hospital caps with a big red cross – very much a First World War era suggestion. Meanwhile, the practice of leaving holes in the second-storey floors of buildings in order to channel heat from the farm

34

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

animals living below, however much it might seem an utterly characteristic Maddin invention, is based on nineteenth-century New Icelandic actuality.13 Of course, trying to do anything so pedestrian as identifying a fixed historical period to this farrago may seem naïve; and yet the film has signalled its Norse-mythic and geographical settings so forcefully that it seems called for. Cheap thrills What emerges from this unique mixture is neither epic nor exactly mock-epic, but instead a certain intoxicating innocence and charm. The primitiveness of the characters, the community, and their practices is all ridiculous, indeed it is deliberately exaggerated to be, precisely, ridiculous. (That it is often exaggerated so much that it passes all the way to surreality does not interfere with that fact.) But Maddin is not quite mocking that ridiculousness – rather he finds it fascinating and attractive, he loves it. The community’s hypersimplicity is a mark of innocence, of trust in received knowledge and practice that seems to our eyes faultily based, but that is lovable in its very fallibility. Perhaps the most beautiful example of this principle is the scene about a quarter of an hour into the film that depicts a medical operation on Gunnar’s leg in the quarantine. A scar-covered doctor (played by Maddin himself) cuts into the patient’s leg with an agricultural sickle on a crude plank bed by the light of an oil lamp: horrifying. There is no anaesthetic for this operation. Or rather, what is used as anaesthetic is the distraction of a puppet show, staged by the nurses in a little proscenium box stage, accompanied by a strange archaic popular instrumental recording, and viewed by Gunnar through a pair of opera glasses that the doctor keeps urging on him whenever he winces in pain. The puppet show includes the raising and lowering of a small metal disk, with face, representing the sun, and the very simple dancing of a couple of puppet dolls to the accompaniment of clunking rhythmic quasi-folk music. The effect of the scene is extraordinary. The idea that looking at this rudimentary spectacle across the room through opera glasses could form any kind of adequate distraction to having your leg punctured by a not very sharp iron blade is preposterous.14 Yet if it could distract you effectively, what kind of innocent subject would you have to be? And what kind of society could devise and implement such a strategy? There is a real tenderness displayed by the film to such a subject, and such a society. Such a pure faith in the potency of narrative, of theatre – even the simplest form is compelling! And such a pure concep-

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

35

The ideal naïve spectator: Gunnar observing a puppet show as a form of anaesthesia.

tion of the viewing subject – he is so innocently enrapturable that he can be distracted not merely from sorrow and hardship, but from searing physical pain. Thus the scene strangely exhales a real poetry, a lyricism, an idealism at some level – even while it never ceases to be ridiculous. It is a little paradigm of Maddin’s creative essence, and almost everything in the film bears a similar tinge. An appreciation for the primitiveness of the depicted world also merges into an actual identification with it. The rude, home-made, ridiculously simple aspects of this world are direct parallels to the ‘garage band’ poverty of Maddin’s home-made filmmaking. There is an a priori gulf between an epic period narrative and the derisory budget and materials Maddin has to work with, but instead of trying (hopelessly) to conceal this gulf, the director just happily plays in it. The camera’s opening descent through the firmament from heaven to earth, a shot in which angels appear momentarily in double exposure, sets the tone

36

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

pretty well: the movie’s first example of special effects that use only the most elementary apparatus for making special effects. The clouds don’t look like clouds, but just various out-of-focus white or grey objects streaming quickly past the lens. The angels, with their gigantic snowy pinions, are actually rather beautiful; but they definitely look like ordinary people dressed in white shifts and craft-project wings. When we arrive on earth, the settings – a strange checkerboard projector-light building, the ‘Gimli Hospital’ sign, the large square-panelled windows of the hospital – look very cardboard, but at the same time stylized in an almost Expressionist way. So it goes throughout the whole film: the musical accompaniments are all lifted from rather decayed public-domain sources; the well-conceived and evocative costumes (especially those worn by the women) are always redolent of a children’s dress-up game; the acting has a similarly childlike elementary earnestness; the mise en scène boils everything down to night shots with only the barest contextual elements; editing and camera movement are attenuated. In short, everything in the film is perfectly frank and ingenuous about its poverty of means. Indeed, as a primitive film about primitive filmmaking, as a rhetorically overreaching basement-made movie about a rhetorically overreaching backwater epic, as a tale told by an imperfect subject (Maddin in Winnipeg) about an imperfect object (Einar the Lonely in New Iceland), Tales from the Gimli Hospital takes its mirroring of subject and conditions of production to the point of reflexivity. In addition to this charm of the naïve, the impoverished apparatus yields distinct aesthetic rewards of its own. Maddin has remarked: ‘I think when I discovered L’Âge d’or [Buñuel/Dali, 1930] I realized that there was much power in primitive film, that I didn’t like reading primitive writing because that was just bad writing, but primitive film, or primitive painting, primitive music was very effective.’15 Obviously, then, the reciprocal virtues of cheap production and the aesthetic attractions of ‘primitive film’ were in his mind from the beginning. When he began Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Maddin’s first instinct was to imitate the look and presentation of Stroheim’s legendary 1924 epic of realism Greed (even for a while wanting to call his film Pestilence), but he discovered that you can’t just go out and shoot a period story during daylight hours without something like Stroheim’s production apparatus.16 The film just drifted more and more into nocturnal settings: I just decided ... [to] set the rest of the movie at night. I was able to control the atmosphere of the movie far better, because there was no need to mask

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

37

out 7-Eleven signs, and other modern extraneous intrusions. […] I found that the shadow was the cheapest prop.’ Then the low-key lighting that he pursued got further simplified: ‘I had read up how to make films in How to Make a Film books, using the three-light set-up, but darned if I could use three lights without getting three nose shadows, so I started unplugging lights until one remained, and one light seemed to be the way I went for the rest of the movie.

And in the end the bald single-light chiaroscuro performs, like almost everything in the film, this same function of being obviously primitive on the one hand and having its own aesthetic presence on the other. It was of the first one-light shots, when they returned from the lab, that Maddin says, ‘I guess I was just starting to find a style that I was proud of.’17 Such stark, high-contrast, visually simplified black and white photography has the effect of stylizing the images often to the point of oppressiveness while simultaneously connecting with visual qualities from the silent film era like the contrasty look of orthochromatic film stock and the sometimes clunking forceful stylizations of early German Expressionism. The employment of silent-film-style iris or vignetted framing and many softfocus or light-fogged shots simply adds to the effect. The film’s long takes, absence of camera movement, and relatively simple editing also present this double face. Lacking the apparatus and the expertise for tracking shots, Maddin uses longer, more static takes; lacking the experience to edit sophisticatedly, he prefers a simple, minimalist editing scheme; and wanting to expand the story to something approaching feature length,18 he has an extra reason for slow pacing, repetition of action, and narrative meandering. There is also the director’s fondness for dissolves and fades (the film many, many times uses dissolves instead of straight cuts where the latter would have done the same narrative work), and for double-exposure shots where events from the minds of the characters appear simultaneously in the frame with them through overprinting (the shots depicting Gunnar’s hallucinations of Snjófridur and the shears while he is ‘blind’ are an excellent example). All of these technical choices bring the movie closer to the practice of a certain variety of silent cinema. Certainly long takes, slow pacing, dissolves, and multiple exposure are just as characteristic of German Expressionism as the shadow-filled photography is. If Maddin started out wanting to recapture something of Stroheim, he ended up recapturing something of Wiene, Galeen, and early Lang. And without disguising, or trying to disguise, the limited and stylized nature of his working materi-

38

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

als, he has again produced something with one foot in the ridiculous and the other in the sublime. It is the same story with the soundtrack, which executes a number of the strategies introduced in The Dead Father to even broader effect. The main title music comes this time from Little Caesar of 1930 (Maddin’s first two films thus recapitulating the soundtrack-score history of the early Hollywood gangster movie), before switching to some kind of wordless choral hymn for the ‘Mount Askja’ poem, then the aforementioned paraphrase of dated stylishness and sophistication in the musical montage, and for the rest of the film veering all over the map from ‘dramatic’ fragments from movie soundtracks, Haydn’s Drumroll symphony, the big tune from the music track to Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece Sunrise, an old quasi-clog-dancing recording, extracts from the work of a Harry Lauderlike Icelandic comedian of the 1920s (Maddin identifies him as ‘Bjarne Bjarnson or Bjarne Bjornson’19) for Gunnar’s storytelling and Lord Dufferin’s speech, a big soprano-and-chorus number from an old musical for the ‘Fish Princess’ vision, all the way to the sonorous blare of the highland piping for the Glima Wrestling scene, and the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the final fade-out. There is certainly more dialogue than in The Dead Father, but it is still relatively sparse, and what there is is obviously post-synched without excessive concern for smoothing over the joins in matching ambience or lip-synch, so that here too artificiality is converted from technical failure to stylistic statement. As well, even more than in his first film, Maddin makes copious use of hiss and crackle, whether record groove noise or white noise from silent sections of videotape recordings. In passing reference to its slow pace and atmospheric qualities, the director calls his film ‘a tone poem, a tribute to ambient crackle.’20 Altogether, this simple, crude style has an amazing presence and power, especially in the visual realm. Its power is so great, in fact, that it is actually able to aesthetically unify the fantastic array of variations and contradictions going on everywhere in the film: in its tone, its themes, its narrative peregrinations and divagations, its simultaneously different periods, etc. This is a substantial achievement for something made in the garage. Avant-garde And then, of course, every impossibility of narrative and tone, every startlingly heterogeneous juxtaposition, and every movement in the direc-

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

39

Snjófridur as angel. An image that shows how close Maddin can be to one facet of David Lynch.

tion of coarsening and brutalizing the images and the soundtrack also emphasizes the film’s potential positioning within the category of avantgarde cinema. From one standpoint, Gimli Hospital, like all of Maddin’s feature films, has too much plot to be thought of as properly avant-garde in the heavily abstract ‘classical’ tradition running from Man Ray and Hans Richter through Stan Brakhage and beyond. The tradition of Jean Epstein, Watson/Webber, and Buñuel/Dali and continuing through Cocteau is perhaps an easier fit, but Maddin’s films seem at times to be too frivolous or casual to belong there completely. (Maddin has very great enthusiasm for L’Âge d’or, but that film, despite its outrageous norms-insulting comedy, always maintains a certain consistency of tone, an immovable stone face.) On the other hand, the term ‘avant-garde’ has often been more loosely applied in cinema than in the other arts. If the 1960s films of George and Mike Kuchar, with their vulgar day-glo parodies and raucous indulgence in low comedy, could ever be classified

40

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

as avant-garde cinema, then there is nothing whatever to stop Maddin’s films from sharing the label. In any case, it is a connection that (again) commentators on the ground have made, and certain elements of Gimli Hospital seem more usefully classifiable in this way than in any other. Everything in the film that tends towards abstraction falls immediately into this category: the soundtrack crackle, the images sometimes smeared and fogged almost to indecipherability, the pacing sometimes slowed to the point of emptiness, the aggressive blankness or disconnection of soundtrack events, the bewildering juxtapositions of styles and tones and imitative modes, the manifold disruptions of any straightforward reading of events or meanings – these may all comfortably be described as ‘avant-garde.’ Narrative Even so, it is necessary to stress how unlike most recognizable forms of avant-garde much of Gimli Hospital is: the mock-epic subject, the appreciative (rather than ironic) inclusions of so much popular culture of so many eras, the general sense that the film is fundamentally a storyfilm, no matter how odd. Indeed it is a kind of über-story-film, with an elaborate series of nestings of narratives inside narratives, and even a film about narrative. The film begins with a species of direct address to the audience, in the form of the character-introduction titles, and even more markedly in the archaic poem that apostrophizes volcanic Mount Askja. The opening descent literally from heaven represents the most omniscient sort of narrative imaginable, but all subsequent forms are specifically placed in the mouth of a storyteller. As the action proper begins it is constituted primarily as a narrative: the Amma’s tale told to the two children in the hospital. Once in this third level of story – the Story of Einar the Lonely – the film proceeds to develop further stories within this story. Gunnar captivates the nurses with the story of the Thorvaldsdottir Sisters of Fjoldelund: another legendary tale just like that of Einar the Lonely, this one featuring three little girls who strayed too far into the woods one day and reappeared in three little coffins floating down the river. But since, with sublime disregard for linguistic consistency, this story is being told in Icelandic (as one of the recorded ‘Bjarnson or Bjornson’ comic routines from the 1920s whose actual meaning is god knows what),21 it has to be made intelligible to us by being narrated in voice-over by the Amma from another dimension. Then Gunnar, in his own voice, and in English (albeit slightly immigrant-accented), tells

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

41

Einar of his meeting with Snjófridur, their courtship, disease acquisition, and her death; and Einar tells of his corpse-violation. Each of these is acted out in flashback. At the end, the film executes a quick reverse movement from the main Einar-story to the scene in the hospital, and then, with the promise of a further story from the Amma about ‘what heaven is like,’ back up into the angel-inhabited empyrean for the end title. It is an intricate and wide-ranging display of narrative forms. The placement of narrative, specifically and repeatedly, as a form of distraction or respite from pain is very striking. The outlandish and ridiculous tale of Einar the Lonely is told to the children to divert them from the fact that their mother is dying in agony right in front of them. The employment of puppet theatre as anaesthetic, already mentioned, is another staging of narrative. And finally the Amma is proposing to further euphemize the children’s condition of loss by telling them another story about heaven. Taken altogether, these phenomena constitute an additional form of reflexivity, a kind of statement about the nature and function of narrative, encouraging the further perspective that the statement should be applied also to Tales from the Gimli Hospital. So then we may ask: What is it that Maddin’s film is distracting us (or him) from? What is the nature of that distraction, and how does it work? Death The placement of the principal narrative (the story of Einar the Lonely) as a distraction from a primal form of death and emotional loss – death of the mother, trauma of the young children – is on one level derisory, on another deeply uncomfortable. There is nothing even potentially funny about children losing a parent like this anywhere this side of the cruelest Monty Python humour, and though Gimli Hospital has a whiff of that, it’s not all the way there. Here we have something of a repetition of the scenario of The Dead Father: a deep, devastating emotional pain staged partly as a farce. The children too young to grasp exactly what is going on (though clearly not happy), the mother lying mute and sweating in a small bed, the father who, in pantomime, arrives at the beginning of the sequence and then leaves immediately in what looks like disgust or violent disavowal, the incongruously happy storytelling grandmother: these elements have something of the flavour of a Saturday Night Live sketch, but with the awful incongruity of a basic situation that is the opposite of something to laugh at. In fact there are autobiographical connections here. In his beautiful autobiographical scenario-fragment entitled ‘The

42

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Child Without Qualities,’ Maddin describes the moment when, as a little boy of seven, he was told by his Aunt Lil of the suicide of his sixteen-yearold brother Cameron: She put the child without qualities on her ample lap and explained with a loving simplicity that cameron had gone to be with carol, where they could be in love. He would not be coming back, ever, but he would be very happy there. A woman who looked like Aunt Jemima cried voluminously – a child on her lap, too – on the Sunday Night Movie, and so did aunt lil, a white Aunt Jemima, as she rocked the child without qualities in her arms.22

The features of incongruity, displacement, and numbness here are clearly related to those of the storytelling in Gimli Hospital, though Aunt Lil’s tears are contrasted with the imperviously cheerful manner of the Amma there.23 The idea that ‘the Story of Einar the Lonely and His Friend Gunnar’ – this story of fish-saturated backwoods primitives and their ludicrous ways told as a legendary narrative – is a kind and natural grandmother’s remedy for children’s emotional suffering is appalling. The most outrageous moment arrives when the dying mother’s pain-wracked face is seen in close-up with, in the foreground, the little girl’s large paper-cup soda drink bearing the trade name ‘Big Gulp.’ This is doubly clever, because not only is the whole tableau of melodramatic family tragedy traditionally evocative of a comic book-like ‘big gulp’ from the audience, but the mother’s Big Gulp is also the Big Sleep. But the tone is unbearably disrespectful and cheaply mocking, a stroke that signals the film’s almost violent desire to distance itself from the painful scene it is depicting, and to push away anything like a straightforward experience of that melodrama. Another feature of this scene is the music coming from the old-fashioned radio speaker at the patient’s bedside, which produces a manic drone of some endlessly looped and repeating bar-and-a-half fragment of music. The result – truly one of the most striking things in the film – is a demented, maddening, modernist riff-chant that makes you want to scream, and it is for a moment as oppressive and sinister as anything in Eraserhead. This dialogue is taking place: girl: Amma, what were you and my daddy talking about? amma: Children, your mother needs her sleep if she’s going to get better. Just let her listen to her music. Come. Come sit with Amma. Have I ever told you the story of Einar the Lonely?

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

43

Of all the evasions and wrong-footings taking place here, the phrase ‘just let her listen to her music’ is particularly chilling (and also funny) in view of the lunatic nature of the music itself, and the most pointed example of the casual insanity of non-recognition or non-acknowledgment pervading the whole scene. There are also indications that there is plenty of extra family dysfunction in addition to this death: the father’s anger was perhaps directed at the Amma, the girl’s question about the father’s and Amma’s conversation is deflected, and, at the end of the movie, the Amma is promising to come and visit them ‘if your father lets me.’ So the family situation, which the tales are meant as distractions from, is truly dreadful: irrevocable loss of the mother, conflict between the survivors, the children getting to choose for solace between the father’s angry absence and the Amma’s cheerful, surreally preposterous storytelling (at the end she ‘feels another story coming on’). If the children can in fact be distracted and their pain soothed by this storytelling – and if the patients in the quarantine can be similarly anaesthetized by puppet shows – it can only be because they are too innocent, or ignorant, to know how inadequate these measures are. Or perhaps they are not inadequate; perhaps they are only inadequate for the film’s sensibility and for ours, and if we were able to attain a proper state of purity (to take the term I used earlier), we too could find something really soothing. But in fact we cannot. Maddin is so inescapably conscious of this that he is first in line to demonstrate, extravagantly, that such a function for art, and for cultural narrative, is now completely impossible and the very idea of it ridiculous. And yet he is struck by how it might be quite wonderful if we could respond in an innocent way. In Tales from the Gimli Hospital, the stories may be outlandish, the culture primitive, the behaviour absurd, the basis for heroic narrative far from heroic, but on the other hand we have only to consider what things would be like without all that naïveté and ridiculousness. What is left is a reality – Maddin’s ordinary reality, our reality – that is not only full of terrible pain, but also flat, meaningless, and oppressive in its blankness. It is a world of deprivation and plague in the past, and of loss and dysfunction in the present. Perhaps in that reality there is no false distraction from pain, but there is also no way to process or frame the pain, nothing to do but dumbly suffer it without expression, and in a world whose banal quotidianness is all-powerful. The other world – of the Amma in her Fjallkona garb telling the children bizarre and inappropriate stories, of the puppet show as an anaesthetic, or of the whole elevation of petty or shocking behaviour in old New Iceland to the level of myth – may be a tissue of falsehood and weird interpretation and grotesque metaphor, but at least these

44

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

things are some kind of response to trauma. They signal that there is something there that needs to be processed, even if the traditional forms of its processing are grossly inadequate. The alternative is the kind of emotional disconnect so perfectly captured in The Dead Father where the mother is serving the children their lunch sandwiches like something out of Leave It to Beaver while the father’s corpse lies stretched out unremarked on the table in front of them. False painting, discredited and ridiculous narrative and ritual, or else anomie and nothingness, those seem to be the alternatives. And perhaps: it would be good to be able to find a lie that would work, but now we know too much. So Gimli Hospital, with a kind of artistic honesty, is driven to show both of those things: the impossibility of earlier, now discredited and utterly unbelievable, forms of mythification, narrativization, expression; and the wasteland of the absence of such forms. Wounds and the body If reality, the bland, blank, alienated present, is characterized by anomie and a muffled inability to express or even properly to feel pain, then many of the devices of Tales from the Gimli Hospital – and of Maddin’s whole cinema – become more clearly readable. They become a form of displaced expression, the return of something repressed. In textbook Freudian fashion, the returned is rather extreme and twisted in form: the extravagances and ridiculousnesses of Maddin’s narratives and juxtapositions and stylistics. Perhaps the most recognizable iteration of this return, though, is the presence of violence, bodily disfigurement or violation, death, and multiple forms of severe transgression. The Dead Father culminated in the actual eating of the flesh of the dead father’s body. And on the other side of Gimli Hospital we may see the cavalcade of amputations, disembowelments, self-mutilations, and Oedipal outrages stretching through Maddin’s films in unbroken succession right to the present. In this film there is certainly a sufficient supply of these elements, from the omnipresent graphic plague-lesions and blood-vomiting deaths to the gory primitive sickle-and-drill operations to the sanguinary Glima Wrestling. These are, to repeat, a subset of the larger category of exaggerations and absurdities, and they are always presented as exaggerated and absurd themselves (and also partake of the poetic qualities of this baroque array). But their violence and explicitness gives them a much edgier and more assaultive character. Are we able to laugh off these things? Is Tales from the Gimli Hospital in these scenes something like

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

45

a not truly horrified horror movie whose gore is a kind of ironic spectacle? The film is schizoid on this subject, as on every subject, but I would assert that at some level all the physical wounding, and also the transgressive crimes (notably Einar’s necrophilia and Gunnar’s corpse-slapping), remain painful. As I have suggested, they are the most recognizable form of the returned-repressed because of their too-sharp-to-be-laughed-off pain. Also, their black-blood-and-scars connection with a modern expressionist horror movie like Night of the Living Dead points to a similar queasy marriage of the obviously over the top and the actually sickening in that genre. Gimli Hospital certainly belongs with Maddin’s whole cinema – at least until very recently – as a film whose qualities may be seen as symptomatic of a condition of cultural repression and inability to express. But about this film we might state a simpler thesis as to the core of repression and expressive return. Here it is the death of the mother, and the inadequate processing and expression of this horror, that gives the impetus to all the subsequent horrors. Indeed, with this in mind the film might almost be retitled The Dead Mother. For one thing, death is insistently present here, and in so many forms. The explicit and sometimes hyperdramatic forms of death in the ‘heroic’ narrative are in precise contrast to the mute and static spectacle of the mother in her hospital bed, where the only ‘expression’ is the lunatic repeating grooves from the radio. The plague is killing off a substantial portion of the community, and in rather vivid sorecovered fashion. The treatments for mortally dangerous disease consist of assault with crude tools and also voodooistic practices such as rubbing a dead seagull on the torso of the sufferer. The three little Thorvaldsdottir sisters go off into the woods where some nameless horror overtakes them, and they come back as three little dead bodies in coffins (‘or were they only sleeping?’ asks the storyteller, but we know the answer to that one).24 There are ritual torch-light funerals in the forest. Einar rapes the corpse of a young woman, while the anguished Gunnar viciously slaps the same corpse. All of these provocations are, then, not simply in contrast to the maddening non-recognition and non-expression of the mother’s death, but the actual maddened result of that disavowal. If in The Dead Father the logical remedy for a father’s corpse lying unacknowledged on the dinner table is to unearth his corpse and eat it with a spoon, then perhaps in Tales from the Gimli Hospital the logical response to a mother’s blandly passed-over death is to go out and have sexual intercourse with the body of a dead woman. There is a strong tinge of absurdity in these more-than-operatic reactions, but finally they are as serious and powerful

46

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

as, say, the equivalent events in Buñuel films from Un Chien Andalou to Belle de jour and Le Fantôme de la liberté. Sex and violence Every sexual impulse or sexual action in the film leads to something bad or is something bad. Einar’s female-ogling on the beach results in his cutting his thumb with his fish knife and thus his infection with plague bacteria (splendid quick cutaway to a microscope slide squirming with organisms, accompanied by appropriate melodramatic music for the very brief moment the shot lasts). In the quarantine his constant sexual desire for the nurses and his incessant jealousy gives rise to a bad state of mind. What his desire might lead him to, what it has led him to, is evident as he recounts how, coming across the corpse of a young woman, it somehow seemed all right to rape it. He does realize this was not a good thing to do, but he doesn’t seem overcome with horror or even remorse: it is simply ‘a bad fish in my net.’ This atrocity is embedded in the larger joke about Icelandic-primitive cultural practices like fishgrease Brylcreem, central-cattle-heating, and fire-extinguishing milk, to which one can now add impulsive necrophilia – and in truth it is not so far away from events in, for example, the Finnish Kalevala epic. But while from one angle Einar’s mythic inappropriate lust is funny in an Animal House way, from another it is truly appalling, and shows that ‘weakness of character’ is too faint a description of the personal defects of this Maddin protagonist, as for many of his successors. Meanwhile even the cheerful and ingenuous Gunnar manages to cause the death of his fiancée by infecting her, and the mutual enmity caused by sexual conflict leads to the bloody Glima Wrestling match. True, Gunnar and his new girlfriend look set for a cloudless life, but the final note is sounded by the frustrated and envious Einar the Lonely. Overall, the picture of sexual relations is that they are a minefield of horror and death, garnished with petty jealousies and hurt feelings. Character Between the flatness of epic and the flatness of send-up, there is little room in Tales from the Gimli Hospital for any depth of characterization. This is hardly a criticism, when three-dimensionality in any narrativerealist sense is far from being a goal of the film. But Gimli Hospital’s characterizations, especially of its protagonist Einar, do give us indica-

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

47

tions of Maddin’s route to a representation of human psychology and also of the curiously personal nature of many of his flatly rendered leading characters. In the drama of Einar and Gunnar and the nurses and Snjófridur, the film is presenting a version of the banal romantic conflicts of the contemporary world, a kind of surreal and manic displaced high school dating drama. The sullen, resentful expression on the face of Einar is very reminiscent of the similar expression manifested by the protagonist of The Dead Father. Already we are beginning the accretion of recurring characteristics of the Maddin hero, in this case sexual jealousy and a certain sense of grievance. As in The Dead Father, what is perhaps most striking is how the hero’s emotional register seems simply more petty and undignified than its rather awe-inspiring context seems to call for. The Son’s most visible reaction to the hair-raising presence of his undead father is a childish anxiety that his craft projects might not be properly appreciated, or a pique that he has been told-off for his shortcomings as a babysitter. Similarly, Einar’s reaction to the wave of grisly deaths sweeping through the quarantine is to feel aggrieved because he is not getting as much feminine attention from the nurses as Gunnar is. This disproportion of trivial emotional response to massive and terrible circumstances is something that shows up again and again in Maddin’s characters, and indeed constitutes an insight into human psychology: people are so narcissistic that they can’t get past their personal obsessions no matter how dwarfed they are (or ought to be) by circumstances. It is a perspective often found in a certain kind of easily cynical television comedy (shall we say Frasier or Seinfeld); but in Maddin’s case the disproportion is ultimately not funny. Even beyond the idea that trivial internal events are of Brobdingnagian size to the psyche that experiences them and Lilliputian to the psyche that doesn’t,25 in Maddin’s films the insight grows stronger and more serious: the behavioural inappropriateness of the characters gives rise to a kind of despair in the film itself at the spectacle of their irremediable, crippled dysfunction. All this rises eventually to real heights of intensity and self-consciousness in Cowards Bend the Knee. Einar’s ailments of sexual jealousy and thwarted desire are those of many of the important male characters in Maddin’s features (the protagonists of Careful, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and Cowards Bend the Knee; the suitors in Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary), and what is also typical is the satire that the filmmaker directs at them. It is a satire that is basically self-critical, if we refer to Maddin’s diaries published in From the Atelier Tovar, and to the fact that the name of the most fully developed

48

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

of all these characters, in Cowards Bend the Knee, is ‘Guy Maddin.’ Maddin is explicit about this in the Gimli Hospital DVD commentary, giving the name ‘cowardice’ to the hero’s character flaws (even though that is not necessarily the first word that would spring to the viewer’s mind to describe them): ‘Kyle [Einar] is of course a stand-in for me ... I’ve always sort of just languished, happily, in my own cowardice. And whenever something comes up in a movie I know exactly what I would do, and it’s not proactive – it ain’t pretty [...] That’s why all the protagonists, usually played by Kyle, are extremely cowardly. For that reason my favourite Warner Brothers character is Daffy Duck.’ Tales from the Gimli Hospital presents the spectacle of Einar, a young and more or less presentable young fisherman whose torture it is to look on darkly in frustration while a large simpleton, Gunnar, gets all the girls for reasons that seem opaque to Einar. The joke here is subtle and quite rich. During his narration of his relationship with Snjófridur, Gunnar keeps plaintively failing to recognize Snjófridur’s interest in him, time and again: ‘I ... I don’t think she liked me, but we spent a lot of time together.’ ‘I don’t know why she ... it was very nice of her.’ ‘For some reason, she made herself busy with me.’ ‘She was nice, but why did she do this?’ ‘She couldn’t have had anything better to do, because she started sleeping here, too – in that very bed you are in now, Einar.’ In effect, both men are wondering what Snjófridur could possibly see in Gunnar, and in particular Einar is baffled to know what that fat fool Gunnar has that he hasn’t got. The subtle thing is that one gets the distinct feeling that Maddin too wonders this even while recognizing Gunnar’s good-heartedness and Einar’s weaselling resentment and self-pity, and the film is thus prepared to share Einar’s moral flaws even as it is exposing them. Or, to take a slightly different slant, Maddin is looking at these people as if they were from outer space, but always aware that he is one of them.

Tales from the Gimli Hospital

49

How then finally to describe this most unlikely debut feature? A parade of personal idiosyncrasies in the strange garb of a mock-epic from an unnoticed corner of the world. A surreal blizzard of contrarieties settled by encasement in archaic film forms and held together by garage-band simplicities of filmmaking. A meeting point of postmodernity and the dusty attic, a constant interpretive challenge to viewers who are given no interpretive clues. Tales from the Gimli Hospital is not a fully finished or entirely successful work. It has unintentionally awkward or ill-executed moments, its protracted pacing and repetitiveness are sometimes too visible as padding rather than aesthetic provocation. But, like its shorter predecessor, it strikes deeper than you expect it to, its attitudes and juxtapositions are regularly fascinating, and its invention prodigal and surprising. As the director says, it strikes ‘a tone that didn’t exist in any other movie.’

3

Archangel (1990)

Amnesia is just forgetfulness, just an all-purpose tool – the kind we all need to get through the day. Forgetfulness is kind of the necessary anaesthetic or opiate. – Guy Maddin1

Beginning with Archangel, the idea of a thematically and geographically sealed-off environment where everything seems to speak the same language militated against too much present tense particularity. The elements wouldn’t marry properly, the light had to be all of a certain kind, he didn’t want real trees to be arguing with pretend minarets [...] With Archangel there was the analogy of northernmost Russia with Winnipeg, creating these improbable kinships with spaces that are both real and/or mythical. – George Toles2

Gimli Hospital is a movie full of delightful surprises and much promise, but it is not an entirely realized film: for all its originality and daring, its apprentice qualities are still visible, its step sometimes not quite certain. Maddin’s next feature, Archangel, is by comparison solid and finished. Indeed, despite a few miscalculations and the odd unsuccessful experiment, it remains to this day one of the director’s most fully achieved works, a film to set, in its early-Maddin idiom, next to Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand upon the Brain! in his later one. Everything in Archangel is on a higher level. This is true in such gross matters as the scale of the production and the ambition and detail of the scenario as well as the true feature-length running time of 90 minutes, but it is also true in a general sense about Maddin’s simple command of the medium.

Archangel

51

Like its predecessor, Archangel is a historical drama. It lacks the framing story of Gimli Hospital, and enters fully into its historical time. Although its level of what one might call ‘historical absurdity’ is as high as in the preceding film, there is a more discernible connection between the setting and events and some recognizable referent in the history that an audience is likely to have some cognizance of. In contrast to the ‘inflated short film’ aspect of Gimli Hospital, here we find a full-blown not to say epic period picture, a war movie demanding spectacular scale and a cast of thousands, and boasting a budget of $430,000 (massively bigger than Gimli Hospital’s $20,000 – $30,000). It attracted some high-profile critical praise,3 and in the United States was given the prestigious National Society of Film Critics award for Best Experimental Film (inaugurating the debate about whether Maddin was indeed an experimental filmmaker or not). But proceeding at the same slow pace as Gimli Hospital, featuring a complex story and characters that apparently baffled many viewers, and also barred by its predominant tone of earnestness from the ‘midnight movie’ cult status that Gimli had found, Archangel struggled to get an audience, and remains something of an overlooked film in its creator’s output. Co-writer George Toles said later, ‘I think doing a part-talkie with all the characters afflicted with forgetfulness posed challenges which neither of us could comprehend until – well, until the premiere.’4 But the story difficulties can be penetrated with some patience, and what emerges from an ‘ideal viewing’ is a considerable achievement. In my opinion it is impossible to find a better example than Archangel of the peculiar chemical process of the Maddin cinema – the emergence from a most unlikely and even unpromising collection of indigestibly disparate components of a strange, absurd, poetically moving, and finally emotionally compelling aesthetic object. The project began with suggestions from Maddin’s friend, John Harvie, who had been a co-founder of Extra Large Productions and played the central role in The Dead Father, and who Maddin describes as ‘the greatest pitch man I’ve ever known.’5 As a history buff of great range, Harvie was struck by the strangeness of the Allied mission to northern Russia in 1918 that lasted past the Armistice and most of the way through the following year, and thought it was a good setting for a Maddin film. (He was also pitching a remake set in the Arctic of the wacky 1933 Universal movie International House, and elements of that idea got folded into the Archangel project, though hardly anything is visible of it.6) Maddin brought Toles in to collaborate on the script, and Greg Klimkiw lined up the money from a variety of sources, most promi-

52

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

nently Telefilm Canada, and got a fairly substantial Canadian distribution pre-sale to Cinephile. Notwithstanding its non-minuscule budget, Archangel was shot locally in 16mm black and white (some sequences were later tinted in monochrome) on Maddin’s Bolex camera, with no direct sound, tiny hand-built sets, and personally sewn or glued-together costumes, a cast made up of (talented) friends and acquaintances, and special effects of the utmost simplicity. The shoot took place over a thirty-five-day period, mostly in an empty warehouse in Winnipeg’s west end during a hot summer – ironic, since the diegesis is 100% wintry and snow-covered, and at a polar opposite (so to speak) from the –40° shoot of The Saddest Music in the World.7 When a new cameraman, Terry Reimer, produced early rushes that were too clean and clear, Maddin sent him back to ‘a really degraded copy’ of Jean Renoir’s silent low-budget fantasy film La petite marchande d’allumettes (1928) as a model for greater grain, blur, and contrast, and that resulted in images closer to Maddin’s wishes.8 Once more the film uses the model, as Toles says, of the ‘parttalkie.’ There is more dialogue than in its predecessors, but synchronization is deliberately indifferent, and many scenes take place with only a music-and-effects soundtrack. It is a model that allows, too, for dronelike anti-naturalism in the delivery of dialogue that is very often stiffly formal, poetic, or declamatory in long-dead styles, or simply bizarrely phrased. Altogether, Archangel preserves much of the deliberately crude and simple quality, and obvious deployment of impoverished artifice, of Gimli Hospital, but now in a much more ambitious and solid frame. It is always after bigger game – and it is successful in that hunt, both aesthetically and emotionally. The historical backdrop Archangel bears no very great relation to actual history, but it does specify a precise historical setting – Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia in 1919. During the preceding two years there had been a series of large historical events in this part of the world: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 overthrowing the Czar and casting in doubt Russian involvement on the Allied side in World War I; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March of 1918 ending hostilities and making peace with Germany and Austria; the arrival of a variety of Allied military units in northern Russia in June of 1918 to try to forestall German activities and possibly even recreate an Eastern Front; the German surrender in November of 1918; and the subsequent Allied decision to continue their intervention in Russia in

Archangel

53

the hopes of overthrowing the Bolshevik regime, and thus essentially to became a participant in the Russian civil war. All Allied contingents had withdrawn from northern Russia by October of 1919 and from the other theatres in which they were involved (the Don/Ukraine/Caucasus areas and Siberia) by the end of 1920. (The civil war itself lasted until October of 1922.) The setting of Maddin’s film then falls into that narrow yearlong window between the end of the war and the Allied withdrawal from Archangel and Murmansk – a period in which forces that had come to fight the Germans had ended up fighting the Bolsheviks. Archangel’s depiction of the situation is grotesque, pitting Orthodoxworshipping villagers and a Multicultural Heritage Festival cornucopia of European, Asian, African, and Canadian Allies against a surreal combination of moustachioed Huns in pickelhaubes in pitched battle and drooling lambswool-hatted Bolsheviks as home-front insurgents. Since the Germans and the Russians had been enemies throughout the First World War until the Bolshevik Revolution, and were never at any time allied, Maddin’s implication of a simultaneous struggle against different enemies is ridiculous. But it does capture the absurdity of the Allied intervention in Russia, which in sober historical fact was scarcely less bizarre than Maddin’s version. The original intervention was a panicked British and French response to the collapse of the Eastern Front and the prospect of scores of German divisions streaming across to France. Britain was also (characteristically) utterly paranoid about the possibility of German units operating so unopposed in the south that they could penetrate all the way to British India. The decision to send troops to Murmansk and Archangel had the specific aim of preventing their use by the Germans as submarine and blockade-breaking naval bases; but it soon became inseparable from what in retrospect seems like a lunatic scheme: to raise anti-Bolshevik forces there to restart the Russian war against Germany and to link these forces up with similar forces in the south and even in Siberia – who were to progress thousands of miles across the Russian heartland – to reconstitute the Eastern Front. The first Allied arrivals in the north were actually cleared with the Bolshevik government, which had not yet signed a peace treaty with Germany. At this point the struggle was blended in with the civil war going on in neighbouring Finland, where the White Finns were allied with the Germans against the Russian Empire, and where the Red Finns thus became the natural allies of the anti-German efforts of the Allies acting with Bolshevik permission. This changed overnight after the Armistice, when the Allied forces themselves became Whites and thus found themselves fighting their former allies.

54

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The Allied contingent in northern Russia was made up of British, American, Canadian, French, Italian, and Serbian troops. It comprised around 30,000 men in all, more or less equally divided between Murmansk and Archangel. The fact that French colonial units were present becomes Maddin’s excuse to give us exotic Congolese (!) soldiers, just as a small Italian presence results in fantasy Garibaldian bersagliere units in traditional miniskirts, and the Asian cultures of imperial Russia give rise to soldiers of both sexes who look like escapees from The Arabian Nights. Since there was a modest Canadian detachment in Archangel – one artillery brigade numbering 487 soldiers9 – the filmmaker can make his hero a Canadian, complete with his own flag (a veiny maple leaf ensign of Maddin’s own design whose crest rather resembles that of the Toronto Maple Leafs of sixty years ago). The leaders of the Allied mission undertook the recruitment of anti-Bolshevik local forces as a high priority, and pro-interventionists argued strenuously that these recruits could not simply be abandoned by the governments who had encouraged their rebellion. In the event, though, they were abandoned, and they paid a terrible price. Meanwhile, hardly any of the participants on the ground or onlookers from afar could understand what Allied troops were doing fighting in Archangel for a whole year after the Armistice. As one American lieutenant embarking from Russia wrote at the time: ‘When the last battalion set sail from Archangel, not a soldier knew – no, not even vaguely – why he had fought, or why he was going now, or why his comrades were left behind beneath the wooden crosses.’10 And this is not so very far from Archangel’s depiction of a conflict that is going on for reasons that don’t make any sense to anyone, according to a set of circumstances and beliefs that have been left behind by history, the result of a kind of collective amnesia. Archangel’s look, and much of its content, was suggested to the filmmaker by a bound set of wartime photographic reports from the Illustrated London News called The War Illustrated, which Maddin repeatedly leafed through as a child. The relation of The War Illustrated to the Great War, or even to a complex and nuanced historical account of the war, is hypermediated: it is wartime propaganda. Although hot from the oven when it was published, by the time it was in the boy Maddin’s hands it was from a fairly distant past, a set of images that he read as quaintly eloquent, unreal, and imagistically seductive: not history, but fantasy. In the DVD commentary, Maddin remarks of The War Illustrated and his reaction to it:

Archangel

55

Everyone in the movie and TV industry knows that TV series have a bible. This movie had a bible, and it was those Great War books, they were war propaganda magazines that were put out, I guess, once a month, and then finally bound at the end of the war, and sold, and you can find them in antique stores. What I noticed was that Russian women soldiers had the greatest uniforms! They looked like Greek Orthodox ministers, with giant wimples and headgear. It really got me fired up, and so when I went to Dee Szöke, my costume person, we had a riot, just sketching them out. This is really a war that’s always reminded me of toy soldiers – just being the baby boomer that I am – the broken-down soldiers, the legless soldiers, that I got to play with, the lead ones. No matter how hard I made them fight each other, they never seemed to be able to hurt each other much. Even though tens of millions of people perished, it seemed like a big toy war, somehow – and that’s why I wanted the snow to be warm and cozy, blankety almost, made out of blankets, and the soldiers appearing to be wearing costumes.

No Maddin film seems as much of a grand dress-up occasion as Archangel: all these men going off to war in horsehair-plumed helmets and other exotic military gear, the Huns, the Bolsheviks, the villagers and their priests, all looking like participants in an amateur theatrical put on by precocious children. The opening As in The Dead Father and Tales from the Gimli Hospital, the film begins with an archaic company title, ‘Ordnance Productions,’ with a logo that features a shield bearing a cenotaph-like object and a surmounting eagle. And there is no main title music, but instead – in an early taste of the distinctly quieter and more sombre mood of this film – the muffled sound of parading infantry boots, distant artillery explosions, and a bell tolling in slow carillon. The title credits appear against worn and archaic backgrounds, with period lettering on scrolls or bars, the images dark and slowly pulsing as with numerous generations of film-print duplication. A title reads: ‘The Northernmost tip of old Imperial Russia. Winter of 1919. The Great War has been over for three months, but no one has remembered to tell those who remain in Archangel.’ And then another title: ‘The Dirge of Lt. John Boles.’ The opening scene, on the rail of a steamship at night,11 the wind slowly whistling and snow faintly flurrying, finds one-legged Canadian soldier John Boles (Kyle McCulloch) hold-

56

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ing a small decorated urn, inscribed ‘IDIC,’ whose contents are shown to be ashes and a military medal. ‘Goodbye, Iris,’ Boles murmurs sadly. An officer (Victor Cowie) a few paces down the deck is confiscating a bottle resembling Boles’ urn from a pair of other soldiers dressed in approximately naval and Cossack fashion respectively. Then coming to Boles, the officer snatches away the container with Iris’ ashes and tosses it overboard; Boles can only respond to this monstrous misunderstanding with a resigned salute. This brief scene – a melange of emotional loss, confident error, and dutiful acceptance – is like a microcosm of the film. ‘Love’ After the opening shipboard scene, there follows a sort of allegorical sermon on the idea of Love. At almost three minutes in length, this is quite an extended sequence, especially coming so close to the beginning of the film and in the absence of much in the way of context. It is conducted in voice-over by an omniscient and didactic narrator,12 and illustrated with images of parental love, youthful and then mature romantic love, patriotic, and finally religious love. At the end of this catalogue, the praying hands emblematic of religious devotion are enveloped by flames, and we now get a series of images of the perversion of Love in self-love, or Pride, which is responsible for the horrors of war. This is ‘a malignant vanity, insatiable, the pride of the Teuton,’ and is accompanied by superimposed flames and images of the hideous depredations of the Hun, led by the Kaiser as an old man with a very strange pasted-on woollen moustache and wearing a rather cheap-looking Cossack hat emblazoned with a death’s-head.13 The narrator conducts a moralizing lecture (‘One must have the discipline to fight for what is right in the Lord’s eyes!’) and asks sententious questions (‘Why must such a belligerent urge ravage all that is lovely and right?’). The images oscillate between almost straightforward expositions of the moralisms uttered by the narrator and completely fanciful stagings such as the execution of a young boy tied to a stake with an apple upon his head, the order given by a young girl (Jilian Maddin, the director’s twelve-year-old daughter) in Cossack hat with death’s-head bringing down a sword almost bigger than she is. This section is poised between the solemn homiletic tone of its discourse and the absurdly primitive and reductive or outright farcical nature of much of its staging. It sits like a large lump at the beginning of the film, and is certainly a substantial and probably puzzling interruption

Archangel

57

‘The insatiable Teuton’ and his model ‘the Pirate Emperor … in the uniform of a Death’s-Head Hussar’ (The War Illustrated, 22 May 1915).

to be endured before the plot – itself rather difficult to get into – can really begin. But it does perform the dual function of setting the historical scene and, more crucially, striking for the first time the rhetorically heightened tone natural to the inhabitants of this world and reflective of Archangel’s bizarre Frankensteinian revivification of it. Again, coming so soon into the film, and presented so baldly, the sequence has the effect of a manifesto to the viewer: this is the kind of film you are going to be watching. Like the puppet show in Gimli Hospital, and like many other elements encountered later in this film, this sequence encourages us to pose the question: what kind of audience could respond to such a discourse unironically? Not us, surely; but we must nevertheless confront the problem of how to receive this rodomontade. Our first reaction may be that it is satire, for it does certainly have features that seem to be

58

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

directing ridicule at the overly simple, impossibly credulous, and idealistic attitudes of both the narrator and the illustrative subjects – a feeling that is encouraged by the sometimes comic stylization of the cobbledtogether costumes and sets. Indeed at first glance it may be difficult to see anything in the sequence that doesn’t fall into this category. And yet this rhetorically overloaded speech and its allegorical visualizations are too complicated and extensive and arcane to work simply as satire. The joke is much too long and detailed, and the earnestness of tone too intense and deadpan, to be really funny. In any case what exactly is being satirized? As in Gimli Hospital, and in fact as in Maddin’s whole cinema, this process of absurd restaging of dead beliefs and expressive forms cannot be functionally satirical when the original objects are so truly dead as to have been virtually forgotten. Nevertheless the large gap between the humorlessness and absence of irony in the tone of this long oration on the one hand, and the plentiful and inescapable ironies of its staging and the film’s awareness of the absurdity of this tone on the other, presents to the viewer a dilemma that is ultimately the film’s also. It is the dilemma of a strong attraction to, and even a wish to believe in, the very ideology and world view whose impossibility is simultaneously seen so clearly as to provoke the film’s own derision. The love of family and country and religion, the patriotic fervour to repel an invading army and rescue what is precious from the depredations of a demonic enemy are powerful emotional simplicities that at one level the film simply envies – envies even as it sees their ridiculousness from a contemporary standpoint. Perhaps the ‘Love’ sequence from Archangel is a little too extended and unclear in its purpose to be the very best example of this condition of the filmmaker’s, but it does embody it very purely. Certainly it is a bellwether for Archangel as a whole, which confronts this difficult emotional condition with a kind of manic persistence. The focus for its dramatization, though, is not primarily social (as in the ‘Love’ disquisition), but instead personal, in the fate of John Boles and the other central characters. An ideal husband A title perfectly redolent of the everyday poetry of silent/early-sound film titles leads us into the action: ‘Archangel – at the going down of the sun.’ Maddin’s Archangel, when we eventually see it, is a ramshackle collection of off-kilter building fronts, wooden huts, hand-lettered cyrillic signs, leafless tree branches, and various primitive implements, usually being sprinkled with snow and always snow-covered. Both it and the extensive

Archangel

59

battle scenes were filmed on cramped twelve-foot stages, and the claustrophobic and largely nocturnal settings exert a strong and distinct aura, miniaturely Sternbergian without a fraction of Sternberg’s resources for settings and cinematography. Boles arrives in the town as part of the Allied mission, and a further set of echt-Griffithian titles introduces the situation and the characters and explains their significance with typical silent-cinema narrative efficiency: ‘Chance leads Boles to billet with a family in need.’ The family dwelling is a crude wooden house with a white madonna and child statue in the front yard, and an interior that seems half living space, half barn, and crammed with hanging ropes, farm implements, a workbench and tools, and a multitude of objects – as claustrophobically cluttered as an interior from Sternberg’s Shanghai Express. The little boy in the family, Geza (David Falkenberg) collapses with a seizure just as Boles is coming in, and the rest of the family is introduced, one by one, with titles: ‘the boy’s Baba’ (Margaret Anne McLeod), ‘his mother’ Danchuk (Sarah Neville), ‘and cowardly father’ Jannings (Michael Gottli).14 Boles instantly knows what to do in the crisis: apply a vigorous scrubbing with dry horsehair-brushes to the boy’s bare torso. After this efficacious treatment, the following dialogue occurs: danchuk: Thank you, Lieutenant. boles: He may have worms. Have you tried feeding him a little horse-

hair? [examines Geza’s mouth] baba: Won’t the hair turn to eels in his stomach? boles: I hardly think so. [he reaches for some horsehairs on his shoulder,

hands them to Baba] Here. A few on your neck will keep goitre away, too. [turning to Danchuk] And I might add, the breath of a mare in foal on your little baby would clear up that whooping cough. [little baby sounds] Here the backwardness and peasant superstition of the locals is met with the brisk scientific superiority of Western culture, which is then immediately revealed to be just as irrational and arbitrary as theirs. (All of Boles’ cures appear to be horse-based: perhaps an echo of the cavalry-based ethos of military ideology so completely destroyed by the First World War, and hence another mark of his pathos.) Boles’ insertion into this family as the father-and-husband figure of masculine authority is begun here, and continued throughout the film. Danchuk cannot help but be attracted to him, so much better a man and a father than the fat, cowardly Jannings, while Geza too sees him as the

60

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ideal heroic father figure, and Baba smiles approvingly at his every action. In token of this picture of completion – the family’s by the arrival of Boles, Boles’ by his fitting so perfectly into the domestic scene – Baba digs up her late husband’s wooden leg. Looking like a large boot-tree and absurdly decorated with Russian runes, this item is a handy replacement for Boles’ peg leg: he marvels at its good fit and pulls his other boot out of his pack (‘I knew I’d need you again some day,’ he says to it). Boles’ missing limb is a very concrete emblem of his damaged psyche, from which something essential (his Iris) has been amputated. His shuffling physical awkwardness always directly expresses his crippled emotions as well as the inherent stiffness of his military and dutiful responses. Indeed, this missing leg is a small but pervasive and insistent sign of everything that is missing in the film: not just a lost love, but a lost memory (amnesia), a lost struggle (the amorphous battle in the Russian Arctic), and in a larger sense a whole set of big lost causes (solid patriarchal values, imperial military virtue, duty, honour, order) that are as extinct in the Canada of 1991 as mastodons in the Archangel of 1919. The present scene, by providing Boles with the wooden leg of the departed family patriarch, deftly symbolizes how in some sense patriarchal status is always incomplete and to be realized prosthetically, how underlying all patriarchal authority is a castration anxiety that can be allayed only in this symbolic way. Boles assumes the false leg of the father. Amputation equals castration, and the replacement phallus is a wooden strap-on dildo. The displaced desire of the family for a patriarch, like every other desire in the film, is built on a quicksand of cross-purposes and mistaken perception, and is doomed to disappointment. And Boles will never truly find his leg, or his Iris, or a meaning in his life, again. Indeed some kind of opposite transformation occurs: Boles and everything he believes in and stands for are revealed to be as wooden, as false, as the leg. In this sense a wooden leg really is the appropriate completion for a wooden man – but it is a melancholy one, for although Boles’ overearnestness is ridiculous, there is always something painful and touching about the sincerity and intensity of his beliefs. The completion of the family by a wooden Boles is then even more poignantly impossible than its prima facie absurdity already renders it. The dominion of forgetfulness Now a defining event takes place. Glancing into a mirror (significantly), Boles notices that a young woman has entered the room. She is strikingly sombre and white-faced, dressed all in black, and wearing a large flat

Archangel

61

Titanic-era hat and lots of dark eye and lip make-up. A title announces: ‘The woman in the mirror, Veronkha, bears a startling resemblance to Boles’s deceased beloved, Iris.’ Boles’ eyes roll back into his head and he faints dead away, while the subsequent title comments: ‘Such is the Dirge of Lt. John Boles.’ From this point forward, Boles will retain as an idée fixe that Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) actually is Iris, developing an instant amnesia regarding the death of his lover, and henceforth trying obsessively to get this new woman to acknowledge that she is in fact his wife. Veronkha, it will soon emerge, has problems of her own, including a husband whose own amnesia has caused him to forget her. Schematically, therefore, she is forgotten by the man she loves and incorrectly remembered by a man who loves her. As this skein develops, it is clear why Maddin describes Archangel as ‘an amnesia picture,’ and why co-scenarist and scriptwriter George Toles can say to Maddin (keeping in mind the opening title where the armies are described as being in Archangel because someone has forgotten to tell them the war is over) that in this film ‘the Love/War thing is braided together in your mind by amnesia – since nearly all of the characters are afflicted by it, both in their war actions and in their love actions.’15 The basic situation is, as Maddin has confided,16 suggested by Henry Green’s 1946 novel Back. There, the protagonist, Charley Summers, who has lost his leg in the war, returns to England and confronts the situation that the woman he had ardently loved has died while he was away. This woman, whose name was Rose, had been married to another man, and had had a son whom the hero believes is in fact his. He meets another woman, Nancy, a war widow who is actually Rose’s half-sister, and he instantly believes that she is in fact Rose, still alive. Although no one else can see much physical resemblance between Rose and Nancy, Charley is utterly convinced they are the same, and interprets all the confused annoyance and sympathetic allowances he inspires in people as further evidence of a plot to deceive and humiliate him.17 Like Maddin’s hero Boles, he suffers not only from grief, disorientation, and basic errors of perception, but also from terrible spasms of jealousy. Ultimately Summers finds his way back to true perception, and even, movingly, to a genuine and reciprocated love for the ‘wrong’ woman. But the carnival of loss-driven perceptual chaos offered by Maddin and Toles in Archangel rejects any consolation at all. Instead, right to the end of the story its cruel dramatic ironies are twisted further, the pathetic wrong recognitions of their characters become more desperate and entangled. Insofar as reality is ever recovered at all, it is as a blasted, arid wasteland. And

62

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

although this prospect is draped with the absurdity of Boles’ clunking wooden leg, or the French-farcicalities of Veronkha’s wedding night(s), it retains its quality of emotional desolation. Veronkha’s husband Philbin (Ari Cohen) is quickly introduced into the scene, so that the dramatic moment of Boles’ shocked swoon at his misrecognition of his dead love is immediately invaded by another set of misunderstandings and dysfunctions before we have had any chance at all to process it. The new development is given its own title, though: ‘Veronkha’s Dirge.’ Philbin is brought in by his doctor (Michael O’Sullivan), who presents Veronkha with a tablecloth-sized paper that is the marriage certificate (‘Why, it’s a treasure map!’ she bafflingly exclaims). The doctor undertakes a lengthy exposition of his patient’s amnesiac condition, tracing it to the effects of mustard gas but also giving a psychoanalytic history that Maddin accompanies by illustrated flashbacks: He was suddenly weaned by his mother, who painted with boot-black upon her breast the face of a fearsome monster. The treatment worked so well that baby Philbin forgot, not only the breast, but his mother as well. As the lad grew, forgetfulness was the very tenor of his existence. Forgetting the kindness owing to God’s creatures, forgetting often the respect due to one’s elders, and forgetting the little things that would have made life so much easier for his forgotten mother. His romances have also been enacted under the dominion of this forgetfulness. No sooner did he catch eternal love, than he would no longer even remember the woman in question.

Philbin himself is an antitype of Boles. Where Boles is always crushed and zombified or feverishly but unwisely hopeful, Philbin breezes through both the war and all the emotional wreckage he has created in the lives around him with a brainless confident smile relieved occasionally by a look of vague puzzlement arising from his drastically misfiring memory.18 He has his own line in cheerfully impervious and unhinged dialogue, as when he remarks to Veronkha upon his first entrance, ‘There’s a dead sparrow on your roof – a good omen for our marriage,’ or later on in this exchange with Geza, who has mistaken him for his saviour: geza: You saved my life! philbin: That’s nice. Your father said he’d drive me to the aero-

drome. Have you seen him? geza: [gesturing to floor] He’s dead!

Archangel

63

philbin: [looking] I can see that. Nothing seems to be going right to-

day. geza: My father died a coward, didn’t he? philbin: I believe there’s a reason for everything. For instance, some-

one shaved off my moustache while I slept last night. Who could that be? If Boles’ amnesia is a psychic mechanism whose function is to protect him from the pain of loss, Philbin’s is simply one that relieves him of responsibility. On the DVD commentary track, Maddin remarks confessionally: ‘I know that everything about the way I’ve led my life is after the fashion of an amnesiac. I’ve forgotten my marriages, promises – conveniently, alas – duties; I’ve forgotten that people have dumped me, and I’ve forgotten that people have died.’ This seems to be Philbin all over. But Maddin goes on to say that his identification with and experience with the problem of amnesia have ‘opened the doors for exquisite pleasures to be found in movies like Vertigo and books like Henry Green’s Back.’19 We have touched on Back, but it is worth recalling that Vertigo too, like Archangel, is about a psychic obsession, a fog of unknowing, whose dispersal brings no release or fulfilment, but only a clear and devastating recognition of loss. Amnesia seems to be Maddin’s code word for an expressionist mental state that is ruled more directly by unconscious desires and fears, and distracted less by rationality and ‘daylight’ perception, than the norm. It is in this sense that he can feel so intense an affinity with it that it can seem like a universal condition, especially in cinema: ‘The more I started thinking about it, the more I realized that almost all movies are about amnesia.’20 Between too-present, too-powerful currents of feeling and the blind self-preserving wish to avoid or transform them somehow, a retreat into quivering, fog-lost atavism or blithe dissociative cheerfulness does seem not merely the strategy for a Boles or a Philbin, but also an analogue to Maddin’s own creative state – something that will later receive more direct and detailed expression in Brand upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg. The physical representation of this almost universal condition is the snow-flaked, fog-bound, arbitrarily illuminated blackness of the mise en scène. And its narrative representation is the dizzying replication of structures of misperception, hopeless desire, and mutual frustration. Boles loves Veronkha because he thinks she is Iris; Veronkha loves Philbin even though he has forgotten their marriage; Danchuk loves Boles although he has no reciprocal inclination and she is already married.

64

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The demented quality of this circling structure is amplified in the repetition of action: Veronkha’s three weddings and honeymoons, Boles’ three ‘treasure hunts.’ A child is being beaten Following a scene in which Boles is elaborately prepared by the whole family for some formal occasion (Danchuk and Geza bathe, brush down, and talcum up his torso; Baba disentangles the horsehair plume of his cuirassier’s helmet, he is tricked out in helmet, long cape, and sabre), Geza is found toying with Boles’ collection of medals. Danchuk, appalled, decides that he must be punished for this non-existent infraction (‘Get into your buckle!’). She proceeds then to begin a ritual beating, wherein Geza has his shirt ripped off, his wrists manacled to posts, and a whipping administered by his mother with a scourge made of what looks like ostrich or peacock feathers. A title asks: ‘Where is the father at such a time?’ – a question answered by a shot of Jannings turning away from the spectacle, and fiddling nervously with other medals hanging from the mantelpiece. A shocked Boles asks Jannings ‘Isn’t it a man’s place to discipline a wayward child?’ but gets no answer. Danchuk takes a breather from this hot work, and Geza, his head bowed in submission, says, ‘Please continue, mother.’ Boles approaches and says to Danchuk: ‘I’m not used to seeing a woman doing a man’s job. Would you mind?’ Taking the whip, and formally straightening his gloves and helmet, Boles lays into Geza with a will, several low-angled shots showing his countenance transformed with violence (then popping back into complaisance with a suddenness that is equally disturbing). It goes on for some time, with a cutaway to Jannings slinking away in cowardice. When it is finished, Danchuk runs and embraces Geza’s naked back, and as Boles says, ‘He’s a good lad – you should be proud of him,’ both she and her son gaze up at him with reverent gratitude. A shot from Geza’s point of view shows Boles transfigured by a hagiographic low-angle and ultra-soft focus into an object of adoration. Boles offers a smart salute, and with an Erich von Stroheim 200mm cigarette-in-holder21 suddenly jutting from his mouth, pivots precisely and comically on his wooden leg and heads out into the snow like the hero that he is. What are we to make of this provocative scene? Absurdities abound. Geza’s crime is to have reverently fingered Boles’ (impressive) collection of military decorations. From the standpoint of the prevailing ideology, it is good that Boles has these medals, and it is good that the boy admires

Archangel

65

them. He has committed a tiny infringement in actually touching them (though his mother’s shout of ‘Geza, what are you taking!’ perhaps implies something more). The notion that even such a small liberty, or that even such a false accusation, should automatically and ‘naturally’ be met with physical chastisement is ridiculous to Maddin’s modern viewers. When all concerned then line up to agree on the appropriateness of this corporal punishment as a matter of course, and when the exercise of the ritual is properly arrogated to the domain of the patriarchal male figure of ideological power, viewers are more or less forced to laugh at the preposterous beliefs of these ridiculous characters: what fools these archaic subjects be! Beyond that, the sadomasochistic creepiness of Boles’ violence-spasmed face and (even more pathologically) the socialized submission of the child who begs to assume his position as the beaten malefactor, seems to emphasize that the film is conducting a savage critique of this earlier ideology. The one figure who acts sympathetically – the father who will not beat his child – is explicitly labelled as a shirking moral jellyfish. But we are left with the same dilemma as with the ‘Love’ sermon. What can be the purpose of conducting a searing critique of, or else of laughing in satirical superiority at, the moral failings of a society so far removed from our own experience that it needs to be expounded in detail from scratch in order for us even to understand these shortcomings? Once more we can detect in the sobriety and detailed care of this fantasyreconstruction something else: an affection, a kind of admiration, even a yearning for the simple sturdy rigour of this ideology. I am certainly not suggesting that Maddin or Toles want to bring back a world of standard whippings, pompous patriarchal violence, and compliant children who have precociously bought into the system. If such a world ever truly existed, indeed.22 As with the puppet show in Gimli Hospital and the ‘Love’ sermon earlier (and as we will see again extensively in Careful), Maddin’s confections are attempts not to construct a historical past, and not even to construct a parody of a historical past, but rather to invent something unique – a fantasy on themes from the historical past. And this fantasy has built into it an awareness of the serious ethical limitations of the past, of its impossibility staged partly as a recognition of those limitations which nothing could now induce us (or Maddin) to accept. But again, the other half of the impossibility is the unreachableness of what is also desirable in this world. This is the curve the movie throws, as so many of Maddin’s films do, and it is what gives it that sober and melancholy qual-

66

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ity which sits so unprocessably right next to its wild, comic absurdity. And what is that desired thing? Maddin’s version of what Toles explains as ‘the rules’: solidarity, social wholeness, personal security deriving from a solid sense of the individual’s place in the group, absence of the chaotic freedom to want and go after everything and anything – in short, a life without fundamental alienation. These values are akin to the fantasies of social conservatism or of religion (and religion does also play an important part in Archangel’s world), but in Maddin’s non-socially-conservative, non-religious cinema they come with their own disavowal or, again, the explicit recognition of their fantasy status, their impossibility in part because of the profoundly unacceptable qualities inseparable from their idealism. Under this rubric, it would be desirable to have even a whipping ritual – and its particularly egregious and sensational qualities are a means of showing that any ritual can operate in this way – if it could function as an expression of social, familial, and in the deepest sense ideological meaning. Of course one’s moral sense rebels at this spectacle and is in turn deflected by the parodistic and comic exaggeration, or simplification, of the staging. This, then, is one of the principal functions of the past, or fantasy-past, in Maddin’s imaginative world: to find, or to suggest, a place which is full of unacceptable ethical and ideological limitations but which is capable of a solidity and coherence that may even only be there because it is imagined to be there in this act of fantasy-creation. The simultaneity or fusing of these opposite qualities (fantasy-historical-world meaning, realworld ethical knowledge and scepticism) is one iteration of the project going on throughout Maddin’s cinema: the project to hold incompatible paradigms somehow together. Illumination The film proceeds immediately to its next set-piece: the Illumination.23 After the ‘Love’ disquisition and the whipping scene, we find here another version of the same phenomenon, now dramatized as a ritual public celebration. The community assembles for a patriotic demonstration in the form of a series of tableaux representing victorious battle scenes. All of these scenes are basically the same: a group of citizens costumed as Russian (or Allied) soldiers pose in menacing triumph over a group of citizens costumed as cowering Huns. Meanwhile the voice of an announcer (Victor Cowie again) booms echoingly through a super-megaphone device with the play-by-play commentary: ‘Courageous in long mous-

Archangel

67

The Illumination, with Veronkha as personification of the heroic nation militant.

taches, injured earlier in the war, too elderly for other detachments, they have come from far afield, from the Congo, from Greece, from jewelled lands, from the infirmary. These dauntless warriors of Mother Russia, reaping a deadly harvest on the field of honour.24’ His commentary is in the same solemn, heightened rhetoric as the ‘Love’ episode: ‘In the Battle of Bessarabia, terrible was the havoc these soldiers wreaked on the Hunnish foe’ ‘A nightmare to Germany were we at Galicia’ ‘Can anything sate the bloodlust of these barbaric Teutons?’ Between stagings we hear, through the same PA system, the same announcer acting as stage manager (‘May we please have the Royal Scots Dragoons, the French Reconaissance, and American Fusiliers’). One citizen-actor25 quits in disgust, refusing to portray a German, and Jannings (naturally, as town coward) is drafted in to take the part. Dominating each of the tableaux is Veronkha, having forsaken her all-black attire for a dazzling satinate white gown, crowned with a kind of Statue of Liberty

68

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

headdress – the goddess of patriotic idealism and battle. A further stage call (‘Small nations! Small nations, please! Greece. The Congo. Dominion of Canada’) suddenly and comically elicits a fierce spasm of patriotism in Boles, and he goes onto the stage just in time to take the co-starring part with his beloved Veronkha/Iris. During the announcer’s ‘10... 9... 8...’ countdown-to-Illumination, the equally deranged Philbin strolls on and tries to pull Veronkha away to their wedding in Murmansk. Boles lays him out with a rifle butt, with effortless delirium crossing the line between representation and action, between propaganda and personal jealousy. The naïve patriotism of the Illumination, and its recourse (as in the puppet theatre in Gimli Hospital) to the purest and most primitive form of theatre are once more too much for a contemporary audience to swallow straight. The rhetoric is too full of fustian and solemn selfimportance and the attitudes too credulous, while the absence of verisimilitude reveals distortions of representation too gross to be overlooked by a viewership unused to allegory (distortions happily emphasized by the amateur-theatrical aura of Maddin’s home-made sets and costumes). But more clearly than in either of its predecessors, this sequence presents also a quality of grandeur, a space where the seriousness of the social ritual being depicted is answered by a seriousness of appreciation on the part of the film. The spectacle is, simply, impressive and beautiful despite its ingenuousness, primitivism, and pomposity, and despite its trailing clouds of absurdity. Well, despite these things, or partly because of them. With the snow gently falling, the beautiful shafts of light and pools of shadow covering the scene, the simple bravura compositions of the tableaux themselves, the religiously enthusiastic spectators, the splendid formality of everything that can even sustain the incorporation of such potentially farcical elements as the duelling amnesiacs Boles and Philbin, the Illumination miraculously traverses the ground from comically grandiose solemnity to actual solemnity, from the mock-heroic to the actually heroic. The sublime ideal of group social/religious/patriotic theatre in the mould of Aeschylus is even suggested. We are of course very far from Greek tragedy in this dramatic rendering which never strays too far away from the condition of a farrago; but Maddin’s garage-band version of a sacred social ritual retains something of its impressive essence even in the most retrograde of circumstances. The beauty of the snowfall is undiminished by the fact that it consists of potato flakes. The naivety of the means and the naivety of what those means are expressing – the oversimple social faith of the Illumination – unite. On the sleigh ride back from the Illumination, Boles tries to coax

Archangel

69

Veronkha into admitting or remembering that she is Iris. All that ensues is a Back-like dialogue in which, because both parties are speaking indirectly or suggestively, each confidently understands the other completely incorrectly. In response to his questions about where she lives and how he is to find her, Veronkha enigmatically gives Boles what started out as her marriage certificate but was identified by her as a treasure map. Approaching his billet alone, Boles somehow crashes through a glass roof panel down into a mass of white roses in Danchuk’s living room. This is geographically impossible, but neither here nor at any other point is Maddin bothered by such things. Danchuck is busy arranging a giant memorial wreath inscribed with the words ‘Dispatched by Wounds Innumerable’ – a phrase that will in the end be able to serve as something of a motto for many of the film’s important characters (notably Boles, Veronkha, and Danchuk herself). As she leans tenderly over Boles’ figure lying unconscious in a bed of white roses, Danchuk picks up a shard of glass and slowly opens a bloody gash on her forehead with it in a nakedly melodramatic expression of her intense love for Boles which cannot be openly declared without encouragement from him (or the disappearance of her husband). Battle I Next in the procession of set-pieces comes the first of the film’s three battlefield scenes. A title in thick, urgent block capitals screams: ALL ABLE-BODIED MEN TO THE

FRONT!! Here and in some of the other titles, Maddin’s models are clearly Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Soviet silent montage cinema in general. One is forcibly reminded of Alexander Nevsky, too, whenever propaganda denunciations of ‘the Teuton’ appear from the mouths of Mother Russia-loving patriots, while some of the film’s more monumental and imagistically heavy moments are quite reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible. Silent or restricted-sound cinema, Russian locations, a situation of serious social conflict, not totally the wrong time period – it all adds up in a certain way. But in another sense it is ridiculous, because the enemy in Archangel is precisely Bolshevism, the inventor and owner of the propaganda language the film is imputing to the proto-Czarist community for which our

70

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

heroes are fighting (it’s too late for them to be actually Czarist, the Czar is deposed and gone forever) and of which the film is the mouthpiece. Actually, the enemy is Bolshevism and Teutonism, it is the inherently absurd entity Bolshevism-Teutonism. (Of course, as we have seen, it was an entity not too absurd for history, or at least the hysteria and hubris of the Allied powers.) In Archangel, Soviet-style propaganda is the delivery system for a sentimental patriotism that has its incongruity further emphasized not only by the icons of military service and the shibboleths of the patriarchal family, but by images of religious piety and Orthodox crosses and priests, and representations of old-world fealty and empire in the Cossack and Asian motifs. This is complexly surreal. A further element in the cultural mix is the sombre rhythmic tread of the musical accompaniment: a seriously slowed-down old recording of the opening of the Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov overlaid with quavering bugle calls. Danchuk and Boles say farewell to little Geza (‘If nothing happens to us, we’ll be back in a few hours’). The soldiers who are seen heading to the front through the snow and the fog are a strange symphony of unrestrained design inspirations: crutches, medals, Uhlan lancer hats, turbans, Italian rustic stocking caps, girl fighters in crocheted headdresses, Jannings in a giant white braided jacket looking like a band master, Danchuk in her sober black dress and big flat hat with enormous bow. Boles in his regular officer’s uniform salutes the crowd with the noble selfpossession of a hero who knows he is one, while Danchuk allows a private possessive smile to escape. Once they are out of the town, their journey in silhouette through the snowy fog-shrouded landscape of leafless trees and large Orthodox crosses is summarized by the narrator in a passage that Maddin explains in the DVD commentary was an attempt to imitate his beloved Bruno Schulz: On the march to the front, Danchuk imparts to Lieutenant Boles her thoughts about darkness. She believes that darkness can be kept, a black juicy harvest actually plucked from the night. That darkness can be sculpted into huge furry logs and complex corridors. That little piles of darkness can serve as useful road signs for the weary traveller. Or for anyone who swims in that dusky fluid. Sometimes the deeper shades are cramping, and one has to duck down low to squeeze beneath them. One can always wend one’s way through the night.26

The battle itself is largely elided. There are iris-framed long tracking

Archangel

71

shots along the trenches showing the World-Encyclopedia-of-Peoples variety of dress, nocturnal shots of Veronkha poised with a flag at the brow of a trench, and Boles and Danchuk traversing a quiet battlefield whose corpses turn out to be only resting – until they find one genuinely dead poilu for whom Boles erects the classic soldier’s grave marker of planted rifle with helmet perched on top. Boles wonders aloud to Danchuk about the whereabouts of Veronkha/Iris’s dwelling and even her identity (‘perhaps she is a ghost’). Then the fighters tramp back to town. Women are warriors Archangel is full of women who take on traditionally male activities. In particular they are warriors in the most literal sense, marching off to battle, fighting and dying with every bit as much courage and aggressive energy as men (in fact the film’s one official ‘coward’ is a man). Leaving for the front, Danchuk proclaims the classic male field-of-honour motto: ‘I will be back, bearing my shield or borne upon my shield.’ Male warriors are clothed in a fantastic array of different national and historical uniforms, but women, hunkered down in the same trenches or fiercely engaged in the same shooting matches with the enemy as the men, have almost no military signifiers other than their rifles. Veronkha and Danchuk are both garbed in sober floor-length black dresses and wear very large, wide-brimmed, flat-topped Edwardian ‘public’ hats. Danchuk looks exactly like a suffragette, albeit with perhaps a little more eye make-up. Other women look like Scheherazade or the Lady of Shalott but with rifles and cartridge belts and possibly epauletted jackets that suggest Marlene Dietrich in military drag. There is an unceremonious presentation of woman as citizen and soldier positioned right next to the ‘nostalgic’ picture of a strongly patriarchal society of which it is, strictly, a contradiction. At the same time women perfectly retain their dress-anddecoration markers of femininity. We may recollect the whipping scene, with its mother-who-controls-the family and its ‘isn’t it a man’s place to discipline?’ So, women go to war, but they do it in suffragette hats and lots of make-up; women are energetic, independent, warriors, but they want patriarchy at the same time. And from the film’s viewpoint, the imagined world has patriarchal values, and also feminist values. Veronkha’s wedding Boles trails Veronkha in order to discover her address, but only finds

72

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Women are warriors: Veronkha on the way to the front.

her going to a meeting with Philbin’s doctor, where the doctor and a Svengali-cum-Rasputin hypnotist put her into a trance and get her to recall her wedding to Philbin.27 Apparently the memory is so painful that she has repressed it in some measure – making her yet another amnesiac. Boles manages to eavesdrop through a gigantic Heath-Robinson listening device made up of banks of polished metal horns and snaking lengths of flexible piping (it is another iteration of the PA system from the Illumination).28 Veronkha’s recollection is accompanied by a flashback to the wedding, and to the couple’s traumatic honeymoon in Murmansk, where they fly in Philbin’s two-seat biplane. The airport set consists of a papier-mâché proscenium gate, and the take-off is a charming and hilarious shot of a model airplane banking at triple-quick speed over a cardboard model onion-domed city and exiting the shot.29 A close-up shows Philbin in flying helmet and goggles but Veronkha still in her wedding bonnet and what look like welding glasses (a good example of the film’s thousand little inspired wardrobe decisions). Arriving at

Archangel

73

‘the famed Murmansk Hotel,’ Veronkha is overcome with nervous exhilaration: ‘Everything was very exciting: a Bolshevik carried our bag!’ While Veronkha slips into a negligee, Philbin goes out to the stables ‘with some old revolutionist friends.’ Veronkha ventures forth to look for him, only to discover him in the arms of the front-desk girl, having apparently forgotten the fact that he has just been married. A small chorus of tall-headdressed women observe her plight from behind the decoratively painted doors of the hotel, shaking their heads in sympathy. Back in the present, the doctor pleads for his patient: ‘But to Philbin, this desk clerk does not even exist. He has no memory of her. There has been no infidelity.’ The eavesdropping Boles reacts to all this with the selective understanding that dominates his whole outlook (again, Backlike) and experiences a fit of severe jealousy. When Philbin strolls by, the following dialogue occurs: boles: Do you recognize me? philbin: [arms folded] Should I? boles: I’m the one who struck you in the head with a rifle butt the

other night. philbin: [hand to chin] Really? I think I would have remembered that. boles: You’re no more an amnesiac than I am! You’re an impostor! philbin: I’d love to hear you out, soldier, but I’m in rather a hurry. I

seem to have mislaid my wife. But as soon as I find her, we’re leaving on our honeymoon. This is of course a splendid crystallization of the comedy and tragedy of amnesia, especially the pain-filled but farcical cry, ‘You’re no more an amnesiac than I am!’ Sternbergiana Since the scene of Veronkha’s and Philbin’s wedding and honeymoon brings the film perhaps closer than at any other single point to the example of Sternberg’s Scarlet Empress (1934), this may be as good a moment as any to consider the Sternbergian aspects of Archangel. The wedding scene of The Scarlet Empress is arguably the Mount Everest of black and white cinematography, and although Maddin cannot hope to approach those heights, Archangel has a dimension of seductive visual beauty that is both very successful in itself and quite different from anything in his previous films. It shares Sternberg’s fondness for gauzy soft focus and

74

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

emulates his virtuosity in thickening and enriching the mise en scène with a cluttered decor and such almost ubiquitous atmospheric elements as falling snow and fog, as well as a striking palette of chiaroscuro that is now edging away from a rougher Expressionism and towards something more refined.30 Archangel’s wedding-night scene has a number of features that very specifically recall The Scarlet Empress: the same soundtrack music (Anton Rubinstein’s Kamenoi-ostrow, though here in a different arrangement); the painted door-frame decorations of the Murmansk Hotel; the icon behind the hotel’s main desk, which looks even more like a quotation of the Orthodox icons proliferating insanely in Sternberg’s film; the image of multiple court ladies peeking out from behind massively decorated doors. Later on, the ‘restaging’ of the wedding which has Veronkha inviting another man (Boles) up to her room in order to get revenge on the man she has really loved (Philbin) is, in the context of all these homages, strikingly similar to Catherine’s invitation to an anonymous palace guardsman to climb the back stairs to her room as a deliberate message to Count Alexei, a scene that is also a ‘restaging’ of an earlier trauma. In a larger sense as well, Sternberg is a potent and fertile model for Maddin. He has often mentioned Sternberg’s use of intertitles years after the coming of sound, and also his admiration for Sternberg’s unconcern about the consistency of accents in The Scarlet Empress and elsewhere. Scarlet Empress has a German-accented Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great of Russia (although as a child she apparently spoke like a modern Californian), with her Oxbridge-accented father C. Aubrey Smith, her mid-Atlantic Social Register mother Olive Tell, her Ivy League lover John Lodge, and her predecessor-sovereign Grand Duchess Louise Dresser who talks like the boss-lady of a Midwestern boarding house – all without the slightest acknowledgment of inconsistency or, indeed, any effect of cacophony.31 In Sternberg’s case, it is one more sign of the filmmaker’s fundamental creative strategy of reimagining every real-world setting and character in utterly personal terms. Perhaps The Blue Angel does authentically catch some of the lassitude and stale cigar smoke of Weimar Germany where it was actually shot, but the authenticity of the subsequent Dietrich vehicles (Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil Is a Woman) is entirely that of Sternberg’s imagination and the utmost degree of artifice that a large Hollywood studio apparatus could bestow. When the Sultan of Morocco was reported as praising the accuracy of Morocco, Sternberg declared himself disappointed and even insulted. Likewise, any resemblance be-

Archangel

75

tween the actual eighteenth-century Russia of Catherine the Great and its reimagination in The Scarlet Empress is purely accidental. Sternberg’s worlds are fantasias on themes from the Morocco, the China, the Spain, the New Orleans, the St Petersburg of his imagination, made up of the free-floating images of a wholly vicarious and often picture-book-centred vision. What is important in them is not their inherent characteristics, but their ability to provoke a kind of opium dream of fantasy-projection for the artist. And this is precisely the way that history and outlandish settings work for Maddin, at least in the aesthetic dimension. Maddin’s design impulses for 1919 Archangel, fired by the exotic images of The War Illustrated, almost exactly replicate Sternberg’s imaginative appropriation of the old Russian Empire, with its barbaric torture and its crude but ultra-expressive icons and statues and its dazzling uniforms, all leading to the image of Marlene Dietrich in white hussar’s drag and a shark’s grin waving a sabre on the steps of the palace as she seizes power. The intertitles of The Scarlet Empress were strange to see as late as 1934, and bear the marks of their creator’s autodidact historical enthusiasm and poetic fervour (at one point Catherine is described as ‘the ill-famed Messalina of the North’). The dialogue, too, is stylized in itself, and even more stylized in its delivery. The slow motion, underwater zombie-pitch of much of the dialogue delivery in The Scarlet Empress is definitely something that is echoed in Archangel, where the infrequency of dialogue scenes, their odd phraseology, very approximate synch, and disembodied acoustic give the actors a sleepwalking quality that floats in the same ether as the setting, the costumes, and the action. Indeed, because of their simplicity or primitivism, Maddin’s effects go further down this Sternbergian path than Sternberg ever did. It may be a startling thing to say, but Guy Maddin is our Josef von Sternberg. A principal difference, of course, is that although Sternberg’s films were almost as bizarre in the context of Hollywood studio filmmaking of the 1930s as Maddin’s are today, he managed to occupy for a moment a position where he could command all the technical and material resources of a Paramount Studios. That, and the fact that for his own survival Sternberg needed to keep his ironic self-awareness secret from a broad mainstream audience, while Maddin really needs to broadcast his if he is to have any credibility with his much narrower base. A restless night After Philbin leaves, Boles tunes back in to the Veronkha/Philbin’s

76

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

doctor session, in time to pick up another crucially wrong fact. ‘And what about a baby I’ve heard about?’ asks the doctor, ‘Do you have a child?’ The tormented Boles jumps instantly to the conclusion that Iris/ Veronkha has had a baby and that he is the father. Back in his billet, he starts to think that Danchuk’s baby is his own. Rocking the cradle, he coos: ‘Your daddy’s come back, little one – you see, I haven’t forgotten you.’ Boles’ insistence that the fevered emanations of his own imagination are solid fact, and his attempt to ground memory in the abyss of amnesia, are like his assertions of medical knowledge: utterly fallible but suffused with a confidence that is ‘natural’ to him. Again, this confidence and certainty founded in a void is like his wooden leg, a part of his being that is supposed to be there but, derisorily and pitifully, can only ever exist prosthetically. The festival of obliviousness and projection continues, with personal damage flying off in all directions. Boles assumes the parentage of this baby, inflicting one more instance of careless disrespect on the actual father, Jannings. Meanwhile Danchuk, who would be thrilled actually to have Boles as the father of her baby, is just razored out of the picture by Boles in his Iris-delirium. (The chain continues with Danchuk’s utter contempt for her existing husband: on the way back from the front, in response to Jannings’s greeting of ‘I was worried about you,’ she replies, ‘No need – I’d nearly forgotten about you.’) The following scene (introduced with the title ‘Nocturnal transmissions from all corners – the dire rhythm of married life’) shows a nude Geza somewhat provocatively climbing into bed with a nude Boles in search of comfort, and a series of close-ups of sleeping or restless members of the household apparently in the grip of repressed sexual desire. It all culminates in the explosion of a cactus plant that covers Geza with wriggling animation insects, and leaves viewers as baffled as by the ‘Fish Princess’ vision from Gimli Hospital – the most egregious of Archangel’s miscalculations. Treasure hunt I After this dream episode, Boles awakes and immediately embarks on his search for Veronkha by following the clues on her ‘treasure map.’ But is he really awake, or is this another extension of the dream world? Certainly the idea of the treasure map and the spectacle of Boles following its directions are quite dreamlike, and difficult to imagine literally. On the other hand. the question may be meaningless, because what aspect of Archangel is not dreamlike and difficult to imagine literally? Still, we must examine the notion of this treasure map, and treasure hunt. The

Archangel

77

map begins as Veronkha’s marriage certificate, so although Boles, the recipient and follower of the map, thinks he is going to find Veronkha’s house, what he is actually going to discover is that Veronkha’s dwelling is her marriage. This ‘treasure’ then, will take the cruelly mocking form of a devastating truth; this ‘treasure hunt’ will be a hunt that ends with the discovery of something awful. Consulting the map at every turn, Boles makes his way past a fallen onion dome, a giant unexploded shell, a hut with the Kaiser’s caricature painted on it, the Madonna in front of Danchuk’s hut, a series of lovers (many in uniform) reclining and spooning, a door bearing a handprint into which he fits his own hand, and the soldier’s corpse with rifle and helmet marker that he and Danchuk had arranged earlier. (One of the shots features an ingenious split-screen where Veronkha is seen in an onion-dome-shaped cutout in the middle of the screen while Boles with map searches from one side to the other of the remnant of the shot, unable, of course, to penetrate to Veronkha’s dimension.) At the end of the sequence, Boles has not been able to find her. It is a journey he will make two more times before the film is finished, and the results will never be happy. What is the purpose of this device, what is the content of the map and its referents? Perhaps the best explanation is that it is a representation of Boles’ experience: his fundamental sense of lostness, his attempts to find some rational and practical understanding of his condition by charting his way with this or that ‘fact,’ his wish to work his way through the terrain of this amnesiac disorientation to the object of desire who will restore everything including meaning to him. And yet the status of the map itself is highly uncertain. Are these real places? Where, actually, does his search lead? Battle II The film’s big battle scene is next. It begins with a blue-tinted sequence, ‘Sleepy Trenches,’ that is noteworthy for the surreal descent of dozens of rabbits falling on Boles and his fellow soldiers. Even in Archangel this is a strange occurrence. In the DVD commentary, John Harvie explains that it was inspired by a moment just before the Battle of Shiloh in the American Civil War when Union soldiers were delighted to find an influx of forest creatures into their camp, only to discover that the animals had been frightened there by the massive wave of Confederate troops about to attack and kill them. The hunt sequence of Renoir’s La Règle du jeu was also an inspiration for Archangel’s all-bunny invasion. But viewers are quite unable to read this rain of rabbits as a cute, then terrifying

78

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

precursor of violence, and it remains just another free-floating surreality. Once more, the environment is such that whether an event is narrative or commentative/atmospheric or both is almost irrelevant. As with the exploding cactus plant, the scene’s meaning for actual spectators is quite different from the one imagined by its creators. In both these cases the intended meaning is almost certainly not apprehended, but the aura of bizarre disconnection can do its own work: the utter surreality of the rabbit-storm is often recalled by viewers as a favourite moment. The battle is now joined. This is the film’s spectacular cast-of-thousands combat-epic set-piece. There are charges and counter-charges and fierce hand-to-hand fighting involving demonic Huns, wimple-headdressed and bandoliered women, Orthodox priests, and regular soldiers, all staged with heavy use of silhouettes and backlighting amid flashing lights and sounds of gunfire and explosions on the soundtrack, with dramatic chunks from Verdi ballet music churning in the background. Meanwhile, back in the town, Bolsheviks are breaking in at the house containing Geza and a cowering Jannings (accompanied by the sound of breaking non-existent plate glass), and the remainder of the segment unfolds as an extended cross-cutting between these two locations. The home invasion gives rise to perhaps the single most memorable moment in Archangel: the disembowelment and heroic resistance of Jannings, who, after spilling a wheelbarrow-load of intestines onto the ground from his capacious nightshirt, finds his courage at last, and kills all the Bolsheviks with his bare hands. He crams one Bolshevik’s mouth with Boles’ military decorations (‘Perhaps this Bolshevik would like a war medal for breakfast!’ crows a title), gouges out the eyes of another with his thumbs, and uses his own dangling innards to kill another (giving rise to the indelible title, ‘Strangled by an intestine!’) Geza sees none of this, since one of the Bolsheviks has shoved his head in a burlap bag while gnawing on one of the boy’s nipples. Jannings’s transformation is perhaps the high point of the film’s insistence on presenting its most heroic moments in a brine of ridicule. The cheap horror-movie gore, the comical quantity of link-sausage viscera, the sheer outrageousness of the employment of internal organs as weapons, Jannings’s elaborately mimed glee in finding his homicidal strength at last – everything is designed to produce titters and guffaws in the viewer. At the same time, there is a satisfaction in seeing the character whom everyone has treated with casual contempt showing some guts (so to speak),32 a kind of uncomplicated happiness in both the character and the viewer. The outrageousness mocks the simple-mindedness of heroic moments in a thousand other movies, and

Archangel

79

yet once again the film seems to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we really did have such moments of pure personal redemption, and were oblivious to how ridiculous the idea is?’ Around and around After the battle Veronkha takes it into her head to renew her marriage to Philbin (she’d had the first one annulled), so it’s off to the airport, the biplane, and the Murmansk Hotel again. Here, perhaps, viewers really feel the great wheel of the film turning and begin to sense its grand dreamlike mechanism of repetition and return. Each iteration of Veronkha’s marriage or Boles’ treasure hunt repeats the flimsiness and farcicality of the staging and the in-some-dimension silliness of the action; but each time these events come back their flimsiness and silliness are more tinged with desperation, their farcicality transmuted more fully into suffering. Meanwhile Danchuk moves endlessly in her own circle of suffering, now having to mourn a husband she did not love or respect while observing the increasingly manic fixation by the man she does love and respect on a woman who does not exist. Even Geza – who alone will be delivered, after death, from the round of misperception and pointless longing – continues to believe that his father was a contemptible coward and his saviour the heedless narcissist Philbin. Each repetition deepens the ruts, and the wounds. Veronkha has in fact decided to manipulate the second marriage to avenge the offence of the first: she will use Boles’ crazed devotion as a weapon against Philbin. But events unfold, as they always and inexorably do in Archangel, in a way that makes a mockery of plans and crushes the heart’s desire. Boles has followed Veronkha to Murmansk in a hell-for-leather sleigh journey. Now Philbin exits the apartment (just as he did at the first honeymoon), and shortly thereafter is copulating with the desk clerk (just as he did at the first honeymoon). At this exact moment, Boles arrives at the bridalsuite door and – in obedience to some exact prompting of Fate – dons Philbin’s discarded flying helmet as he enters. Taking Boles for her husband, Veronkha now attempts to make him jealous by confessing a deep love for Boles – a falsehood,33 but one that of course strikes Boles directly in the heart. The comedy of disguises, mistaken identities, and false inferences is exactly what one might expect in a Feydeau farce; its ridiculousness is unignorable however disastrous the consequences for the characters.34 Needless to say, Boles pays no attention whatever to the fact that Veronkha addresses him as ‘Philbin.’ It all culminates in

80

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Veronkha’s discovery that she has been pitching this elaborate theatrical event for Boles – and the shock is so great that she too loses her memory. A title sums it up: ‘As a result of the shock Veronkha joins her two lovers in forgetfullness [sic]. Total amnesia. Boles now has his Iris.’ For Boles this is an excellent development, since he can now convince Veronkha that she is Iris, and help her back to a state of alignment with his own fantastic picture of things. The spectacle of Boles’ schooling of the emptied-out Veronkha is, narratively speaking, one of the purest distillations of the film’s project: Concentrate and it will all come back to you. We are in Russia. Fighting for the Czar. We are to be married soon. You had a baby out of wedlock. My baby. And I’ve wept countless nights for dishonouring you. We each bear many scars. [pointing to her knee] You received this scar when you were three. A tureen of boiling soup spilled on you.

It is amazing to witness such a complete tissue of mental fabrications so sincerely, carefully, tenderly laid out as facts. He introduces her to their baby. Once more Boles, the film’s demonstration-model character, standing on one real and one wooden leg, is trying to build a solid structure on nothing but fantasy and projection. He is trying to put his beloved on the same memory-footing as himself, as exemplified in his earlier assertions: ‘You’re no more amnesiac than I am!’ ‘Your daddy’s come back, little one – you see, I haven’t forgotten you.’ When Veronkha disappears from the billet, Boles embarks on a second treasure hunt to find her. The onion dome, the artillery shell, the Kaiser’s caricature, the Madonna, and the handprint on the door all reappear in sequence, and are now joined by Boles’ hands-and-knees trip through some kind of large boxlike contraption run by an operator, which sends jolts of electricity through him and causes his eyes to roll back in their sockets. Informally dubbed ‘the electric sodomizer’ by producer Greg Klimkiw,35 this device was inspired, in the typical Archangel way, by something from The War Illustrated – an electrical ‘healing machine’ used by the Germans to treat the wounded.36 And as with most of the film’s other ‘based on a true story’ elements, this one is quite unrecognizable. It does add an important note of hideous physical discomfort and even torture to Boles’ treasure-map via dolorosa. This time the map leads him to her, and he flings himself into an embrace with her, and they start passionately kissing. Soon they are seen, beautifully enveloped by blackness and illuminated by random bursts of light, taking a stroll

Archangel

81

through the street: Daddy, Mommy, Geza, and Danchuk’s other child, the baby. It is a poetic picture of a nuclear family constructed from fantastic distortions (and certainly at the severe expense of Danchuk, who continues to suffer an exemplary fate). Boles murmurs, ‘Iris, Iris, Iris, I didn’t mean to fall in love with you,’ in echo of a hundred embarrassing romantic movies that hadn’t yet been made in 1919. Boles is so close to his paradise, but it is simply in Archangel’s nature that such a development is only permitted in order to worsen his ultimate pain. The sight of Philbin brings Veronkha’s memory back, and as shots of a ghastly vein-covered throbbing internal organ show us Boles’ extreme pitch of anxiety, she curses him for lying to her and tells him if he ever touches her again she’ll kill him, then leaves with Philbin. The last circuit We are ready for the film’s last great circuit of its course. A third battle is beginning, and everyone is heading to the front. Boles returns to the billet and has the following conversation with Danchuk: boles: She’s finally gone. Forever. danchuk: Yes? [looks at him with great expectancy] boles: There’s just the two of us now. danchuk: Yes. boles: I want to know – this is a lot to ask – if anything happens to

me – would you look after my baby? [hands her the baby and leaves] And the ensuing title, openly articulating the meaning of the scene in typical silent cinema style, reads: Taking back her own baby. Her heart ‘dispatched by wounds innumerable.’ The remainder of Archangel is pulled up to a plane of straightforward eloquence. Nothing changes about the staging, the costuming, or the characters, but now there is a seriousness that seems wholly earned. If the central characters have all failed in their pursuits, the film itself has somehow achieved its goal; the absurdity of everything is still there, but somehow it doesn’t seem important any more and ceases to distort every move in the direction of affect.

82

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Geza finally achieving in death an ideal union with his father, Jannings. Silent era multiple exposure at its simplest and most effective.

The battle scene is swathed now in fog, the cinematography glowing in this thick atmosphere. Boles, a lost man, limps stubbornly through the battlefield, stepping over lines of corpses. Here he finds Geza, carrying a rifle too big for him, and Geza falls to an enemy bullet. Boles maniacally fires off his rifle to kill the criminal foe, then kneels beside the boy, who, in a close-up seriously ‘degraded’ by nitrate-decay marks, gasps out the classical slogan of the British imperial patriot who has sacrificed his life – ’It is sweet to die for one’s country’37 – and then expires. In a lingering, silent close-up, vignetted with blur, Boles announces: ‘Never. Never. I alone against all of you.’ And moves off. Now comes the counterpart to the scene of Jannings’ intestine-death-and-revenge, for his bandmasteruniformed presence appears in double exposure in the white landscape beside Geza, and the boy’s soul arises from his body to meet his father in that second plane of exposure. At first resisting his entreaties, Geza is at last convinced by Jannings’ happy mimed re-performance of his stran-

Archangel

83

gulation and eye-gouging of the Bolsheviks that his father had saved his life, and had found his courage. The boy jumps into his arms: father and son are at last lovingly joined in the realm of the ideal and eternal. This scene is one more demonstration – perhaps the most convincing of all – of Maddin’s wish, and his ability, to transmute the archaic, discarded, and contemptibly sentimental and melodramatic machinery of this film language into something entirely functional again. However forgotten this mode of filmmaking, the intent remains entirely clear to a viewer of today. The utter sentimentality of the moment is always unmistakable, but there is something magical about seeing once more how simply and directly silent film was able to stage the ineffable. A transparent second exposure just shows the eternal realm; and if the idea of an eternal realm where a father and son who were spiritually sundered in life are able to unite is a fundamental naivety of religion and sentiment, the ability of the cinematic process to depict that transcendent sphere as just another photographic image, practically as real as the one it is laid on top of, becomes a fabulous demonstration of mechanically reproducing cinema’s ability to enter the dimension of the spirit, and in the easiest way. Although sound cinema is of course able to do this just as well as silent cinema, it almost never wants to. (The recording aspect of the soundtrack redoubles the realist qualities of the recording aspect of the image track and erects a barrier to this easy movement from the physical to the spiritual.) Scattered throughout Maddin’s work, but never more clearly than in this scene from Archangel, are instances of the filmmaker’s grasp of the expressive territories that contemporary cinema in effect no longer has access to but that may still be reclaimed by adoption of an earlier language. The idealist projection of a realm in which all injustices are rectified and frustrated virtuous desires are rewarded is an idea that is just too transparently wish-fulfilling for sceptical adult scrutiny; and yet its emotional appeal is still potentially strong even for the most rational onlooker. We watch the reunion of Jannings and Geza with a full awareness of how outmoded such a dramatic moment is, and how outmoded its cinematic language is. The innocent idealism of that moment of silent cinema romanticism is joined again with the ‘primitive’ cinematic means of depicting the spiritual realm using double exposure. (Maddin even reproduces the primitivism of creating these multiple exposures in the camera – by winding back and re-exposing the same stretch of film stock – just as silent filmmakers did before the industrialization of the business moved such activities to an optical printer in the lab.) But the language is, as moments such as this remind us, also the language of Griffith, Stro-

84

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

heim, Murnau, Vidor, and other great masters of that earlier moment in film history, capable of an awesome grandeur of gesture. In any event, Maddin is able to rehabilitate at a stroke both the form and the content of an earlier and in many ways more inherently expressive kind of cinema – rehabilitate both the sentiment and the visual realization. Jannings is still buffoonish in his uniform and his gleeful silly pantomime, Geza a cliché of archaic fiction; Maddin has not really transformed the characters into something less impossible. But the scene simply works, and without any irony – and because the materials of the scene (a heavenly land of righteous restoration) are big, the scene is big too. The effect is like hauling an old, rusted piece of machinery out of a barn, putting some fuel in the tank, setting the choke, vigorously turning the crank – and it goes.38 As Boles walks doggedly through the battlefield, Maddin cuts away to some pickelhaubed German soldiers fondling a large grenade, inscribed with the words ‘gott strafe kanada,’ and tossing it over the parapet. This is a delicious moment for Canadian viewers, and goes well with Maddin’s fondly ridiculing depiction of the Canadian soldier of the British Empire, a type that has vanished from the earth. The explosion flattens Boles, and he recovers only slowly. Probably there was mustard gas in the shell, because he begins to cough up blood. Staggering now through fog, gas, snow, and soft focus, Maddin’s hero becomes an intensely eloquent figure of suffering: heroic at last because of his suffering, because his suffering has at last completely vanquished his absurdity. His march is accompanied by the remorseless, sinister tramp and tolling bell of slowed-down Boris Godunov, returning one more time with heightened appropriateness. The cinematography, too, is very beautiful: soft and laden, foggily luminous, expressing the scene’s fullness of feeling with a fullness of texture, while at the same time in another sense simple and bare in its relentless close-up portraiture. In voice-over, Boles tries to establish some existential solidity in this decontextualized wasteland of suffering: ‘My name is John Boles. I’m in Archangel, fighting a war. I’m trying to find the woman I love. Iris!’ Boles is now speaking to himself as he had before to Veronkha (‘We are in Russia. We are fighting for the Czar’) ticking off items on the list of facts that are supposed to establish his identity – a fruitless and pitiable exercise. Everything now combines to express the same meaning: the fog of memory and identity, the fog of feeling, the fog of battle; the disjunctive explosion of shells and light and emotional turmoil; the simultaneous and unified iteration of story, theme, and visual expression.

Archangel

85

Boles’ excruciated traversal of the battlefield becomes a third journey through the landmarks of the treasure hunt, now also refigured as an endless torment out of Dante. The Kaiser, the Madonna, the handprint, the fallen soldier with helmet monument, the Healing Machine which now does seem exactly like a Kafkaesque engine of torture and yields a close-up of the martyred Boles with eyes turned into his head and blood streaming from his mouth, which is open in a scream of the damned. It is a terrible wheel of suffering. And it continues as he arrives at Veronkha’s house just in time to see the ceremony of her marriage to Philbin. There is no music now: the film has gone ghostly silent39 and will remain so until the epilogue. As Veronkha and Philbin leave the room, moving past the utterly stricken figure of Boles, she pauses to stare mutely at him for a moment; mutely, he expectorates a gout of blood. It is a moment of pure horror. Then the pair head out past him, thence through the gates of the airport with Boles trailing futilely behind, thence into their biplane for one more manic shot of the little craft whizzing around and past the onion domes. (It is a mark of Maddin’s unique gifts that this shot can retain its sketchlike comic silliness without dispersing the mood of devastation – indeed can somehow even complement it.) There is a lingering close-up of Boles’ face expressively surrounded by soft focus and fog. The piercing valedictory shot is a high angle of the protagonist, surrounded by blackness and swirling snow in a vaseline-vignetted frame, turning and walking away until he is swallowed up by darkness. Wonderful. Epilogue The silence that has been such an eloquent aspect of the last few minutes of the film is now broken by the cheerful tinny energy of a number from the Black American World War I army band of James Reese Europe on the soundtrack.40 The soft white and soft black visuals of snow-covered Archangel at night are jolted by a blast of actual daylight and actual outdoor locations – something, we now realize, entirely absent from the film before this last scene. A crowd of pretty girls (four, actually) are waving flags and cheering the homecoming of the troops to Canada. Boles is seen looking stolid and emptied-out seated in a truck-bed, and even when descended upon by this little flock of girls with kisses and caresses he is completely oblivious. There is a cutaway to the goggled Veronkha in Philbin’s cockpit, her set face an unreadable mask. It is the image of definitive loss for Boles, and, as his present demeanour indicates, he is now a destroyed shell of a man. The sound of the airplane’s engine

86

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Boles near the end of the film: gassed, abandoned, amnesiac, and enveloped by fog and vignetting.

continues over a final zoom-out into a retreating iris shot that traps Boles in a shrinking circle, and an abruptly arriving black screen shows the single word ‘END.’ The airplane engines persist through the end credits, which again are in the 1920s-1930s style of single portraits of each actor in costume against a black background that has an onion-spire landscape overprinted upon it. It is fascinating to look at Archangel as an amplification and more complex realization of the project of Maddin’s two previous films. Comparing it with Gimli Hospital, one is struck by the much greater investment in story and character (perhaps arising from the more extensive presence of George Toles) in a context that shares the earlier film’s alienating absurdity of environment and tone. The Archangel-1919 of this film is certainly not any more ridiculous than the Gimli-1879 of its predecessor, but with its avalanche of discordant historical and stylistic details, and

Archangel

87

its naïve sententiousness of discourse, it is not much less so. The characters are less purely flat than the ‘legendary’ personages of Gimli Hospital, but their rootedness in social mores that are felt to be far more simpleminded than our own makes them impossible to ‘relate to.’ And yet in Archangel, the central characters and to an extent the whole fantastic, ridiculous society is in some respect redeemed and made to seem sympathetic to a degree never approached in Gimli Hospital. There is no genuine pathos, or tragedy, or even melodrama in the earlier film. But by the time that Boles is found wandering, gassed and battered, through the fog and into his loved one’s third wedding, Archangel has hauled itself all the way up to a place where such feelings are fully tangible. They are still accompanied by the preposterous, but they are dominant and strong. Similarly, Archangel’s technical apparatus has matured from the one on display in the previous film. Once more it combines deliberate cheapness and oversimplification with high-flown visual rhetoric; once more it applies the expressive techniques of silent cinema to a kind of grand amateur historical send-up; and once more it transforms itself somehow from affectionate mockery to something aesthetically expressive. But its tools are much more supple and potent, its visual ‘ordnance’ is of a higher calibre. In a tour de force of style strategy, the pathos of its elementary cheapness in production and technique marries perfectly with the pathos of inadequate characters, especially the wooden Boles with his wooden leg. The refinement of the photography and the command of framing is far greater than before, the mastery of occluded textures like soft focus, snowfall, and vignetting newly powerful, the employment – especially in the last half of the film – of chiaroscuro and dynamic lighting manipulations enters another realm of expression. Affect has entered the scene, and it has done so without displacing the alienated distanciation of mocking pastiche and the deliberately false. A few scenes in the film aren’t quite fully achieved or integrated, and as noted, one or two just misfire; the film’s equilibrium is not perfect, and it is not without flaw. But in an overall sense, Archangel shows the Maddin ‘balance’ between travesty and feeling as fully in place, and we can see, really for the first time, what this artist is.

4

Careful (1992)

Careful is a pro-incest mountain träumerei shot in the two-strip Technicolor used in that holy year of 1929. Maddin’s most fully realized project, it’s also his most accessible. His long-time collaborator George Toles was possessed by a high-altitude Hamletism when he wrote the meticulously detailed script as a mad tribute to Herman Melville’s Pierre. – Guy Maddin, Careful self-review (2001)1

The idea for Maddin’s next film, he says, came to him during a trip through the Rockies after the completion of Archangel: I couldn’t even recall seeing mountains before, so I was basically seeing them for the first time. Then something that [University of Manitoba film professor] Howard Curle had mentioned to me came back. He’d said that there was this mountain picture genre in Germany that was as popular there as Westerns were in North America. I thought, that’s it!2

Maddin cooked up a script with George Toles, made a pre-sale to distributor Cinephile, got contributions from Manitoba Film and Sound, the Canada Council, and the Manitoba Arts Council, then took that to Telefilm Canada for a matching grant and ended up with the (for Maddin at that time) rather amazing amount of $1.1 million.3 Once again the project was shot over a twenty-five-day period in Winnipeg, this time in a disused grain elevator mostly, with Maddin’s local cast and crew, but a new cinematographer (Mike Marshall) and two imported actors (Paul Cox and Gosia Dobrowolska). He edited the film entirely by himself. Exactly like Archangel, ‘Careful just took nine months from the minute

Careful

89

George and I thought of writing it and the minute we were sitting down to watch it.’4 And, he says bluntly, ‘I was ordered to do the movie in colour.’5 This latter condition was part of the narrative that Maddin and Telefilm continued to develop that he was working his way up the ladder from artisanal production to something more like mainstream moviemaking.6 Careful adds a number of new elements to Maddin’s cinema; but it also seems like a polishing, and a summation, of everything he had been doing in the feature film to date. The basic situation is repeated from Archangel (and even to a limited extent Gimli Hospital): in a ‘historical’ social setting whose characteristics are primarily those of ‘traditional’ ideological purity and the rigid social expectation for people to conform to and act out the common value system, a number of interconnected individuals become enmeshed in webs of desire and prohibition, with unhappy results. The underlying substratum of melodrama in Archangel becomes in Careful a much more fully imagined and articulated machine – really now the true essence of the narrative. This is very likely in large part the result of a much augmented emphasis on character and psychology. Notwithstanding the dumbfoundingly wide commercial distribution of The Saddest Music in the World, it is probably true to say that Careful is the closest Guy Maddin has yet come to a ‘normal’ movie. It is not very close, of course, but, as Maddin remarked to the film’s co-scenarist and scriptwriter George Toles, ‘this movie had by far the lowest walkout quotient of any movie we did together.’7 Viewers trying to make Careful into even an indie-movie have an arduous climb and many dangerous precipices ahead of them; but there are enough recognizable narrative elements in the film that the attempt to align it with some kind of familiar movie experience, however offbeat, does not perhaps seem an entirely hopeless undertaking. The film does have a story powered by the romantic and other emotional drives of characters who experience elation and disappointment, try to overcome obstacles, and achieve goals. Like Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel, it situates itself in a society too bizarre and ridiculous to do anything but laugh at (at least initially). But unlike its two predecessors, its satire of the society it is depicting also seems relatively easy to read, owing to the fact that the absurdities and rigidities of this hypercareful society are quite familiar to practically all viewers who have themselves been socialized by a process of parental and social indoctrination. Careful’s laws of behaviour, unlike Archangel’s, are simply an exaggeration and caricature of our own, mediated by our sense that we are far less oppressed in this dimension than were our ancestors of a century or two ago.

90

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

In addition, Careful has two other qualities of a ‘normal’ movie: it is shot in colour, and it has a specially composed musical score instead of the musical found fragments that had accompanied Maddin’s three earlier efforts. These new characteristics have at least superficially the effect of taking the film in the general direction of mainstream filmmaking, and away from the archaeo-avant-gardism of grunged-up black and white photography and tinny and crackling old musical fragments. But in these respects, what Careful gives with one hand it takes back with the other. Its colour is perhaps the most deliberately and elaborately artificial concoction ever seen in a narrative film, while its musical score is in many ways simply the continuation of Maddin’s history-scavenging, degraded-object politics by other means. Moreover, the basic production stance of the film fits seamlessly into the director’s pattern: mounting an epic reconstruction of a bygone and/or fantastically imagined world – a world so utterly different from the one we inhabit that it has to be manufactured from the ground up – on tiny soundstages with handfuls of extras, home-made props, and papier-mâché sets. The typically imprecise and suggestible historical setting is a Swiss8 Alpine village sometime in the, perhaps, early nineteenth century; and the film takes it upon itself to represent, in caricatured form, not only the sublime sweep and scale of heroic mountainous terrain but the panoply of socially conservative Germanic class structures, Biedermeierish cultural customs, and Schilleresque Romanticism. Meanwhile the plot is one of Maddin’s most overtly melodramatic ever (a large statement), progressing from the realm of stifled longings in the bosom of the family to the lurid blood and thunder acting out of incest, mutilation, suicide, murder, and thunderous avalanches. Of all Maddin’s many collaborations with George Toles, Careful is perhaps, after Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, the one where Toles’ fingerprints are most clearly and extensively visible. For one thing, there is much more dialogue than in the earlier films, and that dialogue has the characteristic Tolesian identifiers of baroque formality, crazy heightened diction, and casually surreal landmines buried in the musty surroundings of old-tome phraseology. To be sure, these are qualities that Maddin is highly susceptible to as well, and probably productive of; but Toles’ grim aspect of bizarre strait-laced pronouncements, of high seriousness and sobriety enveloped in a wild deadpan absurdist humour, and with a hand inexorably propelling everything to a bad end, seems quite distinctive. In general the Toles ‘flavour’ is very strong, and its general aura of literary and historical culture conveys the sense that there is something substantial and graspable in the film (even

Careful

91

though the collaborators are often leading viewers along this path only to push them off a cliff-top at the end of it). The story The mountain town of Tolzbad (I suppose ‘Tolesbad’ would have been just too obvious) is ruled by iron laws of caution. The film begins with a voice-over very reminiscent in both tone and function of the ‘Love’ oration in Archangel. In fact it is the same voice (that of Victor Cowie), preaching an extended sermon on the necessity for every inhabitant of the town to be CAREFUL in every aspect of life. An endless downpour of admonitions, all-encompassing or trivial, rains down: ‘Don’t spill it!’ ‘Hold your horses!’ ‘Heed the warnings of your parents!’ ‘Think twice!’ ‘Put a lid on it!’ ‘Don’t be rash!’ ‘Don’t stand so close to the walnut tree!’ ‘You’ll catch a chill!’ ‘Don’t put too much pepper on it!’ The stern didactitian himself – Herr Trotta is his name – is seen in black frock coat and top hat presenting his lecture with a pointer in front of a curtained stage to the townsfolk (almost like Dr Caligari), intercut with continuing illustrations of his homilies. So many bad things can happen to you – falling into a crevasse, slipping on an icy mountain path, pitching over a precipice. Moreover the town itself sits perilously under the permanent Damocles sword of a catastrophic avalanche, so hair-triggered that the slightest sound may bring it down. In now-familiar Maddin fashion, this plight, itself absurd, has led to a series of even more absurd extensions – notably the surgical excision of the vocal chords of animals, so that we have shots of a cow wearing a post-operative neck bandage and a dog fiercely barking but emitting only the dry clicking sound of teeth coming together. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that throughout the film the cast speak mostly in whispers or very low tones, even when events reach full-purple stage. (As always in Maddin’s movies, there is no direct sound, and doubtless it was easier to manage this particular effect with post-synchronization.) In this community living in constant danger of an annihilation brought on by incautious behaviour, all are of one mind, and citizens constantly exhort each other not simply to stay clear of actions that might bring on a common disaster, but to preserve themselves from every ill that might befall, however trivial. This concern to avert harm extends then further into the whole ideology of repression, covering all actions and all thought. ‘Silence! Propriety!’, commands the voice of Vic Cowie, and as we get to know the community we see that the system extends to such

92

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

unspoken but clearly internalized commands as ‘Obedience!’ ‘Order!’ ‘Deference!’ ‘Self-Denial!’ It is true that there exist, in rare corners of the mountain ranges, odd little spaces where sound waves cancel each other out and disappear. ‘Here,’ Herr Trotta expounds, ‘cautious vent can be given to stifled impulses. We can sing, laugh and cavort.’ (These unbridled pleasures are illustrated by shots of small children playing ‘pat-a-cake’ and youths engaged in some ultra-innocent game requiring synchronized movement.) Clearly, it is a society dedicated to principles of repression to a truly silly extent, and its exposition is not so far from that of a satire sketch. It is also a society utterly in the grip of class hierarchy: all of the villagers demonstrate a profound respect, in fact a comically reverential awe, for the aristocratic head of this society, the reclusive Count Knotkers (Paul Cox), who lives in his castle and is served by a small troupe of servants trained at the Tolzbad Butler Gymnasium. In this environment we find embedded the central characters – essentially, two families. The first, the Bernholz family, consists of a widow, Zenaida (Gosia Dobrowolska) and her three sons, Franz (Vince Rimmer), Johann (Brent Neale), and Grigorss (Kyle McCulloch). There seems to be a warm and loving relationship between the mother and her two younger sons, Johann and Grigorss. Mother and sons dance together, there are many expressions of mutual love and respect, and generally it seems like a very happy home. But it is missing some rather crucial elements, and gradually it is revealed to harbour deep pain and dysfunction. One major problem is the fact that the eldest son, Franz, is parked in the attic of the house, covered with cobwebs, and unable to speak or move, banished there by his mother’s revulsion for him.9 And that revulsion is largely the result of Zenaida’s revulsion for Franz’s father, her dead husband, known only as ‘the Swan-Feeder.’ This figure has already been introduced to us in passing as part of Herr Trotta’s opening address, as a terrible example of the horrors that can befall one: as a baby one of his eyes was put out when his mother hugged him to her bosom while wearing an unclasped brooch, while the other was lost as the result of a too-close inspection of a cuckoo clock (or, in this case, a goose clock). The baby’s-eye-put-out-by-a-brooch-pin is a simple transcription of Maddin’s story about the accident that befell his own father, Chas,10 and carries an extra frisson of meaning in its echo of Oedipus’ scratching out of his own eyes with his mother’s brooch. This personage, impotent and ridiculous in every dimension, now comes back as a ghost to solemnly warn his eldest son about dangers and wrongs in the family, and to command this attic-bound, dumb, and paralysed young

Careful

93

The ghost of the Swan-Feeder appearing, like Hamlet’s father, to his attic-bound son Franz as a blurred and quivering reflection. Another Maddin dead father.

man to do something about them, now. It is a very Hamlet-like situation, especially when the ghost’s ire is partly directed at his wife, who despised her husband and cherished an impossible love for Count Knotkers (impossible because opposed by the Count’s mother) – except that it caricatures the dignity of this patriarchal ghost by presenting him as utterly futile and out of touch with what is possible, and caricatures also the ineffectiveness of the son by having him physically disabled from any kind of intervention. The second family is that of Herr Trotta, whom we presume is a widower since there is no sign of a mother, and his two daughters, Klara (Sarah Neville) and Sigleinde11 (Katya Gardner). Here too there is an imbalance of parental affection: Herr Trotta dotes on his younger daughter Sigleinde, while Klara desperately wants more of his love and attention. Where Zenaida’s rejection of Franz is a symptom of the chancre secretly eating at the Bernholz family that will eventually grow to

94

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

destroy it, Herr Trotta’s neglect of Klara will be actually productive of catastrophe as his daughter turns her feelings of hurt into destructive anger. The intertwining of the two families begins at the communal celebrations attending the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (a pregnant title in view of the film’s emphasis on parental sexuality and its effects on children),12 where Johann is playing a nine-foot yellow alphorn in the concert while making eyes at Klara. Soon their romance blossoms, and they become engaged. Herr Trotta gives his blessing to the union, as does Zenaida on Johann’s side, and although Grigorss is silently in love with Klara he congratulates his brother with genuine good wishes. At the end of the film everyone from both generations of both families except for Franz and Sigleinde will be dead, and in the most awful way, and the ideal picture of Propriety, Decorum, Family Devotion, and Chaste Love will lie in complete ruin. (George Toles, in some published remarks about the film, points out that when your belief system is as simple and all-encompassing as this one is, it can provide an essentially untroubling environment as long as it is working, but when it begins to dissolve it throws everything into question in disastrous ways.13) In the ultra-repressive world of Tolzbad one might imagine that it would be sexuality which would explode the structure and be the cause of disaster, and so it is. But it is not ordinary, young-lovers sexual desire that creates the trouble. The passion that young men and women feel for each other is effectively restrained by the rules of decorum. (The height of romantic impetuosity is reached by Johann’s exclamation to Klara, ‘Your eyes are so blue!’ and her demure reply, ‘Johann, watch yourself!’) And eventually it is fulfilled properly and safely, in the sanctity of marriage. Rather it is the intense, tangled sexual feelings running unexamined between parents and children that are the whole problem. I should say instead ‘between children and parents,’ because it is the sexual desires, or sexual jealousies, of the sons and daughters towards their mothers and fathers that cause the conflagration. Johann’s sexual attraction to Klara poses no difficulty, but no sooner does properly permitted sexual feeling arise in him than it is massively diverted into a sexual desire for his beautiful mother. The arrival of this overpowering forbidden appetite transforms him into a kind of Byronic damned soul. He becomes hyperconscious of her body at mealtime, then has a lust-dream where the female object starts out being Klara but is transformed into Zenaida. Desire now sweeps him away like a leaf in the torrent, and he passes rapidly to hanging upside down in the chimney like a bat in order to spy on his mother in her bath,14 and from thence to brewing up a love

Careful

95

German Expressionism: the silhouettes of Johann (centre) and Grigorss (with lantern) in a composition whose genealogy runs from Caspar David Friedrich to Weimar-era cinema.

potion that will put her into a receptive sleep, and then cutting through her bodice with a giant pair of garden shears before fervently kissing her naked breast. Horrified revulsion comes immediately, and Johann quickly (and graphically) burns his offending lips with a live coal, cuts off his offending fingers with the garden shears, and rushes away to throw himself from a mountain crag, with a final cry of, ‘Forgive me, mother!’ For the other brother, Grigorss, things are slightly more conventional. He is outraged that his mother could have loved a man who was not his father. For Zenaida’s own romantic passion had been for the young Count Knotkers. The passion was returned, and they wished to marry, but the match was forbidden by the Count’s mother – a formidable lady whom the Count was quite subservient to (‘It was difficult for me to think about anyone else while she was alive,’ he says), and whose body now lies in an open coffin in a secluded chamber of the castle, covered with face make-up and black buboes of decay.15 What kind of an awesome figure

96

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the Countess might have been we do not know; but we can say that it was her son’s surrender to her that crushed his prospective marriage to Zenaida – that is, he was more deeply fixed on his mother than on his young love. To what extent this maternal attachment is simply what a child owes to a parent in the deeply conservative world of Tolzbad, and to what extent it is Freudianly proto-incestuous – or indeed to what extent these two are inseparable – can only be speculated upon, but it does continue the pattern of children’s intense infatuation with their opposite-sex parents as a primal cause of all the trouble. Then, when the heartbroken Zenaida married the Swan-Feeder, it was in despair, and she endured her husband’s love and his physical caresses with inner contempt and disgust. This is the reason she has banished her crippled son, who ‘smelled like his father’ so that she could not nurse him. (In a nice ripplingly reverberating moment, she is having an erotic dream about the young Count even as her other son Johann is incestuously kissing her breast.) Grigorss, eavesdropping on his mother and the Count while stretching over a picturesque mountain outcrop like a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, overhears her telling the Count that she thought only of him ‘while my husband blindly and clumsily laboured’ to inseminate her, so that both her dearly loved other sons are his, ‘in spirit at least.’ Grigorss is sent into a cold rage by this new knowledge, and when the Count showers honours and a title on him at the dinner to celebrate a forthcoming wedding to Zenaida, he slaps the Count in the face with a napkin and challenges him to a duel for ‘leading my tooeasily-tempted mother from the path of virtue.’ Grigorss declares war on the Count ostensibly because of the insult to the honour of his father the Swan-Feeder, but it is difficult to believe that his own overinvestment in his mother is not the principal cause. In a scene that is rather reminiscent of another region of Hamlet – the Prince’s relationship with his mother – he says to her, ‘If I cannot believe in you, all the women of the world are painted like the harlots of …’ (his words are cut off when she places her hand over his mouth). This is certainly not quite the same as his brother’s peeping on, drugging, and sexually assaulting his mother, but it is not absolutely different, either. But as this scene between Grigorss and Zenaida progresses, she assures him movingly of her love for him, pleads with him to beg the Count’s forgiveness, and finally wins his agreement when she accedes to his request to express at last some love for her neglected son Franz and accept him back into the family. When these three are fully reconciled again after all their agonizing divisions, it represents the complete solution to all

Careful

97

the problems of the surviving members of the Bernholz family: Franz is brought back from his terrible exile, Zenaida will remove that stain from her conscience and also be able to marry the Count whom she has loved for most of her life, and Grigorss can rid himself of his jealous anger and feel he has been the means of healing his family. It is, in fact, a happy ending for the most central cluster of characters in the film, and almost for the film itself – or at least it shows what a happy ending for Careful would look like. That is not, however, the kind of melodrama that the movie has its sights set on: Careful’s kind of melodrama must be ruled by catastrophe and violence. So just as a way becomes clear for one awful set of problems to be resolved, another awful set of problems comes down a sidetrack and smashes everything to smithereens. This other set of problems belongs to the Trotta family. It begins with Herr Trotta’s casual but appalling differential treatment of his two daughters. He is fixated on Sigleinde, hovering around her, painting her portrait, buying her little gifts, always worrying about her. Klara he takes quite for granted and is not very interested in, despite her never-ceasing efforts to get his attention and claim some affection. Herr Trotta’s behaviour as a parent towards his two daughters contrasts very unfavourably with Zenaida’s equally loving embrace of her two sons Johann and Grigorss – though not, of course, with her criminal banishment of her eldest son, Franz. But while Franz sits alone, sad-eyed and covered in cobwebs, a figure of pure suffering, Klara is made of sterner stuff. Freud gave the term ‘Electra complex’ to the syndrome of a daughter who is sexually invested in her father, and Maddin is quick to associate that figure from Greek tragedy with Klara. Although Klara’s attachment, and engagement, to Johann seem unproblematic, no sooner does he disappear from the scene than her fixation on her father becomes completely dominant, and she moves quickly into pathological behaviour. First she tries, probably, to drown her sister in a pool. Then she develops a ‘secret place’ in a stalactite-filled (and green-lit) mountain cave filled with emblems of personal value and twin chairs affixed with name tags of ‘Klara’ and ‘Poppa.’ When Herr Trotta is quite unmoved at his introduction to this spot, and can only harp on about Sigleinde, Klara tears her undergarments to pieces, visits Gerda the ‘Mountain-Top Wild Girl’ (who is chained to an isolated crag en deshabillée writhing ceaselessly in the grip of desire) with whom she recognizes some kinship, and at last comes to the conclusion that Grigorss is the solution to her problem. Klara is a ‘Mountain-Top Wild Girl’ herself – not because of her unbridled sensuality, but because of her freedom in other respects from

98

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

social restraints on outlook and behaviour. While Grigorss smothers his own feelings in deference to his brother’s romantic attachment; while both he and Johann are enthusiastic devotees of the Prussian rules-fetish of the butler school; while Zenaida worries about at least two of her sons; while the whole community is constantly adjured to subordinate personal desire to the common good, Klara’s utter investment in her own desire for her father and utter disregard for anything else allows her to use Grigorss like a piece of Kleenex in the pursuit of personal aims that have little to do with him. Such tunnel-vision narcissism certainly does have disastrous consequences for others (indirectly bringing about the deaths of the Count, Zenaida, Herr Trotta, and Grigorss) and suggests that she too ought to be chained to a rock far from society. But there is, dramatically speaking, certainly something impressive about such singlemindedness and unhesitating action. The film very much benefits from the presence of a character of such clean outlines and awesome force – a wonderful combination of fiery envelopment in her own priorities and ice-cold disregard of anyone else’s. (So much so, indeed, that a character very much like her will return a dozen years later in Cowards Bend the Knee to play an equally manipulative and destructive part in that story’s tragic unfolding. There, Meta is a young woman who again coldly uses the infatuation of her boyfriend to enact her father-fixated vengeful mania in a scenario that at times seems like an actual reworking of Euripedes’ Electra.) Klara’s first disastrous action is to undo, with horrifying ease, the pact of peace, forgiveness, and rehabilitation that Grigorss has achieved with his mother, Franz, and the Count. She does not love Grigorss at all, is in fact largely indifferent to him – this much is conveyed in a dozen little ways. But when he pours out to her his distress and relief over the relationship of his mother and the Count and recounts his promise to apologize, her response is simply to remark: ‘What about your father? ... Think of what the Count has done to him. His honour must be vindicated.’ Klara could not care less about the Swan-Feeder or Zenaida or the Count or anyone else involved in that situation, including Grigorss. The only thing she hears in this whole heart-rending tale is the (minor) presence of a dead and gone father: ‘I could not love a man who placed anything above his father’s honour.’ In order to have some kind of vicarious effect in a father scenario, however distant, she is quite prepared to jerk Grigorss around on the gaff of his unrequited love for her. Again, what is impressive is not so much the cold-blooded manipulativeness of this behaviour as the psychopathic ease with which the pain of others is ignored.

Careful

99

Grigorss, knocked over by the possibility that Klara might return his love, immediately assumes again the mantle of the Hernani-like Romantic hero-of-honour that he had renounced in the scene with his mother and brother. He meets the Count on an ice-covered mountainside (‘Mitterwald’s Tongue, 11,212 feet,’ the title tells us),16 and the two conduct a duel to the death with daggers, one that begins with each combatant struggling to unfasten the dozens of buttons on the other’s ankle-length coat-front in order to extract his dagger to use against him. Accompanied by much blowing on the fingers to restore circulation in the cold, it is a ritual combat as delightfully absurd as the Glima Wrestling match in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (and very much its descendant). After an elaborate facing-off and rolling-around fight reportedly inspired by a knife-fighting sequence from Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland (1940–54),17 Grigorss at last thrusts his poignard home. After raising his arms above his head and emitting a feral ‘WWF victory chant,’18 he goes home and collapses on the floor. In another scene of pure melodrama, Zenaida assumes it is because his apology to the Count has exhausted him, and puts him to bed where she rubs his bare chest with ‘the goose grease, just as I did when you were a little boy,’ and he deliriously recalls so often as a child promising her to ‘sail out in a big ship and bring you back all the treasures in the world.’ Again, as with the peace pact involving Franz, this scene is truly affecting, goose grease or not; and again it is dreadfully shattered. The fact that viewers know that this primal mother-son bond can only be momentary, that it will be obliterated the minute Grigorss imparts the news of the duel, gives it extra poignancy, and looks forward to the final scene of Grigorss alone in the cave visited by the visions of his parents and especially his mother. But now Grigorss does tell his mother of the duel, and of the Count’s death with Zenaida’s ‘name forming on his lips as he died’ (this is not strictly true, since we have ourselves heard the Count’s last whispered words: ‘I curse my luck!’) Zenaida is destroyed by this news, pretty much a literal description when after ejecting Grigorss from the house (‘You have killed my love for you! There is no goodness left in the world!’) she goes briskly up to the attic and hangs herself before the eyes of the ever-helpless, ever-suffering Franz, after making a few sarcastic remarks to him (‘If only you could help me. Am I doing this right?’). Grigorss is mercifully spared the knowledge of this act, but his Byronic cast has now grown irremediably deep. However, the destruction of his family does not render him useless to Klara as a tool for manipulation or possibly a human Ken-doll. First (wielding him in the latter capacity) she

100

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

incorporates him into her fantasy of cave-dwelling solitude: ‘The two of us can be outcasts here together. We need never see anything but each other. We can live on berries and grasses, and small animals we can kill with sharp sticks.’ But she has already begun her next move, which is to tell him that her father has raped her. She imparts the information during a gondola ride to her secret cave, and their conversation is punctuated by frequent involuntary yawns from both parties, a side-effect of the high altitude. In the green cave, clutching a stalactite, Grigorss is finally convinced, and from this it is a short step for Klara to manoeuvre him into a plan to kill Herr Trotta by taking him out on a sleigh ride, firing off a pistol to start an avalanche, and fleeing to safety. After an impassioned argument in the green cave, Grigorss Romantically agrees, and then Romantically carries out the deed, only to discover Klara leaping back into the sleigh with her father and kissing him passionately on the mouth before they are both swept into the abyss by the avalanche. Truly, it is hard to imagine a more full-bloodedly Romantic moment, and a better or grander solution for Klara, whose greatest moment this is. Returning alone to Klara’s cave, Grigorss lies on a stone slab, sheds a single tear whose echoing sound creates an avalanche that seals him forever into this tomb, and proceeds to freeze to death, while hallucinating visions of his mother and father sitting by the fireside and at last of his mother leaning close over him to offer him her comfort. It is an extraordinary ending (or near-ending), comparable to the elevated suffering and powerful, simple expressive force of Boles’ last treasure hunt and the conclusion of Archangel. One is again surprised at the wholeheartedness and the bigness of the feelings involved at the end of Careful – surprised, once more, because of the film’s forceful registers of mockery and farce, established right at the beginning and maintained throughout most of the film. Indeed, they reappear, albeit in muted form, in the film’s epilogue, which, in a montage of the survivors Franz and Sigleinde, briefly outlines the possibility of a new beginning. The narrator tells us: The eldest brother’s journey now begins. He could call out Grigorss’ name – Sigleinde might hear him. She too is searching – for a father. And she could dry her eyes, and she and Franz could continue their search – together.

And the music swells up to resolve itself in a major-key resolution. But of course such a positive outcome, even such a severely limited, only partially positive outcome, is clearly impossible. How has Franz, unable to move from his attic, managed to get himself into a sleigh19 with every-

Careful

101

Grigorss freezing to death in Klara’s cave. The original is a pale emerald green.

body else in his family dead? When he calls out Grigorss’ name, perhaps Sigleinde might hear him, but Grigorss certainly isn’t going to. And Sigleinde’s search for her father cannot have any good result, either. The pair could continue their search, a hopeless search doomed to failure, but to what end? This morsel of consolation is false, this papering-over of vast chasms is derisorily thin – and meant of course to be seen as such. It is not a happy ending, but a ‘happy ending,’ a resolution that flies in the face of the facts, of the kind so often to be found in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s like Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life or Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life.20 Mockery, melodrama As in almost all of Maddin’s films, the drama and the characters inhabiting it have to pull themselves onto a level of some substance and affect from a firestorm of ridicule and silliness. The ‘prologue’ of Care-

102

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ful goes to greater lengths even than the ‘Love’ sequence of Archangel in its relentless mockery of this society and its inhabitants. To some extent this is inherent in Maddin’s impoverished ‘garage-band’ production circumstances. The heroic historical societies his films have set out to represent – Icelandic pioneers of the nineteenth century, noble warriors for Czar and country in World War I, and in Careful an elaborately articulated iteration of certain facets of fully developed European civilization 175 years ago – are constructed with pasteboard and potato flakes, mounted on tiny soundstages, and shot on a defective 16mm camera with minimal lighting gear. The mighty Alps are cheap props, the Romantic crags are made of papier-mâché, the cattle-pulled train running down main street and directly into the mines has cars made of wood, one of which doubles as a sky gondola in another part of the film. Under these circumstances of course everything looks insubstantial and sketchlike (and we must also remember that, with a million dollars to play with, Maddin could have made things look rather more conventionally ‘convincing’ it he had wanted to). The film’s visual insubstantiality rhymes easily with the ludicrous exaggerations built into the dramatic material itself. If they are often simultaneously charming – as with the wooden train that Toles correctly suggests might make a pair with the one in Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923)21 – that does not render them less ridiculous. Herr Trotta’s opening lecture presents a blizzard of absurdities (avalanches caused by sneezes or dropped dishes, children and pensioners in bondage gear, a baby with an eye-patch like Captain Kidd, the very fact of the lecture itself). The fundamental premise – that any noise above a whisper can cause an apocalypse – is rather brilliant, but it is absurd; the film is built upon a fundamental absurdity. The next move is an equally brilliant short cut – to bring all forms of caution onto the same level, to conflate vitally important safety measures with trivial slacknesses like standing too close to the walnut tree or putting too much pepper on your food. It all resolves into the principle that the key to safety is selfdenial (most overtly visible in the illustrative sequence from the lecture where a little girl is looking wishfully at a little doll in a shop window, but is warned off by the lecturer’s voice: ‘You can do without that!’). Tying this sort of repressive socialization, this sort of child-training-by-fear, with the fundamental survival of the society is a beautiful literalization of what many little persons in the real world no doubt feel as their parents and social authority figures bury them with commandments: ‘Curb

Careful

103

your impulses or the world will come to an end.’ The opening exposition of Tolzbad offers a systemization, a reduction, a caricature of basic repression, and prompts the notion that the movie’s arena is perhaps a psychoanalytic territory as much as a social one (though this is a distinction that would, I suspect, make little sense either to Maddin or to Toles). For once a Maddin film actually functions as satire, since, as I remarked earlier, viewers are in a position to recognize the film’s object of mockery. But the literalization does render its object silly, starts the film off on a comedy-sketch plane, and once again creates those conditions from which the story and characters must clamber painfully up to substance and affect. In the DVD commentary, Toles expresses satisfaction with the expositional qualities of Herr Trotta’s lecture: ‘I love the idea of ... setting out not only the environment but also all the rules of the movie.’ To which I would add, perhaps unnecessarily, that the rules are not only those that help to determine character motivation, narrative action, and so on, but also those that set the grounds of the general climate of absurdity. Careful has a good deal of fun expansively articulating these basic conditions. The Tolzbad Butler Gymnasium is a particularly enjoyable playground.22 It is presided over by ‘Frau Teacher’ (Jackie Burroughs), who wears a mannered but severe burgundy dress with oodles of fasteners and piping and an equally mannered but severe coiffeur dominated by scroll-like locks, and speaks in dense Teutonic accents of sadistic command that would not disgrace Ilse the Beast of Belsen. Lessons in placesetting and napkin-folding (some conducted with surreally antique photographic flashcards) are intermingled with broader lessons in being careful that may be illustrated by, for example, the crushed and frozen body of an incautious climber laid out in the classroom. Disciplinary measures include caning and throwing hot coffee into the face of pupils who falter in any detail. The society is structured by a strict class system whose expression is just as caricatured as everything else in this world. The highest ambition of any Tolzbad youth is to be chosen to serve in Count Knotkers’ household, and when eventually Grigorss receives the inconceivable honour of a personal interview with the Count on his first day of service, the conversation includes the following almost parenthetical interchange: grigorss: The villagers dream of capturing a glimpse of you. count knotkers: As they should.

104

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Notwithstanding what the film’s viewers must interpret as the cruelty and fanatical repressiveness of these and so many other features of Tolzbad life, the inhabitants show no signs at all of rebellion or indeed any kind of dissatisfaction. Repression certainly exists, but it is not experienced as oppression by its ‘victims.’ Insofar as the film’s social picture is acting as satire, its targets include everybody. When Maddin and Toles refer to Careful as a ‘pro-repression’ movie (and they often do), their intent may be humorous, but whole swatches of the film support such a characterization as straightforwardly descriptive. There does, though, at least seem to be a clear reciprocal relation of repression and return in the instances of violence in the film. The tolerance of physical punishment for children or microscopically errant butler candidates seems to stretch at times almost to a sadomasochistic enthusiasm for it, as when Grigorss and Johann are demonstrating what they learned in butler school that week, and Grigorss hands his mother a rod and says eagerly: ‘If we make any mistakes, feel free to cane us – our Frau Teacher says that’s how you learn to be more careful next time.’ (Although she doesn’t use it, Zenaida tests it with some small degree of pleasure.) This moment is a somewhat less troubling repetition of the scene of Geza’s whipping in Archangel, and again what it demonstrates is the ideological internalization of corporal punishment. In the case of Johann’s lip-burning and finger-amputation the violence is far more extreme, indeed venturing into horror-movie territory, and seems a kind of equal and opposite reaction to the psychological violence of repression. We can also extend this notion of repression-and-return into the more general realm of melodrama that is so important in Careful. That is, there is a kind of aesthetic balance between a world of rules and repression, on the one hand, and melodrama – especially its more hysterical expressions – on the other. Such an aesthetic counterpoise is entirely in keeping with the history of melodrama over the past 150-odd years. So many melodramatic scenarios from the mid-nineteenth century to the midtwentieth century are built on and powered by injustices and frustrations arising from the order of the world and its non-congruence with the virtue or vice of individuals, and in general by the failure of ideology to fulfil its promise and furnish a just society where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. Careful resembles this model insofar as it presents a fixed ideology on one side and tragically suffering individuals whom that ideology can do nothing to save on the other. (And we can also observe that the film’s model of melodrama is a primarily nineteenthcentury one of stark situations, simple oppositions, and lurid articula-

Careful

105

tion, rather than the relatively genteel and ‘realist’ later forms.) The central individual dramas of the film are almost a caricature of primary Freudian Oedipal and Electral dramas: the sexual attraction of a child for the parent of the opposite sex is heavily repressed by social norms, and this repression gives rise to compulsive, very destructive burstings forth of pent-up impossible desire in either action (Johann) or displacement (Grigorss, Klara). ‘Honour’ and ‘justice,’ then self-mutilation, suicide, and homicide, are the excessive and hysterical forms taken by these impulses whose excess and hysteria themselves arise from the terms of their repression. So as we are watching the film, the terrain, at least, of traditional melodrama is totally recognizable, and the effects seem to be arising from traditional and recognizable causes. The conflicts in, for example, Zenaida’s heart (between her lost lover and her husband, then between Grigorss and the Count) and Grigorss’ heart (between his mother and the memory of his father, between his mother and Klara) are of a kind familiar not only from older dramatic forms but from many, many popular dramatic forms descended from melodrama.23 Careful picks its way gingerly from absurdity (the sillinesses of Tolzbad society and individual behaviour within it) to something gentler and more substantial, as the characters whose first aspect is ridiculous begin to assume more sympathetic qualities and more humanity. As we first make acquaintance with the anguished plights of the personages, their suffering states are depicted in laughable ways. The Swan-Feeder’s first eye-loss is more horrifying than silly, but the second – pecked out by a carolling goose clock – has nothing in it but ridicule. The affect that might attend Franz’s lonely exile in the attic is always leached away by the absurd overkill of its depiction: crippled, voiceless, neglected, and, most characteristic stroke of all, covered with cobwebs. Johann’s incestuous reveries are festooned with comic details (his inappropriate behaviour at a butler-school flashcard session, for example), his plot to drug his mother comes complete with a cheap mad-scientist laboratory out of a James Whale movie,24 and even his terrible self-mutilations carry the trashy, distanciating mark of B-horror-movie sensationalism. Every instance of suffering, or indeed emotion of any kind, is branded in this way to some extent. But already at points in the first half of the film, there is something softer and more feeling, something non-ridiculous, entering the picture. The most fully realized example is found in the behaviour of Grigorss. There is always something touching about Grigorss’ innocence: his quietness, his modesty, his quite selfless affection for his brother which is not

106

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

deflected by Johann’s engagement to the object of Grigorss’ own love. Kyle McCulloch’s performance must get a large measure of the credit (what a pity that this splendid partnership ended here), for he demonstrates again, as he had in Archangel, the ability to bring an absolutely straight-faced conviction to the depiction of mental states of simplicity and belief, without the slightest tinge of irony or self-consciousness, and with a subtlety and sureness of touch that lies concealed beneath a surface of apparent immobility and monotone. The innocent devotion of the character survives the ludicrousness of having to scale a mountain crag to steal a condor’s egg to present to Klara on behalf of Johann, and to make excuses for his brother’s absence (in fact he is at home spying on his mother in her bath). This condition persists after Johann’s death, too, as when, speaking to Klara, he is careful to deflect any glory that might accrue to him as the butler-school pupil with the highest marks and hence hired immediately as a servant in the Count’s castle: ‘Of course the job would have gone to Johann ... were he still with us.’ This childlikeness, this trusting innocence, this touching absence of guile or selfishness are still visible quite late in the film, in his scenes with Klara, and even as he descends into tragedy, it is through a route that is carved out by the advice and persuasion of people he loves. It is what allows him his extraordinary death scene, the climax and highlight of the film. In this way, Grigorss is actually a good advertisement for the Tolzbad way of life. And regularly the film shows how the ‘Careful!’ ethic makes room for genuine tenderness and concern between people. People are constantly expressing their love for each other through banal, and in this context comical, little Tolzbadian exhortations. As Johann and Klara are parting at the end of their betrothal scene, they draw out their farewells even as the physical distance between them grows in an exchange of ever-fainter tender admonitions: ‘Don’t lose your way’ ‘Don’t stay up too late’ ‘Don’t forget to wear your sweater with a cravat.’25 The ethic continues to come under mocking assault, but the balance shifts. As Johann hangs upside down in the chimney peeping on his naked mother, a close-up of his maniacally desiring face, with unholy gleams coming off eye and teeth, is intercut with Zenaida calling an exhortation through the locked door to her son: ‘Johann. Johann! You better put your name on your new toothbrush or else some accident might happen.’ This can’t be anything but funny; and yet the contrast between Johann’s ravenous Oedipal appetite and Zenaida’s tender maternal care (however absurdly trivial) carries an emotional force because of the terrible ironic contrast between these impulses, with its clear prediction of the doom that will

Careful

107

fall upon a relationship where inscribing your toothbrush has hitherto been an important consideration. This contrast is melodramatic, and it functions emotionally as melodrama even in the presence of ‘toothbrush’ ridicule. An even more bizarre – and even more subtly affecting – example is furnished in a detail of the scene where the mutilated Johann rushes to his suicide and his concerned brother (alerted by some nameless current flowing through the mountains, apparently) follows to catch up with him. Johann runs through a gate in the middle of a bridge spanning a mountain chasm, but even in his desperation and physical agony, turns back to close the gate that he had momentarily forgotten to close behind him. Then a few moments later Grigorss enacts the identical scene, turning back to close the gate that only desperate worry had caused him to neglect the first time across. Toles points out this detail in the DVD commentary, and remarks on how this rote behaviour has perhaps caused Grigorss to lose ‘that precious ten seconds’ that might have allowed him to save Johann’s life. But since both brothers perform the same action, the ten seconds are neither gained nor lost: it is a zero-sum game in the socially conditioned world of Tolzbad where all are running to the same clock.26 My point, however, is different: I find the brothers’ adherence to their childhood training even under such inconceivable duress to be not simply ridiculous, but also one more touching evidence of their childlike innocence, their poignant striving to be dutiful and good. It’s not that the absurdity of their action is eclipsed in any way; it is simply that here again a (tiny) moment of affect is able to exist in a climate of absurdity. Now, a more extended, more powerful, and clearer example of the same phenomenon. After Grigorss’ first day at the castle, he tells his mother (with some satisfaction) of his interview with the Count, and questions her about the fact that the Count has asked after her. This flusters Zenaida, not entirely unpleasantly, but then the conversation takes a turn that is more menacing to her. Here it is: grigorss: I was a little troubled by his way of talking about you. zenaida: [troubled herself ] How do you mean? grigorss: Oh, I don’t know. Familiar. Almost flirtatious. [almost flirtatious himself ] I realize he is the Count. But you are my mother. And with father and Johann gone, I am your protector as well. zenaida: [breathless] What did he say about me? grigorss: You really loved papa, didn’t you?

108

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

zenaida: [shakes off an unpleasant thought] What a question! It’s not like you to have doubts about me. grigorss: [quickly] I never doubt you, mother – only ... zenaida: [in a whisper] What? grigorss: I’m afraid to ask you this. zenaida: Then perhaps you should think on it better. grigorss: Why do we keep Franz in the attic? Why won’t you let us mention him in your presence? zenaida: [gasping with distress, puts her hand to her neck] I have a hairball in my throat. [gasp] I will swallow it. [she swoons, Grigorss catches her. Tableau] Grigorss has stumbled upon the foundational sin in his own family, the rotten ground upon which it rests: Zenaida married the Swan-Feeder without loving him, despised him for their whole married life, and banished their firstborn son because he reminded her too much of his father. The bald line ‘Why do we keep Franz in the attic?’ raises a laugh (or ought to), because of its unceremonious reductionism of an awful human situation (you keep your old tennis racket in the attic, perhaps), but it is not a real obstacle to the flow of melodramatic feeling: tension, conflict, apprehension. But a hairball in the throat? On the DVD commentary track, Toles expresses satisfaction that nobody in the production process even suggested changing this line, and is clearly particularly pleased with it. Its effect, of course, is to inject a massive local dose of silliness into the scene just at the point where it was becoming most effectively melodramatic. It brings viewers up short, violently derails the flow of feeling, and is a textbook example of the way that Maddin’s films display an unappeasable will to inflict damage on their own affective projects, to punish them almost. The tragic story of family trauma – with so many awful events in its past, and so many awful events in its future – must now survive this harpooning. If it succeeds in doing so, its victory will be heroic, even if it is half-buried in the detritus of its own preposterousness. On the road to affect The next scene I want to examine retraces the same ground – affect and ridicule, affect attacked by ridicule – in a deeper and more extensive way. It is the scene where Zenaida persuades Grigorss to apologize to the Count, and where Grigorss persuades Zenaida to accept Franz back

Careful

109

into the family. Earlier I called this a kind of happy ending, or potential happy ending. The form it takes is precisely that of a scene of reconciliation and healing in an old melodrama, full of a billowing affect that rises in waves from the relief of so much pressure and pain. Its final, lingering shot is of a static tableau of the three characters posed in a composition that represents their unification and the satisfying formality of this resolution of long-standing and structural problems. Maddin himself calls attention to the theatricality and the deliberate melodrama of the staging in his DVD commentary.27 And in what I would call a potent expression of the central difficult knot of the film’s process, Toles remarks about the same scene: ‘If the tears were to flow, however self-consciously, for a few seconds at this point, I would say: it is permitted.’ The basic sense of this remark is that (1) the scene is genuinely affecting, and (2) the affect is threatened by self-consciousness and somehow needs permission to exist at all. Another symptom of the condition is heard in the soundtrack music at this point. The basic material is a sensuous, minor-key waltz (think of a kind of Schnitzleresque version of Sibelius’ Valse triste), light in tone but expressive and capable of carrying some depth of feeling.28 As it rises from an unobtrusive accompaniment to the Grigorss/Zenaida interchange to take on a more central and expansive emotional role when the scene moves to the attic, it is carried by a prominent violin solo of an overtly expressive nature. But this solo, in itself teetering between deep feeling and schmaltz, is pushed cruelly in the latter direction by the soloist’s excruciating uncertainty of intonation and vibrato, and by the introduction of a satirical quavering wow onto the music track that envelopes both solo and orchestra. The effect is precisely to self-label the musical idiom as cheaply tear-jerking and corny, to mock the ‘heartfelt’ performance whose too naïve and too overt expression of feeling is deficient in both technique and taste, and also to ridicule by extension as cheap, tear-jerking, and tasteless the ‘heartfelt’ emotion that is the purpose and goal of the scene itself. In this context, Toles’ idea that your tears will be self-conscious and that you will need permission to shed them comes into sharper focus. The film truly feels the scene, it truly feels the melodramatic conflict and the upwelling of melodramatic sentiment, but – and in this it exemplifies the practice of so much of the film, and so much of Maddin’s output – it also wants to be first in line to point out the sentimentality, the schmaltziness, the threadbare and ridiculously obsolete nature of these kinds of feelings, and this kind of drama. You’d better point out your own shortcomings before anyone else points them out for you. And in terms of creative imagination

110

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

and the aims of the narrative artwork, the moral of this is: it’s not so much that reconciliation and happy endings are impossible with this or any other story and group of characters – it’s the idea of reconciliation and happy endings that is impossible. For reasons of historical eclipse, pervasive cultural scepticism, political deconstruction, epistemological revolution, and every other toxic environmental condition, wholeness and resolution as non-ironic narrative goals are too deeply suspect to live. Affect itself is only allowed to live if it wears the obsolete label of melodrama, is deeply marked by the leprosy sores of its grotesque impossibility, and goes about crying ‘unclean!’ by means of hairballs and wow-quavering music. And there are many, many other examples of the same phenomenon. The duel, with its many-buttoned coats and ostrich-feather ceremonial neck scarves, ludicrous rules of combat, and WWF victory chant, works in the same way. The scene’s final words (the Count’s expiring ‘I curse my luck!’) is a parody of obsolete dramatic diction, and the rain of shot-down geese and their subsequent arrangement by Grigorss into a neat pattern are not simply surreal but aggressively grotesque. Later, the insertion of a series of yawns into a tense character dialogue whose central content is an electrifying allegation of paternal daughter-rape serves to inject laughs into a scene of melodramatic narrative content where laughter – and yawning – are the most dramatically inapposite things imaginable. The ‘justification’ of these yawns is that the altitude is very high at the point where Klara and Grigorss are riding a gondola across a mountain gorge, and that because of the lack of oxygen ‘you may find yourself gasping for breath.’ None of the other high-altitude scenes exhibit the same condition, but of course the script’s explanation is transparently improvisational; and in the context of a script that is constantly broadcasting its own artificiality, this is hardly any kind of a drawback. klara: Could you marry me, Grigorss, even if I were not ... chaste? grigorss: Chaste! My God, did Johann dishonour you [yawn] before his [yawn] accident? klara: No. [yawn] His thoughts were [yawn] pure. He used to call me his golden fleece. grigorss: Who, then? klara: [yawning] My father. [luxurious yawn, then assuming a cold, hard voice] He ravished me in the woods. grigorss: [agitated and yawning at the same time] I refuse to believe it!

Careful

111

The yawns are a result not of a lack of oxygen but of a lack of belief in the functionality of such a scene in the absence of absurdist disclaimers. Then the introduction of goose-grease rubbing to the scene of Grigorss’ collapse at home after the duel, and of a chair labelled ‘Poppa’ into Klara’s mountain-hideaway secret place, like those yawns, puncture any straightforward operation of the pathos and drama of the scenes in question. In all of these cases the melodramatic, affective base-content of the scenes needs to survive the mocking interventions, like so many blows endured in running a gauntlet. That affect finally does survive, and indeed frees itself almost completely of absurdist attack, is something of a miracle under the circumstances. The scene of reconciliation between Zenaida, Grigorss, and Franz carries a real emotional power, even though the dog of ridicule never stops barking throughout it; and in the end we do receive permission to feel that power. As we gradually come to understand the desolation and waste, and the tragic irony, of the characters’ fates, there is an accumulating weight of anti-mockery emotional investment, and this evolution of the action towards a realm of greater recognizability and sympathy allows melodrama now actually to be itself, and not an obsolete form dredged up to be caricatured. As events move swiftly and with ever more forceful momentum from the duel, to Grigorss’ terrible eviction from the house, to Zenaida’s suicide, to the scheme to kill Herr Trotta, to the scheme’s dramatic enactment with its Wagnerian conclusion of Klara’s Liebestod,29 the film shuffles off its habit of derision and emerges at last onto a terrain of almost pure melodrama. Although the duel scene still has its silly elements of too many buttons and preposterous ritual, there are also many images there that display the undiluted rhetoric of thrilling Romantic drama. And when it is time for the next parricide – the murder of Herr Trotta – all mocking elements are absent. The sublime landscape of mountain peaks, ice, and snow is allowed to speak directly as the appropriate anthropomorphic setting for grand and terrifying events. Grigorss pulls with grim determination at the reins of the sleigh to skid it off the path, raises the gun to fire it into the heavens as Herr Trotta sits frozen with astonishment, then levels the gun to point directly at the victim (and in one Great Train Robbery shot, directly at the camera). All these images have now only a pure Romantic rhetoric, which is emphasized as they move to strikingly posed tableau shots where the action is halted so that we can savour the intensely suspended dramatic moment: true, uninhibited, unashamed blood-and-thunder melodrama. It is true that the sleigh carrying Klara and her father then

112

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

plummets into the abyss and whirls around in a fashion reminiscent not so much of The Wizard of Oz (as Maddin suggests on the DVD) as of The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1905. But, strange to say, this does not detract from the current of authentic melodramatic feeling. Indeed, their juxtaposition becomes a kind of expression of how much Careful has been able to achieve: here is the affect, flowing freely and strongly, and here is the primitive special effect necessitated by working with a small set, a few props, and no optical printer. The latter is almost comical, but if we smile it is with affection, not derision, because Maddin has all his elements in balance now; he has risen to these emotions without abandoning the fundamental sandbox play-acting and garage-band terms of his cinema, which now can be seen in a moment like this as, miraculously, not prohibiting something grand. The final destination of the movement away from self-consciousness and mockery and towards a pure affect scraped clean of those barnacles – and it is the final destination of the film as a whole – is the scene of Grigorss’ death. He emerges from under the snow the avalanche has covered him in to a spectacle of icy Alpine emptiness, stunned by the last blow of Klara’s suicide. Like Boles after Veronkha’s last wedding in Archangel, Grigorss is left in a condition of absolute loss – of his family and home, of his love (which he can now doubtless see he never possessed), of his personal and social goodness. Retrospectively, and without even analysing it, the viewer too can see what a perfect disaster Grigorss’ life has been, all its assumptions and projects in ruins, all the participants dead in terrible ways. He makes his way back to Klara’s cave, and as he lays himself down in utter spiritual exhaustion, an intertitle is able to express the pathos of his situation in a way that is a pure replica of silent film’s ability to explicitly invite affect: ‘Alone in a home meant for lovers.’ The pathos is crystallized then in the single tear that rolls down his face. The photography in this scene is in a yellowy-green monochrome (less green than earlier renderings of this space), and heavily fogged with a lens filter, soft focus, light-leak, or all three. This fogging has the double effect of creating a kind of warmth which is a wonderful equivalent of the warmth experienced as you freeze to death and of obscuring almost everything except the blurred outlines of Grigorss’ face in a representation of dreamlike fading consciousness. This dreamlike perceptual space then becomes the space of the dying man’s hallucination of his childhood home, with his parents sitting by the fireside in a picture of domestic contentment and stability, and his mother’s image emerging to bend over him to comfort and reassure. ‘How did you find me?’

Careful

113

he whispers; and she replies, ‘It’s Mother’s secret.’ The power of this sequence is great, because of the vast chasm between what the character wishes for and what we know is actually the case. The sense that every person of whatever age is in some constitutive way still a child, and still longing for some originary wholeness and belonging, and that this is always poignant because we all lose our way and cannot get back home, and that Grigorss as someone who spectacularly will never be able to do this is thus an exemplary subject for all of us, are what is at the base of the deep and strong feeling here. On the DVD, Toles says: ‘It’s always gratifying to have a family reconstituted. That comfortable pre-bed scene, where the mother and father almost wordlessly communicate, and the mother knowing, as she does in Proust, exactly what to do: go up to little Marcel’s bed, and tuck him in.’ That Proustian moment is just what is recaptured in this scene (and later in Maddin’s career, above all in Brand upon the Brain!, the affective power of an emotionally defeated adult son revisiting primal family scenes is conjured up again, in a personal and autobiographical way). But of course the family is not reconstituted, and the fantasy-reconstitution that Grigorss hallucinates has essential differences from actuality: Zenaida actually despised the Swan-Feeder, and there are no siblings present. (A telltale symptom exists in the tiny fact that although Zenaida is heard speaking, when the Swan-Feeder’s lips move there is no sound.) You can’t go home again, or if you do it will be in a fevered death-dream. Once again it is the prospect of loss that underlies this fantasy of fulfilment. In any case it is a fine death, and a fine resting point for the film. From Biedermeier to Byron According to George Toles, ‘the characters in Careful have struck many viewers as lacking in internal definition.’30 Of course this is true if you compare the film to Le Journal d’un curé de campagne, or even an episode of Friends. Maddin’s and Toles’s form of filmmaking is not a hospitable environment for verisimilitudinous psychological detail. But the internal definition of the characters in Careful is far more extensive than it is in Maddin’s earlier features. This is certainly the case if we use character development as a criterion of judgment. The three most important younger characters – Johann, Grigorss, and Klara – all manifest rather startling changes in outlook and behaviour, certainly on a scale different from anything in Archangel, let alone Gimli Hospital. Both Johann and Grigorss undergo a major transformation from good, hum-

114

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ble, contented, repressed Biedermeier subjects to tortured, fate-hunted figures of Romantic rebellion, pretty exactly retracing the transformation of a crucial strand of nineteenth-century European culture under the pressures of a gnawing realization that existing belief systems were inadequate or false. Of course this is just the realization that Johann and Grigorss both experience, the former twisted out of shape by an absolutely unprocessable incestuous desire, and the latter shocked by the discovery of his mother’s extracurricular sexuality and the lie of his parents’ marriage. When the comfortable Tolzbadian world of these youths is shattered, they move directly to become little avatars of Byron’s Manfred, suffering and desperate heroes stalking the Alps in a state of damnation.31 And Maddin stamps them with this Romantic iconography. Johann strikes a pose of manly defiance on a mountain ledge in a monochrome shot of sulphurous yellow, and proclaims his complete defection from ruling ideology: klara: Look at that butterfly. How innocent it is. Let us strive for purity in everything. Even after our wedding. johann: Purity sickens me. You can be pure for both of us. klara: Johann! johann: Klara – suppose that the sounds of angels singing hymns to our virginal love was in reality a choir from the deepest pit of hell? The shot itself is so strongly composed, so splendidly rhetorical, that it would be suitable for framing (though, typically, it is also so overexposed and vaselined that its outlines have to be peered at). It takes Grigorss longer to go over the edge, but when he challenges the Count he is already using Romantic diction. The duel scene and the avalanche scene are both, as I have said, full of Romantic imagery wherein Grigorss is prominently posed in archetypal images recalling Romantic theatre and painting. In the scene of his and Klara’s plotting of her father’s death, the dialogue is strongly Romantic-melodrama: klara: One dire thought occurs to me. But it would freeze my blood to utter it. grigorss: Speak! klara: [in a small voice] You could kill my father. grigorss: Oh Klara! klara: Or better yet – I could throw myself off a precipice. Then perhaps father could repent of his crime and life could go on as usual.

Careful

115

German Romanticism: Johann, posed with Byronic defiance and enveloped in a sulphur-yellow blur so strong that his companion Klara is scarcely visible (‘You can be pure for both of us’).

grigorss: Why should the victim suffer? We shall have no more talk of suicide. Do you think your father is capable of repentance? klara: The hardness of his gaze makes me doubt it. He asked me to come to his room tonight. He told me ... there would be no more pain. grigorss: Monstrous! He must be killed. [turns and grasps a stalactite] A few hours ago I rid this mountain of another villain. I can still smell his blood on my hands. Soon I can wash these filthy hands in the blood of your father. In his DVD commentary, Toles characterizes this dialogue as Melvillian, but I would rather call it operatic. Grigorss’ last speech in particular, translated into Italian, would be right at home verbatim in an early Verdi or other high-Romantic opera libretto. (Grigorss’ last line of this scene

116

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

hardly contradicts the impression: ‘I hear the angel’s trumpet. It is ordained.’ If this isn’t opera speaking, it is opera’s theatrical model.) Klara, meanwhile, has experienced a similar transformation, from typical demure Tolzbad maiden to Electra-like figure of deranged vengeance. Her transformation starts earlier, and is less marked, but it is certainly there. Generally speaking, all three characters are empowered by these transformations, if not in their own lives, then in terms of the power of the striking, posed images imbued with suppressed violence that they now present. This is especially true of the brothers, who progress from butler-school subservience and rote synchronized behaviour to these images of grand defiance and heroic strength. But Klara too becomes a more powerful figure when she starts acting out her Electra fantasies, even though her visual presentation does not rhyme so resonantly with a cultural bank of images of Romantic heroism. It is true that all three characters are progressing from one archetype to another, and their development does not show the subtlety or detailed particularity of characters in a nineteenth-century novel; but they are not in a novel, they are in a nineteenth-century melodrama, and in that context their psychological make-up is not ‘lacking in internal definition.’ Dialogue and acting As we have noted, there is a lot more dialogue in Careful than in any of Maddin’s earlier films. And it is dialogue that is everywhere marked by Maddin’s, and especially Toles’, unique and bizarre combination of heightened period diction pushed to the point of exaggeration and the repeated puncturings of this ‘high’ sphere of speech and thought by missiles of surreal inappropriateness. Now that there is so much more speaking, the task of the dialogue becomes a much more ambitious and difficult one. No longer can the surrealities of particular mots just pop happily in and out of the film as they largely do in Archangel (a random example, Philbin’s ‘There’s a dead sparrow on your roof – a good omen for our marriage’). Instead there is much more plot to carry, much more character development to unfold. Any of the passages I have quoted in discussing the film will testify to this condition: the diction is still strange and stilted, but it is also doing more actual narrative work. Careful treads a perilous line not only between mockery and melodrama but narratologically between authorial exposition (the titles, the opening lecture) and a more normative ‘realism’ driven by dialogue – although ‘realism’ is not a word one really wants to use with dialogue like this. In any event the screenplay is juggling a number of potentially chaotic contending

Careful

117

elements, and it is a tribute to the film that it all actually works. Indeed, Careful may be Toles’ masterpiece for Maddin to date. It seems to me more successful as a screenplay than Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a film where Tolesian dialogue takes a perhaps even greater role; and although both Archangel and The Saddest Music in the World show Toles’ stylistic presence strongly, the former has much less dialogue and the latter contains also the evidence of other creative forces. In Careful the hothouse collaboration of Maddin and Toles is pure; its subject is absolutely and inimitably characteristic; and there is a virtuoso balancing of elements that are very difficult to control. The whole question of acting and dialogue delivery in Maddin’s cinema is inseparable from the conditions of production of his films, and from the aesthetic stance and creative philosophy that lie at the base of all his work. Maddin did not have access to a large pool of polished, professional actors to put in his films; nor would he necessarily have known what to do with them if he had had them. The ultra-artificial, done-on-the-cheap and meant-to-be-seen-as-done-on-the-cheap physical staging and the ultra-artificial and in some degree caricatured dialogue all required something stylized in the way of performance. Maddin’s actors, most of them anyway, perhaps couldn’t play Hamlet very well, still less Willy Loman. Their limited training and skills were simply a given for Maddin. But they were the equivalents of his own lack of training and experience in filmmaking, and the solution to both sets of limitations was to be found in the amateur-theatricals staging and the flat artificialities and downright oddness of the stories and the dialogue. Maddin didn’t need to know how to run a giant soundstage with 35mm film stock, Panavision cameras, elaborate and expensive lighting equipment and setups, and every other aspect of mainstream filmmaking craft, because the kind of film he wanted to make was so far distant from that model; and in this context, shooting Careful in a disused Winnipeg grain elevator with pasteboard mountains is truly the right solution in every possible dimension for him. Similarly, the fact that his actors may not have had a virtuoso ability to produce convincingly verisimilitudinous line readings is really not a problem when Careful ’s dialogue is so strange that there can no longer be any such thing as verisimilitude in its delivery. Most of the actors that Maddin got may have been drawn from a pool of personal friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, and random local discoveries, but they end up serving him as well as his papier-mâché settings and props, and in something like the same way. If their tones of voice are going to be monochromatic, if their line readings are going to be strangely flat or awkward, if their movements and expressions are going

118

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

to be blank or exaggerated or simple, then those features of performances are made to work with the film and not against it. Perhaps I should rephrase that. We don’t know what the histrionic capabilities of Maddin’s actors are, but there is a sense that even if they didn’t innately possess the stylized characteristics I just described, Maddin would need to fabricate them out of actorly skill, because he gets exactly the performances that suit his cinema. In the case of some of his regular actors in these earlier films, the match is so good that Maddin has never surpassed them in subsequent films with more famous and/or experienced performers. Kyle McCulloch is truly a star in the Maddin universe, and his performances may be properly recognized as just as virtuosic and emotionally effective within the flatly stylized, surreal, quasi-expressionist, quasi-satirical world of Maddin’s films as any mainstream actor’s within a mainstream context. Not so much in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, but in Archangel and Careful his performances end up being not only meticulously crafted and flexible, but emotionally big and genuinely moving. Other Maddin performers, by craft or luck, are equally well suited to the roles they appear in. Victor Cowie, Sarah Neville, Michael Gottli, and Brent Neale are all actors without much of a screen life outside Maddin’s films, but who make really substantial contributions within it. When Brent Neale, not necessarily a conventionally armed actor, utters the lines ‘Purity sickens me. You can be pure for both of us,’ he sounds like the oracular phoney Criswell in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, but this stentorian monotone slots perfectly into his desolate new psychological landscape. Even Michael O’Sullivan, whose line readings (despite his soft Irish lilt) can be rather featureless, becomes a substantial tool in the director’s hands. As Maddin’s career picked up more steam, new opportunities or pressures began resulting in the appearance in his films of actors of a different kind. Even Careful features two examples, Gosia Dobrowolska and Paul Cox. They are both excellent, and their imported Polish and Australian accents respectively just add a headier flavour to the delightfully chaotic cultural brew. But Careful represents something of a last hurrah for Maddin’s initial repertory company (though Victor Cowie returns for a final fling in Cowards Bend the Knee), and it is proper, I think, to render it some kind of salute for its more or less complete success in doing exactly what it needed to do. Models Once more, by virtue of its historical setting and its paraphrase of earlier cultural models of narrative and diction and cinematic approach, Careful

Careful

119

is a knot woven of different strands of influence and inspiration. Trying to unpick this knot, to sort out and tabulate the different cinematic and other cultural models lying behind the film, can be a bewildering task. Just in the DVD scene-by-scene commentary, Maddin and Toles make reference to an extensive and wildly variegated smorgasbord of forebears: among writers Melville, Ruskin, Robert Walser, Camille Paglia, Kafka, Proust, and among additional literary works Hamlet and Howard Pyle’s 1888 children’s book Otto of the Silver Hand; among filmmakers Riefenstahl, Sternberg (The Blue Angel, The Scarlet Empress), Stroheim, Max Ophuls, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, René Clement, Buñuel (Land without Bread), James Whale, David O. Selznick, Jean Renoir, René Clair (Le Million), and among additional films The King of Jazz, Glorifying the American Girl, A Woman’s Face, Rear Window, The Wizard of Oz, and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; among actors Conrad Veidt, Joan Crawford, and Lon Chaney Jr; and among composers Wagner and Bernard Herrmann. In addition to this list and the cultural overtones I have already mentioned, I would say that the example of Murnau’s Sunrise is very close to a few of the shots – notably those involving the moon – and Careful ’s shots of the village of Tolzbad, tiny in a cradle of papier-mâché mountains, seem to echo both Sunrise and Murnau’s Faust, with its master shot of a gigantic Mephistopheles looking down on the town. But truthfully, identifying all the paraphrases, remodellings, and echoes would be an endless and uncertain task. Two, however, deserve at least some comment. The first is the already mentioned origin of the film in a preconception of the genre of German Bergfilme (mountain films) – and in the DVD commentary the director again mentions ‘the Riefenstahl mountain pictures’ as a model. Riefenstahl recurs throughout Maddin’s many commentaries and conversations on his film enthusiasms. The mountain films for which she is generally well known, and which made her famous as an actress in Germany in the late 1920s, were not directed by her anyway, but written and directed by the mountain enthusiast and documentarist Dr Arnold Fanck. His three mountain films starring Riefenstahl are Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain, 1926), Die weisse Hölle von Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palu, 1929, co-directed by G.W. Pabst), and Stürm über dem Mont Blanc (Storm Over Mont Blanc, 1930), and there is a related Arctic adventure film with Riefenstahl, but without mountains, S.O.S. Eisberg (S.O.S. Iceberg, 1933). None of them has much of a social dimension, and the plots of all, insofar as they deviate from the strict requirements of scaling that rock face, negotiating that crevasse, or surviving that blizzard, are of a mild and sentimental cast. I see more similarities to Erich von

120

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919), which has a grand mountain finale ending in a duel and the spectacular death of one of the characters, and for the remainder of the film a hysterical potential-adultery melodrama featuring a sexual predator played by Stroheim himself, ‘the man you love to hate.’ Maddin doesn’t specify it as a model, but he is great Stroheim enthusiast, and perhaps he simply neglected to mention it. There are two films directed by Riefenstahl that are somewhat echoed in Careful. Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932), Riefenstahl’s first film as a director, is about a girl living by herself in the mountains who is held to be strange and perhaps dangerous by the narrow-minded villagers living in the valley. Das blaue Licht, unlike the Fanck films, is certainly crazily Romantic enough to be related to Careful. It was available only in ultra-execrable videotape versions until a relatively recent German DVD issue. Maddin might indeed have come across it in that ‘degraded’ form, however, and if so perhaps one can find echoes of it in Gerda the Wild Mountain-Top Girl solitarily chained to a crag, and especially in Klara’s ‘secret mountain hideaway.’ The other relevant Riefenstahl film is her last feature film, Tiefland, which again has a solitary person living in the mountains, a shepherd whose pure soul and natural solitude have heroic qualities, while the dwellers in the ‘Tiefland,’ or lowland, are riddled with compromise and corruption. And, as already noted, Maddin drew on the climactic knife-fight between the shepherd and the wicked Marquis for his own staging of the Grigorss/Count duel. In Tiefland there are some mountain-scapes that are not too far away from some of the scenes in Careful (especially anything with goats or lambs), and the fight to the death between a commoner and an all-powerful local aristocrat is a striking resemblance. But in fact none of these resemblances except the last is very strong or particular. It is rather as if Maddin were influenced by the idea of Leni Riefenstahl mountain films, rather than by the films themselves. A more complex case is presented by Careful’s relation to Herman Melville’s novel Pierre: or the Ambiguities (1852). This connection is emphasized by George Toles: One major style for the dialogue style in Careful is Herman Melville’s incest-novel Pierre, written a year after Moby-Dick. And obviously a movie that looked like this could not have conventional Masterpiece Theater period dialogue, and I wanted something that had its own kind of strange coloration to it. But what Melville’s dialogue has, in addition to having parody – on

Careful

121

one level he’s sending up conventions of domestic fiction, but at the same time there is an authentic hysteria in the book that the parody and the sentiment never effaces. And to get something of that mixed in with the other stuff was still an ongoing hope with the writing. So you would have, yes, laughter and mischief, but never just that.32

Pierre has exerted an abiding fascination for Toles ever since his days as a graduate student,33 and its influence on his writing for Maddin may be seen not only in Careful but, arguably, in aspects of dramatic presentation and dialogue style in many of his other collaborations with the filmmaker as well. Perhaps, then, it will be worthwhile to look a little more closely at it. Pierre was a resounding failure in its own day (one review called it ‘perhaps the craziest fiction extant’),34 and it is certainly not entirely well regarded today (a colleague of mine in American literature describes it simply as ‘a mess’). It is the story of Pierre Glendinning, a young man of intelligence, good social position, and high moral character, who discovers he has an impoverished half-sister, Isabel, whom his sainted and deceased father had adulterously engendered unbeknownst to Pierre’s mother. In order to spare his mother the pain of discovering this stain on her husband’s virtue, Pierre breaks off his engagement with the blameless Lucy Tartan, and pretends to have married Isabel so that they can live under the same roof and he can be her brother, protector, and best friend. Pierre’s mother reacts to this by ejecting him from the family home, disinheriting him, and dying of frustration and grief. Lucy follows Pierre to the city and begs to be allowed to be near him, notwithstanding his apparent marriage to another woman; her brother and Pierre’s cousin seek to revenge her dishonour and stalk Pierre until he shoots one of them dead in the street with a pistol. Pierre is imprisoned, Lucy dies of shock, and Pierre and Isabel commit suicide with poison. The novel’s ostensible purpose is to represent the difficulties and contradictions of trying to live virtuously and morally: Pierre’s actions are consciously motivated by moral idealism, and the result of these idealistic actions is extravagant catastrophe. But Pierre is also, though of course not overtly, what Toles describes simply as ‘Melville’s incest-novel.’ The hero’s relation with his mother is conducted with much flirtation, elaborate loverlike attentions and endearments, and an effacement of their age difference (they call each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’). And his relation with Isabel is always imbued with sexual attraction on both sides, a thing that is never expressed or allowed to be understood clearly by the

122

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

characters, but which can hardly be missed by readers willing to dig one millimetre beneath the surface of the narrative. But perhaps the most startling aspect of all is the novel’s style: hyperbolic, Teutonic, archaic, extravagant to a hair-raising degree. Here is one rather mild example of the typical authorial narrating voice: That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. Wonder interlocks with wonder; and then the confounding feeling comes. No cause have we to fancy, that a horse, a dog, a fowl, ever stand transfixed beneath yon skyey load of majesty. But our soul’s arches underfit into its; and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness.35

(It is not surprising that one contemporary review accused Melville of imitating Carlyle.36) Even more jaw-dropping is the dialogue, as in this typical exchange between Pierre and Isabel: ‘Speak not to me yet awhile, if that seemeth best to thee, if that only is possible to thee. This thy clasping hand, my sister, this is now thy tongue to me.’ ‘I know not where to begin to speak to thee, Pierre; and yet my soul o’erbrims in me.’ ‘From my heart’s depths, I love and reverence thee; and feel for thee, backward and forward, through all eternity!’ ‘Oh, Pierre, can’st thou not cure in me this dreaminess, this bewilderingness I feel? My poor head swims and swims and will not pause. My life can not last long thus; I am too full without discharge. Conjure tears for me, Pierre; that my heart may not break with the present feeling, – more deathlike to me than all my grief gone by!’ ‘Ye thirst-slaking evening skies, ye hilly dews and mists, distil your moisture here! The bolt hath passed; why comes not the following shower? – Make her to weep!’37

Four-hundred-odd pages of this kind of thing is enough to drive a reader to desperation. As Toles notes, the novel is sometimes characterized as a parody, but in truth such a description does not at all encompass the cornucopia of strangenesses that is Pierre, and in particular its ill-assimilated aspects of tortured intensity. Toles is surely right in calling its hyperboles a mask for something very disturbing beneath, in effect a form of hysteria.

Careful

123

To what degree does this array of qualities have some kind of equivalent in Careful apart from its dialogue style? The novel’s framework of impossible moral idealism may perhaps be echoed in the entrenched regime of impossible caution in Tolzbad, and perhaps Pierre’s progress from paragon to outcast, murderer, and suicide is echoed in the somewhat parallel journeys of Johann and Grigorss. (This, indeed, seems very close to Toles’ earlier-cited description of how the collapse of a simple belief system can leave its inhabitants catastrophically stranded.) But the incest connection is probably what Toles had in mind, and in particular the relation between incestuous desire that is repressed by taboo and reemerges as something twisted and violent, with the sign of that condition being its expression in hyperbolic and strangely false diction. Toles describes the dialogue as having a parodic quality – but in Careful, what is being parodied? It is the same question that one so often encounters with respect to the caricatured treatment of the risen-from-the-dead settings and societies in Maddin’s films. Is it a parody, then, of Melville? Or of whatever Melville was parodying? In any event it cannot have the same effect as Pierre’s parody, since Melville’s targets were alive and well at the time of the novel’s writing. Still, the Byronic dialogue given to Johann in his last phase, or to Grigorss and Klara in theirs, becomes readable as an echo of Melville. By extension the whole verbal world of the screenplay is a kind of atmospheric rendering of the novel’s hysterical condition as a byproduct of repression, or of some hysterical response to psychological danger. As in Pierre, the authorial voice manifests the condition as much as the dramatis personae do, and I would argue from this fact that Careful is itself attempting to suppress a psychological – or in this case artistic – conflict. In this model, what is somehow dangerous is a forthright expression of the feeling that is inherent in the melodrama of the story and characters; and the grotesqueness and hyperbole of the diction (voiceover and dialogue alike) becomes then a way of masking or fighting off that feeling. This interpretation does, of course, overlap with the one I have been advancing of the film throughout this chapter. I will add that after reading Pierre in the light of its importance to George Toles, I am, as I was suggesting earlier, tempted to see its stylistic hypertrophies and dizzy oscillations reflected in much of his work for Maddin: the mock solemnity and inflated formal diction, the absurd idealism, the vertiginous clashes of tone, and the underlying outlines of emotional tragedy. That is a picture to be found not only in Careful but in Archangel, in aspects of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and even in some details of The Saddest Music in the World.

124

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Colour and music Careful is Maddin’s first colour film, and it also embodies his most ambitious and best use of colour. He was pressured by his producer and distributor into using colour, and at first didn’t like the idea at all: But watching this almost anonymous little picture, Paul Whiteman’s King of Jazz – just a primitive two-strip Technicolor – gave me the courage to proceed. And I thought that by limiting the palette to pretty much two colours at a time – sometimes even two-strip Technicolor can mysteriously produce a third colour – and then cautiously retreating into one colour at a time (such as the opening sequence, this sort of sepia-tobacco colour) that I could approximate something that was antique, but something that felt refreshingly different, and therefore modern.38

In other words, what reconciled Maddin to the idea of using colour was the insight that he could make colour photography as stylized and ‘degraded’ as black and white. In many of its scenes, Careful does recapture that pale, pastel, eggshell-fragile two-colour quality. The effect is achieved not, of course, with actual two-strip film stock, but through restriction of the design palette, often via an aggressively stylized painting of sets and props.39 In this respect, although the film does rather recall The King of Jazz and other two-colour films from the 1920s, the effect is quite different. The King of Jazz is largely a musical, and therefore has design licence to be overtly stylized and fantastic in its set and costume design. But Careful is not a musical, even though it does import the whimsy and fantasy reserved in Hollywood for musical production numbers into its ordinary expository and narrative proceedings. With its vast quantities of chalky cornflower blues and mid-yellows attached to set and costume design that is itself very stylized, the film produces effects that are intensely mannered and decorative. The use of soft focus and occasional overexposure to blur edges and shapes creates a kind of bath of gentle and insubstantial colour in these scenes. But this two-colour (or, properly, restricted full-colour) scheme is not used throughout the film. In many important scenes, the film is in fact monochrome – black and white footage tinted a single colour. Often, in fact, these mono-colour shots are more vibrant and strongly colourful than the ‘two-colour’ shots, because the single colours employed can be very vivid ones. Herr Trotta’s opening lecture is done in a rich cinnamon-red monochrome, Johann’s mountain-ledge scene with Klara is (as

Careful

125

we have noted) a sulphurous yellow, and Klara’s cave is emerald green. As the events of the film move to their climax, the film moves from gentle two-colour effects to broader, and stronger, monochrome ones. The duel scenes, and the murder of Herr Trotta, take place in cyan blue, and Grigorss’ death scene in Klara’s cave has a single green-yellow tinge. This shift from multi-colour to mono-colour is not haphazard. It follows, broadly, the heightening of the drama, so that as the film becomes more seriously melodramatic it reverts to the cinematographic language which is, for Maddin, the home of this kind of feeling: black and white, or tinted black and white. The film’s drive to seriousness is also a drive to monochrome. And if the full-colour sequences have prettiness, charm, and invention, the later monochrome sequences have, simply, power. Careful is Maddin’s first film with a specially composed musical score. The ‘found footage’ aspect of the music for Maddin’s earlier films – and of Cowards Bend the Knee, which is an extremely effective later example of the practice – is so perfectly suited to the filmmaker’s creative set that it is difficult for any mere contemporary movie composer to rise to its level. I confess I was initially somewhat sceptical of John McCulloch’s score, simply because of that fact. The combination of a traditional Romantic musical idiom (certainly what is required) with a small band of instrumentalists at first seemed to me too thin for the rich soup of emotions needing expression. But I have come around completely on this question. The small orchestra, augmented by a not very numerous chorus for a couple of effects, now seems an excellent correlative to the Maddinian ‘inadequacies’ of the physical production. To hear the opening Romantic fanfare of French horns, an upward-striving motif expressive of optimism and idealism, followed by the shivering downward glissando of a female choir, which is a kind of parody of a lamenting wail, is to have the whole trajectory of the film wittily encompassed in two bars. From this opening flourish to the end, the score walks the narrow line between sickliness and parody on the one side and true emotional expressiveness on the other – again in a fashion completely parallel to that of the film as a whole. At times, as with the melancholy waltz accompanying the ‘reconciliation’ scene, the quality is very high. In the end, the film’s encounter with a composed score is as successful as its encounter with colour. Careful is as virtuosic a juggling of heterogeneous elements as anything Maddin has ever done (and that is saying something). Its incorporation of more plot and more dialogue, and colour, and music, represents certainly a development for the director – if not necessarily the clear

126

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

progress towards a less strange cinema that so many people around him were urging on him. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, Careful may be more like a normal movie than anything of Maddin’s, but it’s not very normal. Its ability to give a thorough workout to issues such as incest and Oedipal/Electral conflicts is rather impressive, given the strong ‘toy’ or parodistic aspects of its narrative environment (and one must not forget to credit George Toles strongly here). The Alpine setting is as delightfully cheap-theatrical as the Russian Arctic in Archangel. Many of the inspirations here, such as the Nibelung-like mine staffed with nubile girls in their underwear and candle-headdresses swinging picks or the violent gyrations of the Swan-Feeder’s ghost as reflected in a piece of agitated Plexiglass (to name two examples of many) are as delicious as anything in Maddin’s cinema. But, as ever with Maddin’s best work, the most impressive thing is the ability to create – slowly, painfully, against great odds – a place for feeling in the minefield of mockery and disbelief.

5

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)

Of all Maddin’s features Twilight proved the most troublesome to its director, and it remains the least satisfying of his features because Maddin’s lack of control over everything from casting and film stock to, finally, the lead actor’s line readings makes it clear how much Maddin’s art depends on his artisanal, rather than merely auteurist, approach to movie-making. – Brenda Austin-Smith1

Paradoxically, it was the greater volume of visual information with the highdefinition formats – VistaVision, CinemaScope, Todd AO – that eventually forced filmmakers out of the studios and into real-world locations. If location photography meant better-looking backgrounds than the painted flats or rear-projection screens of the studios, it also meant that filmmakers had to curtail their creative urges in the face of unmalleable reality. – Dave Kehr2

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs brings many things that are quite new to Maddin’s cinema. The script was George Toles’ take on Knut Hamsun’s Pan as filtered through the sensibility of Melville’s Pierre, and Maddin transferred the Arctic Scandinavian setting into a Symbolist world of perpetual light. On the production side the presence of a major distributor (Alliance) made for great differences of organization and approach, not to mention a budget of approximately $1.5 million. An Alliance-designated producer (Ritchard Findlay) brought a regime very different from that of Maddin’s previous producer, Greg Klimkiw, who was a fellow-Winnipegger and personal friend. The distributor also strongly encouraged the use of the 35mm film format, Dolby stereo, and full colour – not the very strange ultra-stylized 16mm two-colour-reverting-to-monochrome of

128

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Careful. Shooting took place over a surprisingly short twenty-day schedule in the disused Vulcan Iron Works, ‘cradle of the 1919 General Strike’ in Winnipeg, and the finished films came in at 92 minutes.3 For the first time, Maddin has a cast full of recognizable or semi-recognizable figures: Shelley Duvall, Alice Krige, Pascale Bussières, Frank Gorshin, R.H. Thomson. On the script side, the contribution of George Toles is larger than ever. Uniquely in his collaboration with Maddin to date, Toles here receives sole screenplay credit, and rarely has a picture been more comprehensively ‘written’ than this one. Each of Maddin’s films since The Dead Father had had a little more dialogue than the last without ever reaching anything very close to a ‘normal’ level. Now Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, foregoing its predecessors’ intertitles and voice-over narrations and early-sound stretches of silence, fills many scenes with extended, highly articulated speech by the characters and makes a leap all the way to ‘talky’ and in a certain sense even past it. Toles’ language is most often assiduously lyrical or else carefully explanatory, sometimes poetic, perceptibly wanting to say much and suggest more with each line, seeking just the right phraseology for even the most cursory utterance. And certain things are, correspondingly, absent or much reduced. The visual realm of soft focus, light leaks, and all forms of ‘degradation’ is gone, replaced by a forthright and clear-seeing photographic image. There is certainly a full-blooded visual lyricism in Twilight, but it is of a different order from what Maddin has offered before: it is not able to peep out from, or hide behind, the bushes of a half-archaic, half-avantgarde ‘primitive’ visual regime that is stylized almost to the point of abstraction. Rather, it borders on more familiar and less problematic forms of cinematic beauty. The look of the film is by no means mainstream, even photographically: the more closely one examines it the more this is apparent. The settings, costumes, and props are always unusual, and they very often hearken back to the kind of visual imagination we are familiar with from Maddin’s earlier films. But their quirkiness now seems less completely integrated with the whole visual regime, and the forthrightness of 35mm and full colour pulls the movie at least in the direction of the cinematic centre and casts the artifices of screenplay and design in a different key – one that is itself more forthright and less scarred with irony. The perverse and wilfully destructive self-mockery in setting, action, and speech so familiar from Gimli Hospital, Archangel, and Careful is only sometimes evident, and the dialogue, although certainly ‘unnatural’ enough, is comparatively earnest and striving for effects of insight or eloquence that in earlier films would have been rigged with

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

129

booby traps designed precisely to sabotage any such effects. ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘ravishing’ are words that have been applied to the film’s look,4 and there is no doubt that the film contains countless delectable visual moments, most of them in colour manipulation. But I have some difficulty always relating the aesthetic of the film’s visual world with the meaningworld of its script and even more with the wounded, ‘impossible’ creative world that all of Maddin’s earlier features manifest – the world that is so amazingly constructed from material poverty, extreme ideological innocence + scoffing disbelief, and a style comprehending preclassical and radically modernist forms. Compared with these other films, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs seems almost disconcertingly straightforward, even though none of its aesthetic philosophies can remotely be characterized in that way. The action The action is set in the land of Mandragora, a fantasy world where the sun never sets – or at least not for days and days, until it appears at last to be doing so near the end of the film. Although there is practically nothing in the film to suggest such a thing, it may also be meant to be actually underground.5 In this land of the midnight sun, with its seas and forests, we follow the adventures of six interrelated characters (a small cast being another of the distributor’s requirements for the project). The period is impossible to determine, although a number of details seem to indicate it is a quasi-nineteenth century in this fantasy landscape. The newly released prisoner Peter Glahn (Nigel Whitmey / Ross McMillan)6 returns home to the ostrich farm run by his sister Amelia (Shelley Duvall), after having had an almost mystical romantic encounter on board ship with the beautiful Juliana Kossel (Pascale Bussières). Amelia has a hired man, Cain Ball (Frank Gorshin), who teases her cruelly about her attraction to the gentleman scientist Dr Isaac Solti (R.H. Thomson) and thus initiates a serious quarrel about whether she will sell the farm to him, as she has earlier promised. She is indeed hopelessly in love with this scientist and medical man, whose interests include mesmerism and the power of pagan idols, and whose detached, polite, aristocratic manner is laid over a refined taste for sadistic manipulation. Hunting one day, Peter encounters the sensual forest-wanderer Zephyr (Alice Krige), married to a fisherman but strongly attracted to Peter, and also in the first trimester of a pregnancy. She prays to the stone goddess of Venus in the wood to ‘give me Peter to lie with,’ and makes the statue a gift of her wedding

130

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ring. The two do meet again, and consummate their attraction, even as Zephyr explains that she is married to another man and Peter says that he is in love with someone else (Juliana, that is). Dr Solti, too, has been communing with the statue of Venus, who for his pains had toppled over and crushed his leg so badly it had to be amputated. A picnic outing brings the two Glahns together with Solti and his female companion, whom Peter is astounded to discover is Juliana. A complicated toxic mix develops of Peter’s violent jealousy, Juliana’s alternating appeasement and anger, Amelia’s awkward attempts to be an agreeable object for the Doctor, and Solti’s quiet malicious delight in everybody else’s suffering. Things come to a head after they return to the Doctor’s palace, where he mesmerizes Juliana and seems to reveal that he is the author of her words of intimacy to Peter, and Peter attacks Solti’s artificial leg with his own walking stick, makes him hop about in a dance, and smashes the place up before leaping from the balcony. Juliana jumps after him, and there follows the brief moment of consummation in their affair. Now the film enters its final stage, where all the relationships and plot strands are resolved, every one of them negatively. The feud between Amelia and the rough-speaking Cain Ball progresses through a series of bizarre campaign strategies before culminating in Amelia’s perception that Cain Ball is trying to kill her, at which point she seems to capitulate, gets him drunk, and pounds an eight-inch nail into the top of his head while he’s unconscious. She is, of course, mad – driven so by a kind of profound disappointment in life and the derisory prospects for her romantic aspirations – and spends the rest of the film in a state of mild catatonia. Zephyr, making a connection with Dr Solti on the basis of their shared belief in the statue of Venus, reveals (via flashback) that she lured her husband to his doom by enticing him to jump into a pond filled with snakes. Peter’s relationship with Juliana revives for a moment, but then founders irretrievably on the rocks of his jealous paranoia and the harsh reaction it prompts in Juliana. In an absurdly detailed and hyperbolic Grand Invocation, he calls desperately on the trees of the forest to descend and block out the sins of his tormentors Juliana and Solti; but all they can manage is a faint droop. Zephyr now tries to retrieve her ring from the statue – not, obviously, because of any commitment to her marriage, but as a token of her independence from the goddess – but it topples over and crushes her to death. Cain Ball, in a death-delirium following the extraction of his head-nail, hallucinates a boat into which the bedside onlookers pile to deliver what looks like a re-enactment of Washington Crossing the Delaware, and then expires. Now that everybody

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

131

The ship-of-fools pantomime staged by Dr Solti for Cain Ball’s death-passage. From left to right: Juliana, Solti, Cain Ball, Amelia, Peter.

who’s going to die is dead, Solti makes off for new territory, and Juliana goes with him. The penultimate scene depicts the parting of Peter and Juliana, in which she asks him for a memento, namely, his dog Aesop. He agrees, but kills the dog before presenting it to her. All that is left is a brief scene, some time in the indefinite future, showing Peter attending his still-mad sister in a cave amid snow and winter winds. Precursors As always with Maddin’s films, there are a number of texts or other artistic influences in the background. In the case of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, there is one clear foundation for the script in Knut Hamsun’s short novel Pan (1894) – Toles even says that the film is ‘a loose remake’ of that book.7 Pan has a contemporary setting, and takes place in northern Norway in a town above the Arctic Circle during the summer months where

132

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the days are very, very long. Its hero, Thomas Glahn, is a former military officer who lives in a hut in the woods with his dog Aesop and spends most of his time hunting and ecstatically communing with nature, but comes down to the town occasionally for parties and other social events. The main action centres around his relationship with Edvarda, the teenaged daughter of a local magnate, and it is a roller-coaster ride of a relationship, with both parties ultrasensitive, uncertain, and changeable, giving themselves over to passionate devotion or paranoid suspicion and jealousy, swinging between extravagant tenderness and insulting cruelties. There is a good deal of almost explicit sexual tension amid an affective environment where all kinds of strong emotional impulses are swirling. It ends in separation, Edvarda’s engagement to an eminent visiting social scientist from Stockholm, and Glahn’s departure from the place forever. In a highly characteristic touch, and one that better than anything else embodies the hysteria and violence underlying the narrative’s vortex of feelings, after Glahn has agreed to give Edvarda his dog as a parting memento, he kills it and delivers its corpse to her. From the novel, both Glahn’s name and his dog Aesop now attach themselves to Twilight’s hero (though his given name is now changed to Peter), and the hero’s gift of two green feathers and then the dead dog to Juliana is replicated in the screenplay. The other echoes of the book, and there are many, are less straightforward and range from the quite different to the barely recognizable. Juliana is obviously the ‘Edvarda’ character, although her air of mystery and exoticism is quite new, and her extreme youthfulness disguised.8 Dr Solti contains what is left of Edvarda’s father, her fiancé, and a local doctor who is in love with her but is always criticizing her (the latter two even walk with a limp, as the artificial-legged Solti obviously does). But we are now already speaking the wrong way around: the characters of the film are not very usefully seen as versions of Hamsun’s characters; rather they merely retain some perceptible traces of aspects of Hamsun’s novel. Solti’s resemblances to the trio of characters in Pan are far overshadowed by his new characteristics of somehow sinister scientific knowledge and quasi-magical power, courteous sadism, and devotion to the statue of Venus. Even more tenuous are Zephyr’s ‘origins’ in Eva, the young married woman who falls in love with Thomas Glahn, enters a physical relationship with him that serves mainly to distract him from his failures with Edvarda, and is finally killed by falling stone. We can say that the all-daylight world of Mandragora is a version of Hamsun’s northern world of the midnight sun – especially when we learn that the first draft of the screenplay had a Nordic setting9

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

133

– but there is not much left of Hamsun’s pantheism, and where Pan’s endless daylight is an ambiguous and two-sided thing, Twilight’s is better described as simply oppressive. It is certainly the case that Twilight’s general atmosphere of place, with its extensive fantasy elements and what Toles calls its ‘Mediterranean’ feel,10 is far away from the heightened naturalism of Hamsun’s world. Two of the film’s six characters, Amelia and Cain Ball, have no equivalent whatever in Pan. One might say, however, that the film preserves something of the book’s pattern of constant emotional oscillation and in particular of the hero’s impossible and selfdefeating approach to his love-object and human relations in general. Meanwhile, some important details of the film spring from different literary sources. For example, the statue of Venus who kills those who give her their wedding ring and try to get it back is very close to Prosper Mérimée’s 1837 story ‘The Venus of Ille,’ and Dr Solti’s manipulations of a female creature to ensnare the affections of a young man is quite reminiscent of Dr Coppélius and his female automaton in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous tale ‘The Sandman’ (1816). Doubtless this does not exhaust the list of the superbly eclectic Toles’ literary inspirations. The whole production process, and by extension the creative process, for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, differed from those of Maddin’s earlier projects, and one of its features was a less-close collaboration with George Toles at the different stages of the scriptwriting process, and the lack of sufficient time to massage the finished script to the accustomed degree. As Maddin said in 2005: ‘This was the first time I’d actually tried to adapt a script that was already finished rather than being in there [at earlier stages] … I liked the script, but I just don’t think I was capable of adapting yet. (I think I’m better now.) I felt a commitment to keep the script the way it was and go with it, and there weren’t little personal things to go on.’11 So in this case, at least to some degree, Maddin becomes more of a metteur en scène. And his contributions to staging are characteristically stylized and strongly marked. The ‘Mediterranean’ setting goes with gravitation towards a late nineteenth-century ‘decadent’ set of cultural models, whether literary or visual. The film’s title, which Maddin did contribute, was inspired by Pierre Louÿs’ collection of fables with ancient Greek personae, Twilight of the Nymphs (written between 1893 and 1898), and on the DVD Maddin mentions also that he had recently been reading K.-J. Huysmans’ À rebours (1884). In his journal entries during the run-up to the production, the director describes his ‘book stack’: ‘Swinburne’s poems; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Savinio’s The Lives of the Gods; Chateaubriand’s Atala and René; LaForgue’s Moral Tales;

134

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Sachey Sitwell’s Splendours and Miseries; and Beardsley’s Under the Hill.’12 He further reports that his principal visual inspiration was the French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826–1898).13 All these writers plus Moreau add up to quite a lot of Symbolism.14 An application of ornate and decadent Moreau-style imagery – and for that matter the ultra-refined artifices of Louÿs’ Greek maidens or of Huysmans’ aesthete-hero Des Esseintes – to a Hamsun-inspired script was never going to be a natural fit. Of course Maddin’s cinema is full of unnatural fits that produce something new and wonderful, but when these heterogeneities are added to the 35mm-colour production base and the more direct screenplay, the dangers of a certain state of artistic disconnection begin to mount. Many elements of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs are impressive, and many more are interesting. But its successes, in my view, often seem to occur in isolation from each other, and the film as a whole seems to exist in a realm where the left hand may know what the right hand is doing, but where the two are not working with complete efficiency to support each other. There are important areas where the film’s touch is uncertain, and much of that, I think, may be traced to this sense of different projects going on. So, although there is much to be said about the look of the film, about its casting and design, and in general its realization, I would like to begin a closer analysis by investigating the underlying narrative and character layout and looking at the film’s thematic content – elements, that is, principally to be discovered in the script (insofar as the script may be quarried out of the finished film). I would guess that it is partly owing to the screenplay’s ‘independent’ creation and partly to its embarkation on a narrative enterprise that is more literary and three-dimensional than usual for this partnership that Twilight displays a range of themes, character types, narrative overtones, and even philosophical viewpoints that may be clearly seen and talked about in a way that is unprecedented, and not approached since, in Maddin’s cinema. Love, love, love The six characters of the film (or six-and-a-fraction, if you count Zephyr’s unlucky husband who shows up once in a flashback only long enough to be murdered) are displayed in a range of interactions that serves almost as a typology of love relationships – or perhaps we should say of doomed love relationships, as all of them fail. Indeed, the film proceeds almost systematically along this road. It begins with the shipboard encounter

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

135

of Peter and Juliana, and Peter’s sudden enchantment represents an attempt to capture in as pure and economical a fashion as possible an example of instant romantic fascination, strongly marked by its arbitrariness, suddenness, and elements of mystifying allure. No sooner are these two brought together than they are parted, and now, in as Romantic a fashion as his first capitulation, Peter must sustain this perfect love through an indefinite separation, fighting off doubts and temptations. Then, as the story follows Peter in his return home, it encounters his sister Amelia, and this gives rise to two more variations of love. First, there is Amelia’s conventional aspiration to a union with Dr Solti: she is in love with him from afar, trying to gain his attention and approval by little gifts and flatteries. As a basically uncultured, unbeautiful, and unbrilliant person, she recognizes the odds against any success with the scientist, intellectual, and aristocrat Solti, but she can’t help herself. Her hopes are buried in abuse and insult by her hired man, the crude Cain Ball, who dwells particularly on her lack of beauty, and this in turn sets off a civil war between the two of them which lasts for the entire film and ends only when Amelia kills him. But what is not so clear is the unspoken love for Amelia that Cain Ball very likely feels,15 concealed so thoroughly under multiple levels of crude and cranky aggression that no one can see it – and this constitutes another of the film’s forms of love. Next comes the mutual attraction of Peter and Zephyr. This is represented as simple and immediate physical desire on both sides by two people who have other commitments – Peter to Juliana, Zephyr to her husband and unborn baby. It is also connected to Zephyr’s negotiations with the statue of Venus, to whom she gives her wedding ring in return for the goddess’s gift of Peter, and to what then becomes a metaphor for human, and especially sexual, freedom of choice and escape from duty or accountability. And last we encounter the mysterious and impenetrable bond between Juliana and Solti, wherein he routinely subjects her to mesmeric hypnosis and is to some degree able to control her behaviour – activities that carry an ambiguous but palpable erotic charge à la Svengali and Trilby.16 So Juliana speaks words of an intimate nature to Peter that have been hypnotically planted in her mind by Solti (‘This might have been the day we first knew we loved each other, and my kissing you now would not have meant goodbye’), and she says that she wanted Solti for a lover. It might be noted that in the Eros-worlds adjacent to that of the relationship of Peter with Juliana, there is the presence of some larger, more mysterious, more powerful influence: the statue of Venus associated with Zephyr, the uncanny forces of mesmeric manipulation associated with

136

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Solti (and these forces are themselves connected through Solti’s attraction to and embroilment with the statue). The dispiriting and often terribly destructive failure of every one of these forms of love and desire makes the film a kind of meditation on the inability of humans to cope with their deepest aspirations and feelings. Peter and Juliana represent the window-display instance. Juliana presents herself to Peter’s view as such a paradigmatic case of the unknown, intoxicating, romantic object of desire that the impenetrability of her own feelings and motives – the very aspect of her that ultimately drives him to distraction – is completely essential to his attraction to her. It is not much use finding your ultimate True Love if (a) the basis for your attraction to her is her mysterious quality, and (b) you are unable to trust her without knowing her innermost thoughts. The fatal flaw in this model is, thus, laid open to an almost mathematical deconstruction. It is true that Juliana does seem, not only to Peter but to the viewer, under some sort of influence that might at least call in question her commitment to him, and it is also true that Peter’s psychology is revealed to be a profoundly self-defeating one that needs to destroy anything good in his romantic life as soon as it is born. But these qualities only serve to allow a more detailed investigation of the pathologies of the hero and a greater degree of viewer understanding of them, because the film withholds almost any ‘fact’ at all about Juliana and does not obscure the essential representation of the Romantic ideal as inherently impossible. Amelia and Cain Ball present a very different, and more mundane, picture. Both of them are people who have gone all the way through to middle age in a state of fundamental disappointment. Amelia is recognizable as something like a certain spinster-aunt type17 Mandragorized – a woman shunted off onto a siding far away from what she is not only supposed to want, but what she actually does want, namely, a fulfilling love relationship. A relationship that might present itself, with Cain Ball, is so completely low and lacking in allure that it doesn’t even register. And whatever Cain Ball’s softer feelings towards Amelia, his abrasive gruffness, casual insensitivity, and truculently defeated psychological posture are more than sufficient to torpedo any good outcome to them. Given that he has been physically castrated by an accident with a chair nail earlier in life, and that even if Amelia knew about his feelings she is instinctively looking farther and higher than him, Cain Ball’s love is more comprehensively impossible and failed even than the film’s very dismal norm. Altogether, these two miss each other’s signals and defeat each other’s purposes with such perfect reciprocity that they are as much

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

137

a demonstration of the sad failures of human emotion as Peter and Juliana are. And in the end they inflict not just psychological pain but physical damage on each other, as Amelia’s feet get cut up with broken glass strewn in her bedroom by Cain Ball, and she replies by pounding a nail through his skull, dousing him in flammable liquid, and immolating him, and when he has improbably semi-survived these assaults, filling his mouth with live flies. At last he dies and she goes mad – which indeed she has already demonstrated herself to be by the extremity of her violent acts. Notwithstanding its lurid finale, the entire relationship seems, in its relatively detailed account of escalating petty and spiteful behaviour, closer to some Zolaesque rural domestic tragedy than anything we are used to seeing in Maddin. The pairing of Peter and Zephyr is always circumscribed, above all by Peter’s devotion to another woman (he tells Zephyr more than once, ‘I’m in love with another woman’). The way Zephyr’s behaviour is related to a quest for personal freedom, though, is another matter. If we can judge from her fate, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs seems to be as pro-repression as Careful. An early expression of Zephyr’s freedom has been to murder her husband, and the last one is the demand to the goddess to return her ring (the statue kills her for her presumption in this demand), and between those bookends she receives little enough joy from her momentary success with Peter. So there is really not much to be said for personal freedom here, even if the film is rather impressed by Zephyr’s generally forceful personality. What is more striking in the context of Maddin’s cinema as a whole is Zephyr’s combination of commanding sexuality and moral ruthlessness – the same configuration seen in Careful’s Klara and Cowards Bend the Knee’s Meta. Of the relationship between Solti and Juliana it is difficult to say anything concrete. Juliana tells Peter that they have not been lovers, even though she had wished it. Solti for his part seems sexually fascinated only with the statue of Venus, who has crushed him, caused the amputation of his right leg, and in a sense symbolically castrated him (all the men in Twilight are symbolically or actually castrated to one degree or another). His clear delight in a quasi-sadistic manipulation of Juliana under mesmerism seems no different from his delight in tormenting Peter or in giving Amelia the odd backhanded but very wounding gibe – that is to say, not particularly sexual, still less romantic – and his ironic remarks about Juliana’s whims and attitudes of independence have the flavour of appreciation, especially when she seems quite immune to these darts. But whatever is going on here, it is not a picture of a workable love relation.

138

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The note that finally resounds from most of these dysfunctional romantic relations seems, indeed, to resemble the one struck during Solti’s story of the two sisters whose skulls are sitting on his table, one still pierced by a large nail (they are the Ice Nymphs of the title, as a Gothiclettered label tells us). The antipathy of these two was so great, says Solti, that not only did it cause one of them to murder the other and be executed for it, but even in death their crania remain so averse to each other that if they are manually turned face to face they will slowly revolve to their back-to-back configuration (one of them actually bites Amelia when she puts her fingers too close). Here, the ruling force, in life and in death, is not love but bad feeling; and the final picture of both the Peter/Juliana and Amelia/Cain Ball relationships portrays the victory of negative over positive emotions. (Indeed, Amelia’s nail in Cain Ball’s cranium is an explicit re-enactment from the example of the skulls.) Pain is always greater than love, and in its detailed and repeated elaboration of this perspective, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is, as it were, Maddin’s and Toles’ Ingmar Bergman movie. A further position on the film’s map of desires and aspirations is the one articulated by Amelia at some length. After the outing, when the foursome returns to Solti’s palace, and just before Peter’s jealous outburst, attack on Solti, and leap from the balcony, Amelia asks a question of Dr Solti: amelia: These skulls make me think of the Last Judgement, when

Jesus resurrects our bodies to heaven. What I wonder is: will the angels put us all back together again? Like bits of a broken statue? Will we look as we did when we were young and healthy, before we were sick or fat or old? Will mother’s face still be covered with cancer? Will we have teeth? Will it be easy to recognize our loved ones? dr solti: And what if, during our lives, we lost an eye, or a leg, or the cannibals ate us? How much will we get back?! I find it hard to imagine that God cares that much about our bodies. amelia: No? Well, I think he must. I want him to care. dr solti: Why? amelia: [serious, in pain] Because. Some of us got cheated on earth. And there has to be a place where all our bodies have a chance to be loved. There is no answer to this from Solti (only a banal ‘time will tell’), but after the massive distractions of the mesmerization of Juliana, Solti’s humiliation of Peter, and Peter’s physical attack on Solti and the trashing

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

139

of his palace, Amelia is revealed still to be stuck in the same sad place of desperate longing: dr solti: None of this is your fault, Amelia. I’m sorry if it means the

end of our friendship. Let me take you home. amelia: [gasping] No. Our scattered bones will all be knit together,

and the beasts and the birds and the worms will spew up every part of us they’ve eaten. And not a single hair will be lost, doctor. [emphatically, gesturing, face working] Do you know, not a single hair. In the DVD commentary, Toles remarks that ‘whatever other people’s take on the possible centre of the movie, that speech is emotionally the fullest, for me.’ What it articulates is a deeply human but terrible condition of wanting things that are quite impossible. The next time we see Amelia, she is on the point of losing her mind, or has lost it already. She is destroyed not by self-doubt or jealousy or paranoia (as Peter is), or the desire for freedom without responsibility (as Zephyr is), but by a sadder and quieter neurosis. It is the idea that everybody should start out with the same assets in life, a frustrated sense of entitlement that feels it unfair that she should be ineligible for the Doctor’s attentions by virtue of her lack of beauty, without any sense that Cain Ball, for instance, might logically have a similar claim vis-à-vis her. Amelia’s pain here is touching in a way that no one else’s in the film is, and does, as Toles asserts, represent a point of real depth in the film. Indeed it is more than touching. What is touching about it has partly to do – as in so many Maddin/Toles concoctions – with the innocence of the speaker, her unaffectedness, her simplicity and purity of emotion. But the vehemence of her feeling, which is strong to begin with in this scene and grows to a pitch of great distress, has a power that is rooted in existential despair, and by that fact climbs into the realm of the tragic. Her fixation on this insistence that God must right the fundamental injustice of life entirely possesses her here, overriding and ignoring all mere events (Peter’s torment, most notably), and establishes her mental state as one that is alarming not only because it shows her teetering on the edge of pathology but because it expresses a kind of all too recognizable horror at the way life actually is. When, later, Amelia is astonishingly found just whimpering under a pile of leaves at the place of Peter’s invocation of the forest, the film for a moment achieves a quiet pathos that is quite surprising – especially coming after the gleeful mania of her murderous assault on Cain Ball. And generally the film has this dimension of what we might call a liter-

140

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ary-philosophical realm. The question of those who feel they have been cheated in life, of those who defeat themselves through disabling inabilities to trust, those who are victimized, and those who are manipulators – these are all subjects of the film. Peter’s scarred wrists, the repeated reference to manacles and the scars they leave, are a suggestion, in a way, that life itself is a prison. This and Zephyr’s determined crusade for personal freedom are indications that the film is saying that existential freedom is unattainable, however much it is valued and attempted, and however much deluded individuals might feel they can simply insist on it. And it can also be said that at its climax the film – like Archangel and Careful – reaches for a realm of grand feeling to achieve a climax and seal to its journey, and tries to become big in affect. Cain Ball’s fevered hallucination, with its ship-of-fools theatrical staging and keening deluded emotional imperatives, is meant to rhyme with the dramatic, impossible existential demands of Zephyr. They both end in death and Juliana’s life’s wish in madness, while the ensuing farewells of Peter and Juliana represent a final answer to the quest of their relationship that is no less definitive and no less dark. If the film itself cannot attain this level, the script at least shows that it is there in intent. Finally, before we move on to a somewhat different focus, I would just like to point out that the kind of parsing of characters and themes and philosophical exposition that we have just been doing would be an impossible project in any of Maddin’s other films. It is Twilight’s solidity, seriousness, and straightforwardness, and its overtly poetic and philosophical method, that allow it – just as it is the wildness, extreme stylization, and incessant climate of absurdity that forbid it in the other films. In short, it is a demonstration of the differentness of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs that we can even do this. Dreaming The fantasy-place Mandragora is, as its name indicates, a land ruled by a drowsy opiate or something like it. What makes it different from our world is an atmosphere that creates strange psychological states. The clearest example of this is Peter’s propensity to slip unwillingly into a condition of dreaming or partial sleep, or else simply to black out. He often rubs his eyes to create a truly waking state where one seems not to exist, and the film helps us to share this circumstance with double exposures or screens of starry black skies or phosphorescent twinkles. Twice the film shows Peter aiming his musket, and then, at the moment of the

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

141

trigger’s pull, cuts suddenly to another scene where he is hunting in the forest. On the first occasion Peter remarks to his dog, ‘Well, Aesop, it seems I’ve been sleep-hunting again.’ The second occasion is prefaced by a vivid erotic dream of Peter’s in which Juliana is being impaled and buried by a hooded executioner. He tries to fire his gun backwards towards the tormentor, but cannot pull the trigger, and so she is pierced through the heart by a stake; when he does succeed in firing his gun, there is another abrupt cut away to a hunting scene. He complains of feeling faint, and once, as he and Zephyr are getting along famously, he just swoons dead away and wakes up in her bower, where she has carried him. In a gesture remarkably predictive of Cowards Bend the Knee, he stares repeatedly at his hands as if wondering whether they, and he, are really there – and right near the end of the film does so one marked, final time while lying on his back and leaning off the edge of a pier in the direction of Juliana’s departing ship. (This upside down and backwards view of an unreachable Juliana is replicated from Peter’s dream of her impalement and burial, and is an apt representation of his sense of disorientation and powerlessness regarding his love object.) In the first scene, the first encounter of Peter and Juliana on shipboard, the dialogue is half spoken with lip-synch and half as character voice-over where their mouths do not move, as if it were a purely mental conversation. Since whether a line appears in one state or the other seems almost arbitrary, the impression created is of a kind of dreamlike blurring of objective and psychological events. Similarly, later in the film there are a number of large, strongly marked stretches of parallel montage where aspects of the story appear in paired harness (the last, climactic example of many features Cain Ball, Amelia, and everyone else in the hallucinated boat, intercut with Zephyr’s final confrontation with the statue). In other words the dreamlike condition is not simply something that pertains to the characters or the depicted world: the film itself seems to be trying to create a Mandragoran effect on the viewer with these intertwining and boundary-destroying forms of narration. The proliferation of unrealistic events, ranging from the supernatural to the highly unusual, supports the effect, and of course the setting itself is always working to this end as well. The ever-present oppressive daylight, with its searchlight glare and its refusal of any place of cool, quiet reflection, is a principal expression of the emotional stress exerted by this world. (It is particularly hard on Peter, newly arrived from years in a dark prison cell.18) This is a place where anything can happen, where insinuating moods and strong emotions and obscure impulses all seem to swirl in the

142

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

atmosphere, where it is hard to know anything and hard, too, to avoid succumbing to your feelings. Certain characters – notably Dr Solti but perhaps also Juliana to a degree – seem to float above this world, to be able to command it rather than drowning in it, but since we know next to nothing about the motives and feelings of these two characters, it is difficult to say that with confidence, either. Paranoia, hysteria, violence What all the failures of the projects of desire show is that wherever love is – at least, wherever it is in this film – there is also distrust, paranoid suspicion, and destructive behaviour. In this the film resembles its Hamsun source, although the film’s exposition of the idea is more systematic and demonstrative. Peter, the movie’s protagonist, is the clearest and most exhaustive manifestation of this idea, but Amelia and Cain Ball are not too far behind. As Juliana tells Peter in the midst of their relationshipending fight (which follows directly upon their five-minute actual relationship), if he cannot trust her words and her actions there is nothing about her he can trust, for if Dr Solti can manipulate her at his will there is no possibility of belief. This amounts to a philosophical statement on the part of the film, and its assertion that people are unwilling to simply trust – and its observation also that trusting might indeed be unwise – simply adds weight to its sad conclusions. But the film has another dimension to attach to this one of melancholy failure: a dimension of boiling-over emotion that is expressed in demented mood surges and ultimately in physical violence. The paranoia of the hero’s attitude towards the woman he loves, and of his sister’s towards her hired man, has already been mentioned. The level of pain these characters suffer, self-inflicted or not, is enough to drive them wild at moments and to envelop them in a cloud of hysteria. Peter is driven to such distraction that he shoots himself in the foot with his musket, then smashes up Solti’s drawing room and attacks him with his own cane, and finally kills his devoted dog. Amelia, a gentler soul it would seem, perpetrates a horrifying homicidal attack on Cain Ball that surpasses every other brutality in the film. There is, moreover, a kind of background of violence in the narrative. Peter arrives in the film already bearing permanent scars on his wrists and has a very explicit sadistic-scenario dream about violence committed against Juliana, Cain Ball has had his manhood physically torn away, Solti is an amputee, Zephyr murders her husband, the statue of Venus commits bodily assault and manslaughter,

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

143

Cain Ball with nail in cranium (‘Jesus Christ, woman, I’m a redhead!’)

and there are those skulls of the two sisters. Peter’s wrists and his fixation on his hands invoke a Hands of Orlac scenario (something that returns far more explicitly in Cowards Bend the Knee), and he tells Zephyr of how they want to form themselves into claws, into weapons. Although the degree of violence is not at all unusual for a Maddin film, the fact that it is occurring in a more sober and stable narrative environment makes its effect different. At no point does Twilight of the Ice Nymphs resemble a cheap horror movie, as practically every Maddin feature film from Tales from the Gimli Hospital to Brand upon the Brain! is happy to do for at least a scene or two. Indeed the whole dimension of historical paraphrase or artistic necrophilia is absent here. Not just cheap horror movies, but most of Maddin’s other habitual artistic models – notably nineteenth-century melodrama, silent cinema and other older cinematic avatars, the avantgarde – are missing. And in this context hysteria and violence somehow take on a more sober mien as well, even if the film seems not quite to have a place for that sobriety, or rather seems to want still to conduct

144

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

itself according to the rules of a more madcap narrative environment even while inhabiting one that is less so. The same conditions apply to the inclusion of that other dimension of Maddin/Toles wildness, the domain of the absurd and the silly. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs has its share of preposterous moments, even if the proportion is lower than in other films. The omnipresence of ostriches – inherently ridiculous animals – in so many of the scenes at the farm is one example, as is the love-couch at Zephyr’s house, littered with stranded frogs and lobsters when the tide goes out after the literal flood of passion accompanying her and Peter’s lovemaking.19 There are plenty of silly details along the way, but Peter’s invocation of nature and Cain Ball’s nail in the head are probably the most extended and important examples. Certainly putting a nail into Cain Ball’s head has overtones of the Three Stooges (if not Tex Avery), and having him exclaim to Amelia, ‘Jesus Christ, woman, I’m a redhead!’ strikes the authentic Maddin/Toles note of crude iconoclastic comedy in the face of horror. And yet the film is constitutionally barred from reaching the slapstick-related level of Jannings’s disembowelment in Archangel or the cheap-and-potent Grand Guignol of Johann’s self-mutilations in Careful, and all the film’s deaths and maimings have an inherently greater weight simply because it is now not so easy to flatten and guy them in the familiar way. Moreover one has the sense that Twilight is not really benefited in any way by these japes, that they do not serve the vital function they do in Maddin’s other features. One wonders, too, what this film might be like without them. Castration anxiety Relations between men and women have always been dangerous in Maddin’s cinema, from the necrophilic rape of Tales from the Gimli Hospital through the multiple homicidal jealousies of Careful and on through other landscapes of rather extreme male-female violence in Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, Cowards Bend the Knee, and The Saddest Music in the World. Two of the three women characters in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs are murderers, and if we count the statue of Venus as another female quasi-character, then the count is three out of four. Zephyr and Amelia kill men close to them, while the statue assaults another male, Dr Solti. These homicidal women do not benefit very much from their violent victories: Zephyr is killed herself, and Amelia becomes catatonic. (In the Mérimée story ‘The Venus of Ille,’ even the statue is melted down after it has killed the offending male.20) It’s not that the men are particularly

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

145

guiltless or unwilling to engage in a fight with the other sex; it’s just that, apart from Solti, they don’t seem to be as good at it. Cain Ball’s strategy of undoing, in the most destructive way possible, all the unpaid chores he has done over the past years is a masterpiece of petty revenge, but Amelia’s response is always more violent, from the ostrich egg she smashes with a hammer into a sandwich for Cain Ball all the way to the nail, the immolation, and the flies. Peter too tries to be violent in response to his goading by Solti and what he perceives to be his betrayal by Juliana, but with only minimal effect on others. He simply smashes up Solti’s furniture and whacks him repeatedly on his false leg (twice, as he is being maniacally assaulted, the doctor helpfully tells him, ‘Wrong leg’). As for Solti, his victories in hurting people are only with those he cares nothing about; with the statue he too must be damaged. In general, this poor male success with violence is tied into a pattern that is all too familiar from Maddin’s cinema: male impotence and symbolic castration. In Twilight, Cain Ball’s castration is of course not even symbolic, and the spectacle of this character ‘nailed at both ends’21 is one of rather extensive and unrelieved humiliation. But Peter’s shot foot and Solti’s artificial leg are also very legible in this way, as legible as Boles’ damaged limb in Archangel. Peter suffers humiliation after humiliation at the hands of Solti and (Solti-programmed?) Juliana. As stupidly self-destructive as his behaviour during his second meeting with Juliana is, it is abundantly clear that Peter does feel himself choked and drowning in humiliation throughout. Even more striking, perhaps, are some of the details of his momentary dalliance with Zephyr. First, he faints and has to be carried by this woman to her dwelling, in a comic reversal of caveman romance. Then, after she has him installed in her lair and has stripped him and put him to bed and is drying his clothes, she persuades him into wearing her purple negligee. ‘What would my hunter look like dressed in dainties?’ she asks, and he responds, ‘I’ll be your bride.’ A fine, ridiculous spectacle he makes in this role. They turn then to loveplay, and she tells him of how as a little girl she had become sexually excited at the spectacle of the mating of a bull to a cow. The bull was ‘a sickly specimen’ and had trouble mounting the cow by itself, until helped by a young woman who took its member in her hand and guided it. This narration is taking place while something not totally different is happening between Zephyr and Peter, and the implication is that Peter, too, is perhaps a sickly specimen and needs help. Like Zephyr’s later scene with Solti, this one takes place while she looks into a mirror, with her male interlocutor behind her – an implication perhaps of the narcis-

146

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

sist or at least determinedly self-pleasing side of her character and her life-aims. After Zephyr has stated her intention to get her wedding ring back from the statue, what is a kind of muffled contest for dominance continues as follows: zephyr: I control my fate. peter: That [pregnant] belly of yours says something else. zephyr: What do you know about it? You can wear my clothes until

doomsday, but it won’t make you any more of a woman. Just less of a man. Inserted into this relationship that for Peter is always basically a distraction from his Grand Romance with the Idea of Juliana there is a strange and dissonant perspective of conflicted masochistic desire and a potentially humiliating power struggle. It is a perspective seen in different forms in a number of Maddin’s features, and very explicitly in Cowards Bend the Knee, where the hero once more possesses a pair of ‘manacled’ hands that are somehow connected to a dominant and sexually aggressive woman. Cowards presents in an overt and articulated way the picture of a swooning and surrendering male hero who disapproves of his own desire and finds it demeaning; in Twilight what we see is a fainter shadow of the same configuration. Peter’s epic (and endless-seeming) Invocation to Nature,22 pleading for every detailed variety of tree to ‘descend!’ ends, it is true, with some signal from Nature that It has heard him, but the expression is a mild, anti-phallic drooping of branches. During his dream of Juliana and the executioner, he keeps trying unsuccessfully to pull the trigger, a rather clear figuration of impotence. And when he finally does pull the trigger, his victims are himself (his foot), and his faithful dog. This last violent gesture is the film’s (as it is Hamsun’s novel’s) most pointed and forceful dramatization of its hero’s emotional pathology: his powerlessness, his rage, and the ugly and destructive nature of his impulsive actions. In the end, Peter’s is a comprehensive picture of masculine failure: in love, in sex, and in violence, and he assumes his place in line with the heroes of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful, Cowards Bend the Knee, and The Saddest Music in the World. Formal structures With its mandated basis of six characters, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs has

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

147

every reason to come back again to some of the formal structures that we have seen Maddin and Toles using in Archangel and Careful. A cluster of characters are interrelated with each other, like atoms in a molecule, to form a larger corporate group. The range of types is wide: from the most ‘primitive’ (Cain Ball) to the most sophisticated (Dr Solti), with a number of stations in between. And this range encompasses spectra from the plainest to the most mysterious, from the most artless to the most manipulative. The narrative unfolds an almost mathematical set of pairings: Peter with Juliana, Peter with Zephyr, Peter with Amelia; Juliana with Peter, Juliana with Solti; Zephyr with Peter, Zephyr with the statue; Amelia with Cain Ball, Amelia with Solti; Solti with Juliana, Solti with the statue – and so on. A practice of mix-and-match, parallelism, and instructive contrast among these pairings, and the addition of threesomes or foursomes to the list of possibilities, gives rise to a kind of abstract play of different characters and different character-positions. Put all these things together, and you have the conditions for the kind of quasi-philosophical meditation I referred to earlier, while its basic mechanism is to create a kind of rondelay of desire and disappointment. Then on a more ‘micro’ level, there is the reappearance of doubled or paralleled tropes. Although there is nothing approaching the systematic repetitions and revisitations of Archangel, there are the echoings of shipboard arrival at the beginning and departure at the end, the repetition of Juliana’s important speech beginning ‘The first time we met,’ the doubling of Peter’s wrist-manacle scars with Zephyr’s self-imposed symbolic forest-manacles, the deliberate visual paralleling at different times of Juliana and Zephyr with the statue of Venus. At the same time, this profusion of symbolic patterns and abstractions, this play of parallels and echoings, is taking place within a context ruled to some degree by the magical, the mysterious, and the supernatural. The entire picture is not completely distant from what we find in, say, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or perhaps a strange later ‘comedy’ such as The Winter’s Tale, and there is indeed an attempt, I would say, to achieve some ruling viewpoint of wise detachment of the kind found in the most serious comedy. The film’s combination of this rather contemplative position with its in other ways wholehearted Romanticism, or Symbolism, is very unusual. Tone and dialogue Earlier Maddin films clearly signalled the wish to engage in a kind of heightened diction of language, a parallel to their models of heightened

148

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

visual rhetoric. The early title card invoking Mount Askja in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, the narration accompanying the Illumination in Archangel, and the many high-flown passages of dialogue in Careful are examples of this tone of voice. As we have seen, this big, serious, sometimes stentorian register exists in those earlier films in precarious cohabitation with a perspective of ridicule and anarchic silliness. The situation is not entirely dissimilar from the one in the Strauss/Hoffmansthal opera Ariadne auf Naxos, where the sublime and tragic outpourings of the classical heroine must try to impose themselves in the midst of a troupe of Italian theatrical entertainers who dance, juggle and sing showy tunes. In Maddin’s films, the rhetorically pure and noble always has to struggle mightily to survive and impose itself against scepticism, mischievousness, and fear of failure, and this strange struggle is one of the central elements giving his work its distinctive flavour. In Twilight of the Ice Nymphs the balance is crucially different. There is still a degree of absurdity and silliness, but, again, it is diminished and never really a ruling element. In conjunction with the more sober representation of psychology and philosophy, the language is more overtly, and less self-parodyingly, poetic – as well as being more extensive altogether. Take, for example, the first dialogue interchange of the movie, between Peter and Juliana on the ship bringing them to Mandragora. Here is an extended sample: juliana: Mandragora. There is no night there now. Daylight shouts in

your ear. Did night-time hold you down by the wrists? Where did you get those bracelet-scars? peter: Prison. Prison. Prison ... juliana: You have the look of a cornered animal, very menacing. Did you go mad? And what now? Now that you’re free. peter: Home. To Mandragora. juliana: Oh. peter: What, do you know it? juliana: There is no night there now. It is so strange a place at this time of year, when the sun never quite leaves the sky. One keeps dreaming of the darkness, and wondering where it’s hiding. peter: I love the sounds of the long white nights. When you can hear the mountains, the forest, and the sea, whispering to each other. juliana: That’s for quiet people. I’m too restless. I dream of being lost in a cloud so thick that I could kiss a total stranger without either of us seeing each other. That’s what I miss when the sun won’t go down – being kissed in the dark.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

149

peter: I’ll tell you something strange. See these hands? [holds them

out] In the dark, with chains on, they were my lover’s face. Sometimes I’d hook them to the wall, so my mouth could barely reach them. Every tender image I could hold onto, I would try and see in the shape of my hands. And if I so much as breathed on them, they would tremble, and open for me. [his hands open] juliana: Are these hands wild or gentle after so much love? peter: They still have their secrets. juliana: Perhaps if we meet again I shall dare to kiss one. peter: Please, don’t laugh at me for asking you this, but am I imagining you? juliana: What would be wrong with that? peter: You seem very young. Have you had many lovers? juliana: Already you’re trying to tame me? peter: No. juliana: [her lips don’t move] It would be horrible, you know. If you let yourself turn out ordinary. peter: In prison I kept myself alive by clutching every ordinary memory for dear life. juliana: Yes. But aren’t you tired of thinking like a prisoner? How about thinking like a criminal again? I want to point out again that there is no dialogue scene anything like this one (or a dozen others) in any other Maddin film. At times it is quasiconversational (‘What, do you know it?’), at times rhapsodic (‘you can hear the mountains, the forest, and the sea, whispering to each other’), at times loudly metaphorical (‘Daylight shouts in your ear’), at times lyrically poetic (‘Are these hands wild or gentle after so much love?’), at times Romantic in a rather courtly way (‘Perhaps if we meet again I shall dare to kiss one’), at times extensively explanatory (‘See these hands?’), at times almost formally clever (‘How about thinking like a criminal again?’), and throughout rather elaborately, high-stylishly flirtatious. There just isn’t room for so much verbal substance, or for that much verbal decoration, in most Maddin films. One can clearly hear the echo of the Tolesian vocabulary and metaphor cabinet from the other projects he has contributed to, but this is a unique experience of it in its entire expanse. And so it goes throughout the film. At times – and I would say that Amelia’s speech about what ought to happen at the Last Judgment is a particularly good example – this program allows for a truly striking moment, a kind of creative achievement that Maddin’s cinema ordinarily

150

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

does not even try for, let alone achieve. But at other times it can have the effect of dragging the scene under like waterlogged clothing, sitting too heavily on a frame that is not three-dimensionally solid enough to bear its weight. Cast and performance The casts of Maddin’s feature films of the 1990s indicate the rise of his reputation. Archangel’s cast (like that of Tales from the Gimli Hospital) was all local, and mostly personal acquaintances of the director’s. Careful imported Gosia Dobrowolska and Paul Cox from Australia, the former a fine Polish professional whose film career had been almost entirely confined to Australia and much of it as a leading performer for Cox, and the latter of course an internationally known filmmaker who made the occasional onscreen appearance. Now for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, almost the whole cast has some history and profile outside Maddin’s cinema. The two Americans, Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin, are not exactly big stars, but both are widely recognized and both have had their time in the sun. Alice Krige’s movie career has been perhaps rather specialized in ways that are somewhat puzzling, given her great talents, but she certainly made a big impression in a couple of parts, and her work in theatre in Britain has been extensive and impressive. Pascale Bussières is a star in Quebec, and to a lesser extent in the wider French-speaking world, though almost unknown to English-speaking audiences. R.H. Thomson is a highly respected actor from Ontario with a very long list of Canadian film credits and a lot of distinguished work in theatre. The hero’s part went to Nigel Whitmey, a young western Canadian actor. But the producers, and also to an extent Maddin, were seriously unhappy with his line readings, and in post-dubbing his voice was replaced by that of Ross McMillan, a Winnipegger who also appears briefly and silently as Zephyr’s husband Matthew. Whitmey was understandably upset by this action, and had his name removed from the film.23 The multinational, multi-accented potpourri of performers was something that Maddin actively sought, moving further along a path he had already embarked upon in Careful, his model again the uninhibited unlikelinesses of cast accents in Sternberg’s Scarlet Empress.24 Marrying this polyglot cast to Toles’ extensive, musical, and ‘decadent’ dialogue was a kind of experiment, especially for a director who, on his own testimony, had neither a lot of experience nor a lot of expertise in dialogue direction. Sometimes the experiment works, but in many instances, I have

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

151

to say, it doesn’t. Take that first Peter/Juliana scene, quoted at length above. There are a number of problems with this scene, but Bussières’ French-Canadian accent creates an effect of awkwardness rather than exoticism, and can’t encompass the dreamy intensity the words require, and McMillan, though his relative blankness is definitely a better fit, can’t really weave a spell either. Although they both have their moments later in the film, especially McMillan, the unhappy pattern is not seriously disturbed. The next pair, Duvall and Gorshin, produce an equally bumpy ride. Duvall’s unaffected, down-home approach is always looking to be natural and idiomatic in dialogue that is neither. She does rise beautifully to the climax of her role – and perhaps of the film – in her ‘Last Judgment’ speech, where her simple earnestness is very touching. Elsewhere she often seems to be doing pretty well at the wrong job. I confess to finding Gorshin’s very presence intolerably grating most of the time. His performance is abrasive well beyond the demands of the role: his harsh barking of dialogue itself like a rusty nail screeching over slate, and his constant vocal fidgeting, facial mugging, and endless pieces of business irritating in this world that always needs at least some degree of actorly decorum. The last two actors, Krige and Thomson, show at last what the potential of the script is. Krige alone has the sensuous singing vocal tone, the mysterious intensity, the unerring instinct for pitch and rhythm that are required. She is never even slightly bothered, let alone thrown off course, by any of the variety of strangenesses the film throws at her. Crooning erotically at Peter or dressing him down (or up), making pleas to or demands of the statue, negotiating with Solti or communing with her own reflection and memories, vigorously plying a shovel – in all situations she is right at home. Thomson, playing the role of a detached cynic who however still has some curiosity and existential appetite left, has perhaps a less unorthodox task to perform than the other actors, but he is quite splendid, striking exactly the right dry, artificial note with his not quite 100% accent, his fake politeness, and his stance of witty disengagement and cool didacticism. Looking at Bussières in some of her close-ups – above all the ones we get while she is mesmerised – one sees exactly what Maddin found right about her. There, her loveliness looks incredibly exotic and strange, like that of a beautiful alien creature, or an unknowable goddess: exactly right. But as she struggles through dialogue scenes in her sometimes heavy and difficult to understand Québecois accent, and takes her place in group shots with rather prosaic effect, she can’t sustain herself on that

152

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Juliana mesmerized by Dr Solti.

plateau, or rather the film can’t sustain her there. Meanwhile Krige is actually suffering from too much refinement: her cultivated RADA-trained voice with its educated English accent isn’t exactly right for a fisherman’s wife, and, when it is set next to Bussières’ more demotic dialect in a princesslike role, it has the effect of reversing the intended social classes of the two characters, and unbalancing the movie. Bussières tends to sound stiff and empty when uttering a difficult but typical line like: Then it can be our place. And it’s me you’ll have in your thoughts when you see these white flowers opening at night.

By contrast, Krige sounds perfectly in command with an equally difficult passage such as: I look at her and I can hardly pull myself away. I want to stand there for hours. And it seems my whole life is dissolving the more I stare.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

153

These complications make it hard for the film to do what it is trying to do in the Peter/Juliana scenes, especially the later ones, while Gorshin’s crudely lilting delirium in his dying hallucination interferes materially with the ability of the collective boat-piloting enactment to form a proper culmination. It is not fair to blame shortcomings in performance entirely for the film’s lack of success in rising to the Archangel and Careful final level of climactic feeling, but they are definitely part of the problem. On the whole one might have cause to regret the passing of what I think of as the Kyle McCulloch / Sarah Neville / Victor Cowie regime of actors in Maddin’s cinema – a regime essentially captured in Archangel and Careful, though present also in Gimli Hospital (where, however, acting doesn’t seem to matter so much). This troupe, which also includes other members like Michael Gottli, Brent Neale, and Michael O’Sullivan taking important roles, essentially disappeared from Maddin’s work following Careful, except for one last glorious appearance of Cowie in Cowards Bend the Knee. Their level of professional skill in a different kind of drama can’t be properly estimated on the basis of their appearance in Maddin’s work, and one can understand why Telefilm Canada, or Alliance, or anybody else trying to guide Maddin into making a more mainstream kind of cinema would have preferred anybody with a reputation outside Winnipeg to any of those actors. How wrong such an impulse was – and Maddin seems even to have shared it to some degree – is attested by the way Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is so often unable to reach, no matter how often the script calls for it, that dream state which is as good a description as any for Maddin’s filmic world. In retrospect that condition of ‘delirium,’ called for by Maddin on the set as virtually the only acting direction he gave (so he reports25), can be recognized as a beneficent fog enabling the filmmaker’s unique surreal world where every creative impulse, no matter how superficially impossible and discordant, can flower. ‘Delirium’ is a necessary suspension that allows anything to happen. Absurdities and contradictions can arise in that soup of the unconscious, in that lifting off of the requirements of rationality and reality, that return to a childhood freedom of imagination unshackled by adult boundaries and definitions. McCulloch’s delivery of Toles’ dialogue is a demonstration that if you become hypnotized and zombified all things become possible. It may even be the case that the resulting ridiculousness of everything in the movie is a kind of guarantee of this state of transportation and divine madness, and a reason, therefore, why Maddin keeps insisting on it. (For Toles it is perhaps rather different. The state of topsy-turvydom is, as in his key-text Melville’s Pierre, a harsh evidence

154

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

of the impossibility of everything, the necessity for the Romantic project to come spectacularly to grief and to leave behind jagged incongruous shards in evidence of its smash-up.) In any event one of the enablers of this precious and difficult to achieve state for Maddin is the universal ‘degradation’ – of image, of sound, in every aspect of production primitiveness and poverty – a muffling and quasi-throttling condition which forces/allows the film back into something like the womb.26 And that crucial condition is warred on by many aspects of the production set-up of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, including its cast of well- or at least better-known actors reciting acres of coherent dialogue. Subsequently, of course, Maddin fled back to that womb: Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a silent film, and so is Cowards Bend the Knee, while Brand upon the Brain! has narration but no dialogue, and none of them has anything like a movie star in the cast. (Just to finish the thought, The Saddest Music in the World represents a fairly successful compromise, in which most of the imported actors manage to integrate pretty well into the exotic Maddin/Toles world, rather as Gosia Dobrowolska and Paul Cox did in Careful. My Winnipeg, of course, is something else.) The look 35mm But we have postponed for too long any discussion of what is, in the context of Maddin’s cinema, the film’s most startling feature: its look. Twilight represents the first, and so far the last, time that he has ever worked in 35mm film – the standard format for movies worldwide. All of his previous films had been shot on the smaller format, 16mm. One might think that 35mm, with its much greater refinement and solidity, wider visual range, and bigger scale, would be a bonanza for a filmmaker as visually grounded as Maddin, and in particular a filmmaker whose visual rhetoric has so often sought for the full-blooded lyricism of high silent cinema, and whose avowed masters include such sovereign practitioners of 35mm cinematography as Murnau, Sternberg, Dreyer, and Ophuls. How, really, can a film achieve the photographic opulence and ravishing visual refinement of a Sunrise or a Scarlet Empress without using 35mm? Yet this one foray into the field, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, was followed by a reversion to 16mm, then, amazingly, to 8mm (and finally even, in one short film, to cell phone), in a kind of headlong format shrinkage.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

155

The distributor had certainly expressed a preference for 35mm, and the debate over 35 versus 16 descended to a subcommittee comprised of the producer, the cinematographer, and Maddin, where Maddin found himself outvoted.27 It is perhaps not unlikely that, as reluctant as the director was to abandon 16mm, he might have felt at least some curiosity and even excitement about working in 35, as long as he was going to be dragged into it. In the end, though, he found that although the format did pay the expected visual dividends, the complications attending it were so troublesome as to seriously interfere with his usual creative activity. To begin with, the 35mm camera is bigger and bulkier than its smallformat cousins, and lighting set-ups are more complicated and slower. So individual camera set-ups require much more preparation and individual shots are more complicated to get, as well as being more expensive all around. More care and time have to go into every shot, the whole shooting process becomes more ponderous, and risk-taking becomes more dangerous. Spontaneity and improvisation go out the window, to be replaced by storyboards and more intensive and irreversible planning. Equally problematic for Maddin’s practice is the very quality that everyone likes about 35mm – its resolving power. All other things being equal, everything in a 35mm shot is more solid, more exact and actual, than in a smaller format: there is just more information, you get what you shoot, whether you want it or not. Moreover the director felt that the apparatus, and the whole tenor of this production’s shift to bigger and more mainstream means, was going to expose all the weaknesses of his lack of training. He wrote in his journal during pre-production: If these people, Telefilm, Alliance, etc., had simply listened to me when I tried to explain how I took a shortcut 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 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. Now they want to make me pass muster at the front door, where I must check my bag.28

The 35mm format inherently goes against not only Maddin’s ‘garageband cinema’ ethic, but also (and this is visible perhaps only in retrospect) his whole realm of fantasy-invention. We have seen how, in the

156

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

creation of nineteenth-century Gimli in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, of 1919 Arctic Russia in Archangel, of a Romantic Alpine Neverland in Careful, the primitiveness and ‘inadequacy’ of the physical production were woven completely into the aesthetic fabric of the films; how the real triumphs of visual lyricism and poetry there were inextricable from the technical simplicity of their realization; how the cheaper and simpler visual tools of silent cinema could be remarried to the cultural and aesthetic innocence and power of that model; and how the process of battered and ‘degraded’ visuals could express the pathos of a lost, precious object. Now, in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, this entire realm is gone, or at least crucial aspects of it are. No more scratches, blurred focus, hairs in the projector gate, egregious crackle on the soundtrack; no more irised and vignetted shots, extensive multiple exposures, intertitles, selective silence, or part-talkie procedures. And no more papier-mâché sets and props and costumes showing off their handmadeness in a simultaneous comedy sketch send-up and heartfelt display of over-innocence in every dimension. Instead, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs offers a more coherent and less always-already-compromised effort to produce a fantasy world, and the 35mm format is a powerful component of that new direction. Sets, props, costumes Still, Maddin is intent on producing a world that is 100% imagined – Mandragora, with its eternal daylight, its forests, lakes, ostrich farms, tide-houses, palaces, and its odd inhabitants. The budget for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs was bigger than Maddin was used to, but there is still an immense distance between the conditions of this film and those of Maddin’s models – for example, Murnau’s Sunrise at Fox in 1927 or Sternberg’s Scarlet Empress at Paramount in 1934. Murnau could build a whole village and swamp for one half of his movie, a whole city fairground for the other, and a whole railway spur just to get one shot; and Sternberg could fill the Paramount soundstages with gigantic doorways, acres of mural-painted walls and individually carved statuary, and an entire palace painted white and decorated with antler bones. Maddin had been used to paraphrasing effects like these on a super-cheapened scale. With Twilight, he was moving from the realm of the super-cheap to the realm of the cheap, and also moving from a heavily fogged and grained-up and variously ‘degraded’ 16mm to a far more straightforward and revealing 35mm format. To design this film, then, would require not only a new visual approach but a new strategy for achieving epic effects with sub-

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

157

epic resources. Maddin’s own dissatisfaction with the way things went on Twilight – discernible particularly in Caelum Vatnsdal’s interview book Kino Delirium and Noam Gonick’s documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (made during the shooting of the film) – stemmed in part from this combination of a too-revealing medium (35mm) and a too-compromised-for-that-medium production design. To Vatnsdal he said: I wanted to shoot on 16mm, just like all my other movies. There was a quaintness in the kind of artifice that the movie needed which wouldn’t survive the degree of detail revealed in 35mm. And there’s a style of acting for 16 that would seem out of place on 35. I thought that the money it would take to shoot in 35mm should have gone into the art department.29

In 2005, he told me: You’re shooting a 16mm art department in 35mm, and props and backdrops and sets that are charming under low resolution conditions all of a sudden become kitschy when they’re seen in sharp focus.

And talking to Vatnsdal about Max Ophuls’ episode-film Le Plaisir (1952), he mused: Unbelievable décors. I loved the dance hall set in the first story and wanted it for the inside of Dr Solti’s palace in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. With all the cost compromises it turned into something not related at all. It only takes three compromises or so, and you end up with something like a dog house with a whistle on the top.30

In the DVD commentary, as he and Toles are discussing the first shipboard meeting of Peter and Juliana, Maddin remarks that this is a world ‘where people sail around in boats that look like Caramilk bars’ – a reference to the gold-paper fronting for the ship’s bulkhead seen behind the two actors. (My own reaction to this scene is, I’m afraid, even more irreverent: with its gold paper and rhinestones and yellow chiffon drapery and, especially, its gold railing-poles, it reminds me of a strip-club set.) And there are other instances of design that the filmmaker himself has expressed some disappointment with.31 And yet the designs are strikingly successful in many areas of the film. The many forest settings are all very evocative, the sky backdrops offer

158

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

wonderful opportunities for colour design, and the costumes work very well at least half the time. It is true that Juliana, in her cyan chiffony short skirts, magenta feather boa, and Second Empire upswept hairdo with prominent temple-curls and streaks of red, looks rather like Symbolist Barbie (although perhaps the intention was something closer to the Greek mythological heroines of Louÿs’s Twilight of the Idols). But Zephyr’s lovely yellows, greens, and ochres are winning, the design stroke of her and Peter’s Papageno/Papagena leaf costumes is highly successful, and Solti’s eighteenth-century pigtail and frock coat say exactly what needs to be said about him. Solti’s palace, despite Maddin’s critique, is a perfectly workable design, especially when by the strange yellow light coming in through the windows. Amelia’s elaborate butter-yellow costume for the outing with Solti is bizarrely pretentious and very ugly, but that is doubtless its intention, since it perfectly expresses how her efforts to impress him will always appear as ridiculous and pathetic. There is no constant sprinkling of potato-flake snow in Twilight, as there is in Archangel or Careful (and so many of Maddin’s subsequent films), but Maddin achieves the same effect with numerous flurries of bullrush spores, glowingly back- or side-lit in the eternal yellow daylight and floating luminously through the air in a most beautiful way. There are many individual scenes that are masterfully designed – Peter’s dream of Juliana’s execution, for example, or the ridge-top scenes featuring the statue and its suppliants, with glorious sky backdrops. Even when, as with the aquamarine polythene love-couch-and-sheets for the coupling of Zephyr and Peter, there is that sense that the result falls too far short of the opulence that is intended, the effect is often vivid and interesting. Colour and lighting If you look at almost any shot in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs in isolation – separated, that is, from the characters and story and dialogue, and from John McCulloch’s musical score32 – the chances are it will create an arresting impression. The colour palette is simply extraordinary. Gustave Moreau may have been the most conscious model for Maddin, but the strong, vibrating colours of other Romantic and Symbolist painters, from Delacroix to Odilon Redon to Maxfield Parrish, come to mind as well. Such energetic and glowing yellows and greens; such bold accents and unexpected shades of blues, oranges, magentas, purples, golds; such uninhibited, exuberant overtures to the eye. This film looks like no other

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

159

in history, for the models are utterly transformed, and there is (unlike Maddin’s earlier and later films) no effort to revivify an earlier cinematic visual tradition, nor are there any modernist or avant-garde gestures in the cinematography. As a filmic bow to ‘decadent’ nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle painters, it draws on those inspirations without calling specific attention to them. Its experimentation with striking and unusual colour combinations, its picking out of startling hues, seems even to echo the decadent pains taken by Louÿs’s protagonist in À Rebours to arrange his visual environment in a determinedly artificial and completely ravishing way. As Peter and Amelia look out over the forest across a verdant barrier, the sky behind them is light magenta and purple. Peter in his hunter’s blind is surrounded by vegetation that the sun has turned a vibrant bright yellow – although the sky is still that light purple colour. The forest ridge near the Venus statue is backed by a succession of glorious sky-scapes that run a wide gamut of colour ranges from pastel blues and pale yellows to massive organ-stop notes of throbbing purple, orange, and yellow. Zephyr’s bower brings aquamarine blues and greens, Peter’s ‘invocation’ scene a tree-scape of deep oranges, ochres, and browns, Zephyr’s murder-flashback is in Expressionist dark blue with a Sunriseswamp lavender moon glaring out of the sky, while her final demands of the statue are drenched in magenta. And so on. These colour strokes are far removed from the soft and gentle two-colour effects in Careful. Mandragora’s eternal daylight becomes an invitation to create a range of bright worlds where the sun is often seen staring in the background sky, where the light has a pulsating quality that seems actually to create the hues that are so remarkable. Many shots, too, are playing with the placement of faces and bodies in light or shadow in a real chiaroscuro manner whose tone is, again, quite different from that of Maddin’s black and white films. As the story moves towards its end, the daylight at last begins to fade, and, as with any visual tool whose use has been eschewed for a whole film, the introduction of darker tones, shadows, and higher contrasts on the screen has a big and weighty visual impact. (Incidentally, the arrival of darkness brings none of the relief from an importunate, oppressive, inescapable daylight such as the one Maddin and Toles both describe in the DVD commentary; instead it brings the usual associations of bad endings and the death of things.) In any event, whatever problems the film might not have overcome, and whatever disappointments it might have occasioned for its director, Twilight’s visual world is surely a

160

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

thing of value. But Maddin has even distanced himself to an extent from this aspect of the film. He remarked to me in 2005: Don’t get me wrong. Some of it I thought was beautiful looking [...] 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 when I learned that 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, really.

It is difficult, though, to think that so much invention in the area of colour was achieved without an investment from the filmmaker. The film’s ‘prettiness’ (too tame a word) is emphatically not that of so many pretty, vapid films, where an all-purpose gorgeous look is just laid on top of the story. In such cases it is true that to say of a movie that it looks good is no particular compliment. To say of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs that it looks beautiful in a way no other film ever has is not quite the same thing. As I started out by saying, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is something of an anomaly in Maddin’s output. Production circumstances, creative procedures, experiments were undertaken there that have not been repeated. Like the pressure to use performers with bigger reputations and the pressure to work on scripts that weren’t so weird, the pressure to use 35mm and full colour seems to have issued from an institutional desire to get Maddin to be a regular grown-up filmmaker making regular grown-up movies instead of a precocious kid playing around in his backyard with home-made toys and strange, self-indulgent, somehow immature ideas. It would be normal for a major Canadian distributor like Alliance to think this way, less reasonable but still sadly familiar for a state body like Telefilm Canada whose constitutional aim is not particularly to foster a good Canadian cinema, but simply an economically viable actual one. It is not too surprising that a producer and a cinematographer (understandably eager to get a 35mm film on his resumé) might also think along these lines. Maddin too is aware that this is probably a sine qua non for an economically rewarding career, and conceivably even for any kind of sustained career at all. He is not nested within a gallery and museum exhibition world, and he does not have a true high-art relation with the grant-giving bodies, so that a career such as Michael Snow’s is not really possible no matter how much good press Maddin gets from the most discerning critics. And of course he is a very poor fit for main-

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

161

stream venues, and often not that much better for art-house venues. His films, one cannot repeat this too often, fit no category. He has not closed the door on 35mm, and he is completely credible when he says that he learned very much from his experience on Twilight and that in any future 35mm production he would not undergo the same kinds of creative problems he felt on this project. Still, he has moved resolutely in the opposite direction. George Toles’ relatively unreconstructed script also fulfils a wish that I confess I have sometimes had regarding the work he and Maddin have done: namely, to forsake the instinctual silliness and the destructive irony and scepticism that are so pervasive in most of their work and go simply for a more rhetorically direct art – an art that will try to preserve the impulses of lyricism and the grander diction of earlier cultural forms, but without that element of ridicule that acts both as life preserver and enemy. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs essentially does all that. The wackiness quotient is considerably down (if hardly gone), and the scepticism is completely absent. The poetic worlds of a Knut Hamsun or a Pierre Louÿs, the aesthetic worlds of a Gustave Moreau or a KarlJoris Huysmans, are able to exert their influence without being set into quotation marks or pastiched or presented as impossible. As a result, the ‘literary’ aspirations of the script especially are more extensive than anywhere else in Maddin’s oeuvre, and the kinds of subjects it addresses, and the detail they are addressed in, are deeper, more complex, more integral. This form, new to Maddin and requiring a certain bravery from both creators, brought problems that overlapped with those attached to the 35mm/full-colour machine – namely, a lot more dialogue, a different kind of cast, and a need to direct actors in a different way. From this more literary model, too, Maddin has moved away in subsequent production. Except for The Saddest Music in the World (and the ‘documentary’ projects My Dad Is 100 Years Old and My Winnipeg), all of his later films have gotten rid of dialogue completely, and their general aesthetic set has moved back into Maddin’s home territory, with its dazzling and teetering dialectic or schizophrenia of detachment and immersion. Probably there were just too many variables changing at the same time for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs to be a real artistic success. It has a polish that far surpasses Tales from the Gimli Hospital or some parts of Archangel. But the sense persists that things just don’t quite come together in the film. The script and the directorial imagination seem to be working in different directions, the 35mm is unhappy with the production design even as it is achieving new kinds of beauty. The film is fascinating for

162

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the avenues it opens into, for example, what a real George Toles movie might be like, or what Maddin’s aesthetic might do with a 35mm visual base. Twilight isn’t entirely the answer to either of those questions, but at the very least it is an interesting failure.

6

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002)

I needed to open up Dracula because when a ballerina needs to tell a boy ballet dancer that she loves him she needs about the space of a football field worth of dance floor to say it. And I realized that the sets couldn’t be claustrophobic unless I could figure out ways to capture the motion breaking it up and using smaller pieces and composing them like a David Hockney. And also even more frightening was the fact that dancers can only dance about six hours a day [...] so you have to get everything in one or two takes. Which is fine with me because I like moving quickly. So that was when I started covering it kind of like a sporting event. With two or three or four cameras going at once, getting it from a number of angles. – Guy Maddin1

Maddin’s prize-winning 2000 short The Heart of the World 2 may have been as exhilarating for him as it was for his viewers. Both the experience of setting off in new creative directions and the universal enthusiasm that greeted this jeu probably helped to elevate the director from the trough he seemed to be in following the less than perfectly happy experience of making Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. But where his next feature film would come from was hazy for quite a while. Then there arrived an invitation from Winnipeg producer Vonnie Von Helmolt to direct a television version of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s acclaimed production of Dracula for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Maddin’s first reaction was negative, since he had neither a particular love for ballet nor any experience in bringing stage productions to the screen, but for a variety of reasons he decided to take it on. And then it turned into a wholly positive experience for him, and ended up in a production that not

164

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

only succeeded in its original mandate as television arts programming but actually made the leap to theatrical exhibition. The resulting film, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, is of all Maddin’s features the one most without viewer difficulties, buried knots of creative contradiction, startling heterogeneities of tone and action, and all the other ‘problems’ that have made Maddin’s work such a minority taste. It is nothing like a normal movie, but then since it is a filmed ballet nobody thinks it is going to be. And as a filmed ballet, whatever canons of fidelity to the original staged performance it may be offending against, it utterly avoids anything static or simply documentary. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet production dated from 1998, and it had been a great success for the company both in Winnipeg and on tour. (It continues to be so – I saw it on tour as recently as the summer of 2007.) The stage production’s running time of two hours needed to be cut back into a 75-minute television slot, and there were some additions that Maddin wanted to make, so a good deal of the original choreography had to be omitted or compressed and the scene construction sometimes altered as well. Choreographer Mark Godden was an integral part of the filming process, however, and what emerged can justly be called a reimagining of the stage production for a new medium. The budget was a startlingly large $1.7 million, though of course the RWB fee was a considerable part of that. Shooting took place over a twenty-day period, on sets built in ‘an abandoned mattress factory, a block north of where I shot Archangel.’3 (Every Maddin feature made in Winnipeg has been set in an abandoned something-or-other – corollary evidence for the city’s apparently endless economic decline as lamented in My Winnipeg.) After screenings on CBC television, it won an ‘International Emmy,’ and subsequently played theatres in the United States and elsewhere. Given the degree of creative freedom that Maddin was granted, the idea seems in retrospect a natural one. For every ballet adaptation is in effect a silent film with music, and to loose Maddin into a project that was in this way required to be a silent film, and on a subject dating from and set in the late nineteenth century more or less at the time of cinema’s birth, now seems simply inspired. And the sensibility of Bram Stoker’s novel is rooted in that same fin de siècle as so many of the director’s other literary enthusiasms, even if Stoker is essentially trying to ward off exactly the aspects of the period represented by the more decadent artists Maddin admires (he states baldly that he hated Stoker’s novel).4 The Dracula subject matter, with its period sexual transgression and violence, its melodramatic and gothic elements, its hysteria both muffled

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

165

and overt, and its rich possibilities for subtextual mining, could present itself to the filmmaker as a field already half-ploughed. He did first have to resist assumptions that the production should be filmed in HDTV colour, and insisted instead on 16mm (and sometimes even 8mm) black and white film with silent-film-style whole-frame toning and some handcolouring of specific details. The result returns to the image world of Maddin’s earlier silent film recreations, and also, with the renewed presence of deco dawson as editor and associate director, carries over some of the dynamism and montage energy of The Heart of the World. As with that short film, the response to Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary has been uniform and very positive. The ballet Godden’s ballet, a beautiful and often thrilling piece of work in its own right, divides the story into two parts. The first concentrates on Lucy Westenra and her three suitors, her ‘infection’ by Dracula whom she has in some way welcomed as a sexual visitor, the arrival of the vampire expert Dr Van Helsing, her quasi-demonic possession, and finally her death at the hands of the pike-wielding men, and the decapitation of her corpse by Van Helsing (her severed head is displayed for all to view as a kind of curtain-tableau at the end of the first act). The second act then tells the story of Mina Murray, her fiancé Jonathan Harker, and her attempted seduction by Dracula. The backstory of Harker’s encounter with Dracula and his three succubi in Transylvania (which forms the beginning of the novel) is reduced to the barest of skeletons, with his diary and its tales of unholy sexual debauchery the only remaining elements. Mina’s temporary habitation in a convent, her greater piety (greater, that is, than Lucy’s), and the intervention of the vampire hunters (Van Helsing and Lucy’s three suitors), lead to a final scene where Dracula and the imperilled Mina are tracked to the Count’s sepulchral castle, and an extended balletic combat ensues, at the conclusion of which Dracula is defeated and impaled on a pike. Godden’s scenario has made some obvious changes to Stoker’s original story, including the separate presentation of Lucy and Mina each in a different act (in the novel, they are best friends and interact a good deal with each other in the first part of the story),5 and the invention of an extended combat between Dracula and the vampire hunters at the end. The reading of the story is firmly in the revisionist camp where Dracula is interpreted not simply as a monstrous fiend, as in Stoker, but

166

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

as a far more ambiguous and even sympathetic figure. This interpretation has for some years now been so strong that such revisionism is more the norm than a deviation, and the Dracula legend itself so de-fanged, as it were, that it is a Halloween favourite in primary-school classrooms and the Count can appear regularly on Sesame Street. The RWB Dracula certainly has some sinister characteristics, but he is presented as a powerfully attractive figure, and in particular as a figuration of female sexual desire in the context of Victorian male hysteria and repressive need to control women. So not only is Dracula beautiful, strong, and graceful, he is also tender and his mastery a kind of mirror of feminine desire. Meanwhile the suitors, fiancés, and professional experts are alarmed by the unseemly appetites of the young women, to the point where the women’s expression of sexual desire is taken for madness and demonic possession, and they need to be killed. In addition, the anxiety Dracula provokes is a byproduct of his Otherness in cultural and racial terms. Stoker’s novel dwells pointedly on Dracula’s origins in an Eastern Europe that is frighteningly unknown and believed to have access to primitive and irrational forces forgotten by Western Europe, while one of the principal dancers of the Dracula role – and the one used in Maddin’s film – was, happily, an Asian man, Wei-Qiang Zhang. The ballet’s presentation of Dracula as a kind of projection of female sexual desire is quite straightforward and far more articulate than Stoker’s, as is its sympathy for the liberatory project of a free feminine expression of feeling, while its critique of a white male social establishment that reacts to this project with hysteria and oppressive violence lies very close to the surface. It would not be inaccurate, I think, to call Godden’s Dracula loosely feminist, multicultural, and (using the term in a non-pejorative way) politically correct. The music chosen was from Mahler’s First, Second, and Ninth Symphonies, not necessarily whole movements but good long unedited chunks. It is not a source that would have sprung to just anyone’s mind, and there is perhaps even something counterintuitive about using Mahler’s often idealistic music in this way. But it was nevertheless a splendid choice, for other aspects of the music fit extremely well. Its fin-de-siècle Romanticism is contemporary for the period; its strong dramatic gestures can be adapted often very well to specific theatrical situations; its extravagant yearning, moods of irony and grotesqueness, and heights of grandeur reflect illuminatingly on the revisionist story; and even its lack of classical ballet regular metres is helpful in creating a freer and more narratively complex style. It hardly comes amiss that the Second

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

167

Symphony, the Resurrection, has an actual poetic text sung by a choir and deals with metaphysical questions culminating in a grand striving transcendence of death and human limitations, when this Dracula story is itself gesturing metaphorically at new and transcendent realms of experience. The end of the ballet coincides with the stupendous finale of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony (albeit some of its more ethereal parts), and there is something strange about overlaying the death of Dracula with the resurrection of the soul in Mahler – strange, that is, in a context where Dracula is an agent of freedom. But somehow the ballet manages to suggest simultaneously that the death of Dracula and the triumph of organized religion (crucifixes and chastity) are textually appropriate for this music and that, subtextually and more fundamentally, the eternal realm belongs to Dracula and that it is the principle that he represents that will be resurrected. The film, in not only cutting overall running time but also reordering or omitting events and scenes, has to play faster and looser with Mahler, and Mahler becomes less something on which the ballet is founded than very high-quality movie music that synchs rather more roughly to the events than was the case before. But the general effect is certainly the same. A silent movie As the film begins there is a tremendous gust of echt-Maddinism in visual and auditory presentation. The black and white sea churns darkly while the soundtrack carries faint sounds of ship’s bells and seagulls. After the production credits, the first image is an eerie, unexplained shot of a man’s hand making a circular wiping motion on a wooden wall or door and creating what looks like a big black grease stain, where the movie’s title appears. The actor/dancer credits that follow are in the silent film style that goes back in Maddin all the way to The Dead Father. All these sequences in Maddin’s films are impressive, but the ones for Dracula are perhaps the strongest of all. As Mahler’s powerful and evocative music pours from the soundtrack, each character is introduced in a separate iris-shot title card. In double exposure, Mina is set against a handwritten diary page, Harker against a corsage of white blossoms, Lucy against a candelabra, and Van Helsing counterposed to his large black portmanteau (full of vampire hunting tools). All of the background shots are marked with copious rivulets of black blood gliding down the frame or splashing off the flowers or suitcase behind. Simple, and wonderful. The sequence concludes with a shot of what must be a bat’s skeleton, stark

168

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

against a black background. The titles continue, now introducing the story – ‘East Coast of England, 1897’ ‘Lucy Westenra’s Manor & Neighbouring Whitby Lunatic Asylum’ – and an epigraph from the novel: ‘There are bad dreams for those that sleep unwisely.’ It is immediately apparent from these how economical in narrative terms and expressive in mood such a method can be. One recalls again how well Maddin understands these forms in their original context, and how naturally they fit into a film version of a stage ballet (a form that can use all the narrative clarification it can get). In another silent film gesture, this time from the historical avant-garde, there appear a pair of shots of Lucy cut out and pasted, as it were, on a background of rolling sea waves, her eyes opening into a startled stare. (On the DVD commentary track, Maddin remarks, ‘Ah, a little Max Ernst collage.’) Then, in an overt thematic exposition, we see a map of Western Europe with a huge, thick black globule of blood spreading quickly across it from east to west. A title in large block capitals shouts, ‘immigrants!!’, and after quick shots of a wooden box creaking on a ship’s deck, Lucy’s uneasy sleep, and Dracula’s eyes visible through the cracks in one of the boxes, the map returns with blood further advanced, and the titles, ‘others!’ ‘from other lands!’ Maddin could hardly be more upfront about the cultural subtext of Stoker’s novel, and the interpretive perspective of his own film. Blood engulfs the British Isles, then Lucy’s bed in double exposure, as she draws up her legs to avoid it. Again, the forcefulness and directness of these strokes are as simple as can be. We become quickly aware of how appropriate these silent film devices are (black and white, only musical accompaniment, titles that convey character and thematic information) in the context of this late-Victorian story. The additional powerful echoes of German Expressionism and horror cinema of the 1920s and 1930s are perfectly in keeping with this visual mode. Right from the character introduction screens onward, the film immediately demonstrates how useful the silent modus is: its lyricism, its fervour, its easy compass of emotional possibilities and visual rhetoric wholly suited to the task at hand. Maddin’s Dracula strikes a mood that seems exactly right, and exactly authentic, powerfully articulating even as it is critiquing the world view and expressive habits of the period it depicts. Watch five minutes of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary and five minutes of Coppola’s lavish spectacle Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) that is trying so extravagantly hard to be faithful to the original, and the empty ornateness of the latter and what one can only call the natural procedures of the former, are immediately clear. Maddin, with

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

169

The silent era credit title for Dr Van Helsing. Thick black blood drips juicily onto his medical bag as Mahler’s stirring music surges on the soundtrack.

his bargain-basement production apparatus, his antiquarian cinematic language branded with avant-gardisms, and his mocking yet naïve narrative stance, connects directly with Stoker’s world, and with those of Victorian stage melodrama, Griffithian sexual hysteria, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and James Whale’s 1930s monster movies. Coppola, great filmmaker though he once was, can only ponderously embalm the story in lavish costumes and sets, elaborate special effects, fashionable movie stars being fashionable movie stars, and all the cold opulence of high-budget Hollywood postmodernism. The character of Renfield, omitted from the ballet, is reintroduced by Maddin – and Brent Neale’s enthusiastic performance, crazily jumping up and down, his mouth often awash in blood, is a pleasant solitary souvenir of Maddin’s local rep-troupe. The earliest scenes in the story proper have no or very little dancing in them: they are simply silent film, and of an almost classic purity despite the occasional evidences of a more recent accelerated editing style. The situation of Lucy and her three suitors is introduced via a shot of Lucy in a garlanded swing – absolutely descended from Marlene Dietrich’s in an early scene of The Scarlet Empress – rushing towards and away from the camera as she coquettishly points her finger

170

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The inverted head of Lucy Westenra, awakening with sudden Expressionist alarm in a ‘a little Max Ernst collage.’

at one after the other of her three suitors. A demented cry from Renfield in the neighbouring asylum seems to propel her off the swing and into Arthur Holmwood’s arms (prompting the very Maddinesque title, ‘Betrothed by a scream’). The sounds of the lighthouse foghorn accompany these scenes and shots of Dracula in his box. As Maddin says,6 the lighthouse proves a most useful presence, not simply for those excellent foghorn sounds, but because it can serve as the source for a spotlight beam that the director can play back and forth across the set. It furnishes a kind of cinematic visual activity to the choreographic visual activity of the scenes, and creates endless opportunities for chiaroscuro in the mostly nocturnal settings. Filming choreography Presently the choreography assumes a more important role, and the film is more recognizable as based on a staged ballet. But Maddin’s approach to filming even the most extensive or formalized dance numbers carried over from the stage production is highly fluid and cinematic. Part

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

171

of his reluctance to take the project on had been his own experience of filmed ballet, which it seems had been largely of the relatively stuffy and formal sort. Of course dance films do not at all necessarily resemble this model: there is an extremely rich body of, especially, contemporary dance pieces created or recreated for television over the past decade and more. But there is a kind of dance film that has as its primary aim the wish to ‘capture’ the original. The received truth about how to do a dance film is that the film must ensure that the dancer’s whole body and whole performance must be visible, and the choreographer’s whole creation. Close-ups or framings that exclude parts of these wholes are frowned upon. There is a common sense about these strictures, and I confess that had the director of Swing Time decided to give us only part of Fred Astaire’s body as he was dancing I would be very upset. But in the case of a ballet designed for a proscenium stage, with multiple dancers, a whole record of the dance would require a very restricted range of camera positions, and in fact most films based on classical ballets or any ballets conceived initially for the stage embody this regimen. Maddin was determined to get the camera right into the action on a 360º basis, to use all kinds of framings including close-ups, to be ruled by the imperatives of film aesthetics and not those of the dance. But any misgivings he might have had about offending ‘dance purists’ were allayed by the attitudes of the RWB dancers themselves. Maddin gives this account of the process: I approached this project very cautiously, so the first thing I asked the choreographer and all the dancers was what their favourite dance films were, and they said they didn’t have any, that they didn’t like them. While I was videotaping the dance, just so I could have a record of it ... 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 or something, so we wouldn’t have collisions or my head taken off or something like that. I quickly got bored with just documenting it, so I would go in for closeups. And I could feel that the dancers were actually enjoying the closeups. Far from being insulted that their dancing bodies were being removed from their heads, I could feel them and I could see with my eyes that they were doing a lot of work with their faces. Then I would wander down to check out what their bodies were doing now and then and I could see that they were doing things with their fingers and that

172

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

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. So I got kind of a record of what was going on. And every now and then I realized that there were two things going on on the stage at once. The vampire hunters were over there, and that Dracula and Mina were over here, and so I would swish pan back and forth with my video camera, just keeping it running for the full two hours of the ballet’s original length.7

This fluidity of camera placement and hand-held movement was augmented by dolly shots, some of them conducted by deco dawson strapped into a children’s high-chair on wheels and whizzed and whirled through the dancers, panning and swooping and gliding. When these shots, together with close-up inserts and, of course, wider shots – all of them massaged by various archaic or ‘degraded’ inflections – were integrated into an editing scheme that was much more interventionist and fast-moving than anything Maddin had been doing in his previous silent-film-influenced features, the result was something new in Maddin’s cinema, and something new in dance cinema. Some of the best recent dance films created for television have been conceived for, and staged and shot in, the outdoors, sometimes even in big-city streets. On the contrary, there was never a more wholly studiobound film of any kind than Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. This coincides, of course, with the theatrical basis for the production, but it also felicitously revives the low-budget but ambitious mode of films like Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel, and Careful. In his commentary for the DVD issue, Maddin delights in explaining how primitive are his means: how cheap this prop and that setting was, how the trepanning instrument used on Renfield is an ordinary table fork from the commissary, how the graveyard set for Lucy’s last scene consists of brown paper walls with some dead weeds and was assembled in the loading dock of the old factory where the film was shot. Then the material impoverishment of the physical production is half-celebrated and half-disguised with all the treatments and ‘degradations’ at Maddin’s command: shadow-filled Expressionist photography in low-resolution black and white 16mm (sometimes overexposed or ‘blasted’ in processing to remove more detail), startling cut-ins to high-grain 8mm shots, soft focus and large quantities of drifting mist and ground fog. Every trick of Maddin’s early filmmaking is now seen to be still working – intact and ready to submit to his and deco dawson’s vigorous new editing massage.

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

173

On the soundtrack, Maddin has augmented the Mahler that is both ballet accompaniment and silent-movie music with judiciously positioned sound effects. The creaking of ship’s timbers and ropes and muted clanging of bells, the foghorn, are heard at the outset. Later on sounds are laid in of doors, of footsteps on floors, of trains, ticking clocks, pigeons, of blasting steam whistles, of crowbars opening crypts and coffins, of Lucy’s decapitation and Dracula’s rippling cape, even of a cattle drive behind the Texan suitor’s title card.8 These effects add substantially to the vividness of the action, and carry the film further from the realm of ballet where the only (intended) sounds are those of music. They also carry the film away from a strictly silent cinema, and into that brief sliver of history right at the beginning of the cinematic sound era when sound effects could be added to films but dialogue had not yet arrived. Maddin has of course always loved this strange half-enabled realm – this moment and the immediately succeeding one of ‘part-talkies’ which contained curtailed dialogue scenes and many silent scenes with sound effects (and his cinema has many times revisited this terrain from The Dead Father to Brand upon the Brain!). The lighting process is equally backward-looking, equally simple and ‘primitive.’ One of the very first tools Maddin seized on as a director was low-key lighting. Quoting the old B-movie adage that shadows are the cheapest set-dressing, explaining that simplified, shadow-casting lighting was all he could manage at the outset, and always professing an admiration for German Expressionism, 1930s and 1940s horror movies, and film noir (all canonic citadels of cinematic chiaroscuro), Maddin had many reasons for gravitating to the practice. Dracula of course bears a subject already made into German Expressionist and 1930s horror movies, and was from the outset limited by a smallish budget; and in its realization Maddin actively pursues a freer, more improvisatory filming method. Under all these circumstances, a simplified low-key lighting is multiply determined. In the Lucy scenes, the rotating lighthouse searchlight repeatedly and obsessively sweeps across the darkened set, a lighting equivalent to the roving camera. Its powerful beam reflects off glass surfaces, sometimes directly and blindingly into the camera’s eye in a sketchlike, anti-illusionist way that would have horrified any silent era or studio era DOP. Like so much else in the film, the aesthetic end product is an image-set that is simultaneously connected to old cinematic practice and to a stylized, avant-gardish contemporaneity. A further silent era technique on view is double exposure – another Maddin favourite. There are many usages of this practice in the film, from graceful small-scale expressions like diary text entries shown to-

174

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

gether with their writers to the grand and powerful appearances of Dracula’s face, or eyes, double-exposed over a person or scene that is feeling the force of his influence. This is always a technique that can accomplish what no stage version ever can, and Maddin uses especially the image of Dracula inserted into scenes where he does not appear in the original ballet to clarify and comment on character experiences and motivations. One notable instance is the appearance of Dracula’s eyes in giant closeup9 over Lucy’s sleeping form just prior to his actual appearance at her bedside and swooping attack on her throat. This usage – and the related technique of quick cut-in shots of Dracula at different moments – acts as it almost always does in silent cinema: as a picture of events in the mind. Throughout his DVD commentary Maddin emphasizes how Dracula is the projection of the desires and fears of the characters. Such a notion is naturally easy to convey cinematically, through cutaways and above all double exposure. Godden’s ballet may well harbour a similar viewpoint, but it is just harder to express directly on stage. And so Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary becomes a romp through Maddin’s retro-cinema, an all-you-can-eat blowout of portraited irises and vignettes, intertitles wonderfully counterposed with moving images, soft focus and clouds of mist, toning and hand-colouring, dissolves and multiple exposures, judicious and witty sound effects, great movie music. The hand-tinting (a practice that goes back to the very beginning of cinema) is especially effective: the red-dyeing of neck wounds and blood leaking from Lucy’s mouth, of the pupils of Dracula’s eyes, and of the spear points and mortal body piercings of the vampire-kill; the green clouds of steam coming from the giant organ at Lucy’s house and the green wads of cash in Dracula’s trunk; the golden coins that spill from his body when it is slashed open in combat; the blue centre-jewel on Mina’s crucifix. Every single appearance of these points of colour in the monochrome world produces a little surge of delight and demonstrates how in a ‘degraded’ and ‘primitive’ visual world the smallest strokes can create an effect of opulence. The myriad little panning and tracking shots, the camera that shakes in moments of excitement, the general agitation of movement in the cinematic realm are additions from a later era, but they seem to meld seamlessly into the archaic realm of silent cinema: the film’s reformulated mixture of old and new once again attaining an aesthetically unified zone. All this is of course applied, as it were, over top of the strong qualities of the ballet. Ballet dancers, like silent film actors, are required to

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

175

be mimes: using their bodies and faces to express things that in theatre or talking pictures are conveyed by dialogue. Maddin’s remark, quoted earlier, about his discovery that the dancers were furnishing wonderful performances in the tradition of ‘great expressionist silent-movie actors’ is a judgment he also turns to in the DVD commentary: So the dancers are just superb silent-movie performers – they’re not just dancers, but exquisite mimes [...] You would think that because facial expressions are not even visible from the cheap seats, or even from the front row in most cases, that they wouldn’t even bother. But they give close-upworthy melodramatic performances – and by ‘melodramatic’ I mean proper stage melodrama, not any derogatory connotation at all.

Again Maddin waxes particularly enthusiastic about the degree of eloquence embodied in the dancers’ hands and hand movements. One must repeat how fine the acting is – as distinct from and in addition to the dancing. Although Wei-Qiang Zhang has a marvellous presence as Dracula and Johnny Wright is perfectly fine as Harker, perhaps the strongest ‘silent-movie performances’ come from the other three principal characters of the story: Lucy (Tara Birtwistle), Mina (CindyMarie Small), and Van Helsing (David Moroni). Moroni has a splendid patriarchal sternness and certainty, and Small brings a wonderful demure beauty and wide-eyed sincerity to her performance – no minor achievement when she is required at one point to try to undo her fiancé’s trousers and feel up his private parts. Generally, what is most striking about these performers is their ability to bring a presence and a conviction to their habitation of nineteenth-century character types. When Maddin calls them ‘melodramatic’ performers, I believe this is partly what he is referring to: their ability to present historically based ‘melodramatic’ personages seriously and wholeheartedly, without irony or subtly perceptible quotation marks. (Any quotation marks can then be inserted by the director.) Their attitudes and emotions are presented strongly and forthrightly, aided no doubt by the fact that ballet dancers are often necessarily required to characterize in a more simple and hieratic style and hence in a way already closer to the polarizations and heightened simplicities of melodrama. In this respect we can once again speak of the authenticity of the film’s approach. Birtwistle’s case is somewhat different, because of all the characters in the ballet (except Dracula), Lucy is the most ‘modern’ – that is, the one most called upon to embody desires

176

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The possessed Lucy’s dance of demonic sexuality. The hands of the dancer, Tara Birtwistle, performing the kind of expressive gesture Maddin found so inspiring in the dancers.

and actions that transgress against Victorian propriety and gender stereotypes. Exactly for this reason she has the juiciest part, and she seizes it with great relish. Beginning as a coquette, she flirts with her suitors, welcomes Dracula literally with open arms and submits ardently to her own sexual desire, and ends as a quasi-demonic sexual predator. Birtwistle scales this ladder admirably, and reaches the apex of her performance in the final ‘Mad Scene’ phase, where her cruelly knowing smile, wicked sidelong glances, casually shrugged shoulders, and seductive gestures of hand join together with her gliding swoops across the stage in a consummate tour de force. As Maddin says, the finer details of these performances would be invisible in the theatre; not so in the film. A more dynamic cinema altogether It is difficult to overstate the importance of the change in editing and mobile-camera styles that occurred in Maddin’s cinema with The Heart of the World and that have played an important part in every feature film

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

177

since then. Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary was the first of these features, and it set the tone for later ones like Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand upon the Brain! in its much quicker editing pace and higher incidence of camera movement. The latter characteristic, itself an important evolution in Maddin’s filmmaking, derives from using more and more portable cameras (16mm, 8mm, DV) and multiple camera operators in a space that has become far more three-dimensional.10 This latter characteristic, filming in three dimensions instead of in some kind of proscenium configuration, with cameramen darting through the action and swish-panning around it, certainly has its origin in the fact that Maddin could, in Dracula, insert himself in this fashion into a production that was already staged in three dimensions. And these endlessly active hand-held cameras form a natural partnership with a more radically interventionist editing style. Shot changes combine with much more movement by the camera (and, in a ballet film, in front of the camera too) to produce a more dynamic cinema altogether. Dracula’s more energetic image flow doesn’t approach the Soviet silent style machine-gun editing of Heart of the World (or even the digitally edited pace of Cowards and Brand), but it is far more up-tempo and energetic in its visual rhythms than anything before that in Maddin’s output. It’s not as if Baz Luhrmann moved from filming Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a music video to filming the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Dracula as a music video – but there is a whiff of that. Of course strictly speaking the movie actually is a feature-length music video, except that Maddin’s film, with its insistent archaisms, doesn’t look like any actually existing examples of the form.11 Although the change in style represents a move in the direction of the avant-garde, the editing pyrotechnics of Maddin’s Dracula are in a contemporary cinematic context far less challenging to the average viewer than the stately pace of Careful or the downright lugubrious one of The Dead Father, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and Archangel. Indeed, their quotient of aggressive sophistication is clearly one factor in the success of the film, and also something that draws it away from the model of high silent era cinema it is otherwise so in love with. Globally, it might also be said that fast editing has made things easier for Maddin’s viewers because it has distracted them from the otherwise unavoidable task of actually grappling with his difficult program. The resurrected cinema of Archangel and Careful is difficult, it requires almost as much patience and attention and thinking-about – as much work – as a Dreyer or Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr movie or, in a different way, as relatively primitive silent features (not that it is much like any of these). On

178

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the other hand, the accelerated-editing Maddin cinema, especially Cowards and Brand, is more like watching sequences from early Eisenstein (as Heart of the World revealed) because you don’t have to ‘get’ anything, don’t have to agree with anything, to enjoy the kinetic stimulation. There is a reason why advertisers emulate Eisenstein more than Murnau. It is a truism to say that image culture is now unrecognizably faster and more bombarding. Insofar as there still is a contemplative, lyrical mainstream cinematic rhetoric, it is glossy and fashion-magazine in its look, or else creating a direly Disney/Hallmark always already phony idealist aesthetic. Maddin used to have to punctuate and relieve the solemn tempo of his movies with outrageous jokes and, as it were, fart noises. Since Heart of the World and Dracula, without having given up those tools, he has added the constant stimulative relief of micro-montage, hyperactive camera movement, and pace manipulation – massaging, juicing, hammering, shaving the images. If you don’t understand what’s going on in Cowards Bend the Knee or Brand upon the Brain!, well, at least it isn’t boring. It is hard to separate this Great Kinesis Shift from the presence of deco dawson on both Heart of the World and Dracula, especially when the editing styles adopted to a greater or lesser extent by these films resemble to a degree that of dawson’s own short, abstract films, and when dawson receives credit not only as the editor of Dracula but as its ‘Associate Director.’ Maddin says that even before dawson’s arrival he had decided to quicken the pace of his films,12 and certainly since dawson’s departure his films have maintained that practice. There is no doubt that not only the general plan of the editing but, even more, its detailed realization owes a great deal to dawson’s talent and skill. My own sense is that as a mostly self-taught filmmaker, Maddin has had to feel his way with editing from the very beginning and that, although he is probably now quite capable of doing it himself, he has been grateful for and even depended on the highly skilled assistance of creative craftspeople like dawson. (The same may be said with Maddin’s reliance on his current editor, John Gurdebeke. That collaboration, beginning with Cowards Bend the Knee, has produced even more startling results.) The editing in Dracula draws on a wide range of technical tools and stylistic gestures. Dissolves and fades are of course extremely familiar from Maddin’s earlier films, and they are seen here again in profusion, though now sometimes much more quickly paced and applied to single shots that are then integrated into a montage-whole for a given scene, rather than forming more emphatic punctuation to larger units of shots, as in pre–Heart of the World days. Very quick dissolves and fades join a

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

179

parade of other radical editing interventions. Rapid shifting within a scene between different camera positions – or sometimes between 16mm and 8mm cameras – are one, straightforward, example. A kind of stutter-editing, where shots are chopped into small pieces and then reassembled with tiny gaps (a technique referred to as ‘step printing’) is often employed, especially at climactic moments. Sometimes this process is accompanied by slow motion. Slow motion is not, of course, a form of editing, but when it is briefly introduced into sequences or individual shots, and this happens quite a lot in Dracula, it has the effect of an editing device (and indeed may be achieved in post-production, like editing, and thus actually be a kind of honorary editing). At moments like these the film really does nestle into the camp that has avant-garde cinema at one end and high-stylish music video and action-movie editing practices at the other. And the final battle between Dracula and the vampire hunters is certainly Maddin’s most extended, and best, action sequence. From the duel in Careful to the last combat in Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a large step. Perhaps the strangest and most amazing of all the little editing tools displayed in this sequence is the almost imperceptible reverse action of one shot, where Dracula’s cape winds around him (with a wonderful Foleyed heavy crack).13 The impact of all these editing techniques throughout the film is always strongly mediated by the whole array of photographic tools Maddin is using – chiaroscuro black and white, irises, vignettes, soft focus, and high grain – to create a unique effect very far from the pop-avant-garde forms to which they are kin. So Dracula is also demonstrating that Maddin’s new editing philosophy can be seamlessly combined with the existing panoply of his neo-silentfilm techniques from, say, Archangel. And if Archangel could represent a new form of expression in the world, then Dracula is the inauguration of a new form of that new form. Here, the much-accelerated editing rhythm and camera movement are found to be compatible with lyricism, melodrama, and narrative cinematic models of the high silent period, and even to provide new avenues for their expression. There is nothing like this in The Heart of the World, whose six-minute length confines it narratively to the realm of parody. There, the model is a form of Soviet montage cinema (particularly Eisenstein and Dziga-Vertov) that was trying to purge itself of mainstream narrative structures and many mainstream narrative rhetorical strategies – also of psychology and excessive lyricism – and replace them with Pavlovian stimulus-response and a modernist/ avant-gardist escape from the glutinous emotional traps of a melodramaderived narrative form.14 But in Dracula Maddin has grafted some of the

180

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

editing language of Eisenstein and Dziga-Vertov (and their descendents all the way down to the mainstream present) onto the generally slower and visually more stable world of melodrama. Making this work in Dracula is perhaps easier because of the fact that Maddin is adapting an already fully realized narrative creation in the form of the RWB ballet and simply applying this editing language to it, or seeing how it can be expanded and cinematized by such an application. Cowards Bend the Knee represents the real jump. With these films and Brand upon the Brain!, Maddin has created yet another new form. Stoker and melodrama Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among other things a melodrama. The novel has for several decades now been broadly interpreted as an expression of late-Victorian anxieties about sexuality, gender roles, and social Otherness, the existence of something like the unconscious that escapes rational control, and the problems of modernity. In fact the book is more complex (and interesting) than an open and shut application of interpretations like this can accommodate. In view of its primary focus and the primitive atavism of Dracula and the forces he embodies, its technical up-to-dateness is almost obsessive. Phonographs, Kodaks, typewriters, bicycles, shorthand, medical technology, railway timetables, and repeating rifles are introduced into the story without real need, while the figures of Professor Abraham Van Helsing and Dr Seward are attempts somehow to reconcile professionalism and scientific method with irrational and supernatural forces. (The result is a kind of vampire science for dummies, where all you need is to learn a few basic rules of vampire life, and to employ the risibly simple tools of garlic, crucifixes, and consecrated hosts.) Stoker’s Dracula is just one more symptom of the sense of uncertainty arising from traditional beliefs under the assault of Darwinism and the march of science. Meanwhile, anyone reading the book after encountering a thousand later iterations of the legend will be surprised at how small a role Dracula himself plays in the action, and how the horrific appearance of sexuality in a twisted and monstrous form is confined to a very few brief moments. Of course it is the presence of a general atmosphere of repression and displacement that makes these moments so shocking, and indeed all the threatening phenomena of the novel are rendered with a smothered panic that a more forthright sensationalism could not duplicate. And these are also precisely the conditions for a certain kind of melodrama.

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

181

Middle-class melodrama in particular – and Dracula is eminently middleclass melodrama – has most often as its engine a sense of scandal. It is a sense that arises from the presence of contradiction: something shocking or troubling amid the prevailing, fully installed, respectable system of truths and values, something that is ideologically illegal and whose existence calls into question all the grand claims that ideology makes to embody justice and truth. The scandal in Dracula is primarily twofold. First, in a modern rational society full of scientific gizmos we ought not to be troubled with irrational fears; or, conversely, in a spiritually and religiously grounded society we ought not to believe that rationality and science have any kind of ultimate power. Since Stoker’s society was trying somehow to be both founded on reason and science and founded on faith, this is a scandal that will never go away. Not only does the novel fail to offer any kind of solution to or reconciliation of the contradiction, but even its expression of it is very chaotic and unthoughtful. And second, according to the idealized moral order in which good people are motivated by purity, honour, selflessness, piety, truthfulness, loyalty, duty, compassion, and a dozen other virtues including those supposedly inhering in gender, there is no place for anything as amoral as sexual desire; and if sexual desire does manifest itself in a ‘pure’ woman or an ‘honourable’ man, it must be something monstrous and an occasion for hysteria. Indeed, the body itself is something problematic, something that our higher selves are constantly needing to transcend, and yet something whose goodness and health we need fundamentally to believe in and whose ‘infection’ or ‘pollution’ by elements threatening its comforting stability is cause for a dizzying, overdetermined anxiety. Here again Stoker’s novel, with its emphasis on pure blood or tainted blood, good sleep or bad sleep, and its curious constant worrying about rest and energy, has zeroed in on a profound underlying problem. Dracula has pushed out sex, but gender is fully in operation – indeed Stoker is deploying the system of gender characteristics and values with an amazing, tireless excess. A man’s bravery and energy, a woman’s sweetness and angelic compassion, are truisms the novel cannot assert frequently enough. These indeed are the forces that need to be marshalled against Dracula’s realm of horrifying appetite, uncanny shape-shifting, and unaccountable power to somehow get past even the stoutest psychological defences of virtuous men and especially women – marshalled, it often seems, by sheer dint of repetitive proclamation. What a man’s heart is, what a woman’s heart is, what it is to be manly and true, what it is to be womanly and true, a man’s strength and a woman’s trust, and

182

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

on and on. Dracula can be defeated because his pursuers have a ‘man brain,’ collective and organized, while he has only a ‘child brain,’ powerful but primitive and selfish: a dichotomy that represents the battle between socially achieved ideology and the desires of the individual psyche, and between the mechanism of repression and the powers of the unconscious. Women are Dracula’s targets and victims. The novel never even advances a hypothesis as to why this should be the case, but to the contemporary reader it is clear enough. The sweet, pure Lucy Westenra has somehow invited Dracula into her house, had her blood sucked, and become a vampire who must be murdered in her tomb. The description is one of those very few in the novel that does gesture nightmarishly towards sexual congress and orgasm: The Thing in the coffin [i.e., Lucy] writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together until the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared by a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it [...] And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over.15

Obviously male sexuality is being displaced here into violence, with piercing of the viscera with a giant stake and decapitation standing in for coitus and orgasm (this translation is clearer in the ballet, and pretty much spelled out in the film). In truth, there is no expression by any male of a sexual attraction to either of the virtuous women in the novel: only expressions of spiritual love and esteem. And actually, this is less a fear of sexual women and their bodies – as is the case in much horror literature and cinema – than an attempt to desexualize gender relations, and a fear that even noble and honourable men will not be strong enough to keep them so. It is fundamentally a crisis of masculinity that Stoker is staging. Probably the strongest character in the novel is Mina, who is as brave or braver than any of the men, as intelligent, and as technically adept (a dab hand with typewriters, train schedules, and shorthand, and always curious about a new mechanical device). Van Helsing pays her the highest compliment by saying more than once that she has a man’s brain together with the

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

183

spiritual strength of a woman. Meanwhile Stoker emphasizes the warmest and most demonstrative homosocial relations among the male vampire hunters, recalling his attraction to Walt Whitman’s admiring homophilia and opening the door to a queer reading of Dracula. (Though again it seems to me that Stoker is just happier without sexuality, and that the appeal of homosociality is primarily because it is a safer and more comfortable form of human intimacy for him – suggesting a form of arrested emotional development that is hardly unique to his person or his era.) There is indeed a disturbing recognition that women are both objects and subjects of sexual desire, but this is kept resolutely at arm’s length, covered and deflected as much as possible, and peeps in only as a few hysterical outbursts of exciting and disgusting bodily horror. This protosexual force is, moreover, assigned to and dammed up in the personage of Dracula, and Dracula himself is kept off-stage for the great bulk of the novel, his existence acknowledged but his presence constantly deflected, postponed, looked at only sidelong. The three suitors’ sexual desire for Lucy, and in a way Van Helsing’s too, is displaced into the medical ritual of giving her their blood to replace the blood stolen from her by Dracula. This deed starts out as a representation of sacrifice and commitment on the part of the men, but quickly shows signs of its covert status as a stand-in for sexual contact – given legal standing and disguise simultaneously by the imprimatur of medical science. ‘No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves,’ says Seward (not Lucy’s fiancé).16 And the men start to complain in a childish way that one of them got to give more blood than the others. (Both Seward’s line and the complaint are cherry-picked by Maddin for intertitles in the film.) But we should not lose sight of what is classically melodramatic about Stoker’s novel. A principal quality is of course the polarization of personae into characters who are ideally noble and selfless and a villain who is fiendishly evil, with the consequent flattening of character compensated for by the sensational exaggeration of what is at stake in their opposition. And of course there is that sense of scandal whereby sexuality and the lure of transgression cannot be accommodated into the ideology of the book, or the age. Indeed they are not supposed to exist at all, and the suspicion that they are secretly there inside even the most stainless of individuals produces the paranoia and hysteria that are the seed of this gothic melodrama (just as a similar mechanism is operating in Hollywood film melodrama from The Cheat and Way Down East to Written on the Wind and Bigger Than Life). The victory of men with stakes and med-

184

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ical knives over an eldritch supernatural creature from Transylvania, the spectacle of the redemption of tainted and depraved women through impalement and decapitation – punishments that are themselves disguised sex murders – enacts that disavowal and dramatic displacement central to so much melodramatic practice. And then the novel’s confused underlying attempt to reconcile the incommensurabes of science and spirituality is an almost textbook realization of Peter Brooks’ thesis of the origins of melodrama in the death of the sacred.17 Melodrama, revised The ballet very heavily articulates what in Stoker is only faintly discernible, or at least what is unconscious and unacknowledged. In the RWB Dracula, Lucy’s coquetry and overt lustfulness and Mina’s sexual curiosity are straightforward and unmissable qualities, and they are wholesale inventions, nowhere to be found in the novel except as deeply buried subtext (and even that calls for qualification). Stoker’s Lucy is not the at first flirtatious and later openly sexually desiring character of the ballet, but rather a ‘sweet’ young woman whose principal emotion towards her suitors is gratitude and a concern that, having received three marriage proposals in a single day, she must cause pain to two of these fine and noble men. And his Mina is certainly not that of Mark Godden: she, upon reading her fiancé Harker’s journal account of his assault by succubi in Dracula’s Romanian castle, immediately starts making physical advances to him and citing page references in the diary as justification. Harker’s phobic response to this sexual advance is of course also new, and serves to articulate one of the ballet’s major points of interpretation: that the men are not simply controlling and repressive, but are themselves neurotically overcontrolled and sexually highly repressed. This is perhaps Godden’s version of the novel’s refusal of sexuality, though of course here it appears clearly as outright sexual squeamishness and is frowned upon as such. Stoker’s Mina, as suggested above, is an intelligent, resourceful, self-reliant woman, indeed almost a proto-feminist;18 but nowhere does she show the slightest sexual curiosity to go with her scientific inquisitiveness. Certainly in the novel her subjugation to Dracula in the scene where he forces her to drink blood from a wound on his breast, and her subsequently ‘colonized’ behaviour, can take a sexual interpretation; but the ballet jettisons all ambiguity or uncertainty on this point and makes the big Dracula/Mina pas de deux unmistakably sexual. In the ballet’s scenario, Mina must in the end turn from this

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

185

sexual temptation and employ her piety and womanly ‘purity’ as weapons against Dracula, finally subduing him with her blue-light crucifix (effective where the men’s crucifixes were not). At this point I would say that the ballet – and the film, which follows it in this respect – becomes rather incoherent, since the sexually curious Mina is a sympathetic figure and her relapse into conventional repression seems rather opaque and unarticulated. The ballet’s melodrama has thus reinterpreted all the forces, and thus knocked askew the alignments of the book’s melodrama. Indeed, it cannot function so straightforwardly or effectively as melodrama because there is no mechanism of disavowal or displacement any more operating in the ballet’s own creative imagination – it is only present in the original story, and is now being unmasked as sexual and political repression. Here, transgression is not so transgressive, and horror and disgust not at all horrifying or disgusting. Stoker’s other issue, irrationality versus modernity, spirit versus brain, feeling versus calculation, has no role in the ballet, which has no particular interest in science and is not threatened by any Zeitgeist crisis of lost spirituality. Instead, turning Stoker on his head, the ballet presents a stark, sensational drama of cold daylight repression of darkly liberatory desire. The outmoded Victorian forces of convention and respectability are crystallized into a homosocial band of brothers (Van Helsing, Harker, and the suitors), all with a base in social station and professional institutions, who act as a self-righteous policing power. Women who try to break free of this rubric are demonized and punished with extreme violence, and Dracula, the emblem of desire that escapes policing, is hunted down as a monster. The original melodrama, still visible through the screen of revisionist interpretation, is rejected by the ballet and its audience. For the contemporary viewer, there is no edification in the conclusion of the now ironically viewed melodrama, which shows the defeat of the women and of Dracula. Instead, there is a spectacle of historical oppression on the part of forces too blind to see what we can see, and a kind of heroic martyrdom unfolding in the pleasing confines of a period setting that allows modes of visual lyricism no longer available in quite that form. Maddin’s melodrama At every point Maddin has seized on the ballet’s sexual characterizations and extended them with relish. The presentation of Lucy is Exhibit A. Her question to Mina, imported by Maddin from the novel as an inter-

186

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

title ‘Why can’t a woman marry three men, or as many as want her?’19 has of course faintly scandalous undertones in the late Victorian era, but in Maddin’s interpretation becomes pretty frankly promiscuous. Stoker’s Lucy makes this remark in the perfectly ‘proper’ context of feeling sympathy for the fine manly men she must reject, not out of an appetite for more than one of them: hence ‘as many as want her’ rather than ‘as many as she wants.’ This distinction is completely invisible in Maddin’s importation of the line, where it becomes just straightforward evidence of a lusty female appetite for men. Lucy’s coquettish behaviour in the ‘swing’ sequence, indeed the sensuality of her general manner, culminating in the salivating close-ups of Birtwistle’s demonic sexual desire, are all further points. Maddin even takes the outrageous further step of embodying that desire in a large, Phantom of the Opera type organ, incongruously positioned in the Westenra sitting room and emitting clouds of dense green steam whenever Dracula’s approach and her sexual excitation occur: in the lewdest possible way, it is Lucy’s organ. Nothing in the representation of Mina quite reaches this level of frat-house bawdy suggestiveness, even if she is made to lose her under-petticoat in the final scene. Maddin also is eager to show that Dracula’s appetite for blood, and persons, is not only heterosexual: a couple of his scenes with Harker make that clear. (Stoker’s Dracula shows not the slightest interest in sucking men’s blood.) In short, Maddin has taken Godden’s sexualizing reinterpretation of the story yet further. Indeed, Maddin actually says, ‘I don’t even think Dracula exists – he’s just the embodiment of female lust and male jealousy.’ He also muses: ‘I’ve often wondered who the virgin referred to in the film’s title is. You always think of women when that term is used, but it’s the men who seem to be displaying a lot of virginal naïveté, and a lot of sort of virgin-pressured jealousies.’ And later, ‘I have a hunch ... that Van Helsing is the virgin of the title.’20 All this is a prelude to the observation not only that Stoker’s melodrama has been completely denatured in Maddin’s hands (and those of Godden before him), but that this truly ironic or retro-critical presentation of an old melodrama is quite different from what Maddin’s films have usually embodied. The basic ingredients are still present – melodramatic conflict and transgression, a period setting, outmoded social values – so perhaps their very dissimilar meaning is not immediately apparent. This time, unlike Archangel and Careful, there is no sympathy for the older system. The overtly repressive system of Careful is treated far more sympathetically than the relatively less repressive system of Dracula, and there is absolutely nothing of Archangel’s weirdly tender affection for a distant

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

187

land of innocence and social idealism. Perhaps this is one reason why Dracula is less problematic for viewers, certainly less complex and knotted and just strange, than those earlier films. The ballet is p.c., and the film is p.c. Squarely in that mode, the film critiques the older system from a position of greater moral sophistication, or simply greater moral correctness, and the drama of spiritual alienation that is the underfloor of Maddin’s earlier work is no longer there. That is, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is no longer gnawing manically at the fact that contemporary forms are inadequate to convey innocence or lyrical wholeheartedness, but instead lovingly building a Maddinian edifice on top of a lyrically formalized contemporary ballet – and on a photogenic period subject which comes ready furnished with a stock of, as it were, quoted poetic images of its characters and situations. It is no longer alienated from its own time, but now at least in part embodies a quite uncontroversial contemporary outlook on the characters and institutions it is depicting. For Maddin’s Dracula to present the same kinds of viewer dilemmas as Archangel and Careful, it would have had to be anti-Dracula or at least pro-vampire-hunter to an important degree; it would have had to see the constrained, noble, and ridiculous Weltanschauung of the suitors and Van Helsing in the way Archangel regards that of the White Russians and Lt Boles. And of course it could never do this, for a variety of reasons of which the existence of the stage production is entirely sufficient in itself. So in the end, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is less melodrama and more ‘melodrama’ than any of Maddin’s melodramas. Aesthetically, too, Maddin’s Dracula is more unified and less problematic for viewers (that is not to say that it is completely unproblematic, only that it is less so than his earlier feature films). The presence of the period setting, and the period cinema gestures, occur now in a theatrical realm that is already ‘staged’ (already has been staged). The sense of postmodern quotation is stronger than in Maddin’s other work because the retro-realm is already familiar from a thousand other Dracula narratives (contrast the utter unfamiliarity of the settings in Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful, and even Twilight). If Maddin does, as I suggested earlier, achieve a greater authenticity than many of those other narratives by dint of his genuine, very atypical immersion in the older cultural forms, nothing he does can quite efface that viewer familiarity, especially when the narrative hews to the p.c. revisionist line so closely. Moreover, the importation of quasi-music-video styles of editing and camera movement allows the film to merge smoothly into a contemporary aesthetic mode on one level even as it is creating its own aesthetic space on another. Mad-

188

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

din is still having fun with silent film apparatus, and with the spectacle of blood and impalement in a period setting, still creating frissons with the juxtaposition of archaic and avant-garde (and now with the addition of avant-garde editing techniques), in short still able to stoke the engine with the heterogeneities of old and new. Still, if Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is both true Maddin and truly successful as an artwork, many of the things in it that are different from Maddin’s earlier work do also ensure that its viewers are not required to negotiate quite so tortuous an interpretive path. Opposing systems Stoker’s Dracula stages the collision of opposing systems: atavistic irrationality versus modern technology. Cinema is being born at this exact historical moment (1897), and in some of its most powerful iterations in the first decades of its existence the same collision is played out: modernity versus tradition, modernism versus romanticism, progress versus regression, reason versus the sublime and the terrifying. In particular we have this technologically advanced, forensic photographic recording apparatus almost immediately attempted to be used to express inward mental and spiritual events. And – a point of potential difficulty for some film-oriented theorists of modernity – we have the coincidence of this highly advanced industrial technology applied, via popular culture, not to equally progressive aesthetic avant-gardism, but to some of the most backward-looking and already-superseded narrative forms, notably melodrama. The ballet jettisons almost all of Stoker’s modern technology, it points backwards instead, from the antique Victorian world to the timeless and mythological realm of Dracula. But the film reimports the collision, now (as so often in Maddin) between past and present, between a period sensibility/aesthetics and the contemporary sensibility/aesthetics, between Dracula (an atavistic force, an expression of an earlier culture and narrative medium) and the movie (electricity, filmmaking technology that is in this film newly emphasized). As Stoker moves forward (telegraph, phono-diaries, etc.) and backwards (superstition, irrationality, primeval horror), so Maddin moves forward (modernism, postmodernism, technology, avant-gardism) and backwards (silent cinema, Expressionism, melodrama, historical ‘degradation’). And Maddin is doing more with technology in the film than the ballet does. There are Mrs Westenra’s ventilator (coal-fired, it looks like), hand-operated blood pumps, and

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

189

wind-up flashlights, Van Helsing’s crude burglar’s and assassin’s tools. But then there is the technology of the movie: the cinema. As simplified, primitivized, and ‘degraded’ as it is, it is certainly still a technological force in this Victorian world. The modernist and postmodernist editing and swishing camera movement make it even more so. And in this way, the film again expresses that strange chemical combination of old and new that is the essence of Maddin’s cinematic method. As we have seen, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary cannot preserve the instability of that combination as it had previously existed in Maddin’s work. But the director has taken a number of opportunities to add elements that are more truly close to his usual creative stance. The intertitles, with their culling of some of the lines from the novel that interact most juicily with Maddin’s sensibility, are one example. The reimportation from the novel of Lucy’s mother (excised from the ballet), is another – here, in its imagining of a frail but fiercely protecting mother who ends up inadvertently admitting the vampire and who shares a bed with her daughter only to be unceremoniously rolled out of it onto the floor when Dracula arrives, the film looks forward rather startlingly to Brand upon the Brain! Most characteristic of all, though, is the intermittent appearance of Maddin’s wild sense of humour, relatively subtle at some points, crass and outrageous at others. That destructive comic demon that rampaged so anarchically through Gimli Hospital, Archangel, and Careful intervenes at certain moments here. In particular there is a sexual symbolism that borders on, or strays right into, bawdiness. The set designs for two of the later scenes – both the ‘convent’ scene and the final scene in Dracula’s cave – feature ranks of entryways or alcoves that are distinctly vagina-shaped (Maddin remarks of the one that the vampire hunters are crowbarring their way into that ‘that particular entryway would make Judy Chicago jealous’).21 There are a number of tiny instances as well, such as the vampire hunters’ onanistically wound-up flashlights; Lucy’s green organ is the most outrageous of them all, but perhaps bypasses most viewers. The film’s very last stroke is irreverently grinning in this way as well: Van Helsing is seen surreptitiously stuffing Mina’s undergarment into his jacket. Such cackling mockery always has the potential to derail any serious project that is going on, but in Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (even more than in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) irruptions of this kind are circumscribed, and they never fundamentally destabilize the relatively mockery-free project of Godden’s ballet. Going back to Stoker’s distinction between Dracula’s ‘child brain’ and the hunters’ ‘man brain,’ it can be said that Maddin has a ‘child brain’ of his

190

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

own, and that it is responsible for very many of the most powerful and distinctive features of his creative imagination. That wild humour definitely springs from this source, and these irrepressible appearances of his ‘child brain’ in a project that is in some ways rather sober and by-thenumbers function as darting evidences of the director’s constitutional instabilities and difficulty-makings, a reassuring reminder to his devotees that the old Guy Maddin is still there. Perhaps I have been speaking too much as though Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary were somehow not quite ‘pure’ Maddin. But although the film does certainly show its foundation in an already existing piece of work, I am tempted to say that any fifteen-second slice of it looked at anonymously would be enough to identify its creator beyond much doubt. And if Maddin’s Dracula is not quite so 100% bizarre as his earlier films, there is also a very real sense that with this film the director has hit a new, comfortable creative stride. Progressing through his work chronologically, one has the sense that certain creative problems had accumulated for him – in particular, the increasing distance between his original home-made ‘garage-band’ process and the ever more complex and unwieldy procedures that had manifested themselves as pressures drove his projects closer towards mainstream filmmaking practices. Archangel added to Gimli Hospital a much bigger budget and cast, in general a bigger scale, and a bit more dialogue. Careful then brought colour and more dialogue. And Twilight of the Ice Nymphs brought 35mm, an international cast, and a lot more dialogue. Of course at no point did Maddin’s films ever actually approach the mainstream, either aesthetically or industrially, but the production of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs had accumulated enough mass in a number of dimensions that it started to constitute a kind of work he just didn’t want to do, as well as emphasizing the fact that, never having done it, he wasn’t completely sure how good at it he could be. It is exactly this sense of slowly accruing oppression that just vanishes in the Dracula film (well, actually in Heart of the World – but it was a problem that never had existed in the world of Maddin’s short films, only his features). At one fell swoop, he was relieved of almost everything that had started to torment him: 35mm, colour, full sound, dialogue management, the direction of actors. The sense of freedom and relief are palpable as you watch the film – a true black and white, silent, 16mm film. Maddin has spoken several times about his gratitude at the fact that he could just show up and film every day, without the necessity of

Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

191

rehearsing the actors. It allowed a kind of visual spontaneity that even Archangel or Careful had not permitted. Post-production could then be reduced to the editing of image and sound effects, and the difficulties of doing post-synchronized dialogue direction that had given rise to a rather spectacular problem during Twilight of the Ice Nymphs were just blessedly absent. So Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary has about it an ease, an enthusiasm, and an absence of constraint, that spring from Maddin’s being let alone to play with his favourite toys in the sandbox, in a kind of joyous homecoming to what he knows and loves best. And as his subsequent feature films would show, Dracula provided a platform on which to build some substantial and now completely original work.

7

Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands (2003)

It became more consciously autobiographical because I thought maybe this was my last picture. I really thought that. I had a real sense that there were just a few seconds left in the game and I had a lot of yardage to make up – I have to use NFL metaphors – and so I had to throw a long bomb right into the end zone and hope that someone on my team would catch it. So I stacked it with the things that really mattered to me. – Guy Maddin1

I tried to cram so many things into the one-hour running time of this movie that I ended up sort of stomping on them to make them all fit. – Guy Maddin2

In his review of the DVD issue of Cowards Bend the Knee, the excellent J. Hoberman (one of Maddin’s smartest and most stalwart supporters) called it ‘Maddin’s masterpiece.’3 I am inclined to agree. None of Maddin’s feature films is without flaws, but Cowards comes the closest yet to perfection. It has such compactness, verve, and potency, such an effortless and assured wielding of his self-developed silent cinema and avant-garde practices, such an unerring integration of outrageousness and feeling, that it seems like a summation of everything he had achieved so far in exploring an utterly personal sensibility and finding a filmic language in which to express it. Awkwardness, uncertainty, flat spots – all gone. Chiasmic collisions between seriousness and ridicule so compulsiveseeming they sometimes appear to be beyond the artist’s control – magically recuperated into a smooth, onward-driving process that somehow blends Greek tragedy and The Gong Show into a single entity. It achieves,

Cowards Bend the Knee

193

in fact, a sublime point of balance reconciling all the heterogeneous forces that swirl chaotically through Maddin’s work. The film was actually made under a commission from an art gallery – the Power Plant in Toronto – to be presented as an installation, but the project had quite an extensive earlier, pre-commission history as a set of voluminous notes that began to accumulate as early as 2000 and grew to more than 150 pages,4 and eventually emerged in printed form as a script much longer and more elaborate than what is in the finished film.5 But when this idea melded with the gallery commission, it shrank in the filmmaker’s mind to a single installation film of less than fifteen minutes, and then regrew into a set of ten peephole installation films of about six minutes each presented as successive ‘chapters.’ And so the project arrived at its finished length of 64 minutes, where in theatrical screenings or on video it would be experienced as a single continuous work in ten chapters, just like a short feature film. In the event the process of boiling down the rather substantial material in the notes to this format resulted in an entirely beneficial effect of compression and concentration, a sense of nothing being wasted and of a pressure to pack in a multitude of essential things. The formal vehicle Maddin chooses is that of a real silent movie with intertitles, music, and sound effects and not a single line of spoken dialogue. The shooting took place in October of 2002, actually simultaneously with the beginnings of shooting for The Saddest Music in the World, during a phase of last minute pre-production for that film. Cowards was paid for essentially out of Maddin’s pocket at a cost of about $30,000,6 and its shooting schedule was a phenomenally brief five days.7 It was shot, in Super-8mm, in a variety of local locations. In addition to its status as apotheosis of Maddin’s formal and aesthetic qualities, it is, if only on account of its ridiculous budget and shooting schedule, also the crown jewel of his output as a ‘garage-band’ filmmaker. After his sojourns in Arctic Russia, Switzerland, Mandragora, and Transylvania, Maddin here returns to his home town and his own story in a way that seems very close to the inspirational roots of The Dead Father. Maddin describes Cowards as ‘a blatant autobiography’ and ‘almost ninety-nine percent autobiographical’ and says ‘I’d like to insist that I lived every one of those episodes in a literal way.’8 The fact that the principal character is given the name ‘Guy Maddin’ might possibly be a clue. Cowards forms the first of what is, to date, a trilogy of autobiographical films that also includes Brand upon the Brain! and the featurelength documentary/memoir My Winnipeg (Maddin jokingly calls it ‘the Me Trilogy’9). It thus stands as a very important way-post in Maddin’s

194

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

creative journey. And yet it would be difficult for any viewer – except for one very familiar with Maddin’s family background and personal life – to see the phantasmagoric landscape and narrative of Cowards Bend the Knee as anybody’s autobiography. Of course Maddin did not play for the Winnipeg Maroons eighty years ago or have his hands amputated at the behest of a crazed girlfriend, and in fact there is almost nothing in the film that can be read ‘in a literal way’ – so that this claim might seem as extravagant and fantastic as the film itself. But the vehemence of these statements does function as an exhortation to understand the work in a certain way. To follow Maddin’s prescription to read it as autobiography is not to get anything other than an utterly jumbled and mostly opaque account of his literal history (however sensitively his experiential history might be being rendered in metaphorical terms). But looking at the film in this way certainly does encourage us to receive it with some gravity, and it does also provide further insight into the process of extreme transformation that any real-world material undergoes in his creative imagination. The film’s representation of events of Maddin’s inner and outer life bears about the same relation to the events themselves as Tales from the Gimli Hospital does to the actual history of New Iceland or Archangel does to the Allied presence in northern Russia in 1919. There, Maddin transmuted historical settings into a personal fantasy world, and here what he has done is to transmit his own physical and emotional history into a personal fantasy world. As we have seen, so much of Maddin’s cinema has been self-declaredly about amnesia. But Cowards – and this becomes more and more pervasively true as one looks at the case closely – is profoundly a work of remembering. THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES The biggest single item in Maddin’s 2003 collection of miscellaneous writings From the Atelier Tovar is a thirty-two-page ‘film treatment’ entitled THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES. This resembles an actual film treatment to begin with, but almost immediately slides into something much closer to a straight memoir, before just stopping rather abruptly without any kind of an ending. (Maddin states flatly that ‘it will never be made’ as a film.10) THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES is an extraordinary piece of writing, uneven and clearly unfinished, but often wonderfully vivid and poignant in its rendering of a child’s sensibility and experiences. It is quite undisguisedly an autobiographical document, with Maddin’s family members and friends given their own names,

Cowards Bend the Knee

195

and locales and important events straightforwardly identified – always through the eyes of the child without qualities (always named only thus), young Guy himself. It covers the period roughly between 1960 and the death of Maddin’s grandmother in 1970, that is, between Maddin’s fifth and fifteenth years. It lays out many striking and often traumatic events of Maddin’s childhood, and conveys a coherent sense of the child’s subjectivity through it all. It presents a sensibility that, however tinged with rueful detachment, is essentially serious and unironic, perhaps the most extended form of that mood in anything of Maddin’s and a fine corrective to any belief that his imagination is wholly anarchic and gleefully destructive, or any denial that it is based in a deep stratum of feeling. It is also a very useful tool in reading especially Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand upon the Brain! for autobiographical content. Little Guy’s position as absolutely the baby of the family, seven years younger than his next eldest sibling, is forcefully laid out. His lengthy description of playing with the mangy, headless toys and threadbare furniture he had inherited from them is marvellously evocative, as is his experience of seeing old photos in which these items were in pristine condition, in the World Before Guy. The following passage is especially striking, and has always seemed to me a clue to Maddin’s love affair with old and battered cinema and other forms of culture: 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. (187)

The family home and place of business are quickly described: The little child without qualities lives above Lil’s Beauty Salon, the family business, with his mom, herdis, and his high-school-age siblings: ross, the oldest, cameron and janet. Downstairs, in an apartment behind the beautician’s, live his aunt lil and his elderly blind gramma. (180)

There are vibrant descriptions of the busy ‘gynocracy’ of the salon’s working quarters, and of the layout of the establishment. The boy would wedge himself into various chutes and ducts and peer into the salon at floor level. (He says in the movie’s DVD commentary: ‘I guess my first

196

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

erotic memory is just a row of swollen, nylon-clad ankles lined up beneath a row of roaring hairdryers.’) In the basement, never joining the rest of the family, was the mother of Herdis and Lil: The blind gramma spent all her waking hours in profound loneliness. She sat in a hardwood chair against the stucco wall of her living room, in an austere composition that would have made Dreyer envious. (204)

The child’s (and Guy’s) father, chas, was business manager for the Winnipeg Maroons, and then, briefly, held a not quite so exalted position with the Canadian National hockey team that took up residence in Winnipeg for a few years in the 1960s.11 The Maroons played at the Winnipeg Arena, and in 1964 (when Guy was eight or nine) won the Allan Cup, emblematic of supremacy in the ranks of senior amateur hockey in Canada. During these years Chas took little Guy to the Arena repeatedly, let him wander around freely in the dressing rooms and the empty auditorium.12 The place in which the child without qualities felt more ‘at home’ than any other place ... was none other than the Gothic and gargantuan, the elitist and elysian, the perfumer of megalomania and melancholia, the habitué’s haunt of heraldry, horror, hockey and hearses, the wonderful womb of the wondrous: namely, in a word, the Winnipeg Arena ... The child without qualities knew and loved its every dark corner [...] He loved the smell of the ice, the Zamboni and the acrid dressing rooms, where his father let him cut oranges for the players [...] Large swarms of bats issued from the black infinities of the rafters and catwalks. The giant pipe organ played J.S. Bach and a few hockey anthems. The games themselves were played by men helmeted only in a thick protective gloss of Brylcreem, dripping above lumpen faces heavily cross-hatched with the wounds of many years’ play with blade and cudgel. The fans seemed to be selected from the same pool. (190–1)

In one scene after the arrival of the national team, chas and the boy visit the dressing room: they soon found themselves, fully dressed, standing among the naked players in the shower room. chas introduced the child without qualities to the great huck [team star Fran Huck], who stood before him all soapy and steaming, smoking a cigar while the shower water beat off his back. huck

Cowards Bend the Knee

197

extended a hand in greeting to the awestruck lad, whose shy eyes were exactly level with the player’s genitals. (200)

In the DVD commentary to the film, Maddin recounts this moment again, saying, ‘My head only came up to Fran Huck’s penis in the shower.’ The boy listened to games at home: huck was there for him only on those radio broadcasts, which offered to the listener only cubist glimpses of the players – the blur of a brushcut, the overlapping of elbows … (201)

Also recounted here is the tragic melodrama of Guy’s brother Cameron, who at the age of sixteen (when Guy was seven) committed suicide on the grave of a girl who had been killed in an auto crash. Eventually in its wake – and in the wake too of an extraordinary number of fatal accidents and suicides among his group of friends – come the deaths of his father (of a heart attack, when Guy was twenty-one and the day after his girlfriend’s announcement that she was pregnant), and the now very aged gramma (pitching down a flight of stairs in her blindness). These latter two deaths were much feared in advance, impending disasters that the child without qualities feels a special responsibility to try to prevent by whatever rational or superstitious means he can – but vainly. The film The elements of the film are as follows. The place is Winnipeg. The time, as stated by the published script, is the 1930s – but the film itself is silent, with old 78rpm records as musical background, while sound effects are often discreetly inserted in a fashion not so far from what happens in the earliest ‘part-talkies,’ or for that matter in many scenes in Archangel, so it feels more like, say, 1927 or 1928. And in the DVD commentary, Maddin says ‘around 1930’ but adds that it’s hard to specify. In fact the period is unstable (for example, it shows the Winnipeg Maroons as winning the Allan Cup, something they didn’t do until the 1960s), but not nearly to the degree that Tales from the Gimli Hospital is. The hero is Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr), ‘Rover for the Winnipeg Maroons,’13 and his father, Maddin Sr (Victor Cowie) is ‘the Voice of the Maroons’ on radio. Following the Allan Cup victory, Maddin Sr tells his son to be sure to visit his mother, gravely ill in the hospital. Guy’s girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) is pregnant and he takes her to get an abortion in an

198

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

establishment that functions also as a beauty salon and a bordello, but in the midst of this operation he leaves with a girl he meets there, the daughter of the house, Meta (Melissia Dionisio). Veronica meanwhile crawls out onto the ice of the Arena and bleeds to death. Meta, holding Guy in sexual thrall, engages him in her own deranged compulsions: her father Chas (Henry Mogatas) had been murdered by her ‘whore of a mother,’ salon-owner Liliom (Tara Birtwistle), with help from her ‘foul paramour’ Shaky (David Stuart Evans), a police captain who also plays for the Maroons. During the murder Chas’ hands, stained blue from years of hair-dyeing, had been severed, and Meta now keeps them in a jar, while telling Guy that he shall not touch her until he has aided her project of revenge by killing the murderers. She gets the team-doctor/ abortionist Dr Fusi (Louis Negin) to chloroform Guy and instructs him to saw off Guy’s hands and sew on her father’s. Instead Fusi throws away Chas’ hands and paints Guy’s blue. Guy sets out to kill Liliom in the salon one night, but instead ends up making sexual advances to her and finally fist-fucking her at her own invitation. Meanwhile, Veronica has risen from the grave and reappears in the story as a ghost, who, like Guy, now gets work in the beauty salon. Guy visits a forgotten wax museum in the rafters of the Arena, housing life-size sculptures of ‘The All-Time Maroons’14 – middle-aged men in hockey gear, one of whom is Chas. Guy falls in love again with Veronica, apparently oblivious to the fact that he has just dumped her and indirectly caused her death. Fiery Meta, though, is still hell-bent on her plan to have Guy kill her father’s assassins. During a Maroons game against the Soviets, Guy strangles Shaky on the ice, undetected in the middle of the extensive celebrations following a Maroons goal.15 Appalled by his deed, he tries the next day to confess it to Mo, also a policeman, and when Mo tries to hush him up Guy leans over the desk and strangles his friend to death, surrounded by a precinct full of unheeding officers. Meanwhile Veronica has taken up with Maddin Sr following the death of Guy’s mother (never visited by him). Guy finds himself in the position of being in love with a woman (a) whom he has fatally mistreated and (b) who prefers his father to him, while still being urged to acts of criminal vengeance by the girl he is quite unsuccessfully trying to disburden himself of, and being bossed around also by that girl’s mother, whom he also has some kind of sexual relation with, all the while piling up an ever-growing accumulation of horrifying acts committed by himself out of compulsions he cannot identify. Apparently the ghost of Veronica is going to have another abortion, because there

Cowards Bend the Knee

199

she is in the backroom of the salon with Dr Fusi operating on her and Meta standing by. When Liliom tries to prevent Guy from bursting in to stop it, he wrestles violently with her, and at last succeeds in strangling her to death as well. Meta witnesses this act with turbulent mixed emotions, and then instructs Fusi to return her father’s hands to her. Guy is forcibly chloroformed and this time suffers a genuine double amputation. Perhaps he is now free of Meta, but at quite a cost. He heads directly to the Arena and dresses for the upcoming game. His stumps are concealed by his hockey gloves, taped around his wrists by a stick-boy not a million miles distant in appearance from the historical little Guy Maddin. Taking his pre-game pee, Guy finds himself at the urinal next to his father. With no hands and taped-over hockey gloves, he finds it difficult to proceed. ‘I see you still need your hand held,’ Maddin Sr remarks. Guy looks down to see his urinating father possessed of the largest penis in the world (or at least in Winnipeg). The game under way, Veronica’s ghost arises from the crowd and walks zombielike across the catwalk and up to the radio booth, summoned by Maddin Sr’s caresses of a lump of ice on the table in front of him (‘the ice breast’). Meta is still as jealous of Veronica as ever despite the fact that she has now dumped Guy and repossessed his hands. Guy too climbs the stairs and enters the wax museum, where his tarot hockey cards ‘predict a mysterious apocalypse.’ Maddin Sr and Veronica come in, and the father says: ‘Son, meet your new mother.’ In anguish, Guy utters a lengthy and imposing invocation to the wax heroes, calling upon them to awaken and help him. They do awaken, and Maddin Sr and Veronica back out of the room, followed by Guy and the shuffling Immortals. As they come onto the catwalk, Meta, in the crowd, sees her father and rushes up to meet him. In the traffic jam on the catwalk, Meta and Chas are reunited, but when she swoons with emotion, her father tries to catch her, but – as handless as Guy – cannot hold her, and she plunges to her death on the ice. The film’s last scene, which occurs ‘the following season,’ shows Guy now himself a wax figure in the museum (his plaque reads ‘Red Dunsmore’). He has become another figure of failed masculinity trapped eternally in a posture of impotence and humiliation. To further emphasize this condition he is shown being spoon-fed by Maddin Sr during the ‘feeding time at the Wax Museum.’ The final title offers a moralizing quote from that wise elder to the effect that ‘like the French Foreign Legion, the museum is a sanctuary ... for cowards, for husbands afraid to face the burdens – nay, the terrors – of living with wives and families.’

200

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

A life mash-up Maddin kicks off the DVD commentary to Cowards Bend the Knee with the following statement: I decided to set the film in my pre-history – I was born in 1956, but just vaguely set it in some kind of silent-movie past, just because it felt like that was where my life really began, where all the melodramas, all the myths that made me what I am, took place.

The DVD commentary altogether is a telling source of insight: unaccompanied by his usual sidekicks, Maddin finds, especially later in the movie, a self-communing and even saddened tone, seemingly prompted not so much by the film as by all the things that inspired it. As well as many details connecting events in the film to events in Maddin’s life, it offers a kind of tunnel into the composite personality that imagined the project in the first place. The film takes place almost entirely in only two locations: the beauty salon and the Arena. These correspond to the two principal places of Maddin’s childhood so lovingly commemorated in THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES and elsewhere. A third place, the family lake cottage at Gimli, does not figure here, although it does appear quite recognizably in The Dead Father, and in a transformed version in Brand upon the Brain! There are a couple of scenes in a cemetery, and one in a police station, but the rest are rigorously restricted – even Veronica somehow contrives to crawl out onto the ice at the Arena to bleed to death after her literally backroom abortion in the Salon. Some actual events and persons are reproduced in rather fine detail. Liliom’s mother (‘Gramma,’ a role in which the filmmaker wickedly cast his own mother Herdis) lives in a rocking chair in the basement, her blindness Expressionistically signified by black-paned spectacles, an unheeding witness to various sex acts of Guy and Meta, and on one occasion singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Liliom through the heating vent (this exact event related in THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES as gramma’s happy birthday to herdis16). The orange-sucking ritual of the hockey team’s dressing room and the vivid nudity of its showers are faithfully transcribed; the Arena, the Winnipeg Maroons, and the Allan Cup are all called by their right names; and the players inhabiting the Hall of the All-Time Maroons are connected by name to the Maroons and the Canadian National team of the 1960s.17 The salon, meanwhile, was tricked out with props from the actual Lil’s Beauty Salon – even though it is given the name of the rival salon down the street,

Cowards Bend the Knee

201

‘The Black Silhouette.’18 That name was in any case more appropriate to the salon in the film, which, as the intertitles tell us, is ‘beauty salon by day ... bordello by night,’ and which features backroom abortions in the back room. This is another transformation of more of his own childhood memories. Maddin reminisced to Robert Enright: My brother [Ross] was a big man on campus and had many undergraduate parties in the basement that were full of hot Commerce babes. Sometimes a busload of nurses would come over. The party would always overboil from the rumpus room in the basement up into the beauty salon. I remember drunk, beautiful girls shampooed by horny teenaged boys and then both of them going under the dryers together, and ... rolling around in the dark. It was right on Ellice Avenue, a heavily travelled street, and there were huge, noirish venetian blinds and the room was full of mirrors, so the car headlights going down the street would bounce off the mirrors and constantly move the venetian blind shadows up and down and wash them all over the place [...] [A]ll of those activities excluded me completely because of my age.19

How precisely accurate these memories are we can’t know, but as with so many other instances of Maddin’s reminiscences, there is quite enough weirdness in the events as narrated to make visible a pathway to the frankly surreal worlds of his films. And actually the nocturnal activities in the salon are, in the film, visually quite close to this description. Most of Cowards Bend the Knee consists thus of a lurid and flamboyant mash-up and transmutation of earlier events of Maddin’s life and earlier events inside his head. Although the settings are those of Maddin’s childhood, some of the most important events stem from later periods of his life. The missing character from this landscape of the past is little Guy himself, the perceiving subject. Instead, we see a grown-up Guy perambulating through situations that belong to his childhood. The pivotal relationship between Guy and Meta is, says the filmmaker, a twisted version of one that he had been in only four or five years previously.20 Both the way that Guy casually walks away from an existing relationship (actually during his girlfriend’s abortion!) and the perverse and destructive acts he performs while under Meta’s influence represent lurid restagings of felt adult behaviour patterns of his own, and both are labelled as ‘cowardly.’21 In the DVD commentary, the director states flatly that the ‘cowardice’ depicted in the film is ‘simply the terror of breaking up with somebody.’ In

202

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

fact the whole notion of ‘cowardice’ is something that stems from more or less current history rather than a childhood environment, and has a particular, rather counterintuitive, meaning in the film, to which we will turn in a moment. This surreal, fertile overprinting of past and present – more astounding the more one thinks about it – can then present the spectacle of Maddin’s child-sensibility inhabiting the role of star hockey player,22 or re-enacting Oedipal confrontations with the father’s giant sexual member and the mother’s perceived cruel and aggressive sexual appetite directed at the son, while at the same time existing as a mature sexual subject who comes from the present, however much he may be set in the past. Of course it is entirely possible that these simultaneities seem much less fantastic to Maddin than they do to us: probably his childhood past always seems as present to him as the present (there’s certainly enough evidence for this in his work). Best, then, simply to describe this impossible synchronicity as the realization of a psychological state – bizarre to viewers, ‘a blatant autobiography’ to their creator. Oedipus wrecks 23 There are plenty of other wonderful alchemical transformations as well, most notably the presence of both the mother and the father in two separate and contrasting personae. The father is both the powerful Maddin Sr, cold, judgmental, and Oedipally threatening, and the harmless victim Chas, friendly and loving, amputated and murdered (in the latter persona recalling the maimed and betrayed Swan-Feeder in Careful). If the character of Chas, endowed with the name of the director’s real father, represents the parental figure as victimized and disempowered,24 then Maddin Sr (as Maddin tells us in the DVD commentary) is endowed with ‘all sorts of Zeus-like strength – the kind my father deserved, but never got to enjoy.’ But Maddin Sr also has some of the institutional power that Chas Maddin had as business manager for a famous hockey team. Maddin says that he got the idea of his father as a successful rival to his son in romance from Turgenev’s First Love, because he’d just been reading it and wanted to give his father those godlike powers.25 But it seems a particularly explosive power to give him in the context of a story that is overdetermined with signifiers of symbolic castration and Oedipal trauma, and it really seems that Maddin Sr is some kind of avenging-superego father of the unconscious. The mother, meanwhile, is both the pathetically dying wife of Maddin Sr, seen only in one irised shot in her hospital bed and entirely neglected by her son, and the harpy

Cowards Bend the Knee

203

Liliom, swaggering predatory monster of power and sexual appetite. In a way, both of these are Maddin’s Aunt Lil: Liliom as a transformation of the gentle real woman into one who was aggressive and sexual, finally empowered in a way; the mother in the hospital a version of the real Lilian who died in hospital in 1986 while her nephew felt distracted by semi-toxic things going on in his love life.26 But, as Brand upon the Brain! will show us, they are both representations of Maddin’s mother Herdis as well (who is of course actually present in the film herself as the blind and blinded Gramma). All four of these parent figures are versions of the powerful phantasmatic parents of little Guy’s child sensibility, monstrous or pathetic, and when put back together as a single pair, monstrous and pathetic. The self, too, is multiplied: Guy is both hockey star displayed in pillar-of-light soft-focus glamour shots and comprehensive failure – in love, in ethics, in action – horribly amputated before being frozen into a position of impotent stasis and put on display forever as the hopeless loser he is. Moreover, since Liliom is in some sense very much a version of the self’s mother, then the alarming Meta becomes another version of the self (as the director has suggested).27 If the film’s ‘I’ is both, in a major way, ‘Guy Maddin’ and in a partial way, ‘Meta,’ then that poor self seems to get a drubbing both coming and going. The nominal protagonist is a spectacular moral failure in every dimension, and finally a symbolically castrated figure of pathos and dismay, whose awful punishment is explicitly declared to be quite appropriate. This is self-loathing at its finest. The imperious, sexually manipulating, blindly self-concentrated personage of Meta reflects not just a quasi-comical complaint about some high-handed girlfriend, but an arresting repetition of the awesome figure of Klara in Careful. Both Meta and Klara are most striking not so much in their arbitrary and tyrannical behaviour as in their motivation: deep involvement with parental figures that the film asks us to respect. In fact the fullest moment of positive melodramatic feeling in Cowards Bend the Knee occurs in the scene of Meta’s joyful and fatal reunion with her handless dead father, and this wounded child aspect of the character is the one that Maddin has expressed an identification with, so it is probably not wrong to speak of Meta as the filmmaker’s positive version of the ‘I.’ Insofar as the film reproduces the plot of Euripedes’ Electra (and Strauss’ opera28), then of course Meta is Electra (as Liliom is Clytemnestra and Chas is Agamemnon and Shaky is Aegisthus), and that makes Meta the protagonist of the story. It is a configuration that casts Guy as Orestes, Electra’s brother, and thus makes Guy’s sexual attraction to Meta something quasi-incestuous.29 Maddin has resisted the idea of

204

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

psychoanalysis, saying that he doesn’t know much about it, and that it might be destructive to creativity.30 But in Cowards Bend the Knee (and in Brand upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg), he is pretty close to psychoanalysing himself. Cowardice An introductory caption to the published script reads: In human relationships all men are cowards. They lack the capacity for telling the truth even when there is little risk in doing so, and by chronically surrendering to even the smallest fears, they invite, even oblige, women to exploit this masculine cowardice for their own feminine ends. Both men and women are cowards!!! (14)

So, on this account, the characters of the film, and especially the protagonist, are cowardly because they shy clear of any kind of confrontation, they lie in order to avoid unpleasantness, they are too compliant because they are confused by desire, and they render themselves weak before their women lovers who are thus encouraged to bully and manipulate them. Maddin told James Quandt: In the battle of the sexes, women seem to have the bigger army and the chemical weapons, and the only way a man can swim upstream, almost like a little sperm trying to get at the egg [...] men will always take the slipperiest way! ‘Be a man’ means John Wayne, but the men I know are more like Daffy Duck or George Costanza.31

Although the published script accuses ‘all men,’ the only real example the film offers is the protagonist. Guy is thus bullied and manipulated by Meta and by Liliom, who can order him to do things that alarm him by sheer force of personality and his own ‘cowardice.’ Under their influence he murders Shaky and Liliom, he takes a job as a hairdresser where he is ordered around by them all day, he is alienated from his own body (his hands strangle, his sexual appetites move in ways that disgust him). What is cowardly here is the lack of courage to follow true impulses – to escape Meta, resist Liliom. But there is a second, equally important, form of cowardice on view in the film. This is a more straightforward form of moral cowardice in which one shirks one’s ethical and human duty. Guy’s abandonment of

Cowards Bend the Knee

205

Guy Maddin, in the uniform of the Winnipeg Maroons, hears from his girlfriend Veronica that she is pregnant, as tiny hockey players flitter around the ice behind.

Veronica just at the point she needs him most, and just in the sad condition where his appetites have helped to land her, is a clear example, as is his neglect of his mother on her deathbed. Both kinds of cowardice seem inscribed into the muddy final epigraph-title, referring to the wax museum (including Guy) as ‘a sanctuary ... for cowards, for husbands afraid to face the burdens – nay, the terrors – of living with wives and families.’ The confusion prompted by this sententiously pious title simply highlights the dual and contradictory nature of the concept as used in the film: have these husbands neglected their families (‘burdens’), or have they just been too quick to do what those families wanted them to do (‘terrors’)? Likewise, the film accuses Guy of being cowardly because he selfishly follows his own desires (in neglecting Veronica and his sick mother) and cowardly because he pusillanimously suppresses his own desires (to get away from Meta and Liliom).

206

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The concept is slippery and mutable, but one thing is clear: Guy is weak and guilty every which way. In this heads-you-lose, tails-you-lose fashion, the film gives the distinct sense of just being so disgusted with its hero that it really doesn’t matter how you look at it, or what standard you apply to him, a big COWARD sign is going to be hung around his cowardly neck. It is somewhat strange that the forms this cowardice takes include acts such as strangling a teammate in full view of an arena full of spectators, or strangling a cop in the middle of the day shift at a police station, or for that matter strangling Liliom in front of lots of witnesses. In general the film makes the firm point that when its hero is confronted with the enraged and autocratic Meta, any kind of violence, danger, or craziness will seem an easier option than standing up to her. And it is also pretty clear that an underlying weakness in every sphere is responsible not just for his treachery to Veronica and his spinelessness with Meta, but also for his shame and shrinking powerlessness in the face of Maddin Sr. That Freudian viewers will recognize in that character the castrating father of the superego, rendered in a fashion so elementary as to be comical, and perceive the son therefore as in some way helpless by necessity is of no interest to the filmmaker, whose wrathful mood is so contemptuous that he is not going to quibble over questions of which if any of Guy’s failings may not be entirely his fault. The state of waxen inaction that the cowardly protagonist ends up in becomes an expression of Guy’s own self-castration.32 That is an event prefigured almost from the beginning in his ignominious submission to Meta, a failure of traditional masculine power – of masculine power such as that effortlessly manifested by the patriarch Maddin Sr with his enormous penis and easy expropriation of the son’s love object. So cowardice = castration (or castration = cowardice), as well as moral failure. This swirling brew of incommensurate psychic energies just flows wonderfully through the film, another index of its almost magical success in uniting everything that works and has always worked for Maddin. Horror and mutilation As with many of Maddin’s films, Cowards Bend the Knee fuses elements of a number of earlier movie genres, albeit in fragmentary form and in alienating surroundings. Heading the list is horror, since the resemblances of this story to The Hands of Orlac are readily discernible. Beginning in 1920 as a novel (Les Mains d’Orlac) by horror pioneer Maurice Renard, the story was turned four years later into a German Expressionist silent film

Cowards Bend the Knee

207

(Orlacs Hände) directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt. It had a number of later movie adaptations, of which Maddin’s avowed favourite is Mad Love (1935), directed by Karl Freund and starring Peter Lorre.33 The essential idea is that a concert pianist has his hands destroyed in an accident, and they are replaced by those of a murderer owing to the skill of an extraordinary surgeon, after which the heretofore virtuous patient finds that his hands want to kill people: a kind of cousin, therefore, of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Wiene film, meticulous and stately with impressive settings and extraordinary slow-motion ghastly pantomime by Veidt, in the end reveals that the hands were not those of a murderer at all, and thus becomes the equivalent of a haunted house movie where there is no actual ghost. Mad Love changes almost everything. Orlac becomes in effect a secondary character, as centrestage is taken over by the mad doctor Lorre, who is desperately in love with Orlac’s fiancée and tries to manipulate his patient into believing that he has killed his own father. The film is an egregious mishmash, which gives the fiancée the profession of star actress in a Grand Guignol theatre troupe in which she is tortured every day to great applause and appreciation for her art. Lorre never misses a performance, and kidnaps the life-size wax statue of her that was used to advertise the show and then talks to it in his living quarters while playing demented music on the organ and laughing maniacally. Additions of important characters such as a wisecracking American reporter and a drunken housekeeper with a parakeet on her shoulder have a truly dire effect on any unity of mood (quite the opposite of the sombre monomania of Orlacs Hände), but it is quite likely that it is exactly this crazy-quilt of grotesque horror, absurd caricature, and inappropriate humour that Maddin finds most appealing about the film. Certainly that irrecuperable melange, classically presented without the slightest acknowledgment of its wild internal incongruities, bears perceptible affinities to Maddin’s work when you start to think about it. The trope of amputation is hardly unique to The Hands of Orlac, and of course it is startlingly persistent in Maddin’s cinema. The one-legged characters in Archangel and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, the brother who slices off his fingers in Careful, the decapitation of Lucy in Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, and (simultaneously with the creation of Cowards Bend the Knee) Lady Port-Huntley in The Saddest Music in the World who suffers another double amputation by hacksaw even worse than that of ‘Guy Maddin’ – these form a dismayingly populous gallery of amputees.34 When I asked Maddin about this, he replied that he loved Lon Chaney

208

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

movies, melodrama, and fairy tales, and that ‘these are little allegories of disability where someone’s inner wounds are shown expressionistically, outwardly.’35 Chaney’s films are an entire little subspecies of silent cinema. A fascinating figure with a ravaged heroic countenance that would have suited Milton’s Satan, he attracted a fanatical fan base for his painful melodramas of tortured sacrifice or villainy that often displayed a vivid and startling masochistic suffering. Chaney was most famous as ‘the man of a thousand faces,’ and he deliberately inflicted upon himself extremes of physical pain to acquire spectacular deformities. His most famous agonies included hideously contorting his body and face for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), inserting wires into his cheeks to distend his face in Phantom of the Opera (1925), and forcing his limbs into torments of compression to play a legless character in The Penalty (1920) and an armless one in The Unknown (1927). The last-named title, and several of Chaney’s other films, were directed by Tod Browning, whose disturbing career eventually progressed through horror movies of the 1930s like Dracula (1931) and Maddin favourite The Devil-Doll (1936), and reached its apogee of disturbingness with Freaks (1932).36 Maddin’s echoing of Chaney’s amputation-work and Browning’s grotesquery has in some ways a relation to his echoing of the aesthetics of silent and early sound film in general. That is, it is based in a recognition of the simple power of these forms, and also of their impossibility of working in the same way for a modern spectator, and thence of the necessity for some kind of accompanying irony. The absurdities of Mad Love and The Devil-Doll (which features a literally unbelievable movie-long drag act by Lionel Barrymore among many other delights) make them always-already campy, but however ridiculous the extremes of Chaney’s films (and The Unknown is jaw-dropping in this respect), their anguish is at some level so appalling that it is more or less impossible to laugh at them. In Cowards Bend the Knee there are amputations, strangulations, humiliations, terrible crimes, and suffering, but they have too the purely Maddinesque simultaneous quality of ridiculousness. As Dr Fusi turns up for surgery – an abortion or an amputation – his whalebone corset and Stroheim cigarette-in-ridiculously-long-holder instantly render the scene absurd. When Meta demands that he cut off Guy’s hands and replace them with those of her dead father, he replies, ‘Impossible!’, she retorts with a menacing (yet strangely cute) scowl, ‘Do it!’and he meekly complies. This operation, of course, never takes place: Guy’s hands are painted blue and Chas’ dropped into a garbage bucket with a Foleyed

Cowards Bend the Knee

209

As Guy at last strangles Liliom, mashing her face into the two-way glass of the beauty salon. Her daughter Meta in white salon-employee uniform looks on from the near side with profoundly mixed feelings.

‘clunk’ that is both chilling and funny. But later on he actually does saw off Guy’s hands, under a similar compulsion (one more demonstration that ‘all men are cowards’). As this is taking place the viewer is experiencing a mixture of feelings that is quite intoxicating. In the first place, these hands-on-and-off and operations-pretended-and-actual games achieve a virtually Feydeauvian level of abstract farce, where violent events are rendered almost weightless in a wild environment where anything can happen, according to a formula whereby the more outrageous an event is, the more abstract it becomes. (Perhaps Joe Orton is a better parallel than Feydeau.) But the spectacle of desperation and suffering, the speed and momentum of events, and those aspects of the presentation (music, visual style) that encourage a sober vantage point are pushing in the opposite direction, towards pity and terror. This vertiginous mix is, to repeat, practically Maddin’s hallmark. Just as the severed hands and stumps are metaphors for ‘inner wounds’ and this

210

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

amputated condition a clear realization of symbolic castration, so the pathological condition of alienation from the body, the sundering of desire from will, and zombielike destructive actions are realized in the hands that want to transgress of their own accord – like in every other version of the Orlac scenario. Cowards Bend the Knee is probably the most articulate version of this aspect of the scenario, because, first, the hands that transgress actually are Guy’s hands (and in any case Chas was not a murderer but a murder victim), and second, uniquely among all the Orlacs, Guy in the end has his hands amputated and not replaced at all. He is left neither in a condition of unwilling criminality nor in one of redeemed virtue, but simply in a state of waxen impotence. And the reattachment element of the story is only an idea, a fairy-tale idea, thought up by Meta whose whole narrative is poised between a fairy tale with its flat characters of good father and evil mother and a melodrama which marshals the same elements into a turbulent broth of emotion (in between lies Euripedes). Film noir If Cowards Bend the Knee is a horror/mutilation movie, it is also a film noir. Indeed, Maddin baldly labels it as such on the opening page of the published script, which reads: time: 1930s place: the environs of Winnipeg’s criminal underworld – its hockey arena, its most lurid hair-styling salon genre: film noir The description certainly fits the physical environment of the film, with its nocturnal settings, seedy back rooms, and dilapidated public buildings with their aura of lowness, its photographic style descending from German Expressionism in its very noirish use of high contrast and Weegee effects of flash-blast and surrounding blackness, its mirrors and venetian blinds. (Maddin told me that ‘hockey photography in the early 60s and the 50s always looked like a Weegee photograph because it was a flashbulb taking the picture and then everything grading off into darkness instantly. You sort of really felt that hockey players were more sinister then.’37) In fact Cowards is more of a true Weimar-era Expressionist film noir than almost anything, since it is using silent film techniques like high-contrast iris shots, multiple exposure, and heightened images, but

Cowards Bend the Knee

211

in the noir context of the twentieth-century city. Certainly the lighting effects created by venetian blinds and passing car headlights in sex-saturated Lil’s Beauty Salon at night (as related to Enright, above) are reproduced in the film in a way that is 100% noir. The moral environment is equally low: crass appetites, treachery, crime and sex, concealment and guilt. Even the most sensational aspects of horror and mutilation can be nested appropriately within a noir context – and of course what noir gets from Expressionist horror and crime models is not just visual. But Maddin is also interested crucially in another aspect of film noir: its gender map. He offers a partial definition of original noir as stories ‘where you start seeing delusional males who seal their own fate in the opening moments of the movie and then you get to watch them die over the next seventy-five action-packed minutes,’ and adds, ‘My favourite noirs seem to be about a guy and a gal and some quicksand.’38 Cowards reproduces the frequent noir configuration of (1) a male who is not as much in control as he is supposed to be, (2) a femme fatale who leads him off the right path, and (3) A good girl whom he makes the mistake of not preferring. In fact it has two femmes fatales, since Meta and Liliom both qualify. Maddin’s protagonist lacks the overwhelming classical context of powerful, narrative-mastering heroes that made the weak, flawed, or failed males of 1940s and 1950s noir so extraordinarily disturbing by contrast, and in general the proliferation of the ‘erotic thriller’ since the 1980s has made Meta and Liliom types less alarming. What Cowards does echo recognizably is that subcategory of noirs that feature a weak and self-indulgent hero who (to quote Maddin on his own protagonist) ‘gets exactly what he deserves’:39 films like They Won’t Believe Me (1947) and Pitfall (1948) and Angel Face (1952) that make Robert Young, Dick Powell, and Robert Mitchum into figures of painful unworthiness. But unlike those characters, ‘Guy Maddin’’s crisis of masculinity has no social dimension; it does not reflect in any way a culture-wide failure of good patriarchy. Nor are the film’s femmes fatales any kind of response to an institutionally masculine fear of sexually powerful women. In this dimension, as in all the others, Cowards remains private and personal, no matter how extensive its paraphrasing or reanimation of existing cultural forms. Melodrama, Greek tragedy Yet in ways that horror or noir rarely do, Cowards Bend the Knee proclaims affinities with Greek tragedy and melodrama. The echoes of Electra have been noted, but it can perhaps be underlined how the starkness, simpli-

212

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Noir heroine Meta lights a cigarette in the back room of the Black Silhouette Salon. Dim in the background, white-corsetted Dr Fusi is performing an abortion on Veronica.

city, and elemental power of the situation and the characters make their way into the film’s mixture of so many other elements, and are brought out by the film’s swift tempo and the tone of seriousness struck by the musical soundtrack. It is rather wonderful that these qualities can persist through so much pastiche and absurdity, but the fundamental bedrock of parent’s crime and child’s passion conveys an essential note of grandeur despite all distractions. It is above all in the Electra-plot that these qualities show themselves most clearly, and especially in the personage of Meta. And here we find ourselves also in the domain of family melodrama. That form is commonly held to be incompatible with tragedy, but we might reflect that from one angle the story of the House of Atreus really is a melodrama (indeed, a good update would make an excellent television miniseries). It is the addition of trashiness, or at least mundaneness, and of broad conduits for sentimental feeling that convert the

Cowards Bend the Knee

213

awesome ritual narratives of Greek theatre into the ‘low’ form of melodrama. In Cowards, the seedy sex and crime of the noir world invade the drama and lower it, while the hailstorm of ridiculousness pummels every high emotion just as in Archangel or Careful. Meta must deliver her fearsome Electra-like pronouncements while clutching a glass jar containing her father’s hair-dye-stained hands in formaldehyde, and enact a stern design of vengeance in the context of surgical ludicrousness and petty jealousy, all in a beauty-salon environment of perms and manicures, abortions and prostitution. But melodrama has evolved in response to the anti-tragic climate of the modern world, and if its analyses and catharses are shallower and more disconnected than tragedy’s, they nevertheless give some relief of expression to volcanic underlying pressures, and in those very qualities of relative thinness and off-the-rackness reflect modernity’s failing ability to make sense of things. Maddin, master jackdaw, is perfectly at ease in adding together all of these elements without the slightest concern for clashes of tone or any other kind of contradiction, and expecting each separate element still to function. So Cowards can be farce, horror movie, film noir, Greek tragedy, and family melodrama – and surrealist avant-garde piece and three different kinds of silent film – in quick succession or all at once. (The director has also called it ‘an opera without singing.’40) It is the register of melodrama, though, that Cowards chooses for its most genuine moments of feeling, and for its emotional climax. The pathos of Veronica’s pregnancy, abortion, abandonment, and eventual death are achieved largely through her presentation in the old stereotype of demure virtuous girl sadly led from the path of respectability and suffering a fate much too cruel for her transgression, an image coming directly from Victorian melodrama. And as all the plot elements of the film move to their garish climaxes, the one element that is accorded a redemptive flow of feeling is Meta’s reunion with her dead, adored father. I have talked about Archangel and Careful as movies that must journey slowly and doggedly through all kinds of obstacles to some plane of genuine (and melodramatic) feeling. Cowards doesn’t do that, exactly, partly because its compactness and pace discourage any kind of expansiveness, and partly because its principal subject is Guy, whose condition is blockage and alienated action and whose final state is petrifaction: precisely not a redemptive flow of feeling at any stage. But it does allow Meta, the most passionate and active engine of the story, to reach an exalted apotheosis in keeping with the grandeur of her deranged project. (Careful had allowed Klara something similar, but her heroic death-moment

214

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

is brief and sudden, and the film’s climax of pathos is left to Grigorss.) Espying her father issuing from the wax museum and appearing on the catwalk above the Arena ice surface, she runs up to meet him, melts with joy, then faints under the dazzling power of this miracle. One of the idyllic memories of her daughterhood had been of ‘play fainting’ in the delightful confidence that her father would catch her before she fell. This concept, this game of ‘play fainting,’ is a typically bizarre and whimsical Maddin invention whose bizarre whimsy somehow alchemically becomes real and touching, and at this culmination flowers into a sublime moment, like something from an opera. The scene is crowned with the bitter irony that this idealized world of father and daughter cannot survive in the real world: in the real world the father was murdered, and in the real world now, as the intertitles tell us, ‘the weight of a daughter [is] too much for a father with no hands’ – so the unconscious Meta slides off the catwalk and plummets to her death (for in the real world the distance of the fall is not a play-distance either). Like everything else in Cowards, the moment is upon us swiftly and does not linger in the execution, but it nevertheless achieves the true plane of melodramatic pathos and release. Male inadequacy But in its more central activity of self-meditation through the examination of its self-named protagonist, Cowards remains the apex of Maddin’s representations of male inadequacy, failure, and symbolic castration. It is a collection of work that begins in Tales from the Gimli Hospital with the maladroit Einar the Lonely, and progresses through one-legged Boles and gutless Jannings in Archangel, manipulated Grigorss, crippled and abandoned Franz, and their blind unheeded father in Careful, tricked, foot-shot, and wrist-scarred Peter, actually castrated Cain Ball, and wooden-legged Solti in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs to Guy in Cowards, Maddin’s most centralized, articulate, and comprehensive example of symbolic castration (with poor Chas thrown in as an added bonus). As for the three murders Guy commits, they are performed with his own hands, not Chas’, and so seem to endow him with some sort of power. But it is a perverse, unwilled, and even rather inadvertent power. Guy violently assaults Shaky exactly the way Dr Fusi violently assaults him, out of a cowardly obedience to an overbearing woman. It is never made clear why he strangles Mo, an act that seems surreally uncalled for in any dimension (and consequently perhaps the most authentically horror-

Cowards Bend the Knee

215

monster moment in the film) – though this is perhaps an artefact of the script-editing process, and it is probable that what is intended is another demonstration of Meta’s jealous tyranny, this one detaching Guy from his male friends.41 By the time he kills Liliom, one feels he has rather grown into these murdering hands, and is for once acting on his own anger rather than simply Meta’s, even though this is the deed she has been urging him to commit since the beginning. Nevertheless, the total picture is of a man whose only power is excessive, lethal, and not his own, and that when he attempts to exert power for deliberate and personal ends, he can only perform acts of omission (abandoning Veronica, not visiting his sick mother) or else fail abjectly and have his impotent condition inscribed violently upon his body in the form of mutilation and waxen immobility. Rhetoric Perhaps we may now turn to what is perhaps the most brilliant area of success in the film: its range of rhetorical devices encompassing photography and mise en scène, editing, music, and elements drawn from silent cinema and the avant-garde. Building on the editing and cameramovement revolution of Heart of the World and Dracula, Maddin now takes this combination of elements and applies it to a more ambitious project, with an original script ‘from life,’ a strict episode structure, and the kind of found classical (and historically ‘degraded’) music that he had last employed in Archangel. There is a respect for precise formal requirements (ten episodes, six minutes each), and despite manifold assaults from the muse of derision consistently a kind of heightened tone that shows an awareness of the work’s commission as a gallery installation in the world of high art. (Maddin’s way of overtly acknowledging this is typically perverse: the opening montage shows the rapid alternation, almost overprinting, of images of an onanistically curled hand and a large nail in penis position. Explicating this surreal image-montage in the DVD commentary, the director says: ‘I had so much respect for art galleries, I really feared being viewed as a wanker, so I think I had to introduce the project with that image there.’ This addresses the masturbatory element of the image, but not its even more evocative suggestion of crucifixion.) Music and sound The air of gravity emanates from the austere black and white images with

216

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

their ‘degraded’ high contrast and blur, but even more immediately it is conveyed by the soundtrack music. The film’s use of ten discrete classical music selections from the 78rpm era, one to an episode, is the best vindication possible of Maddin’s minimalist ‘found music’ strategy, which had contributed so materially to The Dead Father, Gimli Hospital, and Archangel, but then been left behind as the films acquired specially composed scores (this acquisition seen, like the move towards bigger budgets and better known actors, as part of a necessary maturation process by everybody trying to coax Maddin away from kitchen-table solutions to artistic problems). Again, both Heart of the World and Dracula returned to found music as well – although in the latter case the music had already been found by somebody else and came pre-welded to the story. To some extent the choice of individual selections is arbitrary, because the specific musical content is only part of the equation – the other part is simply the presence of scratchy, limited-recording-range classical music as an omnipresent background, the presence of a certain atmosphere. Still, it is an important part, too. Most of the selections are from what one might call mainstream classical repertoire – Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Dvomrák’s Cello Concerto, Brahms’s Double Concerto, relatively familiar piano pieces by Chopin and Liszt – and none of them are so obscure that I (admittedly a classical music devotee) couldn’t recognize them at first hearing.42 Sometimes there is a straightforwardly appropriate choice – the sombre minor-key tread of the ‘Allegretto’ from the Beethoven Seventh for the doleful procession of figures marching to the Night Clinic for Veronica’s abortion in the second chapter (‘A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND’); the menacing, skipping trumpets of the Ballabile from Verdi’s Macbeth in the sixth (‘WAX TRYST’); the urgent high drama of Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’ for the final chapter (‘THE FURIES’). Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Furies’ is not only strangely appropriate to the fevered erotic frustration of chapter 3 (‘UPON A PILE OF HOCKEY GLOVES’) but also rather interpretive of the characters and their future, given Meta’s Fury-like behaviour. On other occasions the music, while not inappropriate, adds a different element to the scenes it accompanies, expressive but in some way setting off the story content rather like two contrasting colours that complement each other. The pensive lyricism of Chopin’s C#-minor Waltz works this way in the sixth chapter (‘META’S BEDROOM’). Putting Dalila’s seductive love-song from Saint-Saëns’ opera (‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’) over Guy’s murders of Shaky and Mo is magnificently counterintuitive: the music’s dramatic content may be meant to emanate from Meta’s erotic hold over Guy, but its sensual presence is an utter contrast to the

Cowards Bend the Knee

217

events taking place in front of us, and the hooty tunnel-sound of the archaic voice recording is an additional alienating quality that somehow mediates these impossible contrasts. One detailed example will show the kind of complex effect Maddin is capable of creating with this resource. The music for the opening chapter (‘SPERM PLAYERS’) is a transcription for solo cello with piano accompaniment of a number from Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser, the baritone’s big number in Act III, beginning with the recitative ‘Wie Todesahnung.’ Almost certainly the B-side of this 78 would have included the aria itself, the very famous cantabile melody ‘O du mein holder Abendstern,’ but all we get here is that introductory recitative – a solemn, expository address in speechlike cadences, setting a tone of high oratory that absolutely hits the desired spot. The half-smutty chapter title and masturbatory hand, the bizarre spectacle of Fusi squeezing sperm onto a microscope slide, then bending over to see a diagrammatic overhead shot of a hockey ice surface with little cartoon players gives us that highly characteristic Maddin combination of surreal poetic invention and sharp-stick pokes of juvenile provocation. Only in retrospect, perhaps, do we surmise that the masturbation and the sperm are the filmmaker’s and that the product of this receptacle-less insemination is the movie. On the one hand, this is simply an elaboration of Maddin’s self-characterization as a ‘wanker,’43 the product of whose imagination is not an actual living organism but only a B-movie mad scientist’s sleazy experiment with a sensational substance on a microscope slide. But on the other hand, it also, simultaneously and with brave seriousness, functions as a kind of sublime incantation to the muse of inspiration, and this aspect of the scene is what the music is the perfect metaphoric and rhetorical presentation of. The recording’s aesthetic language is obsolete: the whole genre of transcription-piece to which it belongs, once the calling card of virtuoso instrumentalists, is now basically dead, while the degraded sound marks the passage of many decades, and these factors help also to push the musical idiom of nineteenth-century Romanticism further into the musty past. But both music and player have no consciousness of this; their magniloquence is unselfconscious, and they nobly assume the posture of faded grandeur with no recognition of their extinct status. For Maddin, as conscious as the rest of us of how antiquated they are, their resurrection in 2004 in a film that may paraphrase older artworks but could never be mistaken for one itself has that same effect of fantasy and lamentation – and it is exactly the same effect as that created by the archaic idealisms of Archangel. As with many recordings

218

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

from the 1920s and 1930s, the early electrical process actually allows the solo instrument or singing voice to ‘speak’ with a very appealing warmth and forthrightness despite the limitations, and this quality too becomes part of the effect: old and worn but beautiful, and not just beautiful but beautiful in a way that nothing new ever is. And throughout every individual usage of these old classical recordings that immediate presence of an outmoded but whole and eloquent form of artistic address is conveyed to the images and story they accompany. Just a word about non-musical sound in the film. As in many moments of The Dead Father, Gimli Hospital, and Archangel, Maddin has re-employed that favourite technique of early sound films: scattering sound effects liberally through every chapter. We hear skate blades scraping across the ice together with stick, puck, and crowd noises in the hockey scenes, the discreet whooshing of hairdryers, scissors clipping, and girlish chatter of patrons in the salon sequences, innumerable Foleyed details to accompany actions or convey atmosphere throughout the film. Simply delightful to find a quick high-pitched yip coming from a little Scotch terrier on the floor of the beauty salon, or the sounds of Chas’ (and later Guy’s) severed hands landing in a garbage pail. All the slaps and tape-ripping punctuate the film vividly, and the grim sound of a hacksaw grinding through bone is something more than punctuation. A times, the effects are, as it were, imaginary, as when Liliom shoos everybody out of the salon at night to the witty accompaniment of a whip cracking. Apart from the piquancy of individual moments, in general the device works just as it does in early sound movies, something to carry viewers through the movie more vividly and ‘naturally,’ and it is one more element of Cowards Bend the Knee that makes this a completely painless silent film for a modern audience to watch. Photography, degraded images, silent cinema Cowards is shot entirely on Super-8mm film – and let us just pause to acknowledge how unusual this choice of format is. All commercial film formats are 35mm or larger (70mm, Imax), and even avant-garde films using a smaller gauge are overwhelmingly in 16mm. There is a growing use of digital video, a trend that is very likely in the long run to supplant film in all usages by virtue of its increasing quality, relative low cost, and infinite manipulability. Maddin has taken great advantage of digital editing technology in his recent works, very much including Cowards, but he has maintained allegiance to the film format for photography

Cowards Bend the Knee

219

right up to the present.44 He has taken, and then in an almost didactic way reversed, the pilgrimage to bigger film formats: 16mm, the standard format for amateur or avant-garde filmmakers, in Dead Father, Gimli Hospital, Archangel, and Careful; 35mm for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs; then scurrying back to 16mm and even further to occasional Super-8mm in Heart of the World and Dracula; again a mixture of Super-8 and Super-16 for the ‘commercial’ project Saddest Music in the World; then Super-8 only for Cowards and Brand upon the Brain! (My Winnipeg ‘is shot on just about every format I’ve ever used’).45 Maddin has emphasized the flexibility of this format – a camera that is small and light, allowing the cameraman to plunge personally into the stage, whirling, zooming, and whip-panning to pick up details of the action and add physical energy to the images. Clearly, this kind of filmmaking can work easily in a project without dialogue or synch sound; and indeed the presence of dialogue or live sound would probably make this kind of process very difficult or impossible for Maddin (and indeed the dialogue movie Saddest Music retreats from this whirling immersion). In any event lightweight, athletic 8mm has played a major part in his ‘new’ silent cinema: Heart of the World, Dracula, Cowards, Brand, and My Winnipeg. Here is the liberatory antithesis to the 35mm boat-anchor of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. The director’s ability to physically enter the dancing space in Dracula has been noted, and he remarks à propos Cowards how, acting as his own cinematographer, he could get right into scenes and, moreover, create a whole new kind of direction and performance: I surrounded myself in a three-dimensional space, almost always. The beauty salon set was three dimensional, the hockey rink – both 360 degrees [...] And so I could, if I was on the ice, on skates, or if I was in the beauty salon, I could literally in the middle of a shot decide that I was going to shoot someone else, and I would swish-pan to them [...] I just set up the actors and then just start swish-panning around and quite often not even looking through the camera, and if I wanted a close-up of somebody I would just suddenly find that person and start walking toward them with the camera and get to their face and not really looking through the camera. And the performers just got comfortable just acting. And somehow the more I just swishpanned back and forth between actors – or maybe I was shouting orders out at them, or maybe they just got into the spirit of the rhythm – my arm extended rigidly with a camera at the end of it must have reminded them of a metronome and the faster I swishpanned back and forth it seemed like a cue to them to just dial up their performances as well.

220

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

So I felt like a conductor with a baton sort of whipping up an orchestra into a fury when I had like seven main characters. 46

Of course the principal visual characteristic of 8mm in relation to other film formats is its limited resolution, whose artefacts include high grain and lack of sharpness. This absence of visual refinement and resolving power, like the absence of every other amenity of more upscale filmmaking, is actively embraced by Maddin. In contrast to some ‘garage-band’ artists, he has adhered to limited and relatively primitive photography and staging not just out of economic necessity, but well past the point where economic conditions might have allowed a more elaborate form of production. But there is nothing of the grunge artist about Maddin. He does not use a lower-resolution visual format in order to make his work deliberately drab or ugly, and hence more authentic in a realist/documentary or avant-garde/grunge mode. Instead, the aggressive fuzziness and grain of 8mm film are married to other aspects of the Maddin aesthetic in a complicated act of synthesis that brings many contrasting artistic qualities together in the director’s unique and unlikely way. Again it is the worn look of ancient and battered old films, but films that were trying to be as lyrically refined, beautiful, and impressive as possible, that he is inspired by. So, as so often in Maddin’s work, fuzz and grain are married to exaggerated contrasts of black and white and clouded edges, as in photocopied-photocopy images, and to the harsher and more contrast-y look of orthochromatic silent film stock. Other archaic markings include heavy scratching of, especially, intertitle frames, to go with the out-offocus lettering, and the addition of blue-rinse tinting to selected shots (or even its arrival and departure within a continuous shot). Quite often there are portrait shots that adopt that available-to-silent-cinema mode of formal presentation, the painterly posedness, of characters, but in a fashion that grossly exaggerates the idealizing features of the original model. Several times we see Guy in his hockey gear, posed rather nobly with his chin uptilted, and bathed in a brilliant overhead light whose celestial luminescence is made even more dazzling by the emphatically soft focus and light-diffusing film grain. Also portraitlike, and silent-cinemalike, are the many irised close-ups of Meta, sucking her finger or emitting a flashing look – and most of the principal characters receive this kind of visual treatment. Many times there are effects that are quite striking and lovely in a similar tableaulike vein – as in the early two-shot of Guy and Veronica bracketing a background long shot of swirling hockey

Cowards Bend the Knee

221

Guy Maddin, Rover for the Winnipeg Maroons. This shot, flooded with toplight, blurred by soft focus, and grained by 8mm film stock, has no narrative function and exists on a plane of idealized representation poignantly counterposed to the many failings of the protagonist.

players, Guy putting his hands to his head in an pose of Expressionist angst while Veronica looks down in troubled demureness, or the grisly (and funny) but expressive irised shot of the half-clothed Meta clasping daddy’s severed-hands jar to her bosom in a child’s possessive hug. All of these elements ensure the creation and persistence of a strong rhetoric of silent drama – and of course Cowards is a silent drama. Many of these familiar qualities are scarcely any more important here than in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, but now the effect is different because of the bobbing and dancing camera, the accelerated editing, and the complete absence of dialogue. And one may note also the forceful effect of the intertitles, and the kind of work they are doing. There is no equivalent for such a device in sound cinema – a narrative voice that can convey the words of the characters, perform exposition with an efficiency unknown in dia-

222

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

logue films, and make portentous edifying pronouncements or poetic ruminations from some position of high omniscience. Editing: scrolling with Gurdebeke Cowards marks the debut in Maddin’s work of a major creative partner: editor John Gurdebeke, whose work in this film Maddin says was ‘the closest thing I’ve had to a 50-50 collaborator on a project.’47 The editing revolution in Maddin’s cinema coincided with his association with the very young avant-garde filmmaker deco dawson on Heart of the World and then Dracula. Between them, they introduced into Maddin’s films the Eisenstein/avant-garde style of editing that moved from maximal Sovietsilent-style machine-gun montage in Heart of the World to a necessarily more modulated but still flashy style in Dracula. dawson edited these films on flatbed editors, as fiddly and awkward as this process was, especially for 8mm footage. But beginning in Cowards (though with an exception for Saddest Music in the World, which had a different editor), the Super-8 footage was digitized and then edited by Gurdebeke using computer software, and this process allowed for all kinds of effects difficult or impossible to achieve when manipulating physical film. Rapid montage all the way down to one-frame-a-shot levels becomes relatively easy, and many other tricks now present themselves. The technique that Maddin has particularly adopted for Cowards, and for subsequent films he has used Gurdebeke on (and that includes everything substantial up to the present moment except for Saddest Music in the World), is called ‘scrolling.’ Scrolling as an editing strategy was something they discovered more or less accidentally, as they were ‘binning’ (sorting) dailies for assemblage into the film. Strangely, in view of the end result and indeed the whole arc of Maddin’s visual development, his first plan for the editing of Cowards was actually a move in the opposite direction, back to a more primitive editing style: ‘I just thought it would be very straightforward cutting, and I saw it being cut more like one of those Edwin S. Porter movies, you know, just very simple.’48 But then something completely different emerged almost by accident. Maddin explained to me: Every now and then I didn’t shoot entirely in script order so John would have to fast-forward or fast-reverse back to a shot to find it. And then I’d go, ‘there it was,’ but he’d speed past it and then he’d go back again, and he’d go past it again, and I’d go, ‘no no no,’ and he’d go back and forth and what you’d see while the mouse was going backwards and forwards really

Cowards Bend the Knee

223

quickly was not just fast-forward and fast-reverse smooth action, but it was more like leaping with lots of ellipsis [...] So I fell in love with scrolling; it seemed to make sense; it seemed to be the way the wiring of your memory worked [...] Sometimes we would be epileptically skipping all over the place and out of order and we would chance upon an insignificant image instead of an important one, and things like that. So I loved it, and John agreed that he would scroll the entire movie and record it for me ... [This resulted in a three-hour version that had to be scaled back.] I was so in love with scrolling, all of a sudden [...] because it just took my footage at its most ordinary and transformed it into something. And Super-8 footage is already transformed miraculously from real world in Winnipeg into something quite magical, and so this double transformation is really intoxicating to me.49

It is perhaps not exaggerating too much to say that the editing techniques of Cowards transform Maddin’s cinema. Dennis Lim, talking about a later iteration in Brand upon the Brain!, has called the effect ‘cubist,’50 and that is a good analogy, for like cubism scrolling produces something analytical, transforming, and expressive in a new way. Sometimes its rhetoric is dramatic and sometimes lyrical, but (and perhaps here the cubist analogy breaks down a little) it is always poetic. In itself it has no narrative function, only an expressive or at best interpretive one. It often isn’t even an editing technique in the original sense of an alternation of shots – often it breaks up a single shot into frame-length pieces and then reacquires the editing function by presenting that single shot as a flurry of separate shots. Moreover, tempo can be infinitely manipulated with this technique. Rapidly skipping shots will resolve back to normal motion, then speed up again, or normal shots will move in the opposite tempo direction, into slow motion and even freeze-frame. Some shots will rock back and forth between these extremes. All this converts narrative into something like music: an abstracting medium that expresses through tonal and temporal connections in a way that is only distantly mimetic. As a cinematic device it has artistic relations stretching from Eisenstein to rock video to non-representational avant-gardism, but Maddin’s form is unique. Unique not only in itself, but in the ends to which it is put and above all in the material that it is exerted upon. There is a wonderful piquancy to the application of kinetic avant-garde editing to those utterly past forms that Maddin has soaked his film in: melodrama, Greek tragedy, Expressionism, 1930s horror cinema, 1940s film noir, 78rpm classical music recordings, artificially aged images, and naturally aged sounds. And so scrolling allows Cowards to slip and slide and frantically

224

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

skip and lyrically slow down through this archaic melange, in a way that asserts the film’s contemporaneity without disabling its historicity. Moreover it gives the director a fabulous tool with which to embody his own poetic sensibility, to treat gestures, looks, actions, and tableaux in a way that emphasizes the affective meaning. In the DVD commentary Maddin compares its effect to that of memory, returning to and replaying earlier events in the mind in a stop-start-skip way. I would prefer to say (though it may amount to almost the same thing) that it conveys feeling – skittering in panicky or vertiginous out-of-control ways, fetishistically repeating its object or dwelling on it in slow motion. Nestled inside these unstable surroundings the photography itself continues with its idealizing, silent film beauty, and the result of the overlaying of both modes is of a unique trembling intensity of beauty, lyricism, and emotional surges. Hands One need go no further than the example of the film’s most prominent single visual image: hands. Maddin says that after his revelatory experience of watching the fabulous expressiveness with which the dancers used their hands in the Dracula ballet, he was inspired to make this great form of silent film acting a central part of a film that would also use hands as an integral part of the story.51 And so the iterations of this trope extend everywhere in the film, from the very title, Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands, through a plot strongly featuring severed hands and strangling hands, to a thousand emphases on hands performing meaningful actions. In the Guy/Veronica two-shot tableau with hockey players in the background, Guy’s hands are on his head, Veronica’s folded over her womb (and this detail gets its own series of scrolled close-ups). The first chapter ends with an obsessively repeated, fractured, slowed-down and brought-back-up-to-speed close-up of Guy’s hand sliding into and out of his father’s in an ambiguous handshake that is partly congratulatory (the Maroons have just won the Allan Cup) and partly shame-inducing (Maddin Sr is urging him not to neglect his sick mother, Guy is nude in front of his fully clothed father). The second chapter is entitled ‘A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND,’52 and in it, during the abortion, Veronica is repeatedly grasping Guy’s hand but he slips it away to leave and pursue Meta. There are many shots of Dr Fusi’s surgically gloved hands performing one horror after another. Meta is constantly sticking her finger in the sugar jar, then licking it in a marked manner, and throughout the film there are many shots of her curled or pointing

Cowards Bend the Knee

225

fingers. In ‘UPON A PILE OF HOCKEY GLOVES’ Meta many times deflects Guy’s hands from caressing her bare breasts, and in the following ‘META’S BEDROOM,’ Gramma is seen extensively administering to her granddaughter an ‘Icelandic hand charm.’ Two pairs of severed hands are practically characters in their own right. Once Guy has had his fake hands-transplant and begins to strangle and involuntarily caress and fistfuck with them, he is repeatedly seen holding his hands up before his face and looking at them in intense horror. Guy several times slaps Mo, and Liliom slaps Guy while he is waxing her legs. As she is being strangled by Guy, Liliom’s hand is seen dreadfully spread out in agony against the two-way glass in the salon. There are many close-ups of Maddin Sr caressing the mysterious ‘ice breast,’ and in the urinal scene he says to his handless son, ‘I see you still need your hand held.’ But it would take a very long time to catalogue the film’s hundreds of uses of this device that is both essentially poetic and deeply embedded in the plot. Humour Like every other Maddin movie, Cowards has humour worked right into its bones, and there is hardly anything in it that does not have some humorous overtone, however distant or bizarre. The range stretches from broad and often low comedy through surreal incongruity to the deftest touches of wit and elegant allusion. At the latter end of the spectrum – more heavily populated than in some Maddin films – one might note little delicately self-lacerating details such as the way Veronica’s return as a ghost is greeted with the same intertitle that had accompanied her abandonment when Guy first saw Meta (‘The joy, joy, joy, of meeting someone new!’) and that she is thereafter referred to as ‘the new girl.’ Then there is the light-handed treatment of the two dominant women, Meta and Liliom. Until her reunion with her father and her death, there is always something comic about Meta, no matter how destructive her acts. As with her counterpart Klara in Careful, Maddin is somehow compelled to see her blind self-absorption and utterly conscienceless treatment of a convenient poor boob of a suitor as irresistible in almost the way some Jeanette MacDonald character in a Lubitsch musical might be: her tyrannical foibles are unmistakable, but somehow they only serve to make her more delectable.53 Of course no Lubitsch heroine behaves as destructively as Meta, who is after all also Euripedes’s Electra together with some demented character in a cheap horror movie, but that element of appreciation for such a strong-willed filly is easy to see. ‘Off with his

226

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

hands!’, she barks, like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, and the film’s reaction is an appalled admiration for such a magnificent temperament. Maddin’s special gift is to give us the two antithetical qualities simultaneously – the horror and the delight – and they are never homogenized or blended, but presented in all their incommensurableness as one more item in the filmmaker’s unique smorgasbord of aesthetic contradictions. Liliom is brew of a stronger proof, but her presence has similar effects. She is a murderer, tyrant, beast of unholy appetites and savage punishment; but also, with her cigarette and beetle brow and shark’s grin and swagger, she is one tough babe, a cartoon of a gangster villainess that you have to admire. A ‘criminal slattern,’ the director calls her.54 (Much of this quality, incidentally, stems from the performance of Tara Birtwistle, prima ballerina by profession as we saw in Dracula, who replaced the ill Alice Krige in the casting scheme. Maddin remarks that Krige would have given Liliom ‘a hauteur and a coldness that I wrote for her.’55 Instead we get this fantastic dame, this broad, who’s quite hot and in-your-face.) Fusi is another nightmare/comedy-sketch mixture, looking through his microscope or pulling on his surgical gloves with professional aplomb, only to set upon some Guignol task like a backroom abortion or a double amputation by hacksaw, his professional costume an antiquated lace-up ladies’ corset over a white-furred bare chest and a cigarette dropping ashes onto the operating table.56 And the contrast between Fusi’s sublime indifference to crime and his meek knucklingunder to Meta is essentially comic, even as its effects are ghastly. There is a lot of this comedy of horror in the film, and it all has a queasy quality no matter how witty or hilarious it may be in some respects. When the hemorrhaging blood from Veronica’s abortion forms the perfect shape of a maple leaf, Canadians in the audience will grin even as they are sickened. Near the beginning of the movie we see Shaky viciously pounding with his fists on some opponent whose team sweater bears a Star of David crest – a representation of cheerful, anxiety-free anti-Semitic violence that recognizes the political incorrectness of the past while taking a not-that-concerned attitude to the institution of fighting in hockey. Guy’s murder of Shaky at centre ice, even more his murder of Mo in a police station, have an almost comedy-sketch garishness of humour. In a related way, the comedy of Guy’s symbolic castration is just the same combination ratcheted up to agonized levels. As he is being congratulated after scoring a goal (and after strangling Shaky), a teammate tells him, ‘You always had soft hands around the net’ – that is humour of an irony so strong it almost amounts to sarcasm. But when Guy

Cowards Bend the Knee

227

is having his gloves laced up over handless stumps, getting phallically humiliated in the urinal by his father, and then trying to play the game with no hands at all,57 the spectacle of physical clumsiness has an aura of slapstick, while the protagonist’s physical and psychological condition has become painfully abject. There are moments in Cowards where a low comedy of transgression becomes visible as a kind of curse. In the Maroons’ shower room after Shaky’s murder, Guy feels compelled to poke his finger into the anus of Mo as he is bending over to pick up the soap, as his mind flashes back to that same finger poking at the buzzer of the Night Clinic when taking Veronica for her abortion: ‘Two longs, two shorts,’ reads the intertitle. Poking Mo in the fundament is a truly low-comedy, Animal House kind of prank, and it gets an automatic laugh. But the expression on Guy’s face as he looks at his Shaky-strangling, Mo-poking hands is one of utter horror, while the association with the abortion trip is of a prior moral guilt uncomplicated by any actual or imagined hand-transplant. The conclusion then is that this kind of stupid infantile bum-poking is not really a jape, but an awful compulsion, a curse. Can we extrapolate this moment to the many similar moments of uncontrollable besmirchmentby-comedy, from Einar’s casual necrophilia in Tales from the Gimli Hospital to hairballs and yawn-stifling revelations of horror in Careful to cruel and tacky jokes about leglessness in The Saddest Music in the World? Perhaps that is too straightforward an operation, but this moment in Cowards does seem to bring to a point the sense so often encountered in Maddin’s cinema of raspberry-blowing as a kind of reflex reaction to pain or guilt. Perhaps it is no accident that one of his favourite silent films is The Man Who Laughs,58 a grisly Victor Hugo adaptation starring Conrad Veidt (again!) as a man whose mouth has been horribly carved into an eternal, hideously exaggerated rictus-grin that he is compelled to carry through heartbreak and sorrow. The fruits of introspection Cowards Bend the Knee gives the strong impression of being closer to the filmmaker’s fundamental source of imaginative activity than any of his films since The Dead Father. Of course it is easy to say that in retrospect when we have Maddin’s copious testimony to its profound autobiographical resonances. It is not necessary to read the film autobiographically in order to appreciate its artistic qualities, and it is at all stages of reading as deeply tangled, displaced, and hard to decipher as an account of any-

228

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

one’s actual life. But once one has begun to do this, and followed the filmmaker’s own accounts in interviews, the writings in From the Atelier Tovar and the movie’s DVD commentary, one develops a picture that shows just how deep this pool is. Maddin’s childhood is such a strong presence here. And its particular conditions start to become not just the anecdotal details of anybody’s childhood, but the massive building blocks of an entire psyche. Begin with the fact that little Guy was a late addition to the family, an ‘afterthought,’ growing up as, so to speak, the only child in a family with four children. Everyone else seemed to him to have moved on. The picture of little Guy playing by himself with the toys abandoned by his older siblings, looking through his hockey cards and old volumes of The War Illustrated, peering up through vents and chutes into the beauty salon, and keeping his blind isolated grandmother company, or creeping alone through the catwalks and empty rows of seats in the Winnipeg Arena, overwhelmed by the bigness of the bustling salon and the enormous Arena both regularly invaded by vast quantities of strangers from the outside world, wrestling too with the big qualities of his parents (his mother’s volatility, his father’s weariness and inability to be a ‘Zeus-like’ patriarch) and of course with the unthinkable trauma of his brother’s suicide – this picture with its many other elements plays a vital role in the film. But it is one that is only dimly detectable behind the visible elements, elliptically transformed and needing to be pieced together emotionally rather than rationally. The little perceiving subject of this world, the boy Guy, is, as we noted, missing from Cowards Bend the Knee. He is present only as the childhoodremembering sensibility of the filmmaker, the sensibility of the filmmaker as the child he was and is. This sensibility-behind-the-film feels profoundly that the most important emotions and experiences are in the childhood past. They are the most important things in the world, and they exist, in a sense, only in his imagination, his fantasy. Even when he actually was a child he could look at them endlessly, walk around in them, be buffeted or comforted by them, but ultimately could not substantially affect them in any way. Moving through this world in an almost dreamlike way (and how much more dreamlike the experience in recollection!), he was too little to do anything but observe and feel. In a sense, then, he is isolated from everything that is primary and foundational, cut off from it by time and by the disparity between a child’s sensibility and the unknowable constitution of the adult world and adult feelings. Psychoanalysis tells us that we are all sundered in this way from primary meaning and satisfaction, exiled from an originary or pre-originary

Cowards Bend the Knee

229

wholeness that we can never get back to, and in this respect the Guy Maddin that I am postulating is perfectly ‘normal.’ Yet what is unusual about this personage is the depth and detail and refinement of those memories, so present and yet so far away. It is, perhaps, what makes him an artist. The perceiving subject who is present in the film is the adult Guy. The strange condition of this narrative – a world of childhood memory inhabited by an adult version of that child – can now be seen as a reflexive metaphor: it is a concrete staging of the condition of the adult filmmaker still immersed in childhood memory. The grown-up protagonist Guy can have relationships with other adults, sexual relationships and friendships, but there is something about these relationships too that is cut off, characterized by feelings of littleness and powerlessness. When ‘Guy Maddin’ leaves his girlfriend in the lurch or neglects his dying mother, he is, perhaps, reliving the sins of childhood, in particular the child’s ‘cowardly’ wish to avoid emotionally painful situations. In the DVD commentary, Maddin talks obscurely about his family connection with Amy Stewart, the actress playing Veronica; he tells us elsewhere59 that she is the niece of the girl his brother Cameron had killed himself over. When he talks equally obscurely about the fact that there are ghosts in his life, too, he is referring to the ghost of his dead brother Cameron, present as an unquiet spirit in his little brother’s mind, returning from death like the ‘dead father’ of Maddin’s first film. This is certainly impossible to work out just from looking at the film, but it does connect with the uncanny, sad, powerful presence of that ghost-character, whose fate the hero is somehow to blame for, or at least feels very bad about. My point here is that in this film the crime of the adult Guy becomes inextricably conflated with the trauma of the child Guy. And one can go on to say that the whole condition of this adult Guy – intimidated, not in control, unable to grasp his desire, finally utterly passive and cut off physically as a metaphor for his emotional condition – has some relation to the condition of the child cut off, too, from the world around him. Little Guy was overwhelmed by the eye-level view of Fran Huck’s giant penis, and now grown-up Guy must look over to see the enormous cock of an adult in the Big World, located on the body of a representation of the grand patriarchal superego. He cannot compete, he is not an adult like the other adults, and he doesn’t even have hands to pull out his relatively puny member.60 Perhaps for this reason, too, he abandons Veronica and falls under the sway of powerful, volatile females like Meta and Liliom, who will simply grab away from him the torturing burden of impossible

230

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

adult male power and tell him exactly what to do as if he were a slave, or a little child. And his reaction then is that of an ordered-around child, resentful at the parental power of these women, but incapable of truly jettisoning them and disavowing of the constitutional elements of his own personality that attract him to them. (Some of this comes back, more literally, in Brand upon the Brain!) His own hands by themselves can only do bad things: it is better that they are cut off. He cannot do anything (except damage by a process he can’t grasp) – he can only feel, feel bad. A corollary is that the childhood world of memory and imagination, of fantasy and projection, is the real world for him, and the actual real world remote, baffling, even uninteresting or else just scary. That childhood world is a place where one is relegated to the status of nonparticipant through insufficient age and then exiled from by adulthood. It remains the centre of beauty and longing. Maddin’s aesthetic loves – for old movies and old books, products of other cultures and eclipsed artistic forms – are consistent with this general sense. We can now reassert the claim repeatedly made in connection with earlier films, that the appeal of Maddin’s fictional worlds for him is that they are archaic and impossible, they not only resemble or actually reproduce the fantasy worlds he invested himself in as a child but their status of being unreachable, non-existent really except in the imagination, forms a crucial, potent aspect of their value. What love he expends on these impossible worlds with their impossible people, what appreciation for their impossible beauties, how tenderly he treats their poor inadequacy! It is true that there are symptoms of the pathology in this condition, namely, the utter suppression of reality in them, symptoms that begin with their overtly playful and impoverished staging and end in the zany derision that breaks through like Tourette’s Syndrome to self-destroy the beauty and nobility of the mood. But in Cowards there is a breakthrough to a different, more directly engaged and analytical relation with this impossible past. The humour appears explicitly as a curse, a baleful nervous symptom, and it is there to defend not just pre-emptively against any accusations from outside that the imaginative world is silly, but now also in a more refined and witty way as a defence against anguish, and also against desire that is too powerful and unmanageable. And the self is explicitly situated in the environment and made the object of attacks more deflating and painful than those against the absurd idealism of Boles or Grigorss. The overtly unhealthy nature of the situation may be seen in a nutshell in the fact that the Winnipeg Maroons that rise up in his imagination are not alive,

Cowards Bend the Knee

231

vibrant, youthfully athletic representations of ideal masculinity, but the dusty wax statues of sagging and paunchy middle-aged men in pathetically dated uniforms and gear. The fantasy itself is decayed. In the end he is himself one of these statues, in a gesture that confirms his condition as essentially an inhabitant of the mouldering past. Meanwhile, the Good Mother dies neglected in the hospital, the Good Father is castrated and murdered, the self is a Bad Boy who has to stand in the corner for eternity, never to achieve adulthood, and it serves him right. This new level of explicit introspection and seriousness, combined with the film’s verve and confidence, its still triumphant preservation of archaic beauty and its much heightened ability to apply avant-garde editing techniques to achieve a new dimension of poetic affect, make Cowards Bend the Knee, as we began by saying, Maddin’s masterpiece to date – and a platform for future developments as seen in Brand upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg.

8

The Saddest Music in the World (2004)

It’s something that’s just steeped in sadness, but it’s almost never directly shown. – Guy Maddin

All the characters in the film are grieving, but are doing so in ways that are comically inadequate. – Ross McMillan

Have fun, but don’t think that the fun won’t have some fish-hooks along the way. But that’s what fun is. It’s fish-hook time, it’s fish-hook time! There’s one in your throat, and then another in your heart, and another in your balls, but it’s fun! It’s fun, it really is! – George Toles1

The originality, the difference, of Cowards Bend the Knee is only emphasized when we turn to The Saddest Music in the World, the big film that Maddin had in development, and in production, simultaneously with the realization of the much smaller Cowards. In contrast to the latter’s $30,000 budget and five-day shooting schedule, Saddest had a $3.8 million budget and a twenty-two-day shooting schedule, an international roster of performers and a cast of thousands (well, hundreds), a script that was originally written by a Booker Prize winner, and production/distribution by Rhombus Media, a substantial player in the world of art movies and television whose track record included The Red Violin, 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, and Last Night. The cast was the starriest Maddin had had so far, and its contribution is substantial and consistent in a way that the

The Saddest Music in the World

233

director’s previous star-studded entry, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, is not. From a uniformly strong team, Maria de Madeiros may be singled out as melding effortlessly into Maddin’s strange world, and above all Isabella Rossellini (who has since become a Maddin supporter, multiple collaborator, and even writer/commissioner) brings a splendid straight-faced confidence to every aspect of her challengingly odd role.2 The casting, and its success, no doubt helped to allow Saddest Music to masquerade as something not completely weird. Indeed, it achieved a breadth of distribution that was quite astounding for such a freakish movie, opening in commercial cinemas across North America. Sitting in a mainstream theatre and watching this film, shot with vaseline-coated lenses on black and white or strange two-colour Super-8 and push-processed Super-16mm stock that exhibits ‘film-grain the size of baseballs,’3 bizarre characters and dialogue, and a plot of staggering absurdity, is on my personal shortlist of most surreal movie-going experiences. In Saddest Music, we see a return of the Maddin/Toles model that had been set aside for Heart of the World, Dracula, and Cowards – the regime, that is, of Archangel, Careful, and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. In fact from a certain angle Archangel, Careful, Twilight, and Saddest Music are the same movie. In all four there is a complex, painstakingly worked-out drama of multiple characters in ironic relation and opposition to one another; all four bear the powerful imprint of George Toles’ singular style of dialogue and all four wilfully counterpose ostentatious suffering with zany silliness. Saddest Music particularly resembles Archangel and Careful in its Stations-of-the-Cross pilgrimage from initial ridiculousness through manic derision and mockery to something pure and heartfelt, a progress different in profile from the more constant intermixture found in Cowards. Altogether, though the film has its high points and low points aesthetically, it represents another success for this model, in some ways its clearest realization of all – and also, possibly, its last hurrah. The project began as a script by Kazuo Ishiguro that was set in London and featured a scheme to commercialize the sufferings of Eastern Europe in a post-glasnost environment through a contest. Maddin told me in 2005: [Ishiguro] wrote a script called Saddest Music of the World in 1985 or 1987, something like that. It was the story of a music competition, very similar, set in London, sponsored by an alcohol company, and promoted by a CNNlike news network, in an attempt to exploit the loosening up and soon-tobe hoped-for markets of Eastern Europe. And then it had some subplots

234

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

involving a couple of old Yugoslavian friends, or maybe brothers, but it was set in contemporary times.

The script had been circulating for some years, and had been considered and passed over by a number of filmmakers, including Atom Egoyan. Producer Niv Fichman at Rhombus decided to try to interest Maddin in it, understanding that if he were to take it up, the outcome was bound to be pretty far away from Ishiguro’s original concept. Maddin liked the title from the start, and then began a three- or four-way dance that saw various treatments and versions going from Ishiguro to Fichman to Maddin to George Toles. Toles was instrumental in the re-setting of the story, eventually wrote all the dialogue, and gets first screenwriting credit.4 At a certain point Ishiguro gave permission for blanket changes to be made, and Fichman records that ‘he was unbelievably supportive from that moment on.’5 What Maddin and Toles did was to move the place and time to, as an opening title tells us, ‘WINNIPEG, 1933 – THE DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION.’ Of course that is only the beginning. Whatever Ishiguro’s script might have been like, we may be pretty sure that it did not include drunken double amputations, funerals on skates, amnesiac nymphomaniacs, cello-playing fake-Serbians in knee-length hat veils, or glass prosthetic legs full of beer. The relocation – into the past, away from an important metropolis – is crucial in allowing Maddin to keep clear of the real world, and to make another big step in his continuing ambition of ‘mythologizing Winnipeg.’6 It coincidentally places the action of this film in a virtually identical setting as Cowards Bend the Knee, although now the Winnipeg we see is far more the public and social environment of streets, bars, offices, and factories. In its characterization of these spaces and the people inhabiting them, Saddest Music is a serious warm-up for Maddin’s feature-length fantasy travelogue documentary My Winnipeg. We will look more closely at Maddin’s Winnipegof-the-imagination in a moment. The action The film begins with a pre-credit prologue showing Chester Kent (Mark McKinney) and his girlfriend Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) visiting an old fortune-teller (Louis Negin), who tells him to look into the iceblock she7 uses as a crystal ball. There he sees re-enacted his primal family trauma. In a parlour music session where mother is singing the Jerome

The Saddest Music in the World

235

Kern favourite ‘The Song Is You,’ with father accompanying on the piano, little Chester playing trumpet obbligato and his brother the cello, the mother has a seizure and collapses dead on the keyboard.8 The Seer abjures Chester to ‘look into your soul!’ and when Chester demonstrates his imperviousness by getting Narcissa to masturbate him, cries out: ‘Look to your miseries, Mr Kent – otherwise, you are a dead man!’ Local beer magnate Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) broadcasts a radio message: We at Muskeg Beer are proud that Winnipeg has been chosen four years running by the London Times as the world capital of sorrow in the Great Depression. In recognition of this honour, we will be hosting a worldwide contest to determine which nation’s music truly deserves to be called ‘the saddest in the world.’

The prize is $25,000 (‘that’s right – 25,000 Depression-era dollars’). This wacko idea is revealed by be part of a marketing scheme: Prohibition is about to come to an end in the United States; there will be an overwhelming demand for product; sad poor unemployed people drink more than happy people; it all adds up. The radio announcement – apparently broadcast live everywhere in the world simultaneously – starts an immediate avalanche of musicians from all over the Depressed globe to Winnipeg. This avalanche includes Chester, ‘a producer from New York’ who is in fact a Winnipeg boy back in his home town because he is ‘just down on his luck,’ and who manages to get the U.S. slot under the contest’s one-entry-per-country rules. (‘Chester Kent’ is also the name of the go-getting Broadway producer played by James Cagney in the 1933 Warner Brothers musical Footlight Parade.) Among the flock of contestants, too, are Chester’s father Fyodor (David Fox), a World War I veteran who now drives a streetcar in Winnipeg (representing Canada), and his brother Roderick (Ross McMillan), a world-famous cellist who has relocated to Europe and uses the stage name ‘Gavrilo the Great’ in honour of Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian assassin who started World War I (representing Serbia).9 And now the backstory of these characters emerges. Chester brazens his way in to see Lady Port-Huntley in her boardroom to charm her into allowing him into the contest and bankrolling his act. Helen – now revealed to be a double amputee moving around on a low mini-platform on wheels – is both transcendently angry with and compulsively drawn to Chester. We discover the reasons in the flashback occasioned by her

236

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

invitation to tell the whole story of how she lost her legs. They reminisce, in poetic language that modulates into song like a kind of Tin Pan Alley Sprechstimme, about the foundational events. Helen was deeply loved by Chester’s father, who had wanted to marry her. But she had preferred Chester and the two of them had sneaked off to have sex at every opportunity. One night they were motoring down an icy road at high speed, Helen giving the driver Chester a blowjob, when Fyodor leapt out in front of the car, precipitating an accident that trapped Helen in the wreck. Fyodor, who had turned to alcohol because of disappointment in love, was a doctor by profession, and insisted they must cut Helen’s leg off to free her from the vehicle – but was so drunk that he cut off the wrong leg, so that she ended by losing both. We can fill in the remaining blanks ourselves: Chester left town to seek fame in the American entertainment business, and Helen turned all her energies to amassing profits and becoming a sharklike captain of industry. (Her sexual needs are met by the silent Teddy [Darcy Fehr] – ‘he has a lovely wife and two lovely children’ – who is permanently employed to bathe, caress, and ‘swing her in the see-saw’ in front of an always on-call orchestra of blindfolded musicians stationed behind a scrim.) Now, in return for a renewed relationship with Chester, she agrees to accept him as the American entry. Then we see that Fyodor has remained appalled and crushed by the horrible injury he has inflicted on his loved one, and has attempted to rehabilitate himself by swearing off alcohol, giving up his medical profession and taking up lowlier employment, and devoting himself to finding the perfect prostheses for Helen as a way of expressing his continuing love and hope for forgiveness. Meanwhile Roderick, on his way to the contest, is seen in a train compartment dressed in black and unwrapping two sacred items that he carries with him everywhere: an Edison cylinder recording of his own solo performance of ‘The Song Is You’ that he had played at the funeral of his little son, and a small jar containing the boy’s heart preserved in a liquid bath of Roderick’s own salt tears.10 It transpires that his wife, destroyed by the loss of her child, left home, became an amnesiac, and is none other than Chester’s girlfriend Narcissa. (In this kind of melodrama, or mock-melodrama, astounding coincidences are something to be sought out, not avoided.) Roderick has vowed never to play the song in concert again until he plays it for his rediscovered wife. He is greeted by his father at the train station, and upon his arrival in the family home (more like a shack), we discover the intense sibling rivalry, not to say hatred, that exists between the brothers. Practically the first thing out of

The Saddest Music in the World

237

Lady Helen Port-Huntley, on her ‘new dolly’ pushed by Teddy, angrily confronts the standing Chester Kent. The model for this double-amputee status was the Lon Chaney character in the 1920 film The Penalty.

Roderick’s mouth is ‘Did he admit to stealing my music box?’ The positions in the fraternal war are marked so strongly they’re schematic: Chester’s self-indulgent, glitz-chasing, glad-handing imperviousness against Roderick’s lofty dedication to high art and extravagant proclamations of the deepest grief. The contest begins, and nation faces off against nation, their performances of sadness unceremoniously begun and ended by the crass shock of a hockey-game buzzer. Among the first to fall in single combat is Canada, represented by Fyodor in military uniform, whose melancholy anthem ‘The Red Maple Leaves,’ is inspired by and dedicated to Canadian soldiers who fell at Vimy Ridge.11 Fyodor performs it while accompanying himself on a piano tipped violently on its back in an obvious metaphor of some kind (doubtless related to his wife’s piano-death), but is brusquely given the official thumbs-down by Lady Port-Huntley, who has hated him ever since that fatal night and never liked him all that much before it. (Drum-beating Africans with ceremonial face-scars are the victors, for the two nations in competition are ‘Canada vs. Africa.’) Chester

238

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

manages to organize a troupe by scooping up musicians from defeated countries and offering to pay their way home after he wins the contest if they will join America’s team. He moves from victory to victory using the fundamental tools of American entertainment: spectacle, energy, production values. As he says to Lady Port-Huntley while selling the idea to her, he’s aiming for ‘sadness, but with sass and pizzazz.’ The subjects of his numbers are the sorrows of American history, including ‘Lindberg Lullaby,’12 ‘Abolition Blues,’ ‘Ruth’s Bellyache,’13 and ‘San Francisco Quake of ’06,’ and culminating in a grand finale memorialization of ‘the long-forgotten Alaskan Kayak Tragedy of 1898’ which features a chorus line of Indian-subcontinent girls in sequined Eskimo costumes spearing cardboard-cutout fish that recall Gunnar’s in Tales from the Gimli Hospital. The crowd of beer-drinking Canadians in the hall love all Chester’s numbers (just as they were insensible to Fyodor’s sentimental patriotic appeal and indifferent to his defeat). Roderick, too, is progressing swiftly past a series of adversaries. The winners of each individual contest must celebrate with a ‘victory slide’ down a ramp into a large vat of beer. As Roderick, the monarch of high seriousness, stands sopping wet in the beer vat, one recalls Gene Kelly’s words in Singin’ in the Rain: ‘Dignity – always, dignity.’ The inevitable meeting of Roderick and Narcissa at last occurs. Roderick’s towering resentment of his brother is now augmented by a hideous jealousy when it turns out that his tragically lost wife has nicely settled in as Chester’s mistress. But Narcissa’s amnesia is so strong that it survives not only face-to-face confrontation with Roderick, but having sex with him as well (‘That was nice. I hope to see you again’). When a maddened Roderick makes an ineffectual attack on Chester and her in the open sleigh they are travelling in, Narcissa seems to almost feel something. It is faint, distant, she describes it as an empty feeling; but it is enough to precipitate her breakup with Chester. (Chester has remained a two-timer despite his assurances to Helen.) Meanwhile Fyodor’s long researches into prosthetic-leg design have at last found the ideal material: glass. He has constructed a pair of beautifully contoured transparent glass legs that, in a stroke of poetic inspiration, he has filled with Port-Huntley Muskeg beer (‘they sparkle!’14). He gets Roderick to present them to her, hoping that this at last will provide the key to his forgiveness. The legs are a wonderful success – they look great, they work great, and they utterly transform Helen’s personality into one of almost girlish joyfulness. A ray of hope appears in the movie: perhaps Helen will really be able to get her life back; perhaps she will look kindly on Fyodor and

The Saddest Music in the World

239

he will achieve redemption; perhaps Chester will love Helen as he was always supposed to and will become really human; perhaps Narcissa will recognize Roderick and they can begin to reassemble themselves as people. It is a moment that recalls the similar one in Careful when it seems possible for forgiveness and healing to occur – doubly so because Saddest Music, like its predecessor, now proceeds to turn pitilessly in the opposite direction, and all of these possibilities but the last are cruelly shattered in the most dramatic way. ‘Shattered’ is the operative word when breaking glass is the leitmotif of the violent shocks that ensue. The first breakage occurs with Roderick’s physical embrace of the unremembering Narcissa, when the glass heartjar falls to the floor: the tears are now just a puddle on the floor and the heart is horribly pierced by a big sliver of glass, which Roderick must delicately remove.15 It is a disturbing sign that something has broken in his frozen world of fetishized and memorialized sadness. The next shattering is much worse. Fyodor emerges from a daydream of blissful acceptance by Helen to see her and Chester walking in the street. Instead of forgiveness, he gets hostility (‘you have a long way to go before I start saying thank you’) and insults (‘he’s an abomination!’) from Helen. This is the end for Fyodor, who immediately topples off the wagon by draining an entire leg full of beer in his shop, staggers through the snowy nighttime streets and onto the roof of the contest hall, then crashes through the skylight and falls to his death into the victory beer vat. Fyodor’s closeup in the mad death-plummet almost duplicates Johann’s in Careful. But the final shattering is the worst of all. Giddy with happiness, Helen has agreed to appear as a spectacular figurehead in Chester’s production number for the final round of the contest against Roderick. (One of the splendidly fulsome radio commentators offers the puzzled remark: ‘Isn’t it rather odd that Lady Port-Huntley is actually in one of these numbers when she’s also the judge?’) Roderick is driven to distracted fury by Chester’s hugely popular travesty of a number, and even more by Narcissa’s unwillingness to recognize him, and his nominally funereal cello performance turns into a demented torrent of dissonance. The cacophonous onslaught causes Helen’s glass legs to spring leaks and then explode, ending the number and plunging her into public humiliation and a general condition worse than the one the legs rescued her from. Roderick, however, continues to play. He removes his false moustache and eyebrows, his absurd veil, his black sunglasses, and begins to perform in real earnest ‘The Song Is You’ that he had sworn to perform only for his wife – and Narcissa listens, and remembers.

240

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Backstage, Chester goes into Helen’s quarters to find her devastated, in tears, her blonde wig askew. He tries to embrace her, but she stabs him in the gut five times with a huge shard of glass from her broken legs. In a scene that Maddin describes as ‘film noir,’16 Chester manages to utter a couple of hard-boiled wisecracks to Helen, staggers out of the room, and makes his way haltingly down a passageway where he inadvertently starts the building on fire while lighting his ‘victory cigar.’ As the crowd flees in panic, Chester emerges onto the stage to see Roderick and Narcissa reuniting. He slumps down, a long lap dissolve takes him back to the scene of his mother’s death, and when his face reappears it is bathed in tears. Heaving Fyodor’s derelict piano (which no one has bothered to remove after his contest performance) onto its feet with a superhuman effort, he commences to bash out a fortissimo assault on ‘The Song Is You’ with voice and keyboard – musically dreadful but, for the first and last time in Chester’s adult life, full of feeling. As it is taking place, the stage area is more and more enveloped in flames, and the scene becomes a reprise of the delirious conclusion of Hangover Square (1945) where the mad great-pianist / serial-killer Laird Cregar gives his last performance while the house theatre collapses in a conflagration around him. The last shots show Chester’s body, still seated at the keyboard, burning like a torch. On the soundtrack, we hear his voice: ‘I ask you – is there anybody as happy as I am?’ Structure The early part of the film introduces themes of economic depression, capitalist exploitation, Prohibition and Repeal, advertising and popularentertainment hokum as a means of exploiting social suffering for profit, historical and Western-centric myopia about the cultures of the world, and Hobbesian jungle ethics versus humanist idealism as contending forces tugging at human behaviour. This panoply is certainly far in advance of anything else of Maddin’s when it comes to a subject matter that actually pays some attention to the broader social and political world. One might speculate that perhaps this dimension of the story preserves the trace of Ishiguro’s original script more than others, but in any event before too much of Saddest Music has gone by, the movie shows itself not really very interested in any of these subjects except maybe the last. To be sure it retains right to the end a lively interest in satirizing popular entertainment and its reception, but the core of the film rather quickly metamorphoses into a variety of family melodrama in which personal

The Saddest Music in the World

241

relations are far more central than social ones. Like every other Maddin/Toles film, it has a central group of five or six characters (here five) whose histories and desires and relationships are tightly interlaced, in a molecular-model kind of structure that barely allows the identification of a central character. (Probably Chester is the protagonist, but he is really primus inter pares.) In fact the characters are so perfectly contrastive and complementary in their make-up, so carefully arranged to form a meaningful landscape of different drives and life strategies, that the film may be called structurally schematic. In this respect again its resemblances to Archangel and Careful and especially Twilight of the Ice Nymphs are evident, and like the latter film Saddest Music might almost be construed as a philosophical meditation on human nature – albeit one that is occurring among characters often resembling those in a Frank Baum novel, and conducted in a blizzard of ‘noise’ comprised of cartoonlike plot elements and sniggering jokes on the one hand and major barriers to clear reception created by Maddin’s heavily stylized visual presentation on the other. Structurally, we have two central male characters, two brothers, one of whom (Chester) can’t feel sadness and the other (Roderick) can’t stop publicly proclaiming his sadness. And we have two central female characters, one of whom (Narcissa) can’t remember traumatic past experience and the other (Helen) can’t stop remembering traumatic past experience. In addition we have a pairing based on emotional blockage: neither Chester nor Narcissa can feel properly, both have repressed the memory of past pain and produced a numbed sensibility. (Narcissa’s takes the form of a ‘tapeworm,’ as she calls it, which eats everything before it can get into her system; when the remembering process begins, she says that the tapeworm has died.) Each of the women, moreover, has had or is having a relationship with two of the male characters in the film, and each of these double relationships involves a form of betrayal (Helen betrays Fyodor with Chester, and Narcissa betrays Roderick with Chester). Then those betrayals lead us back to the schematic qualities of the two brothers, for while Roderick is ostentatiously faithful to his missing wife, Chester is ostentatiously false to, apparently, every woman he meets. The heavy irony of Fyodor’s undying love for a woman whose legs he has removed with a hacksaw and no anaesthetic obscures, perhaps, the fact that he is the sole figure who really is trying to put things back together, to heal breaches and make trust whole again. The fate of three of these characters (Chester, Fyodor, Helen) is terrible, and that of the remaining two (Roderick, Narcissa), while certainly

242

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

more hopeful, still has a faint suggestion of the absurd hopeful afterlife of Franz and Sigleinde in Careful – so spectacular is the wreckage of the others. In fact one might say of Roderick and Narcissa that all they achieve is a status quo ante which redeposits them into the state of childloss and potential dysfunction that caused amnesia and abandonment in the first place. Like Archangel and Careful, Saddest Music is a tragedy in its basic narrative outline, a grim story of impossible desires, bad choices, pathological strategies, and the miscarriage of all aspirations. And as in Archangel and Twilight, this complex molecule of characters seems deliberately arranged to show how things don’t work and won’t work. There is something bordering on didacticism in the ‘philosophical’ perspective of all of these films: the perspective that says that erring human nature will miss its aim almost perfectly. In the relatively calm dramatic environment of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, this spectacle can be recognizable as a meditation, whereas in the more lurid confines of Archangel and Careful it functions more like the dramatic irony of thick melodrama. Saddest Music lies somewhere in between. Its frantic comedy and even more frantic visual outrages carry the film equal distances away from the lugubrious doom-ridden pilgrimages of Archangel and Careful, on one side, and the aquamarine-and-gold Symbolist debating society of Twilight, on the other. And yet it musters all the violence and cruelty of the first two films, and much of the intricate analysis of the third. In the end, the emotional weight of the tragic conclusions is less substantial than in Archangel and Careful. There is no equivalent here of Boles lost in the fog, coughing blood, witnessing the crushing defeat of all his longings without comprehension; nor of Grigorss in the ice cave at the end of Careful, fantasizing a tender vision of childhood family ideality that we know is utterly false. One can see how Chester’s illumination and breakthrough to feeling at the end of Saddest Music resembles these moments, and yet the affective force is less because there has been little ramp-up to this moment. Boles and Grigorss endure long drawn-out agonies before final defeat comes to bring their sufferings to an awesome resolution. But Chester remains sealed tightly in his cocoon of repression and sublimation until pretty close to the last minute, so that he exists as a feeling, suffering personage only briefly before he, and the movie, are gone. He is shallow, shallow, shallow, shallow – and then, suddenly, he is deep and then he is dead. He never achieves enough psychological depth for us to care about his problem. Of course his psychic case remains interesting, one can see how his life of repression has been pathological, and how he really needed that fatal epiphany; but that is on the

The Saddest Music in the World

243

level of a kind of detached understanding. Even Roderick, far closer to the realm of seriousness, only achieves something genuine near the end of the film, and it is hard to sympathize with his grieving process when he is so often accompanied by signifiers of triviality and possessed by the comedy-persona Gavrilo the Great. In this respect the film is closer to Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, where characters are lined up for cathartic climaxes (Cain Ball, Amelia, Peter, even Zephyr) but affectivity is scarce. By the end of Saddest Music, all the characters have achieved some kind of reality or seriousness. Fyodor (for much of the film the most sober of the characters, the least infected by zaniness) recognizes that an act with such serious consequences as his will not go away no matter how much you wish it, collapses, and dies. Helen sheds not only her giddy neo-girlishness but her steel facade of power and contempt, and is seen wigless and mascara-stained, just a suffering human – whose anger finally moves from poison-dipped sarcasm to compulsive violent directness of expression in a savage multiple stabbing. Narcissa recovers her memory and her reality, Roderick loses his Gavrilo persona, and Chester’s attainment of authenticity is brutal and climactic. But the film still has to struggle to contain and stage those moments of apotheosis unironically in an environment as hostile to seriousness as that of any Maddin film. Sadness Like the ‘cowardice’ of Cowards Bend the Knee, the ‘sadness’ of The Saddest Music in the World requires some investigation. The very first scene, pre-credit, lays out the terms of the Chester story. Acknowledge your inner sadness or die: an explicit warning from a personage who exactly performs the function of a fairy-tale soothsayer or Shakespearean witch. And, as in a folk tale or Macbeth, the solemn prediction comes to pass. Chester doesn’t acknowledge his inner sadness – instead he flees it – and he dies as a result, to the accompaniment of the Seer’s harsh laughter, in a closure as implacably moralizing as that of any fairy story or Tale from the Crypt. The film’s message, then: ‘Be sad or else!’ But what is the nature of this sadness? Chester’s primal trauma is presented in a flashback whose veracity we have no reason to question: a boy sees his mother collapse and die in the middle of a family activity that is a kind of perfect emblem of ideal family harmony (making music together). But the scene is full of cues that we should not take it seriously. Mother’s singing is definitely not of professional quality, and while there is no reason family music-making should manifest such skill, the effect is faintly

244

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ridiculous – and becomes completely so when her seizure begins and her voice trails off in a fashion one can only describe as comical. The effect is distinctly related to what the soundtrack music is doing to the pathos of Zenaida’s reconciliation with Franz in Careful. The spectacle of this decorous Victorian-hair-bunned woman crashing onto the piano keyboard with Cecil Taylor-like discordancy and then lying there in a posture of bad opera acting is witty, a deft little skewering of stereotypes of parlour propriety and nineteenth-century melodrama. The dressedup little boys at their instruments – above all sailor-suited little Chester17 with his trumpet – only add to this impression. There may very well be affection in this satirical portrait of the genteel cultural content of the scene, but there is no sadness. It is of course quite believable that a little boy would be scarred for life by such an experience, but this trauma runs perilously close to another one from Careful, the Swan-Feeder’s loss of an eye through being pecked by a goose clock. There is no real pain here. The film has to work as hard to rehabilitate Chester’s trauma, and just as hard to reclaim any real emotional pain in its foundational event. Only at the end of the film, as the mother’s death appears once more, over Chester’s mortally wounded face, does the deep, deep loss of such an event begin to seem real. Until then, the film has shared Chester’s own insouciant dismissal of it. A similar syndrome afflicts all the other instances of sadness in the film. Roderick’s über-melancholy is in a death struggle to keep its head above the waves of preposterousness that accompany its every turn. Narcissa’s amnesia takes the form of a tapeworm that talks to her. Even Helen’s horrible mutilation is festooned with silliness in the form of the wall-full of sportif photos of her in her youthful wholeness that display a set of ridiculous poses and somewhat recall the flash-card quizzes at the Tolzbad Butler Gymnasium, while her damaged attempts at sexual satisfaction (via Teddy) have to survive the rococo insanity of the blindfolded orchestra. It doesn’t help when Chester meets her angry reaction to his visit by commenting on her nineteenth-century street-cripple’s wheeled platform – modelled specifically, like her disability, on Lon Chaney’s from The Penalty,18 with ‘I see you’ve got a new dolly. Nice.’ Again, Fyodor is something of an exception, since he maintains a sober and penitent demeanour, but his po-faced harping on love, forgiveness, and redemption are not only themselves faintly satirical, but are heavily compromised by the comic-strip Grand Guignol of his hacksaw original sin and the inherent absurdity of his beer-legs project. The sadness of Winnipeg is just funny. That this cold-blasted, snow-

The Saddest Music in the World

245

buried wasteland in the middle of nowhere (the film’s characterization, not mine) has even been noticed by the Times of London, let alone voted the world capital of anything, is a self-directed satirical jab, no more substantial than the fatuous caricatures of the Nations of the World performing in its contest. The sadness of Winnipeg may be truly there, and deep, as indeed may be that of the Nations – but, like Chester’s, they are all presented in the register of burlesque, and they would all only even be perceptible after a titanic burrowing operation through layers and layers of self-protective irony. In ‘The Saddest Music in the World Contest,’ none of the music is sad, or at least it is not allowed to emerge as functionally sad after its trip through the gauntlet of mockery. The very first competition, by no means the most ridiculous, pits ‘Siam vs. Mexico,’ and features an oriental gentleman with bird-cage prop performing on a wooden flute versus a family mariachi band. The contest itself is a riot of farcical incongruities, with its arbitrary national designations, home-made musical talents, victory beer vat, and minor league hockey buzzer rudely interrupting every sadness. The sporting metaphor is carried further by the pair of announcers, Mary (Talia Pura) and Ellsworth (Claude Dorge) who provide play-by-play and colour commentary for the radio audience. So in the ‘Siam vs. Mexico’ contest, Mary adds this helpful explanation: No one can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats, or twins. But I’m embarrassed to say that before now I’ve never taken Siamese sadness all that seriously. You can almost hear the typhoon bearing down on a defenceless seaside village through this tortured flute solo. The fatal deluge is announced by birds. The performer has taken the trouble to put out their eyes so they’ll have a bit more soul to their warning chirps.

Then, in elucidation of the Mexican performance, the pair of announcers offer this commentary: ellsworth: [looking at notes] The Mexicans are giving us a sad peek into child-burial customs down Mexico way. mary: The Mexican mama is being very firm with her dead infant. ‘Now go away,’ she wails. ‘You – are – dead. Don’t sneak in at night to nurse from my breast. That milk is only for the living.’ To Canadian ears that may sound harsh. ellsworth: [cheerfully] Well, I guess dead children, like any other kind, have got to learn.

246

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The extravagant ‘sadness’ of Gavrilo the Great’s performances is utterly dispersed by his all-black costume including four-foot hat-brim and bedspread-sized veil, Groucho Marx-style eyebrows and moustache, and sunglasses as opaque as those of Gramma in Cowards Bend the Knee: a travesty both literally and metaphorically. Of all the acts, only Fyodor’s – dignified in costume and performance – is straightforward and melancholy, but he is quickly voted down by his compatriots in favour of the much more spectacular group from the Cameroons performing a pygmy funeral ceremony complete with self-laceration and wildly beating drums. After all this, Chester’s ludicrously upbeat Broadway- and Hollywood-ized production numbers are no more preposterous as representations of sadness than any of the other acts. Indeed, when Narcissa, to Roderick’s horror and disgust, takes up the sacred grief-anthem ‘The Song Is You’ and converts it (in a kind of fantasy performance that is not in the contest) into a jazzy production number that develops a chorus of hockey players19 and a whole ballroom of evening-dressed dancers with a full orchestra conducted by Chester, the result is just a straightforwardly good musical number, really the only one in the film, at least before Roderick’s final cello solo to Narcissa. (Who knew that Maria de Medeiros, with her little piping child’s voice, could sing, and swing, so well?20) The thesis statement holds: none of the ‘saddest music’ is sad. It’s not ‘The Saddest Music in the World,’ it’s ‘The “Saddest” Music in the World.’ So: not sadness, but ‘sadness.’ In a conversation about how postmodern Saddest Music is or isn’t, George Toles had this to say in elaboration of his contention that the film is not essentially sceptical in a postmodern way: In Saddest Music, to put it bluntly and baldly, we’re talking endlessly about fraudulent forms of sadness to the point where all sadness is self-conscious, fraudulent, and self-serving. It’s as though that’s all we have to say about it, but in fact the real goal of the narrative is saying that all that talk about fraudulence, we were never away from real sadness for an instant. Sadness was always and everywhere the real quarry, the thing that the movie is never in any deep way sceptical about. It’s just finding the way in which sadness can emerge in the midst of all this gaudiness and fakery about what it means. You can light up, with a moment, a path all the way through, and [have the viewer say] ‘look, it’s been really sad from the start. I didn’t feel that, I didn’t feel it that way until right here.’ And make Chester the means for conducting that kind of both blocking and detachment, and finally discovery.21

The Saddest Music in the World

247

And it seems clear that the film really does embody this blueprint on one, fundamental, level. But the question remains, as always in Maddin and especially Maddin/Toles, why are all these obstacles there in the first place? Saddest Music does not feel like a movie about how people fake sadness. Perhaps it is a functional satire of how representation, how entertainment, fakes sadness, and how audiences will flock to consume fake sadness instead of the real thing. It becomes a comment on popular art (we will turn to this in a moment). But for the characters, fake sadness can’t really work in that way. Roderick’s Gavrilo act, Narcissa’s tapeworm, Fyodor’s beer-legs project – these things are too surreally weird and ridiculous to be functional. What do they represent, what are they satirizing? They are metaphors, perhaps, for something less bizarre, but their exaggeration and comedy-sketch flatness create a big barrier between the metaphor and what it is a metaphor of. The hyperbolic, self-consciously too-grotesque aspects of suffering in the film prompt a parallel question. Isn’t ordinary sadness enough – bereavement, the catastrophic emotional failures occurring in families and other intimate relationships? Surely there’s plenty of distance between this kind of profound everyday sadness and the derisory pastiches that society and culture make of their representation and consumption, space to allow a critique and even a satire. Why do we need drunken double amputations, amnesia and tapeworms, child hearts pickled in tears, and all the rest? How is the absurdity of the circumstances, and the results, of Helen’s loss of her legs helping the thesis of fake sadness? Is the movie saying that there would be a more emotionally honest way for her to deal with her trauma? That instead of running a predatory-capitalist beer company she should just stay in her room and cry? But in the event, all the characters are in some important way ridiculous by virtue of their suffering – not because of their fake sadness, but because of their real sadness. The scene of Chester’s mother’s death is ridiculous while it is actually happening, before Chester even has a chance to disavow it, Helen’s amputation-by-hacksaw equally so (albeit far more of a fish-hook). The movie is in effect pushing the primal sufferings of its personages into the same bin of overwrought, inauthentic dramatization as the contest. Some elements of character sadness escape this mockery, notably the fantasy appearance of the dead child to both Roderick (in the train) and Narcissa (in the dressing room). And Chester’s condition can work in a transparent way because his whole life has been a denial of feeling, not a luridly overdramatic fakery of feeling. But the program that Toles states for finding underlying sadness is made more complicated and antiintuitive by so much of the film’s presentation.

248

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The best answer to these questions must be, I think, that the faking of sadness is a kind of pathological psychic condition, but not so much for these characters as for the film itself. The fundamental activity is not Chester’s or Narcissa’s progress to reach feeling by stripping away repression and aversion, nor Helen’s to reach bedrock sorrow and juicy anger instead of living in a state of horribly dry bitterness. Rather, it is the film’s own progress to become actually sad instead of manifesting the neurotic condition of sadness buried under comedy-grotesqueness and other forms of armour-plating. Of course the main characters are a vehicle for realizing this goal. Perhaps the one whose project is closest to the film’s is Roderick, who must explicitly reject the theatrical trappings of his emotional hiding place, stripping off ridiculous moustache and eyebrows, to reach, simply, his own face. Just so must The Saddest Music in the World get past its farcical mockery of everyone and everything. As we have seen, it is once more the progress of Archangel and Careful. But Saddest Music is the most explicit, the most self-thematizing, of all: it is even a thesis-movie. More than any previous Maddin film, the storyline and the thematic development of the movie are representations of the movie, and a ruling paradigm in Maddin’s cinema. That is, the problems of amnesia, numbness, displacement of feeling into something more superficial and finally more manic, the thick proliferation of self-protection mechanisms – all these need to be painfully overcome until the object itself can be attained: connection, authenticity of emotion, ethical responsibility, self-knowledge. We may conclude that the lesson of seeing this configuration so many times in Maddin’s cinema must be that this gnarled and difficult route must seem to the filmmaker the only route – that a more direct one would cause the object to vanish completely before it was reached, that the quarry would surely flee if one didn’t sneak up on it in this most disguised and circuitous way. In Cowards Bend the Knee before, and Brand upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg afterwards, Maddin does, in fact, find a more direct path (though god knows those films are full enough of misdirection too). In this respect The Saddest Music in the World may perhaps be seen as a kind of final, most explicit exploration of Maddin’s obliquer first model. Since the contest is kind of the organizing event for all this, we can clearly see the film as reflexive. The musical and performative aspects of the contest are representations of art in general and cinema in particular. Moreover the low-budget amateur status of all the acts – and even Chester’s are low-budget amateur versions of big-budget professional production numbers – mirrors the condition of Maddin’s cinema. When

The Saddest Music in the World

249

the Heather Belles, a Winnipeg all-girl highland pipe band, appear representing Scotland, we are right back in the latter stages of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, which featured the Khartoum Lodge Shriners Highland Pipe Band. The utterly casual, and self-mocked, attitude towards ethnographic truth runs with perfect consistency through every group and performance. The Siamese flutist (to begin at the beginning) is playing Chinese music on a Chinese instrument. Maddin remarks: This is my friend Xiang. He’s one of the two greatest Chinese Bumbershoot flute players. He’s representing Siam here, which is just one of many examples of my attempt to pay homage to 1930s Hollywood insensitivities to ethnicity. Just a total disregard for geographical fact.22

This, too, is a practice that goes back to Gimli Hospital, which has a character embodying Maddin’s conscious caricature of 1930s Hollywood’s unconscious caricature of laughable Negro simplicity.23 But Maddin loves these carefree lies even as he recognizes their mendacity. They are another manifestation of the childlike innocence of earlier times, the innocence that appeals to Maddin’s innocence. And in fact the relationship of Hollywood ethnic caricature to actual ethnic fact is rather close to the relation between Maddin’s historical environments and actual history. He is essentially incurious about what really happened in Archangel in 1919 or the Swiss Alps in 1820. And if he actually knows something about what happened in Gimli in 1879 or Winnipeg in 1933 (or any of the other periods of Winnipeg history that make their way into his films), his first act is to make them false, to exaggerate and caricature and fantasize them. So that all the lies about the world and culture in the Saddest Music Contest are Maddin’s lies, or at least are intimately related to Maddin’s lies (alternate term: ‘mode of artistic transformation’). Hence, the satire of Hollywood historical insouciance, and even of Hollywood shallow glitziness, is essentially gentle. The combination of pure brass chutzpah and actual naivety in ‘The Alaskan Kayak Tragedy of 1898’ emerges as campily delightful even as it is driving the ‘genuine artist’ Roderick to maddened transports of modernist cacophony that will shatter Helen’s glass legs. And really, in this film, the non-existent Alaskan Kayak Tragedy has exactly the same status as Gavrilo the Great’s memorialization of the proximate cause of World War I, and Roderick’s take on the assassination at Sarajevo is not so far from Maddin’s take on the Allied expedition to Archangel. The amazing thing about all the ‘sadness’ in all these

250

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

films is that they eventually do manage to reach something not-in-quotation-marks. Art, as it is staged in The Saddest Music in the World, only leaves the realm of the charmingly preposterous when it is transfixed with a pain so great it cannot be avoided or disavowed or displaced. Roderick’s laments for the death of nine million are fundamentally ridiculous; only his authentic rage can produce art that will break things, and only his authentic unadorned sorrow can produce art that will penetrate and dispel his wife’s amnesia. Chester’s production numbers are delightfully silly but weightless; only his gutted performance of ‘The Song Is You’ really expresses something. (And one notes that the musical ugliness of Roderick’s discordant performance and the musical ugliness of Chester’s bad one are simply markers of their depth of feeling.) Meanwhile Fyodor, whose unfeigned performance of ‘The Red Maple Leaves’ has neither the charm of Chester’s fakery nor the farcical Wagnerian overkill of Roderick’s, is simply ignored – just like his personal suit to Helen and his personal project of redemption. In the end, what we can say is that the mechanism of fake sadness masking real sadness is a property of the film rather than of all the sadness fakers in the film. Humour, savagery, elegy All of Maddin’s feature films are funny, but Saddest Music is probably the funniest of them all, if only because of the sheer volume of jokes. The open bar of opportunities presented by the setting and the contest – to single out only the most fertile fields – is so abundant that the film is able to keep up a steady snowfall of jokes from the beginning almost to the end. We’ll turn more closely to the comic presentation of Winnipeg in a moment, but the contest and everything surrounding it are an endless source of amusement. Maddin and Toles keep whacking it like a piñata, and it keeps disgorging little treats. The extravagant absurdity of the idea of it is rather grand. The individual acts are often rather appealing in their basically artless way, but at the same time always ridiculous by virtue of standing as emblems of national musical sorrow. The terms and procedures of the contest are even funnier, from the wonderful fruity radio commentators of whom one somehow never tires, to the regal presidings of Lady Port-Huntley who waves her handkerchief to start the contests like a Lady Bountiful and ends them with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like a Roman emperor, to the victory beer vat whose coarseness is so breathtaking it almost counts as elegance, to the rude buzzer interrupting the proceedings, to the blackboard where losing contestants are sim-

The Saddest Music in the World

251

ply crossed out in chalk, to the cutaways to ‘American Gothic’-type U.S. rural radio listeners glued to the set in envy of ‘that happy suds-buddy to the north.’24 Roderick as contestant, too, is a rich jest: the sheer outrageousness of his costume and high seriousness of manner is the perfect counterpart to the sheer vulgarity of all his surroundings, and in particular the beer vat. When during one performance he faints, and then is dumped unconscious into the vat and has to be fished out before he drowns, Mary the radio commentator remarks: ‘Still no word on the condition of Gavrilo the Great. We don’t know if he’s in a coma, or just very, very sad. We’ll try to find out as soon as we can. Now, a word from PortHuntley beer.’ And this reminds us of the delightful beer commercials, accompanied by a catchy jingle suitable for radio: Get up! Get your boots on! Hurry up, hurry up! Time’s a-wastin’ If you’re not tastin’ Lady Port-Huntley’s Beer! The first time this song appears, it is accompanied by shots of drab, heavily garbed male tavern-goers hunched with dull concentration over their beers. On a later occasion, the song is accompanied – in a move that would create narratological confusion if you thought about it – by a stylish montage of bubbling beer, a bottling assembly line, and other events in beer manufacture and sales. (The editing here would cause no comment if it were to appear on television today, but in the context of the period-cinema environment of Saddest Music, it looks a bit like a cubscout Slavko Vorkapich montage.) Chester’s numbers are all hilarious, as indeed is much of the humour surrounding his activities as a hustling Jimmy Cagney wannabe. SerboPortuguese Maria de Medeiros in fur-fringed outfit on a Ferris wheel seat singing ‘Swing low, sweet chariot, coming forth [sic] to carry me home’ sends Gavrilo the Great into a cross-eyed synaesthetic swoon (‘Can’t you smell that?! It’s roses! My nostrils are choking. Too many thorns! I bleed!’). Both halves of that equation are funny. When, in an access of enraged resentment, Roderick smashes Chester over the head with a trumpet – signifier, incidentally, of his childhood music making – he falls to the floor and, as he slides into unconsciousness, gasps reflexively: ‘Gimme more of that fizz!’ Roderick’s attack on Chester and Narcissa in the open carriage is another succulent moment: leaping in, he points a

252

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

finger at Chester and announces with insane matter-of-factness ‘In the name of Serbia I kill you both,’ pulls the trigger, and makes little shooting sounds to no effect, and then is whacked over the head with a violin by Chester. (Assault by musical instrument is obviously just a development of a metaphor that begins in the scene of the primal trauma and informs the whole film.) Rarely has a Maddin film occupied such levels of outright slapstick. Maddin remarks about this scene that it was the realization of a decades-old ambition to restage the assassination at Sarajevo. It is totally characteristic that when he finally does so, it is in the terms not even of an Archangel-like home-made dramatization of a backwater of the Great War, but of a delusory, childishly impotent pretend-assault: a lovely homuncular embodiment of Maddin’s whole way with the epic violent events of the historical past. If only every mortal problem in life could be addressed through play-acting – life could be enchanting and funny instead of sad. The effect of all of the humour in this vein is just to lift the spirits, to invite us to share a delectable, ‘fizzing’ comic sensibility that is having a lot of light-hearted fun with its materials. But there is comedy of another sort, too. Chester’s line ‘Gimme more of that fizz!’ is echoed in another line he delivers after another, much more serious, assault, when Helen has stabbed him in the gut: ‘Well now you’ve given me something to laugh about.’ The configuration is the same, the attitude is the same, but the result is not funny any more, not funny at all. Everything connected with Helen’s amputation and leglessness is a giant ‘fish-hook’ – one that is big enough to stifle any laugh. When the film jokes about blindfolded musicians and ‘singing in the see-saw’ (Helen’s description of the on-command sex that Teddy must furnish her with), the result is queasy to the point of distastefulness. Even the beer legs are able to give comfort really only because they are so surreally preposterous; and the threat of their cracking and breaking moves this absurd comedy into realms of pure anxiety and finally crushing humiliation and utter defeat. The ridiculousness of the child’s heartin-a-jar – an essential component – is always counteracted by qualities that are unironically horrifying if not revolting. As the film makes its way through so many instances of cruel humour about disfigurement, about anguish of a dozen varieties, about pain so great you lose your memory or your affect, I am strangely reminded of Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and especially its final musical production number that features a whole hillside of crucifixion victims singing ‘Look on the bright side of life.’ The pithiest expression of its philosophy is: ‘Life’s a piece of shit / When you look at it.’ It’s a Broadway chorus of damned souls, Samuel

The Saddest Music in the World

253

Beckett with 101 Strings, the darkest kind of existentialism without the consolation of any kind of gravitas. You might as well laugh, say the Pythons, since the fundamental condition is as bad as it can possibly be, and you have absolutely no recourse whatever. The laughter that arises, though, is an entirely arid, maniacal cackling that is the opposite of therapeutic. Crying seems out of the question, since it would require some kind of vulnerability which you’d be mad to entertain. This is a state of emotional blockage, trapped in an eternal hell of withering poisonous laughter, that the Pythons never escape nor want to escape and which is indeed home territory for them. This is a kind of sensibility, a kind of cinema, that seems a species of ground zero for imaginations unable any more to believe in truth, beauty, and the Good, and see themselves surrounded by a million ever more plastic counterfeit expressions of those values (Disney, Forrest Gump, Titanic) that fail dismally at the awesome challenge of spontaneously producing one authentic tear. It’s not their fault, either, it’s the culture that surrounds them; we all suffer from the same emotional impotence. The Life of Brian and Saddest Music are alike enemies of this kind of ‘fake sadness.’ But unlike the Pythons (or Spitting Image or Curb Your Enthusiasm), Maddin is still fundamentally motivated by the echo of emotional authenticity. In his case it arises from childhood, from eclipsed and ‘childlike’ forms of culture the foremost of which is silent cinema, and is somehow conjured up in the very act of playing with these things. The more ridiculous, the more impossibly naïve, the more obviously inadequate the model, the greater the residual current of emotional authenticity, so that Maddin proceeds by debunking with one hand what with the other he magically reconstitutes as the font of that most scarce and precious elixir: truth, beauty, and the Good. In Saddest Music the debunking of mainstream entertainment is rather extensive, and includes the ludicrous guying of moronic showbiz strategies and even more moronic audiences, while at the same time not exempting itself from the same charge of falling short in the holiest tasks of representation by staging its own dramatic strategies in the form of ridiculous excesses of suffering and damage. But all of these things – Muskeg Beer advertising jingles, gulled idiot-audiences, beer pools, caricatures of culture and ethnicity, the frozen primitiveness of Winnipeg, and also Gavrilo the Great with his pickled child-heart, Narcissa with her tapeworm, Fyodor with his prosthetics laboratory that looks like Gepetto’s workshop – must be recuperated through their inadequacy, into something whose childish simplicity gives access to the lost world of innocence. So that, again,

254

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Chester at the piano keyboard as a human torch. On the soundtrack, his voice proclaims: ‘I ask you – is there anybody here as happy as I am?’

it is their oversimplicity, their obvious childishlyimagined-ness, that as it were guarantees their truth-of-a-certain-kind, whereas a more threedimensional, grown-up-realist kind of imagination and representation would only doom the result to true numbness and lies. Underneath that silly play-world, at its foundation, is something whose dreadful pain is expressed in the violence of the imagery: amputation by hacksaw, child’s heart pierced with glass, images that combine derisory artifice with horrors that can’t be laughed off. And the recovery of that foundation is then represented with the Passion de Jeanne d’Arc-like image of Chester’s flaming body at the keyboard: a mortal holocaust where the raging fire has burned away all disguise. And one sees how The Saddest Music in the World has been able to go somewhere that Monty Python does not reach. All of the savage humour at last resolves into pure savagery: Helen’s vicious stabbing, Chester’s horrifying immolation. All humour dissolves, but especially that humour that had served the film itself in the project to defend itself from the underlying world of pain, from a too-clear view of reality with its attendant danger of a too-clear form of cinematic realism. Any truly grieving kind of representation of, for example, the death of the mother at the beginning of the film is impossible: it hasn’t been

The Saddest Music in the World

255

earned yet, it can’t survive the charge of instant sentimentalism, the event must be mocked and laughed at. Moreover the childlike-uncomprehending and infantile-destructive must be given their head before any distilled form of truth can emerge. The film not only goads and jabs with this cruel humour, it is goaded and jabbed by it. The need to make cruel jokes about cruel reality is something it needs to get past, a big roadblock to feeling that it needs to break through. When it at last does so, it is not by some gradual, therapeutic process, but by an explosion, a sudden, violent release of all the accumulated tension of avoidance and smothered pain. A breakage, exactly, like all the narratively central glass breakages in the film – and after the final breakage, and murderous attack with glass shards, a conflagration. Only such an excess of pure violence can pierce not just the defences of the film’s characters, but the defences of the film. When everything is shattered and then burned away, when all the jokes are finished, the final resting place of the film would like, perhaps, to be elegaic, as expressed in the reunion of Roderick and Narcissa, and in Chester’s tearful remembrance. That moment of sublimity, where Chester can at last remember and feel, is to me strongly reminiscent of Max Ophuls’ great film Letter from an Unknown Woman, where the hero Louis Jourdan is cured in the last scene of his arid selfishness and connected by memory to everything truly valuable in his life – but only when it is too late, when all that is left is to die.25 But the Letter from an Unknown Woman ending of Saddest Music in the World has to contend with its Passion de Jeanne d’Arc ending (and with its Hangover Square ending). It is a question whether any elegaic mood can survive in the face of those scorching flames whose cruelty is at last without any kind of funny costume. Pointedly cruel, too, is the inserted shot of the antlerheaddressed seer, maniacally laughing in derision at this fool. Chester’s last voice-over – ‘is there anybody as happy as I am?’ – ends the film on a very pure note of the characteristic Maddin/Toles oxymoron: at once a cathartic moment of self-release and a savage self-mutilation. Our Winnipeg Right from the start, Maddin has been a local filmmaker. To make The Dead Father, he walked out the front door or the back door of his house in Winnipeg, or in the door of the family cottage at Gimli, and shot what was there. When the ‘mythologizing’ bug bit, he turned first to the Manitoba history of New Iceland (Gimli Hospital), then to an obscure First World War battlefront where Winnipeggers had served (Archangel). Care-

256

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ful, Twilight, and Dracula had a far less visible relation to Winnipegness (notwithstanding the fact that Dracula was an original production of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet), but with Cowards, Saddest Music, and of course My Winnipeg Maddin has returned home in every sense. As we have seen, Cowards has explicitly local settings, but there are relatively few markers of a Winnipeg anyone else might recognize. With Saddest Music, the city of Winnipeg is a major character in the film. Given its musical content, one might almost say that it is Maddin’s Meet Me in St Louis. It is actually rather interesting to explore this eccentric parallel a little: then it seems that every ringing tone of energy and forward-looking in Minnelli’s film has a sourly self-mocking echo in Maddin’s. The World’s Fair of 1903 = the Great Depression; the burgeoning exuberance of Midwest American civic pride = ‘the world capital of sorrow’; Judy Garland singing ‘The Trolley Song’ = the Heather Belles performing ‘Cockney Jock’; spacious Technicolor mansions, candy-striped dresses, and spectacular coiffes = cramped monochrome shacks, Roderick’s outrageous get-up, and Chester’s ‘slippery hair’ or Helen’s cheap blonde wig.26 And so on. In short, St Louis’ joyful paean to local boosterism is precisely answered by Saddest’s status as a kind of extended anti-travel brochure whose message is: ‘You’d have to be crazy to visit Winnipeg.’ The Main Street setting features a black sky with a big tilted sign reading ‘TAR’ in the distance, frozen ponds, head-high weeds, telephone poles buried halfway to their cross-members in snow, cheap commercial light-bulb signs in the background, houses angled Expressionistly and sunk to the gables into the snowdrifts, hunched and shuffling passers-by bundled up against the cold, but also pyjama-clad sleepwalkers perambulating like zombies or leaning against buildings. Altogether the effect of this master-set is Germanic, Expressionist, evoking Caligari in one detail, Sunrise in another. A streetcar trundles along half-subterraneanly, so deeply immersed in snowbanks that it must be entered through a door in the roof, its design suggesting Captain Nemo’s Nautilus as built by Georges Méliès, its route a long passenger-pickup for delivery at the terminus of the biggest beer parlour in town. Needless to say it is snowing all the time. The Port-Huntley offices are brighter and more upclass – a kind of high-key, fantasy Art Deco, geometric-patterned madness – but all the other interiors are dark, rough, and impoverished: the contest hall, the rooms inhabited by Fyodor, Roderick, and Narcissa. Then diegetically, Winnipeg is the place that the hero of the picture tried to escape for somewhere important, and where his return represents defeat. (In My Winnipeg, ‘Guy Maddin’ is trying to escape from the town, too.)

The Saddest Music in the World

257

Chester and Narcissa stroll down the main street of the World Capital of Sorrow, vegetation and stagnant ponds in the foreground and bright lights in the background both from Murnau’s Sunrise (1927).

In the DVD commentary, Maddin delights in suggesting to viewers that these fantastic whoppers are the bare truth about Winnipeg, and giving helpful explanations and amplifications, such as: The telephone poles are all about three feet tall. Another typical problem in the winter – you know, you’re always getting clotheslined when you’re running down the street because of the short telephone poles.

One imagines him chuckling as he thinks of viewers in Albuquerque or Birmingham or Canberra saying to themselves: ‘My goodness, maybe Winnipeg really is like that.’ The film’s main shooting location was the abandoned Dominion Bridge Factory, a one-time steel mill that has since been condemned and that was also the location for The Heart of the World. During the two to three weeks when the shooting was taking place there, Winnipeg was suffering one of the worst winter cold snaps in decades. The temperature inside the vast, windowless building with its concrete floors rose

258

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

as high as minus 28° Celsius (intolerably cold) but usually, says Maddin,27 hovered around minus 40° – a truly dreadful temperature where exposed flesh can freeze after a few minutes. Steam-breath pours from the mouths of the actors in many scenes, and the moments where they are required to perform in skimpy costume or strip off to underwear level are uncomfortable to watch if you know the circumstances of shooting.28 But there were important advantages, too. The set could sustain real snow drifts and real frozen ponds, while the steaming clouds of heat coming off winning contestants after their victory slides into a vat of warm beer simply testifies to the literal reality (strange term to be using about a Maddin film) of one aspect of the Winnipeg setting. It may also subliminally insist to viewers that underneath all the clownish joke making occurring in this environment is an underlying level of ferocity and punishment – and in this it would be echoing a fundamental configuration in the characters and the drama as a whole. So, The Saddest Music in the World is an expression of civic pride in a frozen hellhole. That expression consists largely of a deluge of mocking caricatures and stinging darts of self-criticism. But it is a love-hate, or perhaps a love-shame, attitude that underlies everything, as if Maddin were saying (as he actually does pretty much say in My Winnipeg): This is the frozen hellhole that is my home. Perhaps he is saying, too: Like my childhood, like my family, Winnipeg makes me suffer through its desolate qualities, but I love them all anyway, they are me. As Maddin takes this home town and makes jokes about its godforsakenness, exaggerates its every quality of deprivation, isolation, and bleakness, Winnipeg becomes more and more clearly an avatar for his own cinema, which is also deprived and out of the mainstream, self-enclosed in its own amateur fabrications, somehow inadequate and besmirched and needing to be rescued by fantasy or ‘mythology.’ (Saddest Music may be Maddin’s biggest undertaking to date, but its shooting conditions are as punitive as any avant-garde or art film’s could possibly be – a kind of guarantee of anti-mainstream authenticity on the level of production.) It is fascinating to watch the ways this identification works its way into extended metaphorical expression. In the making-of documentary Teardrops in the Snow, poor Maria de Medeiros and sundry other cast and crew members may be perishing from the cold, but Maddin himself embraces it: ‘I like the cold,’ he says simply, skating right past the fact that for anybody but a polar native, minus 40° isn’t just cold, but bone-chilling, death-causing cold. But such an attitude fits perfectly with Maddin’s entire outlook, which is to embrace the conditions of your deprivation and

The Saddest Music in the World

259

your peculiar deferred pain. The character of Narcissa in fact embodies the whole syndrome in a detailed way. When we first meet her, she is so indifferent to and even fond of cold that she simply lies down in a snowbank to take a little nap while Chester goes in to Helen’s offices. An Auschwitz-inmate-clothed local denizen leans dazed against a wall. The cold, which freezes all feeling, is, like the tapeworm that eats all feeling, her friend; it expresses and enables her amnesia, her shallow cheerfulness and equally shallow sensuality. Indeed it seems even to have aphrodisiac qualities – and here we are reminded of Veronica’s Ghost in Cowards Bend the Knee, who (especially in the published script) has an erotic attraction to all forms of cold and is summoned by Maddin Sr’s caresses of the ice breast. This love for cold is exactly a symptom of numbness and amnesia and the disembodied condition of ‘dreaming’ that Maddin talks increasingly about. A schema of related zones presents itself: amnesia = repression of painful memories, and repressed feelings = frozenness, a numbness to cold, a liking for cold because it protects you against your memory. When Narcissa starts to remember, she begins to feel the cold. The defeat of amnesia creates a more normal (that is, connected) relationship to the exterior world. In a larger sense this might be thought therapeutic, but in Saddest Music these growing-more-normal, growing-more-human developments are likely to be uncertain at best, catastrophic at worst. Winnipeg, then, is a place where the cold protects you from the worst pain of your bad feelings, even as it freezes you into a certain pathological condition. How close this is to the petrified finale of Cowards Bend the Knee, or the suspended despairing end point of Brand upon the Brain!, or the whole inner project of My Winnipeg. Maddin is explicitly fighting this condition in all these recent films, and the explicit Winnipeg settings of Cowards and Saddest Music – and of course My Winnipeg – are an aspect of the project. (Archangel too is in a sense all about Winnipeg, as can be seen by the iconographic similarities between its main street and that of Saddest Music, but in a much more displaced way. Perhaps it is notable that nobody in Archangel really does recover his or her memory.) It is a project that has the closest ties to the attempt to overcome ‘cowardice,’ and it is surreal but not too surprising to see Darcy Fehr (the ‘Guy Maddin’ of Cowards Bend the Knee and of My Winnipeg as well) reappearing in Saddest Music in the wordless role of Teddy, a degraded and humiliated lapdog of a man servicing a dominant woman on command, briskly described by Maddin in the DVD commentary in these terms: ‘he’s playing me again.’ The men of the Kent family collaborate to severely disable Helen: Chester and Fyodor together at the

260

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

accident and its aftermath, and Roderick with his glass-shattering cello. Fyodor’s and Chester’s catastrophic errors and transgressions are obvious, but Roderick, who devotes his whole life to lamenting the loss of his family, is seen in his own memory as having pushed both wife and child away in annoyance so that he can practise the cello. The unfeeling or disassociated and self-protective qualities of Chester are precisely those of ‘cowardice,’ and the whole tenor of the film is again that people have to face up to themselves and their own emotions – notwithstanding the fact that their eventual moments of truth tend to be rather disastrous. On the other hand, Maddin’s cinema continues to avoid facing up to reality; indeed it continues to run away from it as fast as it can. It is eye-opening, in Teardrops in the Snow, to see the settings for Saddest Music represented in a blank documentary-recording way, without benefit of severe grain, blurring, monochrome, and other barriers to direct apprehension. They are solid, heavy chunks of scenery, three-dimensional buildings of real weight and presence. But in the completed movie, they look as fantastic and flimsy as anything in Archangel. In Archangel and Careful Maddin gets up to all kinds of ‘degrading’ tricks to conceal the fact that his sets are cheap and insubstantial; whereas in Saddest Music he gets up to even more extreme tricks to conceal the fact that his sets are expensive and substantial. Clearly he has learned what he characterizes as the lesson of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, where 35mm colour and no vaseline revealed in the finished picture exactly what had been in front of the camera. Now, with another (by his standards) big budget, Maddin absolutely refuses to return to the Twilight zone. Neither the actual Winnipeg nor the Expressionist Winnipeg purpose-built in the Dominion Bridge Factory is going to be allowed to look like it ‘really’ does. Maddin remarked in an interview just after the film’s completion that he had to create a Winnipeg ‘because you still don’t want to see the “real” Winnipeg.’29 Sleepwalking, dreaming Winnipeggers, who will make a full-scale appearance in Maddin’s cinema in My Winnipeg, perambulate through Saddest Music as well, and by extension the major characters and the filmmaker too take on this tinge. The Winnipeg they traverse has the same qualities as themselves. Mise en scène The Saddest Music in the World sets visual challenges for its viewers that arguably surpass that of any other Maddin feature. To be sure, there are no endless, meandering long takes as in Gimli Hospital or sections of some

The Saddest Music in the World

261

other pre–Heart of the World features. The editing doesn’t have the flashing, flickering, musical quality it has in Dracula or Cowards Bend the Knee – it hardly could have, with so much dialogue to traverse – but it moves far more energetically and flowingly than in the dialogue-centred Twilight of the Ice Nymphs or the features preceding it. Of course it helps that there are musical numbers and Vorkapich-commercials that introduce free-editing zones into the movie, and in fact every opportunity is taken to liven up the editing in non-dialogue scenes. So it’s not anything in the domain of pacing that presents these challenges. It’s photography. The irising, vaseline-vignetting, fogging, smudging, and vagaries of exposure that occur in films like Archangel and, especially, Careful are a considerable obstacle to transparent classical visual reception, but they don’t quite measure up to what we see in Saddest Music. All of those strategies are carried into Saddest Music as well, but they are now accompanied by a powerful new force of ‘degradation.’ When Maddin says that the movie has ‘film grain the size of baseballs,’ he is humorously exaggerating. What it actually has is film grain the size of golfballs: that seems a literal description of what you see on a theatre screen when Saddest Music is projected. The movie is shot on Super-8mm and Super-16mm, and when one encounters the many moments where grain is so monstrous that the image borders on disintegration, one is inclined to attribute the effect partly to the poorer resolving power and refinement of the smaller format. But, as Maddin explains, what is really happening is rather different: [The Super-16 camera] has a crystal shutter that’s timed so perfectly it’s almost digital, as opposed to the shutter of a regular 16mm camera which is more analogue and irregular, I guess, on a subconscious level. The Super-16 stuff on the first day’s rushes ... was coming back so clean it looked like video compared to the regular 16mm and especially compared to the Super-8. 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.30

Push processing – essentially, overdevelopment – makes images brighter and grainier than they would with regular development. Usually it is employed to allow shooting under low-light conditions, a way of artificially speeding up film stock. There are certainly shots in Saddest Music that look as if they were markedly underexposed, and remain dark (and hugely grainy) even after the brightening of push processing, and these seem like rather twisted examples of the ordinary, utilitarian modus of

262

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the technique. But, as Maddin says, the principal aim is to de-clarify the photography, to use it as a new tool in the filmmaker’s perpetual campaign to ‘degrade’ the image, and this it succeeds in doing to a degree unequalled before or since in his work. Maddin ended up going perhaps even further than he wanted to: ‘I’m not sure if I had it to do over again I would go quite that far.’31 In any event what we see in much of the film is an image that is extremely grainy, alternates between looking underexposed (too dark) and looking overexposed (too bright), and then has the further challenges of vaseline-vignetting, eccentric framing, and most potent of all, soft focus extending all the way to outright blur. The final result of all these techniques combined is to make the spectator peer at and puzzle to decipher the images, fight the photography just to see. This is image stylization to the point of hard-core avant-gardism. Maddin, speaking of the visuals of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, remarked that: When you’re mixing 16 and Super-8, you’re getting sudden jarring changes in grain, things like that. I wanted that. It asserts that all accidents are intentional.32

This idea would be perfectly at home in the credo of an avant-garde artist, and is certainly very far from the kind of accidentalness that might be sought in more mainstream kinds of narrative filmmaking. But like every Maddin feature film, Saddest Music is quite unique in its relation both to the avant-garde on one side and narrative moviemaking on the other. We can ask, as viewers of Saddest Music in a mainstream cinema, what we are doing at a movie that assaults us so massively with golfballs and blur, not to mention a plot of transcendent outlandishness. But as avant-garde enthusiasts, we can ask in turn why our dignity is being affronted by crass jokes (‘I’m not an American, I’m a nymphomaniac’), beer-vat slapstick, and a narrative that shows the director ‘intentionally turning my dial towards American film.’33 The presence of colour, nominally a more realistic photographic technique, merely extends the syndrome. Two funeral sequences, Roderick’s Cocteauvian dream vision during his swoon, and the final ‘Alaskan Kayak Tragedy’ production number are in highly stylized two-colour hues extremely reminiscent of Careful, complete with actors once more in orange-face. There is no visible rationale for the decision to ‘colourize’ these particular scenes except perhaps the last, but visual arbitrariness has always been an aesthetic virtue for Maddin (as the comment above

The Saddest Music in the World

263

about Dracula demonstrates). The general effect goes back once more to that favourite film-historical moment of early colour and early sound: as he is fond of part-talkies, so he is of part-colour movies, traditions that stretch from early cinema to Ivan the Terrible (and Andrei Rublev). It is a large part of the particular charm of these films that the colour sequences are so often in such strange colour. The ‘failure’ of these movies as sound films, or as colour films, is what endears them to Maddin’s own artistic sensibility: in some way they succeed by failing, through feeble or immature technique, just like Maddin’s films. Here, the colour sequences come across as just another element of Saddest Music’s cinema of primitive attractions. In the chapter on Archangel, I suggested that that film owed a particular debt to Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress. I have a similar sense with The Saddest Music in the World, except this time the forebear is Murnau’s Sunrise (which Maddin says is ‘a film I’ve seen at least 60 times’34). The main street of Winnipeg, with its dark sloughlike (albeit frozen) ponds and its six-foot weeds, just seems like a deliberate homage to the great swamp set from Sunrise: an Expressionist country-of-the-mind set down in the natural world. The cramped and askew habitations of Weimar-era cinematic Expressionism appear to pervade the film in ways that seem counterintuitive to a world that so much emphasizes beer factories, radio broadcasts, and Prohibition, and yet, as we have seen, answer very well to the film’s wish to characterize Winnipeg as a psychic symptom of marginalized discouragement and dull introspection. As the trolley car piloted by Fyodor and bearing Chester and Narcissa arrives at its destination, we get a shot through the front window of the scene being traversed and the goal arrived at which, in the circumstances, seems rather close to the trolley shots of Sunrise. (And, come to think of it, the main street in its neon-bulbed aspect is not totally without an impoverished resemblance to the City set of Sunrise.) But what is truly Murnau-esque are the scenes in which Roderick and Narcissa’s dead little boy comes back to each of them in imagination. On the train as he journeys to Winnipeg, Roderick muses by a darkened compartment window covered with raindrops. Into this black, dropletcovered pane, just like an image appearing on a movie screen, comes in large double-exposure close-up the head of his little son, a sweet, blondhaired child with a clear-eyed serious expression on his face. As Roderick raises his hand to it the head rapidly recedes and disappears. A series of shots of raindrops on the glass follows, with a single, large, frozen drop appearing again in double exposure. As the camera moves in to the crys-

264

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

tal, the images of cello-playing Roderick and his wife and son approaching him for domestic hugs appear; he shakes them off and exits from the droplet-image, returning then to scold them as they embrace each other; then the image fades, and the camera moves back from the droplet, which disappears into the now-natural drop-covered windowpane. In a later scene, Narcissa is seen sitting, alone and pensive, in a bedroom in Fyodor’s house. Over her shoulder, where she can’t see it, again the image of the dead boy that Roderick has seen appears in a dressing-table mirror; there is a close-up of the boy; then a wider shot as she turns to see the image. Now Narcissa herself appears as a reflection in a basin of water which has ice chips floating in it; as Chester pops up beside her (accompanied by a trumpet rip on the soundtrack), the water surface is violently agitated, destroying the reflection. The shot dissolves to her son in the mirror, who, as we hear the sounds of sex, backs into the darkness. These sequences make a truly recreative use of the widespread silent film technique of double exposure. Many of the greatest masters of the medium made splendid use of this simple, straightforward tool to show the thoughts of the character, to create a mental and spiritual landscape, to vividly access the past, memory, emotion. There is no better example of this than Sunrise, with its images of a Margaret-Livingstone-of-themind materializing around the hero to caress and tempt him, or his cold thoughts of drowning his wife appearing over his haunted sleepless face in the form of the deadly waters themselves. The scenes of Saddest Music I have just described can hardly measure up to this godlike standard, but they are poetic, expressive, moving, and moreover in a register that is entirely unironic. It is important to emphasize that last point, when so much of Saddest Music is marinated in irony, or sauces sharper still. Like most of the examples of double exposure in Maddin’s cinema, these testify once again to the filmmaker’s desire not to pastiche, or paraphrase, or quote these techniques, but to use them. The Canadian artist Saddest Music not only presents Winnipeg far more directly and extensively than in previous Maddin films. It also contains a little allegory of the practice of Canadian art,35 with special relevance to filmmaking. English Canada has always had terrible trouble, both practically and metaphysically, generating a distinctive feature film industry.36 From the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it looked as if a real English-Canadian movie industry might have at last been born,37 filmmakers

The Saddest Music in the World

265

In a train compartment on his way to take part in the Saddest Music Contest, Roderick imagines the face of his dead child in the windowpane: another instance of silent cinema’s willingness to photograph thought and feeling.

were caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock was the necessity to attract at least some Canadian viewers at the box office if the national movie industry was not to be exclusively a charity case sustained by government funding agencies. The hard place was the necessity for the films to distinguish themselves from Hollywood movies, and to represent in some way an authentic expression of Canadian identity. Since English Canadians themselves have repeatedly found that they don’t know what their identity is no matter how many times they are asked to think about it, that latter requirement was a tall order. The first model proposed for Canadian movies was an outgrowth of the sober, responsible, realist (and often very fine) documentaries of the National Film Board of Canada: Canadian movies could achieve distinctiveness by pursuing little, local subjects in a documentary-realist manner. Many movies in this vein were made over the years, some good, some bad, and all box office failures by any reasonable commercial standard. Dour, narrow-horizoned, depressed, and depressing – this is certainly no formula for attracting anything but a tiny viewership. It is true that some of the greatest cinema in

266

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the world has only a tiny viewership; but that is no way to found a national cinema. But then it was also discovered that even if they wanted to, Canadian filmmakers were unable to make movies in the Hollywood vein which were the only product Canadian audiences had a demonstrated desire to patronize. English-Canadian viewers, endowed with supersensitive antennae for distinguishing differences between themselves and Americans that are undetectable by anyone else on earth including Americans, could immediately sense when a particular piece of commercial junk they might otherwise have been happy to watch was the product of Canadians on both sides of the camera pretending to be Americans, and they weren’t going to be taken in by that. The whole story is a sad one, although at least some of the terms were changed in the 1990s when Canadian filmmakers like Cronenberg and Egoyan began to attract an international following, and the documentary-realist model started to be replaced by something more wild and strange. Now the Canadian movies that Canadian viewers aren’t watching are of a different kind – famous for their quirkiness if not their ghoulish sickness. While nobody could less resemble a documentary-realist filmmaker than Maddin, he has often inserted visible markers of the Canadianness of his subjects and himself into his films, even when they were not set in Canada. Archangel has a Canadian hero, and also a made-up Canadian flag that features a version of the defunct Red Ensign38 with a ‘veiny’ maple leaf instead of the actual Red Ensign’s crest or the stylized maple leaf of the current Canadian flag. The presence of this made-up flag makes at least a certain amount of sense in the Allied brigade in wartime Archangel, but when another made-up flag suddenly appears just before Johann’s suicide in Careful the effect is dumbfoundingly surreal, since that film has no overt Canadian content whatever, and Canada wasn’t even Canada in 1820 and didn’t have any kind of flag of its own. This banner consists again of a large ‘veiny’ maple leaf, this time sans quartered Union Jack, and described by Maddin as ‘a more sinister, expressionist maple leaf’ to replace the existing one, with its ‘locked-in-the-60s look.’39 Even more sinister and expressionist is the maple-leaf abortionhemorrhage bloodstain in Cowards Bend the Knee. In a narrative context, too, Maddin has twice chosen to resurrect that imperial-Anglo period of English-Canadian history before 1945. It gets its fullest statement in Archangel, where, as we have seen, it represents a vanished world of duty and Romantic idealism, full of what we would regard as severe flaws and limitations, but somehow also achingly innocent. That same ethos reappears in Saddest Music in the person of Fyodor, who continues to go

The Saddest Music in the World

267

about in his soldier’s uniform fifteen years after the war’s end, who sings ‘The Red Maple Leaves’ as a sentimental anthem of explicitly elegaic Anglo-Canadian military patriotism. Here again the attitude it expresses is in eclipse, and already in 1933 is felt by everybody but Fyodor to be outdated and pointless. But for all of its lapsed currency, it may be the film’s only figuration of a Canadian art that, if not good, at least bears some traces of authenticity. For when we turn to the Kent family’s entries into the Saddest Music Contest, we find a kind of diagram that represents the unhappy triangle of Canadian cultural, and especially filmmaking, difficulty. Briefly, Chester’s art embodies demotic Hollywood glitz, Roderick’s embodies European high art, and Fyodor’s a once-living form of national culture (albeit one highly parasitic on the mother country) now dead and in its grave. Chester’s American popular art and Roderick’s European elitist art are both characterized as completely phony. Although Chester is ‘a famous producer from New York,’ and Roderick is a ‘Serbian’ master-virtuoso of the cello, they are both from Winnipeg, and they both have disguised themselves heavily in order to take on a greater weight of impressiveness that they could never attain if they presented themselves as ‘local artists.’ (At the same time, all the performers in the Saddest Music Contest except Maria de Madeiros are profilmically Winnipeg local artists.) The condition of the Kent brothers’ art is fakery, and their artistic expressions are as fake as the feelings of ‘sadness’ they supposedly represent. That they are the two finalists is attributable to the low-brow tastes of the Winnipeg audience and the middle-brow – and corrupt – tastes of the judges and commentators. (Is the judging mechanism in part a jab in the direction of Telefilm Canada, the country’s principal feature-film funding agency? Given some of Maddin’s grumpy asides about that body, one wouldn’t be too surprised.) Fyodor performs from the heart and represents himself frankly as Canadian. Perhaps his cultural stance that looks back to more substantial times is even parallel to a retrospective gaze on Winnipeg’s trajectory from booming gateway city many decades ago to self-perceived backwater at the present time. In any event, he is voted off the island at the very first opportunity, to the complete indifference of his fellow-countrymen in the hall: a blunt yet witty representation of Canadian film’s difficulties with its own audience. We can read from all this the idea that Canadian filmmakers have three options: imitate Hollywood, try to join the international guild of art cinema, or fall back on the corny and exhausted, but once perhaps spontaneous and true, forms of Canadiana. The Canadian artist has to

268

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

choose between being authentic and a loser like Fyodor, or inauthentically Yankee-glamorous and a winner like Chester, or else inauthentically high-art European and a runner-up, like Roderick. Canadian, ‘American,’ and ‘European’ artists are alike ridiculous (and so are all the national entrants), but the Canadian at least has ridiculous actual pathos, whereas the American has only ridiculous brazen glitz and the European ridiculous high-toned posturing. In the end, the weight of true sadness crushes all the fakery. Roderick strips off his disguise to perform a true elegy, while 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. Or if not Canadian cinema, then at least the cinema of Guy Maddin, an overtly Canadian artist who refuses to play any of the accepted games and insists stubbornly on his own. Despite Kazuo Ishigiro, Isabella Rossellini, and Maria de Medeiros, The Saddest Music in the World is a very Canadian, and very local, production. In managing to get wide showing in commercial theatres in multiple countries including Canada as a Canadian-financed, Canadian-distributed movie, it actually seized the Holy Grail of Canadian film production, if only for a moment. Given its supreme oddity, this is something of a miracle, but it does enhance Maddin’s ability to be as vehement as he is about the local and personal qualities of his own work, and to be the positive pole of which the negatives are Chester’s and Roderick’s put-on performances. For all his quotation of, allusion to, and revivification of other forms of cinema, Maddin’s really is unquestionably itself and not disguised as anything. As a matter of fact both the manically joke-making surface and the depressive frozen core of Saddest Music are archetypally Anglo-Canadian in different ways: the former resembling the anarchic comedy of Canadian expatriates such as Jim Carrey and the original SCTV crowd (John Candy, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, et al.), the latter the long line of English-Canadian movies featuring loser-heroes with American-like pretensions (from Goin’ Down the Road and Paperback Hero to I Love a Man in Uniform and Hard Core Logo). Of course no other inhabitant of either archetypal wing looks anything like Maddin’s work. The Saddest Music in the World embodies Maddin’s contradictions as well as anything else in his oeuvre. It is a jolly, sparkling movie about trauma and death. Its casserole of elements has more ingredients than anything before. Especially it is a unique meeting point between two

The Saddest Music in the World

269

types of Maddin film: the Toles-written model and the dawson/Gurdebeke-edited model. It has almost as much dialogue as Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, yet Saddest Music avoids all the pitfalls that Maddin himself has pointed to in that film, whether in the realm of script development (where he was a more constant presence) or of realization (where the over-clarity and relative cumbersomeness of 35mm full colour is most definitely avoided). There is a real sense of joie de vivre in the film, and paradoxically this may even be a reason why it doesn’t, in my view, reach the level of pathos that attaches to the climaxes of Archangel or Careful. In its conception Saddest Music may be (as Maddin says) ‘steeped in sadness’ which (as Toles says) ‘was always and everywhere the real quarry,’ but there is perhaps too much going on, too many separate activities of satire and pastiche, for this to hit with the force it might have. Dialogue allows a far more detailed articulation and development of issues, and the film strikes a masterful compromise between the relative visual stasis of Careful or Twilight and the editing jamborees of the movies immediately surrounding it. Whatever aesthetic straightface the dialogue may be imposing is totally countered by the extraordinary excesses of the filmic ‘degradation’ process. But Saddest Music also demonstrates, as it were in the negative, how full-dialogue cinema has for Maddin never yet quite been able to access the realms of poetic feeling that silence can. In effect dialogue is always a potential problem for him. Even in Archangel and Careful, the most telling moments are silent, or almost silent. Heart of the World and Dracula don’t reach poetic intensity of that kind either (and aren’t really attempting to). But Cowards Bend the Knee does reach it, in a direct and problem-free manner, while at the same time carving out a route of untrammelled communication with Maddin’s private history. That was a pathway that the director was to turn back to immediately following the big adventure of The Saddest Music in the World.

9

Brand upon the Brain! (2006)

I realized this would be the one time to do my childhood recollection picture because I could just import huge chunks of autobiography without having to think about it, and without having to boil them down, because they’d already been boiled down by my memory to fit together, and they would fit together because my life fit together already. – Guy Maddin1

With Brand upon the Brain! I’m getting a little bit closer, I feel, to my goals. With Cowards Bend the Knee, which is a more inherently cynical movie, and maybe even heartless, I may have hit the bosom right on target, but by the time the viewers got hit there was only a cold heart there anyway. The movie had lowered the temperatures of everyone’s hearts. So here I feel, by keeping the body temperature normal, and not trying to manipulate anybody’s heart at all, I stand the best chance, just by being honest, of letting music and image and cutting all work together best. – Guy Maddin2

Brand upon the Brain! came into being through an invitation from The Film Company, a Seattle non-profit cultural entity whose aim was to commission filmmakers to make a film of their choice with all production costs paid, the only stipulation being that it should be shot in Seattle with the artists provided by The Film Company.3 Of course the budget would be small (Maddin estimates that the movie cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40,000).4 The time between Maddin’s acceptance of the proposal and the completion of shooting was an incredible two months, with a mere two weeks for script preparation. The extremely

Brand upon the Brain

271

short production time line was just another reason for Maddin to decide on a dialogueless movie with voice-over narration, sound effects, and music. The actual shoot, entirely in black and white Super-8mm (with a few tinted shots), occupied nine days.5 This opportunity arrived completely out of the blue, while the director was still recovering from the intensive efforts of the almost simultaneous Cowards Bend the Knee and Saddest Music in the World, and just as he was getting ready to fulfil some teaching duties at the University of Manitoba. But he seized on it, and began quickly to ransack his own early life for memories and dramatic moments, very much in the mode of creative imagination that had produced Cowards. So much so, indeed, that again his hero is named ‘Guy Maddin,’ and again it is his childhood experience with parents and siblings that produces the raw, sometimes very raw, material. To this vivid but not very organized set of stimuli were added an old ambition to create a Grand Guignol drama set in a lighthouse, and the example of some John Ashbery critical writings that gave a whole range of models of compressed poetic insight.6 And then, with notebooks full of somewhat disconnected material, he turned to George Toles. ‘George suggested a number of artificial plot structures that I could hang my own family story on; he came up with an elaborate family that ran an orphanage and an organ harvesting plot.’7 That skulduggery genre-landscape encouraged another inclusion, of elements of period adventure fiction from Fantômas to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.8 All these things were grafted onto a set of memories from Maddin’s boyhood experience at the family cottage at Gimli – especially some rather sharp ones relating to the battles between his mother and his teenaged sister, and to his own early romantic longings. With all personnel except co-writer and editor but including a composer provided by the Seattle company,9 the shoot was quite different from Maddin’s previous productions (‘my first foreign film,’ he told Dennis Lim),10 and the film has a special look because of it. There is, for once, a lot of outdoor footage, the interior designs have a different feel, and of course there isn’t a single familiar face among the cast. At the same time, though, the director’s memory flood reaches a higher tide-mark than ever, and there is never the slightest sense that the film could have been made by anyone else. The performance piece During shooting, Maddin realized that certain sound effects were going to be necessary as well as desirable for what was otherwise going to be a

272

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

silent film with voice-over narration and music. But it was not until a few months after shooting that the notion occurred of presenting the film as a live theatrical event with narrator, live musicians, and two songs, and this was followed by the idea of adding live Foley artists to the performance.11 The songs were to be taken by a castrato (such was the billing for Dov Houle, ‘The Manitoba Meadowlark’). It was in this form that the film premiered at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, and then travelled to New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Chicago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and several other places. The first narrator was Louis Negin, for whom Maddin had conceived the narration (and who gets a narration-writing credit), but in New York he was replaced by Isabella Rossellini, and subsequent performances featured a bumper crop of celebrity narrators including John Ashbery, Laurie Anderson, Crispin Glover, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Udo Kier, Lou Reed, Barbara Steele, Tunde Adebimpe, Daniel Handler, and Geraldine Chaplin (in Spanish). Jamie Hook, the producer of the roadshow production, makes the plausible claim that ‘we were distributing the film in a way that nobody has distributed a film before.’12 The novelty of the performances, both in concept and realization, delighted everyone, and they received a rapturous response everywhere. To my great regret, I was never able to attend a performance, but film and video clips document something of the intensely physical nature of this cinematic event. There were many reviews, but to my knowledge nothing much in the way of a critical analysis of what the performance aspects actually added to the base film. Obviously, I am unable to provide anything of the sort either. It does seem clear, though, that seeing Brand upon the Brain! as a performance piece is quite a different experience from seeing it in a cinema, with narration (by Isabella Rossellini), sound effects, and music now all fixed in extradiegetic metaspace and no performance at all going on. (The Criterion DVD does give an astonishing eight choices of narrator, including four taken from live performances,13 plus Footsteps, a documentary on the Foley artists, but the total effect doesn’t go very far towards recreating the theatrical event.) These thoughts are prompted especially by the particular inwardness of this film as one consumes it in the regular cinematic fashion, away from live performance. Beginning explicitly in the realm of memory and private fantasy, then insisting repeatedly on the foundation of everything in this realm through constant reminders of the private remembering sensibility that is producing everything, Brand feels like the most direct transcription yet of Maddin’s mechanisms of quasi-Proustian recollec-

Brand upon the Brain

273

tion. So it is hard not to think that live performances, with their P.T. Barnum elements,14 their importation of externality (theatre) into the landscape of internality (cinema), and their ultra-Brechtian drawing away of attention from the narrative to the means of its production, must inevitably put some distance between spectators and the affective entry into the narrative world. They introduce an extra dimension of amusement, of spectacle, of playing with materials that has nothing to do with the narrative content it is supposedly supporting – rather the reverse.15 Of course this is not to assert the superiority of the non-live version, or to cast any shadow on the undoubtedly electrifying and theatrically unique qualities of the live performances. Maddin’s comments on how they could somehow recapture elements of the theatrical extravaganza of late silent cinema as actually presented in lavish cinema palaces of the time, or revivify the ancient tradition of live narrators who interpreted silent drama to audiences, are also highly suggestive, if not exactly applicable literally.16 But I want to claim that the ‘purely cinematic’ iteration has an integrity of its own, not to be trumped by the live versions. Like any theatrical production, the live Brand is definitively in the past, with essentially the same status as, say, Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Meanwhile the stand-alone film version has essentially the same status as Lynch’s Inland Empire – or Maddin’s Saddest Music in the World. The action Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs), a house painter in his early forties, is returning in a rowboat, after an absence of thirty years, to the deserted island of Black Notch, with its empty lighthouse where he spent his childhood in the ‘mom and pop orphanage’ run by his parents. He is coming in response to a letter sent by his mother (‘also not seen for thirty years’) to go back and put a coat of paint on the old lighthouse to make it a fit place for her to revisit, should she be able to do so. As he slaps white paint on the brick and wood, and perambulates the neighbouring beach and woods, he deeply inhales the sights, sounds, and smells of the locale, and experiences a flood of memories which, as flashbacks, form the basis for eleven of the film’s twelve chapters. He is catapulted first back to a ‘secret meeting of orphans’ after dark in the woods, presided over by Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska), a devotee of violent pagan ritual. Guy (Sullivan Brown) is a boy of twelve now – although really he seems a bit younger than that, and in fact his age in these flashback scenes seems to oscillate between older and younger.17 As Savage Tom is promising

274

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

to cut the beating heart out of Guy’s quivering little friend Neddie (Kellan Larson), the event is terminated by the screeching breakup-distortion sounds of Guy’s ‘aerophone,’ a radiolike device that Guy’s mother uses to communicate with her children. And this brings us to the lighthouse, where the orphans are kept in dorms enclosed by iron bars, the basement is occupied by Father’s mad-scientist-like laboratory, and the revolving light at the top is fitted with a marlin-fishing chair and is apparently used only to aid Mother in her endless project to surveille her children through a telescope. Mother (Gretchen Krich) is invariably dressed by day in a floor-length many-buttoned black dress with white collar that is hardly of the twentieth century and makes her look like a character from Dreyer’s Day of Wrath. And that is a good comparison in other ways as well, since Mother is fixated on the campaign of repression in general and making sure her children behave properly at all times, with special emphasis on squelching anything even hinting of sexual expression in her daughter, Sis (Maya Lawson). Mother also enjoys telling the story of her own birth to the orphans: I too am an orphan. My mother, I’m told, was very beautiful, but completely bald. Her sister had superb hair, but was barren of womb. The two girls were so jealous of each other [...] their hatred spilled over into bloody violence. Knives were never far from hand. One was scalped for her beautiful hair, the other one stabbed into the stomach to get at that baby [...] From my mother’s womb untimely ripped. Now my mother and aunt are buried in the silt of the lagoon next to each other.

(Maddin devotees will recognize the similarity to the story of the sororicidal sisters in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.) Mother also routinely practises emotional blackmail on her children, threatening to sell the island, not to bother cooking if they don’t appreciate the food, and, in extreme instances, to kill herself. In the meantime Father (Todd Moore) in white lab coat toils endlessly at his workbench, never present at meals or anywhere else, even his face rarely seen. One day in the woods Guy comes upon a lovely girl dressed all in white, a young personage who turns out to be the famous Wendy Hale (Katherine Scharhon) – ‘the sister half of sibling teen detectives known around the world to readers of crime stories as The Lightbulb Kids’ – who has come to the island to investigate the fact that orphans sent out from the island for adoption have been found to have strange holes pierced in the backs of their heads. Guy is instantly smitten (‘Smitten!!!’, actually)

Brand upon the Brain

275

Mother knows all, sees all, Part I. Mother at the giant, clanking panopticon-telescope.

with this lovely teen star, who, in addition to solving crimes, plays the harp beautifully in every sense. He sneaks out at night to play ‘spin the bottle’ with her, Sis, and Neddie, and at this gathering he and Sis stage a recital with miming of their mother’s often-told tale of her birth, at the end of which Sis hikes up her nightdress to reveal a large birthmark on her abdomen identical to the one her mother bears, in the shape of a map of Rumania. As a repeated, surpassingly beautiful close-up shot of Wendy’s face shows, she is deeply moved by this spectacle, and we can soon understand that it isn’t only Rumania but the entirety of Sis’s body that is so attractive to her. Wanting to pursue this interest, Wendy disguises herself as her own twin brother, Chance, Wendy having supposedly gone away to attend to some detecting mission. The gender-switch is a simple matter of doffing the white dress and donning an all-black outfit featuring roll-neck sweater and stocking cap. She looks like a regular little commando now, but a bewitching one who completely captures Sis’s desires and causes Guy, though he still mourns Wendy, to develop a ‘Boy crush!’ Chance – whom I will refer to without quotation marks and henceforward using masculine pronouns for as long as his disguise lasts – undertakes a seri-

276

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ous effort to prove that Mother and Father are criminals, and, posing as a lighthouse inspector, actually moves into the family home (there is a hilarious shot of Chance displaying to Mother his credentials: an elaborate parchment charter with large wax seal). He is now regularly seen snooping around the lighthouse and the island, prominently making notes in his oversize book with his oversize pencil, and meeting with Sis for clandestine necking sessions. Naturally these pose a certain risk for wrong-gendered Chance, so he invents a control-tool that carries its own fetishistic pleasure for both parties: ‘The Kissing Gloves.’ As the narrator tells us, ‘only the wearer of these nifty little items is allowed to do any touching.’ Later they morph into ‘The Undressing Gloves,’ which allow for more advanced play. The criminal investigation too is advancing, with Chance delegating Guy to crawl up into the ventilation ducts (again!, cf. Careful, Cowards Bend the Knee) to spy on Mother in the orphans’ dormitory, and to drop phials of sleeping gas from overhead so that Chance can creep among the slumberers and investigate their headholes – and bestow kisses on the sleeping beauty Sis. For this operation, Chance somewhat counterintuitively changes his commando outfit for top hat and tails and a Lone Ranger-style mask, a costume that conjures up the image of Feuillade’s Fantômas from 1913. The fiendish plot that is discovered through these investigations is that Father is trooping the orphans – and also his own daughter – through his lab and using his sharp-toothed ‘family signet ring’ to drill into their skulls to extract ‘nectar’ from their brains. This precious liquid is then shipped off in bottles to the mainland in a rowboat manned by sailors who look like they came from illustrations for Treasure Island. We witness the effects closer to home, too. Sis is nectar-harvested as a means of behaviour control: she turns into a zombie when Mother blows her bosun’s whistle and has no memory of her time in the lab. Then Mother awaits with great anxiety her ‘nightly visits with Nectar Harvest’ – the film’s typically bizarre and flavourful transposition of conjugal relations. Fear seems a quite justified reaction as we see the Expressionist shadow of Father’s hands creeping over Mother’s face, but the ultimate effect on her is to rejuvenate her by twenty years (and have her played by a different actor, Cathleen O’Malley). Chance, after tasting a single drop of the nectar, runs amok and pummels/‘ravishes’ Savage Tom out in the woods. Mother’s avowed aim in taking nectar treatments is to revert all the way to infancy, and certainly back before puberty made everything difficult. But the effects of the drug on her never last, and after each day’s work surveilling her children and being driven crazy by the spectacle of Sis’s

Brand upon the Brain

277

sexual maturity, her rage ‘withers, dries, crinkles’ her back to her former middle-aged state. Sis’s trysting with Chance has infuriated her so much that she is sending her daughter for more and more nectar harvests, and on one particularly creepy occasion, when Father just keeps extracting and extracting (‘Never enough!’), Sis in zombie fashion picks up a nearby knife left over from Hitchcock’s Blackmail and stabs her father to death. Guy, witnessing this, faints away accompanied by the intertitle ‘Too much for Guy!’ – an intertitle that appears at each of Guy’s swoonings under the weight of traumatic witnessing. After Mother and Sis strip Father’s rigor-mortis-twisted body, wrap him in a sheet and stuff him in a coffin, the burial takes place, with all the orphans in solemn attendance. The gravesite is on the beach at high tide, so the grave itself is full of water, and little troops of orphans in nightshirts and gumboots have to jump up and down on the coffin to get it to sink. Then Mother, who is driven to extreme reactions even by trivial events, retreats to her bed, having apparently taken poison. Gathering all the orphans round her bedside, she enacts an operatic scena of grandiose suffering and heart-rending outbursts, installing Guy beside her in his nightshirt in the bed to receive passionate appeals such as ‘will you not shed a tear on my tomb?’ But by this point Sis and Chance have progressed so far, thanks to the Undressing Gloves, that their common femaleness is now a shared secret, and Sis is so untroubled by the discovery that the two are ready to get married. ‘What’s a suicide attempt without a wedding?’ the narrator asks, in a marriage announcement without the slightest preparation, explanation, or indeed literal consequence. Even though Chance the groom appears in Fantômas garb and there is no clear sense that anyone but themselves knows this is a same-sex union, the mere blatant spectacle of Sis’s sexual independence is enough to raise Mother in a rage from her deathbed, shouting, ‘Wait till Father hears about this!!’ Of course Father has just been buried, so it is necessary to dig him up, stick his dripping corpse in its winding sheet in the top berth of a bunk bed, and connect it to the beating heart of Mother lying underneath by means of jumper cables. To rev up her engine sufficiently to provide boosting power, Mother pulls out a comedy jumbo hypodermic syringe and gives herself a giant shot of nectarite ‘just south of Rumania!’ Amid the primitive-horror-movie sounds of electricity jolts and the sight of rising steam and Mother’s thrashing body, ‘the paternal body returns to a species of life.’ Mother is smiling madly, again rejuvenated by nectar and a metaphorically sexual encounter that in this case has a pronounced necrophilic flavour. Mother’s youthening is typically

278

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

short-lived, while Father just lurches back to his lab, his zombie activities scarcely any different from those of his actual life except for his freshfrom-the-shroud nudity. This development prompts what is my favourite intertitle of the entire film: ‘Dead or alive, it’s back to work!’ And the spectacle is, understandably, ‘Too much for Guy!’, who collapses in a heap and is taken to bed with brain fever. Mother attempts to reinstitute the old order, shouting at Sis that she knows ‘what you’ve been up to with that boy,’ and saying sinisterly, ‘your father would like to have a “word” with you.’ But things are now in too much flux for any kind of return. Mother’s project to revert to childhood resumes with greater force than ever and her frustrated attempts to control her daughter are making her more maniacal. Savage Tom begins a wild campaign of religious mania based on everyone’s witnessing of Father’s resurrection from the tomb (‘He is risen!’) Guy’s fever continues unabating, and he becomes a delirious sleepwalker in the woods, just like Einar in Gimli Hospital. At the height of this wandering, he stumbles on the Romero-like scene of his mother devouring the body of little Neddie, who may possibly be still alive, in a maddened quest for more nectar. This hideous crime, on top of all the others, is enough to precipitate a revolution. With fabulous iconographic flair, Sis arms herself with a harpoon and forces her Mother off the island. She is prodded onto that same rowboat with those same sailors, accompanied by Savage Tom and the reanimated corpse of Father, packed into a harp case for preservation and easy transport. As the craft moves out to sea, Mother shouts into the aerophone: ‘Goodbye, Guy! I love you!’ The still bedridden Guy responds with, ‘I love you, Mother! Don’t go!’ Another pathos-laden scene of Mother-farewell. Because, as the narrator tells us, ‘three’s a crowd, on honeymoons,’ Guy too is soon banished from the island – given into the care of a farcically kitsch pair of foster parents. His emotional condition is expressed in a song, sung by a piping boy soprano, with the repeated words ‘Whither wander, whither wander / everything, everything twice.’ Now the film is ready to revert to the present tense. All the events so far have been memories invading Guy’s head as he applies whitewash to the old lighthouse, in what is clearly also a symbolic project to make the past bearable (‘covering up major structural cracks with a thin film of paint,’ as an intertitle spells out for us). Combing the woods, watching the birds wheel overhead, touching and smelling the details of nature, trying to retrace his boyhood steps to find some kind of ultimate meaning, recapture some originary desire, he at last sees Wendy again, in her

Brand upon the Brain

279

first guise and in the same place he first saw her. He kisses her feet and sits in an attitude of adoration before this phantom of lost first love: ‘phantom Wendy.’ From this ghost he hears the story of the end-days of the Sis/Chance regime: how Sis had become a tyrant just like her mother, sitting at the revolving surveillance telescope and even continuing to harvest nectar from the orphans, operating ‘a reign of terror’ until Chance rebelled and then escaped from the island; how Sis, driven mad by this desertion, ran around the lighthouse lamp like a moth around the flame until she actually combusted and burned up. Phantom Wendy is ‘lonely and morose,’ always looking sadly off into the distance and paying no attention to her worshipper. Now Mother herself (Susan Corzatte) actually appears in the present, arriving on a rowboat with her packed-up undead spouse for a reunion with her son and ‘blind as a bat!’ Father, ‘dried out by thirty years in a harp case’ and now, like Mother, played by a different actor (Clayton Corzatte), returns robotically to his workbench as before. But what Mother returns to is her idyllic/oppressive relationship with her little boy, reinstituting all the hyperintimate acts of feeding and grooming that we have seen in the past. These days of reunion exemplify Guy’s wish to come to terms with his aged mother, to connect on the basis of love with a figure whose history with him is so lurid and contradictory. He finds that he cannot submit endlessly to her caresses any more than he could as a child, but their bickerings are minor compared to the titanic events of earlier days. Father, meantime, at last meets his real end at the vengeful hands of sailors who used to be orphans at Black Notch, who stuff him in a trash can head first like Dante’s simoniac pope and set him alight. The spectacle of his naked legs sticking out of the barrel ravenously licked by flames is partly surreally comic but mostly just shocking and powerful, a recollection of Chester’s fire-death in Saddest Music and, like it, of that fiercest immolation in cinema history, the burning of Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc. Guy continues to be torn between a still-difficult mother and the phantom of his remembered desire. When Mother falls in what will surely be a mortal collapse, he pulls the stopper from a small glass bottle in order to catch her dying breath (in an act that repeats and inverts Roderick’s child’s-heart-in-a-jar from Saddest Music). Her deathbed ravings are another pathos-laden operatic scene (‘Is Sis’s hair off her forehead?’ ‘I was a good mother, wasn’t I’ ‘I love you, mother’). But at the moment of her actual death the son’s attention is deflected by phantom Wendy, who appears to him in double exposure with phantom Chance, and Mother dies with a last expression of outrage while he is left to bitter

280

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The dead father in flames: Father’s reanimated corpse, finally deanimated.

self-reproach. Mother and Father and Sis dead, phantoms all dissolved to nothingness, history and memory are both destroyed. All that is left is ‘Guy, utterly alone!’ and, in a gesture that is unique in Maddin’s cinema for its unalloyed despair, adult Guy now stands naked on the ledge of the lighthouse tower, poised between ‘The past! The past! The past!’ which has resolved itself into a landscape of pure sorrow and loss, and ‘The Future!! The Future!!’ which seems merely cold and desolate. The intertitle ‘To stay, or to go’ then becomes explicitly a question about suicide. As Guy stands literally on the brink, the narrator intones, in imitation of a mocking childish singsong: ‘Cry baby cry / Stick a finger in your eye / And tell your mother it wasn’t I!’ Blackout, end credits. Structure Looking at this plot, one becomes aware of the heterogeneity of its constitutive elements. The film’s main imaginative and affective project is to enter memory and the past and gain access to the immensely powerful and formative history of childhood experience. This fact is pounded home insistently by repeated exclamations of both the intertitles and the narrator: ‘The past! The past! The past!’ and ‘Secrets! Secrets! Secrets!’

Brand upon the Brain

281

Amid these efforts to, as it describes it, ‘find the right combination’ of memory stimuli, the film even proclaims this as its own foundation: ‘From this the poem springs!’ Guy wanders through the lighthouse and the island obsessively sucking in every possible sensory stimulus to recapture the font and origin of all desire and loss. And the activity pays off handsomely in strong and piercing memories: of Mother, Sis, Father, Wendy, Neddie, and Savage Tom; of tense family dinnertimes; of mother/daughter yelling matches and sister/paramour trystings; of the first girl he was smitten by; and most importantly of his overpowering and conflicted relationship with his mother, careening sickeningly between closest love and emotional tyranny, and at last updated to the present with the prospect of the mother’s death. These things are what Brand upon the Brain! fundamentally is – that matrix of raw, unprocessed childhood feeling. Steven Shaviro likens the progress of the film to a movement that jerks this way and that in response to the raw power of an underlying unconscious scenario: ‘There is therefore no real narrative progression, but only a series of peripeteias, punctuating passages of dread, suspense, and anticipation. Brand upon the Brain! has a feel to it of lurching seasickness, and of nightmarish repetitions from which we (like the protagonist) are unable to awaken or escape.’18 As basically true as this assessment is, there is at least a degree more direction to the film than Shaviro implies. For the rawness and unprocessedness needs to be workable, it needs some structure and a plot, however rickety, to shape the stream-of-unconsciousness, because Maddin wants Brand to be not just an avant-garde dreamscape but a narrative film. Hence the orphanage, the nectar harvest, the Lightbulb Kids. But these elements are not, I think, really connected with the project of memory. Their function always seems on the one hand like a mechanical tool to be employed to move things on and provide some kind of connective material between the sites of memory, and, on the other like something deliberately quaint and charming, period kitsch, essentially decorative and weightless. The idea of a ‘mom and pop orphanage’ causes a snort of laughter (or ought to), but really what relation has it to the picture of family life that the film is driven to rediscover and present? The discovery of a monstrous parental plot and its highly consequential aftermath – what does this translate into in the family dynamic? That the subject’s mother and father were engaged in actually or even metaphorically criminal behaviour of some kind? (Surely not.) Similarly the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew / Fantômas elements are delightful in themselves, and in their invitation to curioshop frolicking of the kind Maddin has always had such a particular af-

282

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

finity for. Moreover the opportunities they offer for gender-bending and cross-dressing provide an avenue for Maddin to get to more substantial issues of sexual desire as it floats free of gender boundaries and overlaps with same-sex desire. But they seem somehow less connected to the underlying questions of lesbianism, sibling-desire, gender confusion, and all the inchoateness of sexual awakening in a not-even-adolescent boy than, for example, the powerful symbols of maternal desire and surveillance or paternal work-absorption are to their underlying questions of child-parent relations. And in general they do not perform the kind of central function that the similarly toylike period elements of Archangel or Careful do in expressing an innocent, or pathological-innocent, worldview that has something to do with the film’s basic ambitions: they are not usefully parodic. The sectional and episodic nature of this dramatization of events in the child’s psyche is often very visible (and is abetted by the chapterdivision strategy that is continued from Cowards). Wendy appears on the island out of nowhere, Sis and Chance are suddenly getting married, Mother is ejected from the island, Guy is given up for adoption, Father is burned by former victims, Mother returns – none of these is given any preparation or more than a cursory explanation. And in fact the whole structure of the film, after what looks like a solid and orderly beginning, is something that becomes less solid the longer the film goes on, and the more one looks at it. (From this perspective, the film is as Shaviro describes it.) Cowards Bend the Knee, notwithstanding the slightly ad hoc impression its epilogue gives, is much more tightly knit in its organization of disparate plot strands and elements of memory, and in its integration of genre criminal activities in the story. But then Cowards is very rigorously boiled down, and at 64 minutes very fleet of foot. Maddin expresses regret that he could not reach his target length of 80 minutes for Brand (it emerged fifteen minutes longer than that, already reduced from the 99-minute first cut),19 and a certain looseness and undulating repetitiveness are features of the final version. This sense of an utterance not quite under control, or even quite finished, is also a feature of some of the verbal presentation: repetitions of ‘the past! the past!’ or ‘secrets! secrets!’ create the impression that Maddin has resorted to a kind of unprocessed inarticulate directness in his attempt to put his finger on the ineffable. (And it surely is Maddin himself, for this is just the opposite of the ornate and precise rhetoric of George Toles.) But how much does any of this matter? Brand upon the Brain! succeeds beyond any other Maddin film in opening an unobstructed pipeline to

Brand upon the Brain

283

what seem like primal emotions in its creator’s imagination. Maddin’s cinema has always had some difficulty with just this process, has needed to struggle mightily to reach the unregulated, unironic flow of emotional utterance in Archangel, in Careful, in Saddest Music, and has avoided or short-circuited it in Gimli Hospital, Twilight, Dracula, and the short films. (Of course he has also produced a fascinating and unique body of work in the process of that negotiation or wrestling match.) Brand represents a notable breakthrough in this sphere, establishing from the very outset the unfettered access to deepest memory and the condition of desire and loss, and an uncomplicated willingness simply to insist on them as a starting point. Brand begins, in other words, in almost exactly the same space that Saddest Music has reached at its end, as if the clearing away of disavowal and distraction which was its predecessor’s mighty and destructive, but foreshortened, final victory had simply persisted, and provided a landscape of psychic freedom for the present film to move into. And if Cowards Bend the Knee had showed how fertile the actual, not transposed, territory of Maddin’s personal history could be, its principal emotional projects were those of ritualized humiliation and scornful self-accusation, and its emotional temperature (as Maddin says) was cold instead of warm. In its revisitation of that terrain, Brand adds the feelings of nostalgia and family love to the mixture. Mother and Sis may be figures who give rise to contradictory emotions in the protagonist – they are often spiky and dangerous and never simply warm and fuzzy. But in comparison with the mother and sister figures of Cowards (principally Liliom and Meta), the fact that they inspire substantial attraction and admiration (Sis) and fundamental love (Mother) renders this Guy’s family ties deeper and more wrenching. Equally important is the fact that the principal missing person in Cowards is now present: the child Guy himself. The character played by Darcy Fehr in Cowards20 can stand in for a young-adult Guy, but the child-Guy who is the source for those pungent memories of beauty parlour and hockey arena is not actually there. Whereas in Brand he is very much there, and in Sullivan Brown’s person and performance he shimmers productively between the cusp of adolescence and earlier stages of childhood, so as to contain and broadcast from every pulsating node of the boy’s experience over time. It helps a lot to have the protagonist actually in his own drama, and to be presented as the unquenchable sponge of all these memories, these desires and losses. Maddin describes the way his hurried scriptwriting process gave rise to a certain looseness of structure:

284

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

I never really thought about any one thing for more than a second really. I was acting very impulsively and just grabbing things and writing things down and just trying to find a place for them. So even the finished script, which was about forty-five pages long of prose, with little episodes sort of separated by double spaces or something like that, they never really had a proper order. I would sort of cut and paste on my computer, try to get them into an order, but there were repetitions and repetitions, and I basically just shot it the way it was, with endless repetitions. It’s not the most efficient storytelling, but it sort of came out in one piece and there was only one cut to the movie [...] It was kind of sprawling, rolling around, it’s like a bag of marbles, marble-like memories just rolling around. It kind of reminds me of air traffic, in a holding pattern, you know – a lot of that boredom of the island that I experienced as a child comes back and puts the story in a holding pattern for a while. But at least it’s honest.21

And yet, even the disconnectedness and irrationality of the plot elements can be recuperated as reflections of the disorder of memory and unconscious processes, so that structural cracks really are covered over in this way, and apparently random repetition reflects a mental state. At some deeper level, the surreal intensity of the memory field makes the sleepwalking story construction, the arbitrary scene juxtaposition, and the repetition not only untroubling but actually appropriate. In this dimension, the child’s confused emotional state, and the yet-more-disconnected recollection of that state in the temporally distant adult, are made more vivid and present even as they disrupt the legibility of the story and obscure all wider horizons. And that is a defensible trade-off, even if elements such as the Lightbulb Kids continue to seem as if they belong in some other Maddin movie. The horror, the horror If the orphanage and Hardy Boys genre-related elements do not seem really connected to the film’s central action, then the horror movie elements often do. Father’s mad-scientist laboratory, entirely redolent of something in a 1930s Universal horror movie, may seem like just more period decoration, but its deployment carries a more potent sting. First, the activities of Father are entirely mysterious to begin with (he is ‘inventing many things’), and then almost unthinkably monstrous as they are partly discovered. Moreover their monstrosity is directly connected to the secret central energies of family life: parental sexuality and Oedi-

Brand upon the Brain

285

pal currents of an alarming strength. The ‘family signet ring’ is a device that is lifted very recognizably from the 1960 horror movie The Leech Woman.22 There, a similarly barbed ring is plunged into the base of the skull, and the fluid that is then dripped off the ring into a container forms part of a compound that will restore youth to older women – just as in Maddin’s film. An addiction to this serum causes poor Coleen Gray, a cast-off middle-aged wife with a drinking problem, to claim more and more victims, and this together with the terrible effects of her reversions to old age make her a real horror movie monster – and of course this is a position that Mother’s addiction to nectar also at least momentarily deposits her in as she cannibalizes Neddie. The reanimation of Father proclaims a different horror movie lineage: most notably from the original Frankenstein (1931) and its many descendents. Of all the scenes in Brand upon the Brain!, this is the one that most completely recaptures the manic Maddin of patriphagia, plague scars, disembowelment, self-mutilation, and amputation – all of them presented with at least a degree of wild comedy and a gleeful nod towards the excesses of horror cinema. Crude bunk beds, the corpse still wrapped in its dripping-wet winding sheet, a vaudeville-sketch hypodermic needle, the bawdy vulgarity of ‘a jolt ... just south of Rumania,’ jumper cables that bring Father back to life from cold death just like any other dead Winnipeg engine in the frozen winter, electrified arcings and shakings and clouds of steam, an audience of white-nightshirted orphans like some surreal Anglican choir, and young-again Mother’s mad grin of exhilaration – all of these elements conspire in an exuberant tour de force of comic energy, and the suddenness of the scene’s arrival and the shuddering dynamism of its execution produce a grand effect. But it has real content as well: it expresses the boundless power of Mother’s determination; and its end result, as Father staggers naked back to his workbench, is on the one hand to finish the joke while on the other invoking an authentic horror movie dread in the prospect of a death-in-life whose resemblance to actual family dysfunction is all too clear. Such a connection of cheap genre elements with the actual psychic condition of the film, with its fundamental subject, seems closer than in any of Maddin’s films before Cowards, more in tune with Brand’s search for plainer speech and more direct depiction, and therefore at the highest pinnacle of the director’s repeated attempts to weld together farcical exaggerations drawn from obsolete cultural forms and some kind of emotional truth. Drawing vital juices from the brains of victims in a secret mad-science project, achieving youth and life at the expense of these victims, leaving

286

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

them with the scar of sucking penetration on their bodies but no other memory or outward effect of this occult visitation connects the whole activity pretty clearly to vampirism in addition to B-grade science fiction movies. But this genre affinity seems to me less productive, or at least more problematic. The orphanage and nectar-harvest elements of the plots again get in the way of the fundamental psychic dredging operation. ‘My parents were vampires and I was their victim!’ is one thing, and ‘My parents were vampires and, I dunno, neighbourhood kids were their victims!’ is another. It is quite easy to imagine the film translating the regime of the parents in this family into a form of vampiric control of the children – that is, something that felt like vampiric control to the child doing the remembering and imagining. But Guy is at no point a victim of this horrifying process, only a witness, and the actual orphan victims don’t seem to suffer any very bad effects other than, perhaps, being regimented into mass marching compliance like the workers in Metropolis, and that’s something that any quasi-Dickensian orphanage tyrant like Mother could manage without extracting brain juices. The only point at which the idea of vampirism hits a vein is in the utilization of nectar harvest by Mother to control Sis’s independence and by Father to – well, for potentially far more sinister aims that we’ll come to in a moment. ‘My parents were vampires and my sister was their victim!’ resonates in the proper way, even if the film presents Sis’s insertion into the nectar harvest as almost a mere offshoot of the main factorylike activity. It is unclear just what Guy is accusing his parents of here. Maybe that is a reflection of his uncertainty as child or adult about exactly what was going on. But, with divided focus and uncertainty of effects, the vampire plot isn’t able to fulfil its sensational potential, and its culmination, in Mother’s frenzied nocturnal feasting on the body of Neddie, seems to come out of nowhere. The phantasmatic mother Of all the characters in Brand upon the Brain! whose presence in his mind house painter Guy is trying to come to terms with, Mother is the most powerful. She appears in a repeating set of powerful but strongly variegated forms: the surveilling and order-giving parent, the self-dramatizing emotional blackmailer, the extravagantly affectionate caregiver, the woman driven to hysterical excess. The first we encounter is Mother the invigilator, sitting behind her telescope in her revolving chair attached to the powerful searchlight of the lighthouse. (This beam, by the way,

Brand upon the Brain

287

seems to have no lighthouse function at all, since it is constantly being trained at will by Mother on fugitive children, and the only shipping we ever see or hear is a single rowboat.) The clanking of the gears of this surveillance platform, loud and crudely industrial, is my nomination for Best Foley Effect in the film, since it conveys the inhuman power of the device, the relentless mechanical biting together of massive iron gears that metaphorizes the intimidating size and strength of the weapons the parent can bring to bear upon the child. The turning searchlight, also blindingly strong, and cutting massively through the black night sky, is its visual counterpart. Mother’s constant seat at the helm of this monstrous Foucauldian panopticon is a sight to overawe the child in every viewer. It is one of those strokes of dazzling inspiration that populate the film in some profusion and demonstrate how direct and concrete Maddin’s surrealist imagination can be, and how immediately it can communicate. Here, in a fantastically literalized way, is the supernatural Mother who can ‘read into her children’s hearts,’ and whose omnipotent seat of power and daunting tools of enforcement are a mere transcription of her gigantic size in the mind of her little son. An equally pointed realization is provided by the aerophone, the device invented by Guy’s father that ‘allows two people who love each other to communicate over great distances.’ The eldritch squawks emanating from this machine are a strange manifestation of loving communication, yet the embodiment of parental concern in screeching cacophony again perfectly encapsulates that double sense of Mother as grating intimidator and caring protector at one and the same time, and in one and the same way. Yet the all-powerful mother is also a creature of emotional quirks and strategies whose self-serving emotional idiosyncrasies are quite visible to Guy. He notes her ready use of threats to back up her commands (‘I can sell this place if you don’t enjoy it’), her plate-hurling tantrums, her selfpitying outbursts (‘Nobody loves me!’) and her door-slamming retreats to her room. Even the orphans get this treatment (‘Mother used suicide threats as a primary teaching aid,’ says the narrator). She can be tricked and evaded for a while, and a substantial part of the boy’s relationship with his sister consists of conspiracies to sneak out at night, to engage in forbidden activities, to avoid detection. But then there is Mother’s other side: her lavishly bestowed love, which is expressed directly but is also dimly seen by the boy as the reason behind the searchlight and the aerophone and the other instruments of rule. She feeds muffins and tarts from her own mouth to his, like a mother bird; he lies with

288

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

his head in her lap while she brushes his teeth; her kisses and cuddles which can escalate alarmingly into a frenzied smooching of his naked bottom (‘Mother’s little tushy!’). The lurching oscillations between tyranny and immoderate affection – recognizable again as literalizations of the feelings of many a small child with respect to the parent that is both loved and feared – place taxing demands on little Guy’s ability to make sense of things. His reaction is often a sullen muteness, most explicitly presented in the mealtime scenes, where he sits scowling at his plate with cheeks puffed out as we repeatedly read the title: ‘Dinner as usual. Grim.’ In all these arenas of family conflict, and in the pitched battle between Mother and Sis, the child’s fundamental inability to take an actual position is rendered with fine psychological acuity. He can tag along with Sis, he can drop everything in instant obedience to the summons of the aerophone, he can witness his mother’s neurotic self-dramatizations and actings-out, he can hopelessly fail to juggle all these things with his own wishes and desires, but he can never really take his own stand: he is just too young. When actual war breaks out between his mother and sister, he is helpless – indeed everything in his situation has reduced him to bedridden brain fever. Mother’s base position is that of a puritanical hatred and fear of sex. Her costume, that of an austere sixteenth-century northern European Lutheran, emphasizes this fact with a sublime indifference to period appropriateness that is just one more signal of the film’s willingness to live in a fantasy neverland even as it is supposedly recapitulating events of a real history. Her children become a battleground in her own neurotic struggles, though their sexual policing is simply seen by Mother as a plain duty. ‘Mother demanded vows of chastity so strict she would have the children ignorant of the differences between men and women,’ the titles tell us. Her unceasing, militant vigilance lest Sis’s hair stray down over her forehead has the exaggerated force of a War on Evil. And yet of course she must submit to sexuality herself as a feature of marriage. She prepares for Father’s fearful night-time visits by vigorously scrubbing herself down in a bath of turpentine ‘to wash the sin away,’ and as she lies in her nightgown, her grey hair voluminously spread upon the pillow, her face wears an expression of dread in the anticipation of a nocturnal encounter so horrifying that (as its lighting overtly suggests) it might be a visitation from the predatory somnambulist of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The description of this nightly meeting as an ‘appointment with Nectar Harvest!’ does nothing at all to disguise its sexual nature, merely suggesting instead the sexual properties of nectarite. And yet

Brand upon the Brain

289

these encounters leave Mother literally, miraculously rejuvenated and wearing the stereotypical broad smile of sexual satisfaction. The film really presents Mother – and also nectarite – in a dual and contradictory light here. She is both smiling complicitously after an encounter with nectarite and using its youth-bringing properties to regress back before puberty in order to escape sexuality altogether. She wants to use this means to escape sinful bodily desire, indeed to escape any kind of responsible subjectivity whatever by regressing all the way to infancy; and yet she develops a druglike addiction to it that suggests that it is a bodily pleasure – an addiction that drives her all the way to cannibalism, the grossest of all appetites. And yet the contradictions of Mother’s sexual life, like the inexplicability of certain plot developments, can be understood as effects in the psyche of the boy who is confusedly apprehending them. They represent a darkness that cannot be penetrated, only imagined in an obscure yet lurid way from fragments of evidence, part of the child’s attempt to piece together what the parents are up to. They are contingent with the tushy-kissing mother who progresses to inviting the boy into her bed for intimate cuddling – but whose bed, as she throws back the covers to admit him, is revealed to contain an array of butcher knives. This devouring/castrating mother is the perfect consort to the giant-penised father in Cowards Bend the Knee, a pair of phantasmatic monster-parents who are astoundingly explicit literalizations of Oedipal anxieties.23 All by itself, this threatening prospect would be ‘too much for Guy,’ but such frightening projections of shadowy and illimitable psychic fears need also to be integrated with mother-love that broadcasts itself with equal power, as exemplified above all in the two scenes of separation from the mother; and this is a task whose obvious impossibility reflects the emotional dilemma of everyone who has ever tried to reconcile the haunting inner contradictions of feelings towards a parent. The return of an older mother to an older Guy is a lucid staging of the way that parents lose some of their powers but not others, as both they and their children advance in age. Some kind of reconciliation after so much metaphorical bloodshed, some kind of distance or tinge of maturer wisdom, and at the same time some kind of bleak recognition of how it is actual death and total absence that is going to write the conclusion to this story, is where the film can jump to in its final chapter, after arbitrarily skipping over an intervening thirty years. Guy can finally love his mother in a relatively unambiguous and direct way in these circumstances, even if he feels himself unworthy to do so really properly.

290

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Mother extends an invitation into her bed with knives.

A comparison of Mother in Brand upon the Brain! with all the earlier mothers in Maddin’s cinema emphasizes how this figure, like the film as a whole, has carried a set of persistent themes and imaginings to some kind of much fuller realization. The mother in The Dead Father who serves her children peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a dinner table that also bears the father’s corpse, or who climbs into bed every night next to that same corpse, is clearly a forebear of the mother who reanimates her husband in this film. And the forcefulness of Zenaida in Careful and Liliom in Cowards seem also like earlier avatars of the furious energies of this mother, although both of them are allowed a more forthright and less conflicted sexuality. At the same time the sexual overtones of Mother’s Guy-cuddling are related to the full-blown Oedipal desires embodied in those two predecessors. And the other side of Mother – her pathos-laden expressions of love, her exile, blindness, and death – are prefigured in the dying mothers of Gimli Hospital and Cowards, and the blind and exiled-to-the-basement Gramma in the latter film as well. There are odd single flashes of connection, too. As Mother employs suicide threats as a learning tool, she yanks a rope around her own neck by way of illustration, and we recall that Zenaida hangs herself in Careful. Mother’s simultaneous mailed-fist domestic rule and smotherings with

Brand upon the Brain

291

sweet tarts shed light on the otherwise baffling line of Liliom in Cowards: ‘No sugar before pie!’ What is most striking about Mother is the absence of fragmentation (though not contradiction) in her character, the way that she can combine the cartoonlike qualities of a Liliom with some of the recognizable actual mother-features of a Zenaida. And in backdating the age of the son through whose eyes we see her to a stage of childhood rather than post-puberty, the film can endow her with the phantasmatic powers of the psyche’s fundamental mother, a process that in turn is enabled by the film’s gravitation to a more surreal and literally dreamlike narrative method. The end result is that this is the most fully realized of all Maddin’s mothers. The undead father It’s interesting, too, to put Father through a similar exercise of comparison. Like Maddin’s very first filmic father, the Dead one, Brand’s father is reanimated in a dreamlike shape that finds him performing his habitual actions even after death, reflecting, probably, the continued presence of the dead father in Maddin’s imagination and frequently in his dreams. It is remarkable, in fact, how many of the director’s fathers return from death: in addition to these two, we have Jannings in Archangel, the SwanFeeder in Careful, Chas in Cowards Bend the Knee, and three of these four are the victims of homicide. So many of Maddin’s paternal figures have an element of melancholy or futility about them, corresponding no doubt to the director’s sense of pity towards his own parent: ‘my dad, my poor father, was a cornered victim of … life grinding him down.’24 The list of fathers who are impotent, marginalized, scorned, and shamed is rather substantial (to the candidates above we can add Fyodor from Saddest Music). And in one dimension, Father in this movie is as shockingly vivid a representation of this position as Mother is of hers: unsmiling, doggedly chained to his workbench, hardly even part of the family except when he is dragged in to administer punishment to Sis or make his rote nightly visits to Mother, humiliation after humiliation heaped upon his naked corpse, buried and dug up, jump-started like a dead battery, his zombielife pointedly hardly any diminishment of his actual one because the actual one was so limited, packed around in a harp case, at last stuffed head first into a trash barrel and set on fire, and his place taken by a hamster on a wheel. Often only his back is seen, or, hauntingly, his hand beckoning to or stopping those approaching his workbench; sometimes he is not seen at all, only his footsteps heard as he moves from his lab to his bed-

292

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

room. During the later parts of the film he works naked, stripped even of his lab-coat uniform. The titles refer to his conjugal duties as ‘midnight exertions’ – a phrase that recalls Zenaida’s humiliating description of her husband’s comparable activities as ‘blind and clumsy labourings.’ But there is another dimension to Father. He has an occult power that is forever beyond the grasp of a Swan-Feeder or a Fyodor. Perhaps that power can be found in the original Dead Father, who is still a commanding figure invested with primeval authority by his son; and it is certainly found in Cowards’ Maddin Sr, who has achieved the stature of castrating superego (moreover a superego with a large penis). Father’s ‘many inventions,’ his mastery of the arcana of brain nectar, his isolation and secrecy, his inflexible grimness of visage, all mark him as having a share of the phantasmatic parental powers of which Mother has such a large measure. One of the severely restricted spectrum of shots of him is a repeated menacing close-up of his eye looking through a magnifying glass at his victims. Even more startlingly than Mother, Father is a fusing of antithetical opposites whose expression in the lurid terms of cheap sci-fi, horror, and primitive surrealism is one more example of the film’s triumphant wielding of these tools in the service of something really basic. Most troubling of all is the suggestion of parental sexual abuse as practised by Father upon Sis. Visits to Father are the cure for her unruly post-pubertal desires. Their explicit aim is to desexualize her, but there is definitely something sexual about this penetration of her by her father’s instrument, and equally about the bordello-wear that she is strangely costumed in for her last visit. Even the air of secrecy, the clouds of vapour that wrap her enterings into the lab, add to this sense. When Guy, spying from the ventilation ducts, finally does witness the mysterious ritual – like Johann in Careful spying from the chimney on his mother’s nakedness – what he sees is the awful spectacle of his father enacting some liquid interchange with his sister, one that is allowed by her zombified state and that causes her body to jerk and tremble despite her numbness and catatonia, one that is vampirelike in its excessive and insatiable appetite (‘Never enough!’), and that finally causes a murderous striking back that seems just as unconnected to conscious awareness as the ‘operation’ itself. Is there anything here that cannot be read as part of a scene of sexual abuse? Not to mention the fact that ‘nectar’ – presumably included that drawn from Sis – is the transmitted liquid of Father’s night-time visits, and that this seems to set up some kind of intrafamilial economy of secret sexualities in which Sis’s inclusion must constitute some kind of dreadfulness.

Brand upon the Brain

293

But there is something indeterminate about all of this. If Father really is a sexual monster, this is the biggest thing in the whole family dynamic, but it is not presented in this way. Why is Mother the whistle-blower who initiates these sessions, and why with the explicit aim of desexualization? Any kind of sexual appetite in Father would sit in puzzling juxtaposition with the ponderously automatic nature of his behaviour in general, as even his nightly visits to Mother attest. There, though the shadow of his fingers falls horrifyingly over her face like the black hand of Nosferatu in Murnau’s film, nothing changes his slow, affectless deliberation, his seeming imperviousness to feeling of any kind. Can it really be that Father’s sexual appetite feeds monstrously on both wife and daughter? Or is this rather a representation of the boy’s blind imaginings about an only very vaguely understood parental sexuality, and of the tangled mess of occluded apprehensions about his sister’s sexuality, and his own? This at least is consistent with that deepest and most vital conduit of the film which seems to channel unconscious sensings and connections into a spectacular flowering of surreal metaphors. It would be highly consistent with the son’s Oedipal instinct to read any kind of sexual power in the father as threatening. As Steven Shaviro writes, the entire film seems constructed on an Oedipal template: It involves a basic Oedipal configuration – the smothering and controlling mother, the distant, detached, yet ultimately sadistic (and even more ultimately, dead or living-dead) father, the brother and sister with their incestuous desires [...] It is as if all conceivable variations on the Oedipal triangle, and the androgynous-love triangle as well, had to be played out at some point in the course of the movie.25

In this quasi-unconscious creative activity which is something between a free-for-all and an exercise in geometry, then, the Father must be given his moment to play the part of ‘sadistic father,’ even if on other parts of the map he is a pitiable victim. He is doubled, like the father Chas + Maddin Sr in Cowards, but the stark contrast of these two personae is centrally grounded in Guy’s unconscious sensibility, which is no more accountable to rational criteria than is anyone else’s unconscious. The liberated sister The vital, charismatic figure of Sis almost steals the show in Brand upon the Brain! – especially in Maya Lawson’s energetic and committed perform-

294

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

ance, one of the best in any Maddin film. It is an idiosyncratic reproduction of Maddin’s own childhood that omits his two older brothers, but gives a dominating place to his sister. Whatever the reasons behind that, it is evident that in Brand Sis is a kind of gateway and enabler for twelveyear-old Guy’s sexual awakenings, both personally and in her own teenage erotic attachments. Her same-sex adventures with Chance/Wendy are really no different in their heedless strayings across the conventional boundaries of gender behaviour than are Guy’s own in his successive girl and boy crushes or indeed the indeterminate stirrings of a sexual desire that receives some kind of stimulus from an attractive sibling. Such is the centring of everything in the film in Guy’s perception and memory, and specifically in the unconscious brew from which those emerge, that any and all transgressions and scandals are best interpreted as effects of that phantasmagoric place, events whose larger than life qualities are absolutely unverifiable in any more objective realm. At the same time, Sis’s place is that of the pioneer who strikes out across the border to autonomy and sexual endeavour, a figure whom the little Guy cannot but look upon with considerable admiration, a slightly awed recognition of her pursuit of powers and pleasures that he cannot hope to reach. But he remains essentially a child, not at all ready to leave the parental nest, and too young to join his sister against his mother even if he truly wanted to. Sis has something in common with the sexually powerful and chaoscreating young women with parental issues who appear in other Maddin films – specifically Klara in Careful and Meta in Cowards Bend the Knee – not only in her irrepressible moxie but by a process whereby her predecessors too may be seen as types of a female sibling in what, especially in retrospect, can be read as an ongoing secondary reflection of Maddin’s childhood sense of family and the world. Of course it would be folly to try too simply to read Klara and Meta as equivalents to Sis, and to separate them from the role of more conventional erotic object to the male protagonists who are closest to Maddin’s stand-in in each film. But it is at least odd in this context that like those two, Sis appears somehow in thrall to her father in Brand, and that the Electral configuration of father fixation should keep popping up in Maddin’s cinema. It is certainly telling that even if Sis has a fuzzy status as object of Guy’s sexual interest, she can at any rate make a direct sexual appeal to viewers. The multitude of depictions of her in frilly underwear, transparent bodices, or topless nudity leave no doubt of the movie’s intentions in this regard, and her zestful and provocative assumption of the role of sexual-games player more or less puts her in charge of the film’s erotic energies. (It

Brand upon the Brain

295

may be argued that Wendy/Chance is the prime sexual mover in their relationship, but it is Sis’s enthusiastic exposition of the map of Rumania that sets everything going.) But then, what is the consequence of making the sister so central to the film’s erotic interest? To create, by virtue of its identification with Guy’s viewpoint and in syllogistic fashion, the Q.E.D. that Guy is erotically stimulated by his sister. As to the lesbian proclivities of Sis and Wendy/Chance, these move effortlessly from being a potential problem to just being an exceptionally imaginative form of girl-on-girl action. Their delicious transgressions are those of sexuality itself, and the entire handling of the drama of gender deception and revelation captures the uncertainties and excitements of erotic interchange not with any flavour of jaded kinkiness, but rather in a lovely spirit of innocence and almost Shakespearean magical romance. Wendy, indeed, is in a position that rather recalls Viola’s in Twelfth Night; but Sis, it turns out, just doesn’t care what sex her lover is. In any event we are far, here, from the Inferno-esque sexual predations and tortures of Cowards Bend the Knee. The object of desire The personage of Wendy/Chance is certainly the film’s most important character outside the family circle. The first thing to note is what a protean figure she is. Not only is she female and male and female by turns, she is the object of desire for both Guy and Sis, the essential manager of Sis’s same-sex adventure, and the detective who unravels the mystery of ‘The Face in the Lighthouse’ (in the last two avatars she is simultaneously devoted to concealing underlying truths in one area while exposing them in another). By the end of the film she is inhabiting her last remaining role, as ghost in the mind of the adult Guy. In truth she was always ‘phantom Wendy,’ never anything else but a projection and a symbol. When she is announced as Wendy Hale, sister half of the Lightbulb Kids, ‘the harp-playing teen detectives,’ she is established from the outset in a position of impossibility, as an absurdly naïve fiction and fantasy. Such narrative flatness, however, is no barrier to her becoming the lodestone of desire. If the über-naivety of toy soldiers, outmoded belief systems, and trashy movies could attain emotional power in the filmmaker’s imagination partly by virtue of impossibility, the connection in Brand of a caricatured personage from long-gone youth pop fiction to some tabula rasa where purest desire is born cannot be too surprising. As a matter of fact Wendy has constituted herself as that site of pure

296

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

desire at Guy’s first glimpse of her: in his sensory prowlings of the island he pulls back some long grass to reveal – her, in white dress standing among the trees divorced from any rational explanation for her presence. (In just this way her harp-playing is didactically free from any rational possibility.) The revelation that she is the Wendy Hale is only a spur to his desire, but that has already been formed in the initial moment. Guy’s smittenness has the engulfing power of a first crush, but it is a phenomenon of late childhood whose evanescence is built in, and in any event is very soon compelled to convert itself to mourning and then transplanted into a ‘boy crush’ on Chance. His discovery that Chance is Wendy, which occurs during a brain-fevered wander, is hardly processable as anything other than a hallucination, and its shock is quickly buried by the spectacle of Mother’s cannibalism and both their exiles from the island. Only at the very end are commando-Chance and topless-Wendy united in a slow dissolve in the house painter’s imagination. But by this point the status of Wendy/Chance as phantom has been clearly established, her dual genders and many roles now legible as features of her almost allegorical constitution. However real and solid little Guy’s first crush may have seemed at the time, in the retrospection of three decades later it has become a kind of glowing locus of the birth of desire itself, an aching tender spot whose very cause has vanished but whose ache is only greater with the passage of years and the disappearance of any possible object. Such all-encompassing wounds and longings are, of course, in the realm of psychoanalysis, and notwithstanding their category difference from his family traumas, Guy’s Wendy-desire seems right at home sharing a landscape of Oedipal stresses and other family turbulences. Once again the effortless combination of superficially different elements demonstrates the film’s ability to swim freely in this subaquatic unconscious world. In addition to inspiring Sis’s desire, Wendy/Chance of course experiences her own desire for Sis. At the moment this desire hits her, its power and solemnity are incarnated in the repeated close-up wherein her moonlike white face glows magnetically inside a black iris surround. I have already remarked on the beauty of this shot, but I think it deserves further comment. It is perhaps the most beautiful shot of Maddin’s entire cinema, just radiating with a kind of pure, smooth, goddesslike lyrical intensity. It functions as more than one shot, because it repeats, and also shifts its framing, moving with great slowness closer and closer to this epicentre of something. Really it receives extraordinary emphasis, far beyond any narrative utility, and even beyond any narcissistic indulgence

Brand upon the Brain

297

Wendy’s all-encompassing moon face of desire.

the film might be extending to its own gorgeous creation. I mentioned a moonlike face and a goddesslike intensity, a combination that would add up to Diana, the goddess of chastity, as a representation of the birth of sexual desire: another of the film’s innumerable surreal meldings of antitypes. But this profound emphasis, this repetition and persistence – the way it lasts, and lasts, as though the film could not bear to be parted with it – also decisively transcends its function as the expression of the face’s own desire, of Wendy’s desire for Sis. It moves from the desire experienced by the face to the desire experienced for the face: Guy’s, Sis’s, the film’s, ours. And in doing this it becomes the definitive image and symbol of desire itself, and the power and solemnity of the shot become those of the very principle of desire (not that the superfine physicality of the shot has anything innately abstract about it). How strange and moving this transference is, from subject to object, from person to principle; how expressive, once more, of the film’s ability to wield images and feelings in a sublimely intuitive way. This symbolic status is only confirmed by Wendy’s reappearance explicitly as a phantom. Now, years after the initial thunderbolt of feeling, her (non) reality has progressed from that of harp-playing Lightbulb Kid to that of sad, introspective, distracted ghost, her indifference to

298

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

the desiring subject made perfectly manifest. Indeed it is her status as a projection of that desiring subject, and moreover a projection that no longer has any life, that is so painful for the subject to apprehend. This quasi-spectral form is also the one taken by Veronica in Cowards Bend the Knee, where her lostness as object of desire is rendered as coldness, deadness, ghostly absence-in-presence – qualities that do not make her any less desirable, but only emphasize the always-already-impossible nature of the subject’s longing for her. In Brand, the fact that the carrier and symbol of desire, Wendy, is ultimately identified as a phantom serves in addition to emphasize the purity of her existence in that symbolic position: she is purged of any actual humanity which might interfere with such an idealist role. Finally all questions about gender slippage, about the nature of Sis’s sexuality, and even about the objective existence of Wendy/Chance and the Lightbulb Kids and the detective investigation, are swallowed up and rendered irrelevant by this recognition of the figure’s quality of non-existence and of its function rather as an allegorical carrier of desire. (This has some secondary plot effects, though: all of the melodramatic details of the island regime of Sis and Chance after the expulsion of Mother and Guy, including the death of Sis, come from a witness who is a figment of the house painter’s imagination. How can this be constituted as actual information?) In turn the depiction of house painter Guy, still kissing the foot of this ghostly idealization, still drinking in her appearance even as he knows she is not there and never was, at last indeed missing his mother’s dying moment to look again at this utter projection, has a sadness that Maddin is entering into more directly and wholeheartedly than in any other film. Guy It is an unproblematic statement to say that Brand upon the Brain! consists almost entirely of the contents of its protagonist’s memory, affect, and unconscious. There are of course two Guys, the boy and the house painter, and the film’s principal project is to position them in an arrangement whereby the latter is seeking again to enter the realm of his earlier self, to enter it as wholly and synaesthetically as he can. His aim is not really to understand the powerful, formative events of his past, only to re-experience them, and the film as a whole is not analytic at all, but sensitive, receiving the impress of memory and retransmitting it. Maddin himself talks about how he feels that he experienced the important events of his past only dumbly, without comprehension or even feeling

Brand upon the Brain

299

on his own part, and about how the autobiographical reimagination of those events allows him at last to experience them fully. So the narrative of Brand, with its adult seeker after his own past and its mantras that ‘all things will happen again’ and ‘everything happens twice’ is in effect a reflexive model of its maker’s own psychic process. The two Guys are set, as it were, side by side with no interaction. Little Guy sees and does all that he sees and does in a kind of immediate and automatic way. He is submerged in events to the point of being unable to process them, brain-fevered to the point of numbness, a kind of helpless observer or child-subaltern ‘running to please’ or appended to games and schemes run by older children. Even when he is nominally taking part in events – Savage Tom’s blood rituals, ‘spin the bottle’ with Sis, Chance, and Neddie, grim dinner times, misdirection schemes to aid Sis, spying schemes to aid Chance, attendance at his mother’s suicide bed or his father’s resurrection – it is essentially as witness rather than participant. So that everything in the flashback that is the main body of the film might almost be described as ‘what I saw in my childhood.’ ‘What I felt in my childhood,’ too, of course; but that feeling seems not to have the necessary channels and outlets compared with the flood tide of the remembering house painter (and the film itself). This is reflected in the rather stunted nature of the boy’s reactions to things as they can be read in his face and body language. One of the most charming things in the film is its quasi-comic representation of Guy’s sullen resentfulness when watching Neddie get all Wendy’s kisses at ‘spin the bottle,’ when asked to turn around and not look at Sis’s and Chance’s necking, when suffering his mother’s overaffectionate embraces – and all the related moments in the context of grim dinners and maternal complaints and threats. But this expression, and possibly this feeling, is all that is available to the child when confronting also the biggest traumas of parental crime, volcanic sexual discovery, even the traumas of death and separation. There is a narrow continuum, in other words, between the trivial and the grand, wherein there doesn’t seem actually much difference between them emotionally to little Guy. It is tempting to place this in the context of Maddin’s recollections of the trivial manifestations of big actual traumas in his real childhood, such as being told at the age of seven that your brother has killed himself and that now you would be getting his room. In fact that petulant expression of the face of Brand’s child protagonist is almost exactly the same as the one on the face of the twenty-something hero of The Dead Father as he is frowned at and upbraided by his dead father for not adequately performing his duties as

300

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

a son. Again, the emotional reservoir available for situations of trauma is just not deep enough to produce a ‘proper’ emotional response, and the subject just has to use the same old trivial responses that he would to any little childhood oppressions. Only the remembering adult can have this ‘proper’ response, while reimagining and re-experiencing the traumatic events. Even the boy’s most dramatic responses – swooning and brain fever – are escapes from, rather than immersions in, a full experience. Too much for little Guy, but not too much for the adult he grows into. That adult is now able to drain the bittersweet cup to its dregs. Shaviro states baldly that ‘the only way to describe Brand upon the Brain! is with a Freudian account of trauma and Nachträglichkeit.’25 Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardness’) is a term used by Freud to describe a condition in which the true significance of certain important early experiences will be deferred, to be brought back by some circumstance later in life, and only then properly understood or felt. This does describe the way that the phantasmatic events of Guy’s remembered childhood are exploding in these waves of emotion triggered by his revisitation of the places and things of their original experience: ‘all things happen again.’ The narration’s repeated cries of ‘the past! the past!’ have exactly this force; and again their reduction to a kind of obsessive, insistent repetition of the plainest word, whose explanatory powers are threadbare and inadequate, indicates how profound are the depths to which it refers, and how uncapturable in language. The house painter’s return to the island is also a return to his past, to his childhood. Concomitantly, the traumatic regime change that results first in the exile of the parents and then of little Guy is a kind of figure for the end of childhood. It is curious and telling that the film imagines this transition out of childhood not as a growing up, or growing away, but as an exile from the place of fundamental authentic experience. The boy is forcibly separated from his parents, forcibly banished from his home. The narrative says it was Sis’s new regime that imposed this exile, but this seems like a kind of alibi or convenient mechanism for dramatizing the end of a situation. Conceivably Sis’s act in successfully growing up herself, successfully insisting on her own independence, can be seen as constituting a dethronement of the Mother principle and hence an end to everybody’s childhood. But in fact the film is not thinking too clearly at this point.26 Indeed, it is not thinking at all, only feeling. And what it feels is that childhood ended, and Guy was sent to live somewhere else, where the parents weren’t really the parents and home wasn’t really home. Perhaps he remained a child, but his childhood deserted him. Wherever he may go after this, it

Brand upon the Brain

301

will not be home, because home is childhood, and nothing will ever be as important or big as what occurred there. The fact that his parents are ‘criminals’ and that his mother is a terrifying and unmanageable person is not even relevant, and his separation from these troubling circumstances is certainly not experienced as any kind of liberation. Rather it is as though everything that happened later in his life is the truly ghostly, unreal condition, and only memory and the past is reality. And so we arrive at the present. It is a place that is literally empty, a set of mnemonic locations and props where the phantoms of long-vanished people of immense importance to Guy appear and disappear in his adult mind. It can’t be brought truly to life; the only thing to do is to slap a coat of white paint on it. But now, near the end of the film, Mother does actually arrive in this place. She is only a shadow of her earlier mad-queenly self, old and frail if still showing clear traces of her old habits. After all these years, the adult Guy can tell her, in a heartfelt way at least somewhat extricated from childhood confusion, ‘I love you, mother,’ and she can still reply, with the old Mother moxie, ‘No you don’t.’ Essentially, though, her power is almost gone, and like any aged parent she now needs to be looked after by her child. This reversal of roles is always disorienting for both parties, and so it is here, additionally so because it expresses so unmistakably how diminished the psychic landscape has become. The passionate exchanges of ‘I love you!’s at Mother’s deathbed are deeply felt, but there is a sense that they are marooned somewhere far away from the authentic landscape of meaning, just a kind of trailing edge of ‘the past!’ Mother dies, and Guy commits one last filial dereliction of duty by being distracted from her final moment by a phantom-topless-Wendy, in another guilty reworking of the moment in Cowards Bend the Knee where Guy looked away and abandoned someone in her death-throes to pursue an erotic interest. After this, all his phantoms disappear, one after another, and he is left ‘utterly alone!’ to stand naked on the suicide’s ledge. It is an extraordinary moment of despairing self-pity, but the film’s final response is to cruelly mock any emotional indulgence (‘Cry, baby, cry’), and to leave Brand like almost every other Maddin movie torn between pain and ridicule – but now more than ever before explicit and direct in its expression, and entirely stripped of anything comic. 96.518 per cent true Maddin continues to have fun with numerical estimates of the autobiographical content of his films. Evidently the proportion has gone up

302

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

since Cowards, whose absolute-truth content he pegged at 95 per cent. With Brand, it has fluctuated somewhat: to Dennis Lim in the New York Times he said it was 96 per cent,27 but it had gone up a notch to ‘97 per cent true’ in the DVD documentary of that title. (I believe Maddin has missed an opportunity in not, so far, describing My Winnipeg as ‘114 per cent true.’) These grossly inflated yet precise numbers serve a double function: épater les critiques, and at the same time point emphatically to overwhelming importance of autobiographical elements in a story where otherwise they might be undervalued. So, since Maddin was not actually brought up in a lighthouse where his father sucked brain juice from orphans and siblings, we might speculate about what actually is true about the characters and events of the film, or, more usefully, what underlying truths have been metaphorized into those characters and events. Here is part of a conversation I had with Maddin in 2007 that gives some insight into the process of transmission and mutation: gm: The years I spent at Gimli – and the movie really is just Gimli – I fell in love with Gimli because it always held a promise for romance. And well past the age when all other kids, like at age fifteen or sixteen, started hanging out in Winnipeg in the summers and skipping the lake, I just kept holding out that Gimli, unlike Winnipeg, would deliver to me, as if from out of a bush or something, the perfect romantic pay-off, and man, I was hooked just the way someone who won a jackpot once on a slot machine just goes back and I just kept going back to the same patterns of searching around Loney Beach for someone. wb: This was on the basis of having hit the jackpot once? gm: Yeah, once or twice, they were just little thrilling, little brushes with – meeting a girl named Wendy, who’s the Canadian actress Wendy Crewson (now she grew up, she played the First Lady in Air Force One, opposite Harrison Ford). Anyway, she came down to Gimli when we were all about fifteen and tortured us all, tore the tops of our heads off and stomped on our hearts. wb: No, that was what you were doing to yourself. gm: Yeah. That’s right, we allowed her to do it, we used her to – she was like a human can opener. So I thought that the movie will just be this big, haunted, lonely landscape. Here, then, is the origin of Wendy,28 and a key to decode back to Maddin’s history the wanderings of both Guys through the island in search

Brand upon the Brain

303

of that first image of desire. But we note that whereas the actual Guy and the actual Wendy were the same age (both born in 1956), the movie’s Wendy is an older girl, and its Guy is definitely more of a child. This slippage in both directions across the boundary of puberty is, of course, also a characteristic of Cowards Bend the Knee, where the story of Guy and his girlfriends is immersed in the landscape of earlier childhood (the salon, the arena). That Brand is ‘just Gimli’ is no qualification of the fact that the Gimli experience extends all the way back to Maddin’s early childhood as well as encompassing his later girl-hunting teenage days. And it is of the utmost importance for the film to include the child and his parents as well. Because what it seeks to address is not just the protagonist’s girl-wanderings through a ‘haunted, lonely landscape,’ but that landscape and that activity as the essential expression for the totality of his past experience and his present psychic state. So the Gimli memories of house painter Guy, although they take place in the narrative in a relatively condensed time period, in fact comprehend his whole childhood and adolescence, which are presented as if they were simultaneous. And this simultaneity, however chaotic as history, makes compelling sense psychologically, since all aspects of our pasts are present at once in our minds. Brand demonstrates once again, and probably in the most powerful way yet, just how malleable and permeable Maddin’s psychic hoard of experience is, how easy it is for him to create a fantasy melding of elements that has both a surrealist force and a truth-to-feeling. Another specific moment in Maddin’s history that comes back pointedly in Brand is his mother’s fierce struggle with his sister. It’s a topic that this film retrospectively allows us to see happening also in Cowards in Liliom’s treatment of Meta, and it will get another extended, and explicit, rehearsal in My Winnipeg. It is impossible to say how traumatic these hostilities were for the actual participants, but they evidently made a deep impression on the young witness Guy, who now describes them as ‘a titanic internecine battle.’29 The little observer’s sense that something big was going on may be ultimately responsible for the fact that Brand shows Sis having her brain sucked out by her parents. It also shows that these malefactions seemed not to interfere substantially with Sis’s independent spirit, and it is very clear that it is she who finally won the war. Sis’s moth-death after her abandonment by Chance, in contrast, is impossible to situate in this way, and seems just another of the plot detonations (revolution, expulsion) that separate the era of childhood from all later times and clear the table of earlier plot elements in preparation for the present-day epilogue. As for the gender transgressions of Sis’s romantic

304

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

life, it is hardly necessary to read them literally in the circumstances, especially when they are so closely connected with Guy’s own multisex crushes. Other specific scenes have specific historical origins. The most startling, perhaps, is the stripping and preparation for burial of Father’s dead body and its waterlogged interment – a series of actions that, if we are to believe Maddin’s testimony,30 is a fairly exact copy of the events following his grandfather’s death as lived through by his grandmother and his mother. Like the story in Careful of the infant Swan-Feeder’s loss of an eye because of his mother’s brooch, this surreal and from one angle comical development looks like any of the movie’s other fantastic representations but turns out to be pretty much factual. On the other hand, the basic characterological representations of Mother and Father obviously involve transformations of an altogether more swingeing sort. Mother as an omniscient discipline-and-punish surveillor or tushysmooching maniac is a figure from some deeper and more phantasmic level of the unconscious than anything in the Sis and Chance realm (or the more literally recognizable Neddie and Savage Tom realm). And Maddin’s representation of his father’s physical absence, grinding work demands, impassive mask of desiccated persistence, and domain of secret power is quite astonishing – especially as it manages to present simultaneously a little son’s view of his father’s occult omnipotence and an older one’s recognition of him as beaten down by life. If these parents are 97 per cent true, it is because they are that much true to their child’s psychic sense of them. Realization If genre influences from Grand Guignol to the Hardy Boys to cheap horror movies are evident in various aspects of the narrative, the actual visual realization of Brand upon the Brain! relies as heavily upon the language of silent cinema as any Maddin film. The presence of the voiceover narrator perhaps disguises this to a degree, but in this respect what is noteworthy is how much that voice-over simply duplicates or underlines what is already in the intertitles (and vice versa, of course). In fact subtracting the voice-over and adding a couple of intertitles would leave the essence of the film substantially intact. The narration’s effect, arguably, is to rescue the film from the panic/aversion responses of viewers who become disoriented by the absence of the human voice while at the same time preserving in its entirety the apparatus of silent cinema. Of the other elements of the soundtrack, musical accompaniment is already

Brand upon the Brain

305

proper to silent cinema, and sound effects without speech – a relic of the earliest forms of sound cinema – also function to soothe away viewers’ silence anxieties. The most important fact is the absence of dialogue, and in this respect Brand is as pure a silent film as Dracula, Cowards, or the shorts. It is functionally a silent film, and once again the director can draw on the priceless treasure chest of tools of the form that, seemingly, cannot survive the added realism of direct sound and so have been effectively dead since the 1920s. There is a synergy among these tools, and the mere presence of techniques such as intertitles, irising/vignetting, and multiple exposure creates a generalized flavour of ‘silent cinema’ that is distinct from whatever actual work those devices are doing – and this is the first (and unfortunately sometimes the last) thing that viewers notice about Maddin’s ‘evocation’ of the form. As usual, Maddin uses intertitles (and voice-over) in the characteristic silent film way to conduct a compressed and short-cutting style of narration, one that throws the attention of viewers more concentratedly on the images, which are then parsed in a way significantly different from those of most sound film. In particular, close-ups must bear a much greater burden, and here the framing by means of irises and vignettes has the amplifying effect of removing the images yet further from a quotidian prosaic status into a more poetic realm of visual rhetoric. The Everest of all these close-ups, of course, is the magnetic, positively singing one of Wendy as she succumbs to Sis’s charms, singled out glowingly from an idealizing surround-frame of black iris. But essentially the same treatment is extended to every character in the film in a multitude of situations, so that the viewer’s apprehension of each of them occurs much more in a realm of elevated reception. Characters, in other words, are pushed onto a more fabular and lyrical level of existence by their ‘silent’ visualization, and indeed this operation extends to locations and settings as well (think of all the black-surrounded shots of the lighthouse beam at night), and finally to the narrative as a whole. As cinematographer Ben Kasulke points out, the lighting is stretched between the two poles of shadow-filled Expressionism and what he calls ‘this great sort of Marlene Dietrich lighting,’ a softer light that also extends to producing ‘beautiful ghostly haloes of light around people’s faces.’31 Much of the photography especially in the latter style is ravishingly beautiful, the apotheosis of a practice that Maddin has been pursuing successfully in his black and white films ever since Archangel with its fabulous close-ups of Boles and Veronkha. Both the Expressionist mode and this specific portrait mode, of course, have firm roots in silent cinema.

306

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Even more striking is the utilization of what I think of as a Murnauvian technique (though in fact it dates back to the earliest years of cinema) of photographing mental events by means of double exposure. Maddin has instinctively used this device ever since Gimli Hospital, and one could adduce dozens of examples from his later cinema. We saw in Saddest Music, for example, how powerfully the Murnau-like appearance of the dead child or the lost wife could be presented in the thoughts of the bereft ones, and on the screen. In Brand upon the Brain!, the most common use of the form is in the repeated appearances and disappearances of the character’s from Guy’s past who dissolve into and out of the point of view of the house painter, as literal realizations of the events of memory and the imagination. As used here, the device is beautifully simple and intuitive: there is nothing as showy as the great moments from Sunrise or even those just mentioned from Saddest Music (Narcissa appearing inside a frozen tear on a rain-streaked window, for instance). Instead, the very simplicity of these embodied shadows from Guy’s mind conveys their concrete importance in his imagination, the simple force of their presentness, and then of their absence. And this brings out how peculiarly appropriate, within Maddin’s body of work, the device is in this film so completely devoted to, indeed constituted by, memory and imagination. In high silent cinema this kind of visualization was applied not only to elevated, ‘arty’ narratives, but even to the most homespun kinds of stories. But rarely then could it be applied to so frankly mental a landscape as it is here, and so there is even a sense that Brand upon the Brain! actually represents a certain kind of apotheosis of silent film ‘photographed thought.’ Certainly at the end of the film the appearance and disappearance of the important figures from the drama that has been enacted, and especially the last double superimposition and then disappearance of Wendy/Chance, have a simple and poignant eloquence that realizes the power of this very plain old device in a kind of ultimate way.32 Maddin’s description of the multiple conjunctions that made Brand a silent film project certainly confirms all this: I realized it would have to be a silent film, because there’d be no way there’d be time to write dialogue for a feature in such a short time [...] I thought maybe I’ll get to make one more silent film, great, you know, because no private investor in his right mind would ever give you money to make a silent film. So I thought, well, here’s my chance to make one more, and then that’ll probably be it. And I thought, there are still some things

Brand upon the Brain

307

silent movies do best and a childhood recollection might be one of them, because everything is so – [...] I think everyone’s a poet when he or she is in the act of remembering his or her own childhood. You just immediately go back into the reasoning you used and you immediately enter into the faultily constructed model of the world that you make for yourself each day and then throw away as you have to correct it until you get basically the same world view as every other boring adult. But when you’re a kid, you’re the creator of spectacular mistakes that actually produce intoxicating results when you flip cause and effect and you confuse things and you don’t know what’s going on and you forever link the memories of, you weld together memories of smells, incidents that were contemporaneous with certain phenomena and it’s mythic times, you know, so it’s very lyrical, silent movie stuff.33

A marriage made in heaven, then. Shooting outside Manitoba, and with a group of actors and technicians previously entirely unknown to Maddin certainly gives special qualities to the film. There hasn’t been this much location shooting in a Maddin feature since we had all those people stumbling around in the woods at night in Tales from the Gimli Hospital. The beach has a different look from the one at Gimli – stonier, more windswept – and the forest is most of the time just a few thin little stands of trees. But that outdoors landscape, bright grey and chilly, creates a beautifully Nordic look (especially in the great images of Sis wielding her harpoon in wide-angle slashvignetted shots). The lighthouse, too – above all its castlelike curving stone and brick stairwell – has a solidity that is far from the pasteboard qualities Maddin has often actively sought in the past. Partly because of these things, the all-Super-8mm cinematography, by Ben Kasulke and Maddin himself, has a freshness that is quite different in tone from the sepiaed claustrophobia of Cowards Bend the Knee, and scenes such as Father’s burial or Mother’s suicide attempt have a grander quality (aided by the chorus of orphans costumed somewhere between altar boys and the nocturnal denizens of Maddin’s favourite Zéro de conduite). The presence of a completely new cast also makes things look fresh, and with one or two minor exceptions, the actors are truly excellent. I confess to wondering what putting Darcy Fehr into the ‘Guy Maddin’ role he plays in Cowards and My Winnipeg would have done to the film, but there’s nothing at all wrong with Erik Steffen Maahs’ melancholy performance, and the Big Four of Sis (Maya Lawson), Wendy (Katherine Scharhon), Mother (Gretchen Krich), and little Guy (Sullivan Brown) are all quite

308

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

splendid, with even smaller roles like Neddie (Kellan Larson) and Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska) beautifully taken. John Gurdebeke’s editing is almost as interventionist here as in Cowards Bend the Knee. In this, the most explicitly and straightforwardly memory-centred of his projects, Maddin’s sense of the ‘scrolling’ or ‘cubist’ process of digital editing as a reflection of the feel of memory gets its most extended workout. The entire editing style seems more settled and under control, and less excitable, than it did in the heady days of its first discovery in Cowards. At the same time, we see the continued fruitfulness of the marriage of highly flexible shooting practice and equally flexible editing technique that can be traced back to Dracula. With multiple Super-8 cameras shooting very close, and in a wild hand-held fashion, the scrolling method is capable of capturing and mixing that raw material in a blending – or sometimes blenderizing – fashion. Altogether it is a synergistic method, as Maddin explains: ‘It’s something that gives me the courage to just go on the set without any storyboards, without any rehearsals, and just start shouting audibles from the line, no huddle at all, no telling people what to do, just knowing that the whole thing will be full of captured moments that can then be stretched, shortened, eliminated, or created out of the blue.’34 And in the editing process proper, not just energy but also lyricism and reflection can be produced through the finely manipulated control of tempo: when to slow things down and when to speed them up, in both macro (shot length) and micro (shot speed) dimensions. The film plays over these tempi and rhythms like music. As for music proper, Jason Staczek’s score is undoubtedly the best ever composed for a Maddin feature film. He really seems alive to every mood of Maddin’s film, and his ability to navigate the perilous channels from charm to desolation with all the stops in between is wholly admirable. It is a beautiful, eloquent, enlivening score, at its most crucial moments deeply felt and simply moving (and with never the smallest hint of a parodic rendering of these qualities, as in Careful). It is fascinating to compare the effect of this fine music track with that of the more primitive but equally powerful ‘found’ score for the partner-project Cowards Bend the Knee: leaving aside the impact of live musicians in the performance version of the film, the modern score acts in the same way as the voice-over narration to distance Brand from some of the more ‘degraded’ aspects of the silent film model – whereas the scratchy 78s of Cowards have precisely the opposite effect, coming at us in vivid fashion through the long tunnel of historical culture and bearing all the scars of their long passage.

Brand upon the Brain

309

All things will happen again It is very striking that in Brand upon the Brain! Maddin has moved all the way to the opposite pole from his earlier insistence on amnesia as a central subject. The Dead Father takes place in ‘the dominion of forgetfulness,’ Archangel is a festival of amnesia, and in more recent years both Cowards and Saddest Music are still dealing with this intractable issue. (George Toles could even say in 2001 that ‘to Guy Maddin, every contemporary story that feels true is at bottom an amnesia story.’35) As we saw, in the case of Cowards this may simply be a matter of talking about any kind of disavowal or item of bad conscience that has been pushed to the side as a forgetting. But Saddest Music certainly does bring back the psychic condition of avoidance of big and painful memories, and moreover stipulates quite plainly that it is a condition that must be fought and overcome: again, the conclusion of that film may be described as the defeat of amnesia. In Brand, however, there is no struggle: the war is over and memory has won. The result is not only radically to warm up the film’s temperature (as Maddin observes in the epigraph to this chapter), but to connect with all the ‘warmer,’ emotionally fervid, moments in his earlier cinema – the endings of Archangel and Careful, for example – validate them retrospectively, and show what a strong subcurrent of feeling has always run through his work by bringing it to the surface. At the same time the futureless, quasi-suicidal position of the ending revisits some of the things Maddin has been doing in his two preceding movies, but with a very different emphasis. The hero of Brand, like the hero of Saddest Music, is, as it were, killed by memory, killed by the successful arrival of hitherto repressed memory. That process is already beginning at the start of Brand, whereas in Saddest Music it only happens suddenly at the end. Chester at last finds his sadness, and this sadness equates to his death, metaphorically the end of his old life, literally the end of his actual life. The future! the future! is non-existent for him, even though it may have some value for others like Roderick and Narcissa. But in that film, does Maddin find his true sadness? No, he only finds the idea of finding it, as it were, an intellectual recognition that it is a necessary thing. The actual moment of rediscovery, of true memory which is true sadness, cannot even now escape from its own thinness and ridiculousness (Mother collapsing over the piano). In Cowards Bend the Knee, Maddin has found something true, but it’s not so much sadness as guilt, self-contempt, weakness in every dimension, an anguished but cold inner centre of horror. And despite all the markers of absurdity at the end of that film, there is nothing in it that

310

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

is really artificial or held at arm’s length – it is entirely serious and felt. In any event this memory process, this anti-amnesia, leaves behind a bleak, futureless prospect. In Brand upon the Brain! the pattern is the same: Guy plunges right into his memories, not deflecting anything about them, and in doing this he discovers his sadness and pain. At the end of the process he is left with a life that seems to have no future, a life that is in fact seen to have been utterly constituted of the past. His sadness is precisely that the past is the past, that what is most essential to him does not exist any more except as memory and imagination, and when at the end of the film those final visions disappear for the last time it is his life that is disappearing with them. If this facing up at last to his inner condition is a healthy overcoming of disavowal and blockage, its therapeutic benefits are to say the least hard to discern in the bleak endings of all three of these films. Artistically, of course, it is another matter, and the benefits there are immediate and obvious. The victory of memory and feeling also weakens what had always been the other side of the equation: mockery, derision, silliness. It is not, certainly, that the zany Maddin humour has disappeared from the film, but now its iterations have a less destructive effect upon the seriousness of the drama. Mother gets no hairballs in her throat; instead, she feeds her child from her own mouth, washes away her sin in a turpentine bath, and comes out with passionate operatic utterances like: ‘Soon I shall sleep in the earth on the mainland, and when you die, many years from now, you can be buried on top of me.’ Jannings’ guts on the floor and Cain Ball’s nail in the head have turned into Father’s nectar extraction and Mother’s knives in the bed – or, to take a beautiful concentrated example, the naked feet of Father sticking straight up from his trash-barrel immolation in an image that is both ridiculous and powerful. In all of these cases the risible or absurd features do not pull the rug out from under the emotional events they are features of. Rather, the effect is to fuse their absurdity with their authority and unironic force. It is important to acknowledge the persistence of a corrosive fierceness that has not at all disappeared from Brand upon the Brain! The occult and scary aspects of parental power, Sis’s jerking hands, Father’s rigor-mortised corpse and torched extinction – these are all as disturbing as the most exaggerated violences of Maddin’s earlier films. But they are not stamped so implacably with the imprint of Pythonesque ridiculousness. Perhaps none of them is quite such a spectacular example as the perfect bipolar vertigo of the severed hands in Cowards, but they carry the same sense of a synthesis of antithetical elements that Maddin would previously have had to

Brand upon the Brain

311

present as vibrating opposites. And they are accompanied by elements of sweetness and delight that also have their predecessors in Maddin’s work, but never in quite so crystallized a form. The charm and elegance of harp-playing Wendy, of Fantômas Chance and commando Chance, of Sis in frilly underwear, of the Kissing Gloves and the mock wedding, of the orphan choir, represent a realm of the movie in which silliness and affection can unite as triumphantly as absurdity and awe do in the darker moments. One could simply call all of these things subsets of a particularly successful outing of Maddin’s surrealist imagination, or even a kind of breakthrough revision of Maddin’s surrealist method. It seems to me that these achievements are fundamentally enabled by the filmmaker’s breakthrough on another level – the level of memory and untrammelled feeling. It just seems as though some kind of blockage has been removed, and now everything flows more smoothly: not just the attainment of a goal of emotional expression, but all these integrations of opposites as well. Everything occurs under the sign of Guy’s sad-sweet immersion in the font of meaning, in early experience, and the psychic landscape that then effortlessly opens up, vast and fertile, and makes all things possible. What was the dominion of forgetfulness has now become the dominion of remembering, and the numbed sleepwalker of Maddin’s earlier films has become a quivering sensibility in direct synaesthetic contact with every fleck of childhood experience, a soul riven with sorrow who sees with utter fullness and clarity ‘the past, the past’ with all its ‘secrets, secrets’ – to such an extent, indeed, that the experience blots out the present and leaves ‘the future, the future’ as a kind of hysterical emptiness. The memorious condition is so overwhelming that it is the Brand upon the Brain. What a distance Maddin has come from cold films like Dead Father and Gimli Hospital through blocked films like Archangel and Careful, through the detour from Twilight to Dracula to the ‘heartless’ but anguished Cowards, and now to something like the Sacred Heart of Guy in Brand. Of course it was Cowards that took the crucial new step, but its mythological method was quite different. I will offer a ridiculous comparison: Cowards is Maddin’s Iliad, all savage conflict between merciless combatants in the grip of primal drives, and Brand is his Sorrows of Young Werther, all throbbing sensitivity seeking to put its finger on the very centre of feeling. The tidal-wave moments of Brand upon the Brain! are truly something new in Maddin’s cinema. As the rememberer is being swept away in them, the intertitles cry out ‘all things will happen again!’ ‘and again!’ ‘and again!’

312

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

‘and again!’ ‘and again!’ – an exclamation that captures the condition of memory itself and seems to exemplify some space of utter, primal truth for Maddin. In the DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True, he says: As a child, I always had this feeling that everything would happen again. Somehow I always felt that my emotional responses to things were inadequate to them. You know, if someone died in the family, or if a baby was born, or someone got married, I kind of flatlined for some reason, I had a little circuit-breaker that always went off, and I failed to deliver the proper emotional response. I could sometimes fake it, but I never felt it. And I would often tell myself, for some reason – this is from earliest childhood, like when I was pretending to be thrilled by a birthday gift that I really was thrilled at receiving, but somehow still faking my exhilaration – that next time this happened, next time, you know, my Uncle Herb died – it wasn’t next time an uncle died, it was next time my Uncle Herb died – I would have the proper response. Something very early on taught me not to have an uninhibited response, and that was a good thing, for some reason. It enabled me to sort of go through life anaesthetized, but sort of accumulate a stockpile, a massive inventory, of memories to be experienced properly, with proper emotions, later. And I started to wonder if that second time would just be when I’d die, I’m falling off a building or something and my life’s flashing before me, that then in an explosive orgy of emotions I would finally get to experience everything properly, before splattering myself onto the sidewalk. But then I realized the second time is actually to myself personally when I’m making these movies, and I’m finally beginning to understand what it was I went through.

From this perspective we can understand that sensation we may have when looking at Brand upon the Brain! that it is reaching a new level of expression for the filmmaker, a kind of goal long approached but never fully attained. And we can see it, too, as a reflexive film, a work that contains within itself the model of its own working, and in fact the model of Maddin’s whole cinema, where the past, in every sense of that term, comes back again and again.

10

My Winnipeg (2007)

I wanted to portray Winnipeg the way American cities are portrayed in Hollywood mythology. I wanted to give Winnipeg a profile of mythic proportions. That’s all. I didn’t want it to be as famous or glorious as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, but I wanted it to exist like Cleveland, Kansas City or some of those second-drawer American cities do. People who haven’t visited them still have a vague idea what they’re like. I wanted the world to have the same vague idea what Winnipeg is like. – Guy Maddin1

A feature-length documentary film certainly represented something of a departure for Maddin, even given the fact that he had not long before directed the quarter-hour documentary My Dad Is 100 Years Old for Isabella Rossellini. Michael Burns, president of the Documentary Channel in Canada, commissioned Maddin to make a movie about his home town, enjoining him to ‘make it your Winnipeg, enchant me.’2 Maddin says that his first concept was like a combination of ‘[W.G.] Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and I Vitelloni set in the Winnipeg of Italy.’3 The film was scripted in a fairly detailed fashion, and George Toles was asked to write all the dialogue for the family re-enactments. The project was quite firmly shaped going in, then, even though the project underwent some alterations and additions during shooting. The voice-over narration was written and delivered personally by the director. The budget was $500,000 and shooting occurred over a ten-day period, in a bewildering variety of media: Super-16mm film, 16mm film, Super-8mm film, miniDV video, HD video, and cell phone, in addition to archival footage formats.4 Oddly, although there were high-profile festival and then

314

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

theatrical screenings across North America and the United Kingdom, and an avalanche of positive reviews in major outlets, the film was late getting a Canadian television screening, owing to the vaporization of the Documentary Channel by its owner, the CBC.5 Maddin describes the completed 80-minute film as a ‘docu-fantasia,’ which seems like an appropriate term given that it is a mixture of civic and personal history all of which is presented as true even though much of it is certainly not.6 The film’s organizing structure and procedural logic are as unusual as anything in Maddin’s cinema, but they have not prevented it from being probably his most popular feature film, in the sense that it reaches audiences in demographics that would normally never go near his work, especially older people.7 This popularity is in itself a surprising and intriguing phenomenon. One reason may be that the film’s project of taking the unremarkable and isolated city of Winnipeg and revealing its history as more complex and bizarre than you might think, with a deeper set of symptoms of and resonances with its inhabitants and their memories and personalities, can easily prompt viewers into reflections of how their own locales have a similar status – and the nostalgic and grievingfor-the-past elements of the film can speak to older viewers particularly. Another reason may simply be the personal directness and confessional loquacity of the filmmaker’s narrative voice. A very high proportion of My Winnipeg is black and white, with the remainder consisting of a bit of colour period material and some contemporary video footage. There are some sequences in ‘tinted’ monochrome of silhouette cutout-animation à la Lotte Reiniger. The black and white material, as already indicated, is from a variety of sources, but some of the newly shot material bears the marks of Maddin’s habitual ‘degradation’ of his images – especially the scenes of residential areas at night, where flaring streetlights and blurred edges are the companions of restricted resolution and exaggerated contrast – although Maddin’s usual methods of creating heavy grain and introducing dirt and scratches are not as widespread. There is much use of back projection and multiple exposure to combine historical materials with new restagings. Other than the scenes of family re-enactment, there is no dialogue and very little live sound, only voice-over narration and multitudes of intertitles, with a soundtrack enlivened by effects and music. The combination of narration, intertitles, sound effects, and music is exactly the modus of Brand upon the Brain!, so that much of My Winnipeg can be called with at least a degree of accuracy a silent film. But at the same time, this combination (except for intertitles) is quite common among

My Winnipeg

315

historical documentaries by filmmakers who have no thought of recapturing the aesthetic of silent cinema, so My Winnipeg definitely feels like less of a silent film than its two predecessors do. To begin The first thing we see is a scene of Ann Savage (in the role of Maddin’s mother) running through the lines of the dramatized confrontation with her daughter that we will see in full later in the film, prompted from offscreen by Maddin’s own voice giving line readings. It is a rote and unconvincing performance, and, by including it and featuring it so strongly to begin, the film seems to want to indicate a gulf between intention and execution. We move then to a montage of archival and contemporary footage of city, accompanied by a truly dreadful boosterist song from, as it were, the 1940s or 1950s, ‘Wonderful Winnipeg,’ rendered by a deep baritone voice, and this serves to introduce the credits. As the film proper begins, we are in a primitive-looking railway passenger compartment inhabited by a handful of sleeping and almost-sleeping men. They are dressed in cold-weather apparel: winter jackets, toques, gloves. Half-empty bottles grasped in semi-unconscious hands testify to a substantial alcohol consumption, and a large, partially consumed roll of cold sausage hangs from a string affixed to the roof of the compartment, so that the atmosphere begins to resemble something from an Eastern European railway car of a century ago. (One wonders if this could be a remnant of Maddin’s little I Vitelloni band of brothers.) Through the window we see snow-covered landscapes, though, as we look more carefully, not landscapes that you would see from a train – rather streets and buildings that you would see from a car driving through Winnipeg on a winter night. The principal personage in this compartment is ‘Guy Maddin’ (played by Darcy Fehr, who has already performed the role once in Cowards Bend the Knee), lolling in sleep or doziness, struggling for consciousness as ‘his’ voice on the soundtrack (the actual Guy Maddin’s voice) talks about how he has to finally leave Winnipeg, has to wake up in order to leave Winnipeg, has to wake up and stop dreaming and sleepwalking as goals that seem identical to leaving Winnipeg. ‘What if?’ repeatedly ask both the narrator’s voice and the intertitles: what if I were really able to leave, what if I really did leave? This scene is the film’s narrative locus, to which it returns with great regularity throughout its entirety, accompanied often by insistent close-ups of a train’s steam whistle screaming madly. It is from this state of desperate somnolence that all

316

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

of the subsequent episodes illustrating the city’s past and present, and the filmmaker’s, are imagined or remembered or projected. Right from the beginning My Winnipeg is overtly reflexive, since the narrating voice expresses this last big push to get out of town as an effort to ‘film my way out.’ And now we begin the movie’s succession of discrete sections, each illustrating a particular event of history or point being made by the film. The Forks, the lap, the fur Winnipeg is described as a lap, because in aerial or map view it is centred on a groinlike Y formed by the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. This junction, known as the Forks, is associated by card-carrying Surrealist Maddin with the zone of female reproduction: the Forks are the generating lap that gives birth to the city of Winnipeg. And moving, as he always does in the film, easily across the boundary between personal and social history, he also associates it with the lap of his own mother, who of course gave birth to him. Images of the riverine Y and the Y of a naked female lap are superimposed to accomplish this fusion of private and public. It also accomplishes the fusion of a poetic but still rational geographic and biological account of things with some other, occult, sphere of explanation. The Aboriginal First Nations people speak of a subterranean river system duplicating the visible one and running directly beneath it, and impute great and mystical powers to this hidden and secret river-juncture.8 These are then ‘the Forks beneath the Forks,’ and are, as a title tells us, ‘Magnetic!’ The narrator’s voice evokes the forces surrounding the city’s origins – the Native peoples, the animals, the hunters and fur traders, the geography of ‘the Forks and the Forks beneath the Forks’ – and sinks into a formulation of these foundational elements, and his own, in the repeated mantric phrase, ‘the Forks, the lap, the fur.’ Again, this phrase combines the external world of geographic and historical Winnipeg with his own world, since the lap belongs both to the river junction and to his mother, and the fur belongs both to the animals, hunters, and traders and to his mother’s lap: ‘the woolly lap, the hunted lap.’ And by this point in the film we have already discovered to what an extent the narration will utilize the simple, hypnotic repetition of words and phrases as a poetic tool. It is the technique of ‘the past! the past!’ from Brand upon the Brain!, now variegated and extended, and attempting to call up the occult realm of fundamental hidden feelings and truths. Another biological metaphor is introduced, too: Winnipeg, as a pulsating retro-animated map shows

My Winnipeg

317

us, is geographically at the very centre of the North American continent, and is ‘the Heart of the Heart.’ Treasure hunt The film digs up a trivia nugget from the past of ‘always winter’ Winnipeg. As we look at period footage from the decades before World War II, the narrator tells us: Back in Winnipeg’s earliest years, the Canadian Pacific Railway used to sponsor an annual treasure hunt. This contest required our citizens to wander our city in a day-long combing of our streets and neighbourhoods. First prize was a one-way ticket on the next train out of town. The idea being that once someone had spent an entire day looking this closely at his own home town, he would never want to leave. The real treasure was right here all along. And you know what? Not one treasure hunt winner ever got on that train and left. Not one. Not in a hundred years.

Who can say how much of this concoction is historical fact? Anything at all? No? Here is an evocation of a boosterist civic pride from a more naïve earlier time where, who knows, perhaps one of its manifestations was as bizarre as this – as bizarre as the song ‘Wonderful Winnipeg,’ whose heartfelt schlock salesmanship is cringe-making but recognizable. Maddin’s astonishment at, understanding, and, ultimately, envy of the impossibly innocent social beliefs and subject positions of an earlier era has been a feature of his filmic world ever since Tales from the Gimli Hospital (another local story) and Archangel, and here it links up with the film’s organizing metaphor to present the spectacle of a century of Winnipeggers who, like Maddin, never left home either, but made the decision on the basis of careful inspection rather than slug-headed inertia. As we look at the cheerful citizens of earlier eras going about their business in the period footage, we can feel Maddin simultaneously thinking ‘what’s wrong with them?’ and ‘why aren’t I like them?’ – and also ‘maybe they could be like that back then, but we can’t any more.’ Sleepwalking in Winnipeg Already in the film Maddin has emphasized the theme of ‘sleepiness’ as his more or less permanent condition, and now he goes on to impute the characteristic to the entire city. ‘Why don’t I leave Winnipeg?’ becomes

318

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

an unspoken ‘why don’t all Winnipeggers leave?’ It is because of their sleepiness, their unwillingness or inability to wake up. ‘Why can’t we just open our eyes? Is it the mystically paired river forms? The biomagnetic influence of our bison? The powerful northern lights? We dunno. We sleep.’ Winnipeg, the narrator tells us, ‘has ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world.’ Its citizen carry the keys to all their former houses and apartments in case they should return to them while asleep, and a city by-law compels the new owners to let them in and allow them to sleep if off in their old premises.9 These fantastic animadversions and assertions take place to the visual accompaniment of blurred black and white small-format footage of snow-covered Winnipeg streets and residential areas by night, the quality, and even the content, somewhat reminiscent of Canadian community television broadcasts of the 1970s. These stark, empty landscapes take on simultaneous qualities of boring everydayness and existential dread, the freezing darkness illuminated by streetlights just as cold. Through composite shots of them, in zombiemovie or film-noir manner, sleepwalk the silhouettes of Winnipeggers. Back in the railway car carrying the dozing Darcy Fehr, mother’s head appears gigantic in the compartment window, a supernaturally potent figure who recalls the enormous nagging Jewish mother in the sky over Manhattan in ‘Oedipus Wrecks,’ the Woody Allen episode of New York Stories, only without the humour. Her omniscient, all-penetrating image – a kind of variation on the surveilling mother of Brand upon the Brain! – is like a silent command for the film to move closer to her primary domain, the filmmaker’s childhood. My home And so the topic of former domiciles segues into the subject of Maddin’s own childhood home, the combination beauty salon and living spaces at 800 Ellice Avenue. This building, formerly Lil’s Beauty Salon, long since sold and now occupied by Tam’s Custom Tailor, will already be familiar to Maddin-watchers on account of its appearance in Cowards Bend the Knee and in many of his printed and verbal reminiscences. Old Maddin family photos and home movies begin to appear, as the film draws us now into the particular life of the filmmaker’s childhood. The narrating voice forsakes its trancelike gloom and becomes almost chipper as it identifies his parents, his sister and two brothers, his ‘long dead’ pet chihuahua Toby. His own self is there, too – a dome-headed little guy seven years younger than the next youngest sibling, posed in family

My Winnipeg

319

Mother knows all, sees all, Part II. The angry surveilling head of Mother at the train window. A multiple exposure.

photos, running around in a pint-sized derby hat, spraying the side of his house with a hose, playing with toys. Then the salon is sumptuously evoked, with a barrage of old photos and the narration moving back to incantatory poetic conjurations of perfumes, clouds of hairspray, ‘the smells of female vanity and desperation,’ sights of ranked hairdryers and other paraphernalia, hair sweepings and chutes, period coiffures hailed as ‘Helmets!’ These memories are so much warmer and more alive than the streets we have been looking at, and the people, of course, so much less anonymous. (But the narrator does remark somewhat less happily that ‘at school I reeked of hair product’ as well as of corn plasters, barbicide, girdles, and talc.) The building itself is next up, reduced to an abstract shape – ’White. Block. House.’ – and related impressionistically to other house and building shapes in the surrounding streets and elsewhere in the town. ‘I can’t stop dreaming of this home,’ the narrator says. ‘But the waking is bitter. Bitter. Bitter.’ Not for the first or last time,

320

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

one wonders just what the sleep state and the waking states are. If the dream is so sweet – ’I love this shop’ – why is it so important to wake up, to leave? What is the relation between the warm, sweet dream and the cold, oppressive streets? Are they opposite sides of the same coin? Is it the condition of an intoxicating inner life of dreaming the past together with a hostile and meaning-poor external life through which the subject has been disavowingly sleepwalking for decades? Cold is good A little section next on the joys of Winnipeg winter. Period photos of people having a grand old time skating and cross-country skiing, family photos of little Guy and his toboggan, these seem to say that even though Winnipeg is a ‘frozen hellhole’10 it’s a fun frozen hellhole. In a fine example of the negative boosterism that pervades the film, the narrator briskly claims: ‘We’re the coldest city in the world.’ This is a dubious claim,11 but no one outside the high north would argue too much with the proposition that Winnipeg winters are seriously cold. What is noteworthy is the reversal of normal categories whereby everything oppressive is embraced and anything less miserable is ignored (we see very little of the seven months of perfectly acceptable weather that Winnipeg gets every year, and hear nothing about its higher than average ratio of sunlight). Anyway, ‘I like winter,’ Maddin has often been heard to explain – for example, when describing the killing temperatures during the Saddest Music shoot. And My Winnipeg makes even stronger statements, the narrator trumpeting: ‘Happiness! Dazzling outdoor happiness for anyone who cares to put on a pair of mitts and embrace it!’ But how does this winter of joyful activity tally with the lifeless winter nights we have already seen in this film, with their sense of a dead, cold, zombielike, or sleepwalking soul? If the Winnipeggers sleepwalking through these frozen nights to their old homes are asleep because of the winter desolation, are the winter revellers of this part of the film awake, or asleep? Happyland The difficult idea of happiness, and the (for this film) counterintuitive notion of happy Winnipeggers, lead to a reminiscence of ‘Winnipeg’s own Luna Park,’ the large Happyland amusement facility, which opened in 1906. It was a fun-filled fairground of rides and amusements of every kind, illustrated here with advertisements and souvenir colour postcards,

My Winnipeg

321

and photographs of happy visitors. There is something didactic about the film’s conception and disposition of this entity. The narrator exclaims: ‘Wind-chilled Ferris wheels and roller coasters enveloped themselves in frost – half the year. A happyland for us wintry Winnipeggers. Happyland. Keeping us happy.’ And an intertitle chimes in: ‘Happiness!’ This place and the idea it embodies is posited, almost like an algebraic symbol, as a locus of civic happiness: there was a time when Winnipeg was happy, and Happyland, as it were, proves it. If it is not a mathematical truth, it is at least a mathematical proposition. But the actual happy life of Happyland was brief, its subsequent history pathetic. It closed after three years, and its slowly decaying remains became the site of evermore-inglorious attractions before being destroyed in the early 1920s. The essence of Happyland – and the essence of happiness for both Winnipeg and Maddin – is that it was brief, long past, and irrecoverable. Re-enactment I The idea of a once-experienced happiness that may perhaps be re-attained produces the next development. Spurring himself again with the commandment to ‘wake up’ so he can leave, the narrator has the idea that ‘maybe I can film my way out.’ So arrives the first of the movie’s re-enactments of scenes from Maddin’s domestic childhood. ‘I need to make my own Happyland – back at 800 Ellice,’ he says, and explains how he has rented the old house for a month, hired actors to play his siblings, and convinced his mother to play herself. What does it mean for the film’s Maddin to make his own Happyland? Happiness in the middle of freezing desolation becomes then a description not just of Happyland, but of Maddin’s childhood, and the winter of his discontent is then everything that has happened to him since the passing of that happy time. To reconstruct this personal Happyland will then be to actualize and demystify it, and thus to free him of its grip. But is this so wise? Will it not leave him exactly where the protagonist of Brand upon the Brain! is left, with ghosts who have finally been recognized as ghosts, a past which is exorcized of its haunting power through the process of acting out its own extinction, and at last ‘Guy – utterly alone’? This may resolve itself into the question of what actually is outside Winnipeg. Clearly that will be ‘the future! the future!’ but in Brand that turned out to be a harrowing prospect. Still, it is odd to say the least that the specific reconstructions from this personal Happyland should range from the irritating to the traumatic,

322

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

and that incomparably the most powerful figure in it should be represented as a personage with a more than passing resemblance to a harpy. The radically unstable truth-status of the film is embodied nowhere more succinctly than in the narrator’s bland assertion that the woman we are looking at is his actual mother, when she is obviously not his actual mother but the B-movie hard-boiled femme-fatale legend Ann Savage, eighty-six years old at the time of My Winnipeg. Savage (nomen est omen) is known almost exclusively for her appearance in Edgar G. Ulmer’s ultracheap film noir Detour (1946), the most universally celebrated B-movie in Hollywood history. There, she plays a memorably venom-spitting hitchhiker picked up by the hapless Tom Neal, whom she blackmails into a criminal conspiracy before he accidentally strangles her from an adjoining room with a telephone cord. In his voice-over narration, Neal says of his first impression of her, ‘Man, she looked like she’d just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world,’ and she herself is a fountain of poisonous wisecracks, such as her imputation that Neal has bludgeoned to death his former travelling companion: ‘What’d ya do, kiss him with a wrench?’ Savage has become a little fetish-object for Detour’s legions of cult admirers, but Maddin was able to coax her out of retirement because this role was age-appropriate and seemed to offer something different from the stereotype she had been caught in for sixty years.12 But of course Maddin too is only interested in her because she was once ‘the most ferocious femme fatale in film noir history,’13 because those heroic powers of aggression are just what the doctor ordered for a depiction of the phantasmagoric mother of his psychic landscape. Still, this mythic and terrifying figure is immediately put to specific work in a posture of comic incongruity. For the first reconstruction is ‘Experiment 1a – the Hallway Runner,’ which features this quasi-supernatural gorgon supervising the straightening of a carpet. This activity, says the narrator, was something we did every exasperating day of my childhood. An unbelievable source of frustration for everyone. For the rug could actually never be straightened out, no matter how much anyone pulled from either end. And mother always nagged from the sidelines.

The radical discrepancy between mythic power and absurdly mundane pettiness was a maternal feature already fully explored in Brand upon the Brain! (with pre-echoes as far back as Zenaida’s strictures in Careful), but its fascination is something that age cannot wither nor custom stale. Its

My Winnipeg

323

position at the exact intersection between unconscious and conscious, emotion and reason, childhood and grown-up-ness hits the very centre of Maddin’s creative project. How to reconcile the utterly incompatible forces of fathomless unconscious feeling and ironic hyperawareness of limitation and triviality? It is a question even more relevant to the quasihistorical project of My Winnipeg if it is put in its corollary form: how to reconcile rich and fertile memory with the despoiled, deflated, and oppressively meaningless condition of the self and the city as they are felt to be now? From this perspective it is easy to understand why the film – the narration, the editing, the musical soundtrack – perk up so noticeably once the game of childhood-reconstruction begins. Partly it is because we are now, as it were, in the past, the place where everything real and vivid exists, the place that sleepwalking is trying to get to. And partly it is the game-playing activity itself: the dress-up and make-believe with lots of room for mischievous fun, the opportunity to convert inchoate desires and fears into a toylike fetish object as a way of fending off anxiety – an activity that Maddin has revelled in not only from the absolute beginning of his career, but doubtless all the way back into his childhood itself. Maybe tobogganing in the winter is declaimed to be fun, but this is really fun. In this context mother’s awesome and frightening power really is best put to use tyrannizing over the straightening of the hall runner, and even annoyances and frustrations can be welcomed back cheerfully. An indication of more traumatic forces that might also be present occurs as the family assembles in the living room to watch television. The first thing to observe here is that the family group assembled for this reconstruction is missing two fundamental participants. Guy’s dead brother Cameron (Brendan Cade) is there, along with his other two siblings, Ross (Wesley Cade) and Janet (Amy Stewart), and his mother – and also the lady who is subletting the premises to the film and refuses to leave – but he himself is not, and neither is his father, except in symbolic form. Why is Guy not present? Well, he is present on the soundtrack and behind the camera, is even heard giving directions – and his alter ego is in that railway compartment – but his childhood self is not part of the reconstruction. In this realm My Winnipeg reproduces the autobiographical landscape of Cowards Bend the Knee, where the child Guy who actually experienced the salon and the Arena is missing also. But Brand upon the Brain! had presented the child Guy, and with great effect. Perhaps Maddin couldn’t find the right actor, or perhaps he felt that in order to be

324

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

able to observe the scene properly he had to be definitively outside it. But it is a striking omission. The narrator wants to exclude his father from this domestic scene, a fact that he just states baldly: ‘The scope of this experiment excludes my father, and I decide to keep him out of the formula.’ He offers no further explanation. Perhaps father was not a feature of the TV-watching ritual. Perhaps he was away at work. Indeed, when we recall that Maddin’s father held a full-time paying job14 in addition to all his work for Winnipeg hockey teams, it would make sense that there couldn’t have been too many hours left in the day for him to spend at home; and we may then remember Father from Brand upon the Brain!, ‘always working!’ and never present for mealtimes or other daily domestic activities. But, says the narrator: My mother, missing him terribly since his death some thirty years ago, lobbies strongly for his inclusion. We settle on a compromise, and pretend we’ve had him exhumed and reburied in the living room, beneath a mound of earth concealed by the area rug. This seems to buy her off.

This is outrageous and funny, especially when Mother is not actually part of any of these deliberations at all, except as an imaginary viewpoint in the filmmaker’s head. If she were being consulted, the film seems to say, she would insist on Chas’ presence, and the persistence and perceived grotesqueness of her devotion to her late husband’s memory – somehow a denial of his death and absence – can be most vividly captured in an exhumation scenario that continues the literal return-from-death scenarios of Maddin’s fathers all the way back to The Dead Father. Most recently, in Brand upon the Brain!, the father was exhumed and Frankensteinianly electrified back to undeadness by the mother, and then carried around with her on all her travels packed in a harp case. In My Winnipeg the mother is not really there (although the narrator is pretending that she is) and the father not really exhumed, either, but just represented by a human-shaped lump of dirt wrapped in a carpet that sits in front of the television set, serving as a convenient backrest for the children. The scene is one more casually, brilliantly surreal Maddin rendering of the sense that the family incorporates every absurdity and horror into an untroubled daily routine. Meanwhile, Chas’ actual absence from this and all other re-enactments remains an important one: he inhabits another part of the film, another part of the psyche, one in which it is the mother who is missing.

My Winnipeg

325

LedgeMan That show the family watches is a local production called LedgeMan, ‘the only television drama ever produced in Winnipeg.’ The narrator tells us: Every day – the show runs at noon – the same oversensitive man takes something said the wrong way, climbs out on a window ledge, and threatens to jump. And every day, his mother appears at the nearest window and tells him to remember all the reasons for living. By the end of each episode the son is convinced to come in to safety. But the next day he is back out there again.

But while mother Ann Savage is sitting placidly in front of the television show, she is also appearing in the show. The narrator spells out the mise en abyme: on the one hand, ‘my mother’s been the female lead in this show since 1956’ (the year of Maddin’s birth), and on the other, ‘Mother has never missed a day [of viewing] in the 50 years the show has been broadcast.’ Meanwhile LedgeMan himself is being played by Darcy Fehr, so that Guy is, in a sense, on television even if he isn’t in the family. The episode we see is shot in low-def monochrome video and viewed on rounded-corners TV screen – again a nice reproduction of fifty-year-old television. The whole concept is wonderful. The daily broadcast of an identical dramatic situation simultaneously captures the clichéd repetitions of daytime soap opera and the obsessive return of scenarios playing themselves out in the unconscious. Meanwhile the principal subjects of the drama are at once participants and observers in a fashion that precisely stages the action of memory, and their trauma is both wrenching and cheesily banal. The tinny musical accompaniment is a splendid example of the menacing cheap expressionism of B-production scores of the 1940s and 1950s, and the dialogue has a similarly off-the-shelf hysterical intensity. (‘Don’t try to sweet-talk me! Talk, talk, talk! All you do is talk! I’m going to do it for real this time!’) Other dialogue content, though, takes on the delightful yet horrifying contours of a more personal ritual repetition. Mother’s first position is nagging attack and vengeful self-pity: ‘Don’t think that they don’t know you’re a coward and a baby who has to get his own way all the time,’ and ‘You’re looking pretty cocky now that you’ve given me shingles.’ But then it metamorphoses into gestures of reconciliation and love that nevertheless retain the flavour of narcissism: ‘In spite of what you think, you have never been a disappointment to me. Why, when you were a child model

326

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

for Hudson Bay, I was so full of pride I could hardly breathe. That little check suit! And not a hair out of place!’ It ends, like Guy’s similar reunion with Mother in Brand, with ‘I love you, mom.’ Of course the position of the Fehr/Maddin LedgeMan every day at noon, on the brink and ready to jump, exactly duplicates the last posture of ‘Guy Maddin’ in that film – a disturbing suicidal note appearing now in Maddin’s last two features. We may also note a reversal of the suicide-threat-as-family-negotiation scenario from the one present in that film, where it was Mother who was threatening to kill herself in response to any domestic difficulty.15 Together, these representations of the Maddin family landscape as filtered through the consciousness of its littlest member and his play-acting activities as a grown-up filmmaker are boiled down to exchanges of : ‘I’ll kill myself!’ and ‘No, I’ll kill myself!’ The excesses of melodramatic histrionics have become comically tickling even as they bear the shadow of a condition that is not funny at all. The Wolesley Elm Next comes the brief episode of the Wolesley Elm, a large old tree growing in a small grassy island in the middle of residential Wolesley Avenue. This tiny item was, the narrator tells us, listed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not as ‘the world’s smallest park.’ In 1957 the city slated it for destruction, and it was defended by outraged local residents, notably a squad of whitehaired old ladies, who (as we see in period photos) surrounded the tree with linked arms to prevent city crews from getting to it. Police wagons arrived to take them away, and the demonstration escalated as more and more citizens came on the scene until the mayor himself told the crews to go home. A victory! But ‘later that week, vandals, obviously working for the city, blew up the tree with dynamite.’ And so the episode ends, with the narrator’s mournful question: ‘What if City Hall ever listened to the wishes of the people?’ What is this little item doing in the film? The quirky aspects of old ‘biddies’ fiercely defending the neighbourhood are clearly a crucial attraction – there is not very much in this film that doesn’t have a faintly surreal touch – but the narrative here clearly fits into one of the film’s major themes: that, in Winnipeg, everything good comes to an end, that all efforts to stop the destructive tide of time are futile. The General Strike From the trivial to the genuinely important. The minuscule drama of the Wolesley Elm is succeeded by the biggest event in Winnipeg’s history

My Winnipeg

327

– the General Strike of 1919. This six-week struggle is featured in every Canadian history survey textbook, and maintains an honourable place in school curricula even amid the rightward inch of national politics over the past couple of decades. Indeed, it has an international significance as well, being the first important general strike in the anglophone world, a potential flashpoint in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the long struggles for workers’ rights in the United States, and a harbinger of the 1926 General Strike in Britain. Arising spontaneously from the combustible mixture of high inflation and low wages, it spread throughout every city union including the police, and eventually brought out on strike over 30,000 people in a city of 175,000. It was met by a coalition of owners and social elites, backed by the provincial and federal governments, finally put down violently by specially hired constables and the Northwest Mounted Police (on ‘Bloody Saturday’), and followed by emergency amendments to existing legislation to deport or imprison the Strike Committee leadership. Those workers who were allowed to return to employment did so at the old wages, and in the short term the General Strike may be said to have been a complete failure. But its profoundly disturbing example was such that in a longer term it contributed materially to better working conditions and more favourable labour legislation, as well as to more effective political organization on the left (including the foundation of a Canadian social democratic political party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation – now the New Democratic Party). Altogether it is a proud badge in the history of a city that has maintained an allegiance to labour. Maddin’s treatment begins with historical photographs, agitprop intertitles, and a cutout-animation section illustrating a key moment in which a streetcar piloted by strike-breakers was overturned by demonstrators, precipitating the mounted police charge and volley. Maddin appears to get some facts wrong, as when he aligns returning soldiers with the strike-breakers rather than the demonstrators, but in any event the political and social analysis is fairly cursory, and the ‘up the workers’ rhetoric rather generic. What is remarkable, and totally characteristic, is the way this section very soon veers wildly off the main road onto the bizarre side street of the role in the 1919 strike of Saint Mary’s Academy for Girls, a nun-run Catholic school for the daughters of the bourgeoisie. The workers’ struggle is all very well, but the hysteria on everybody’s part – nuns, parents, and not least Guy Maddin – at the prospect of barely pre-pubescent girls threatened by early ravishment is pure catnip to the filmmaker. With vile Bolshevik workers probably from the shtetls of Eastern Europe prowling the streets in front of the school, barbed-wire

328

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

barricades are erected and manned by priests and the fat-cat fathers of the pupils. In back-projection and double-exposure shots, the defence of this line is shown, together with idealized images of praying virginal girls, nuns juxtaposed with rifles, circles of flame representing the feared onslaught of rapists, and Reiniger animations of nuns scarifying the pupils with bulging-crotched demons. (Some of this seems like a reversion all the way to the vocabulary of the ‘LOVE’ section of Archangel.) Maddin makes an explicit connection between the bourgeois property owners’ fear that workers will take control of society and the bourgeois fathers’ fear that unlicensed animalistic males will sexualize their daughters. This linkage of political and sexual repression might be placed in a line of descent from sub-Freudian political thinkers like Wilhelm Reich or Norman O. Brown, but probably owes its DNA, rather, to Luis Buñuel – both the Buñuel of L’Âge d’or with its outraged and outrageous bourgeois caricatures and the Buñuel of Viridiana with its religious perversities and movie-long assault on the virginity of a nun. A contemporary (say, Žižekian) psychoanalytic/political analysis would have no difficulty in simply explaining that patriarchy’s fear of losing political and economic power and its fear of losing gender and family power are fundamentally the same anyway, but Maddin is far from such a discourse. It is somewhat startling nevertheless to find him characterizing capitalists’ anger at the prospect of losing ownership and fathers’ anger at the prospect of their twelve-year-old daughters being raped in the same intertitle phrase: ‘Fears of the Inevitable.’ The film’s own subversive appetites emerge completely from behind the bushes in the extension of this historical moment to the present, when the narrator first reminisces about being surrounded by girls from S.M.A.G. as a little boy, fussed over and petted by them, and then about seeing them sometimes even now leaning against trees in the snow-covered grounds of the school taking cigarette breaks. The camera looks at some of these smoking Lolitas longingly, and for a moment the narrator seems to take on the persona of a stalker. The idea of ‘delinquent girls’ inflames his eternally adolescent imagination, and he caresses the phrase as if savouring its delicious taste. It all culminates in the retropop-culture intertitle: ‘Academy of the Ultravixens.’ This is hardly the first time that twelve-year-old girls have set Maddin’s heart beating (he was drafting girls of about that age to play nurses already in Tales from the Gimli Hospital), and the same erotic undercurrents will be found again later in My Winnipeg.

My Winnipeg

329

Re-enactment II Pivoting on the recollection that ‘nothing stokes my mother’s engines more’ than ‘delinquent girls,’ the film heads back to the family living quarters for another restaging session. The delightful earlier re-enactment was probably too delightful, for this second one self-consciously girds itself to enter more frightening territory. The narrator introduces it like this: ‘One scene I’m really anxious to get at is the recreation of the time my sister hit a deer on the highway coming back from Kenora. I felt at the time my mother really overreacted. I need to view this episode again.’ The scene – very straightforwardly shot and edited throughout – begins with Janet’s arrival in great distress, and consists basically of her mother’s astounding reaction to her story and to the spectacle of the automobile dented and disfigured by animal blood and fur. Immediately the mother converts Janet’s account into a cover-up for some furtive sexual encounter between her daughter and either the motorist or some male on the track team: ‘I wasn’t born yesterday, dearie. Where did it happen? In the back seat? ... Did he pin you down, or did you just lie down and let nature take its course?’ This is the scene that we saw being rehearsed at the very beginning of the film, and viewers of Brand upon the Brain! will also recognize a return to the wars waged there between Mother and Sis. Here, although the terrain of the battleground is less extensive, the participants have their own names and we are given the specifics of an actual engagement. The mother we see in the present encounter is rather feebly characterized as ‘really overreacting’ – a better description would be ‘unhinged.’ One can see very clearly in this scene why Maddin wanted Ann Savage. She’s not actually very good, as the rehearsal has already warned us would be the case, but the point is that what is required to embody the incomprehensible hostility and cruelty of this personage is someone with the awe-inspiring aggressive powers of the heroine of Detour. There are a number of striking things about this sequence. One is that the mother who is absolutely the tutelary deity of the home so much missed, so warmly the centre of fundamental identity, is here almost casually presented as a vicious tormenter of demented-psychodrama proportions. In his project to ‘view this episode again,’ Maddin has presented it as a kind of parental atrocity, a clear case of emotional abuse – occurring, too, at a moment when the daughter is already greatly upset over a traumatic accident, and hence casting the participants with even

330

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

greater melodramatic starkness as perpetrator and victim. Having such a mother, one might suppose, would have been a hellish experience (even though Brand rather implies that Guy, as the baby of the family, may have been somewhat exempted from this reign of terror and the tyrant’s little favourite). But these excessive characterizations are at another level of Maddin’s cinema acknowledged as the lurid exaggerations of the unconscious. On the one hand, the sensibility experiencing and remembering the events is a child’s, a mental environment where everything is bigger than life and more cartoonishly vivid. And on the other, who does not recognize that emotional atrocities of one kind or another occur in practically every family, and that families routinely manage to survive them and even thrive in spite of them? But perspectives like these do not fundamentally interfere with the garish effect of Maddin’s motheras-noir-ultravillainess. What is truly surprising is to find the narrator taking a more doubtful stance than we as viewers are doing, and then, in a somewhat shaky leap, connecting Mother’s supernatural powers to a condition enveloping the whole city: My sister hit and killed a deer. My mother sees through this euphemism. For it is a euphemism. Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism. Mother understands in a second what this deer blood and fur means. And somehow she’s right. She can read our family and our civic secrets, our desire and our shame, as easily as she can read a newspaper.

What does this mean? Somehow hitting a deer on the highway is occultly connected with some kind of sin; somehow the sister’s distress and guiltlessness are masks for underlying impulses of transgression and concealment. This seems an outlandish thing to say. True, in Brand Sis’s behaviour really was sexually transgressive – but here? It is only by passing out of any kind of rational world and entering into a terrain of psychic transmutation that the unplumbable inner bog of desire, fear, and guilt can be seen as the objective truth of things, and that rational understanding can be always a ‘euphemism.’ On the personal, and childlike, level, this reduces to the uncanny conviction that mother, no matter how cruel or irrational she may appear, is always right, including about the contention that the sins of the child are always to blame for everything. The surveilling Mother of Brand puts in yet another appearance, now explicitly identified as an internalized phenomenon:

My Winnipeg

331

No matter where I am, I can feel her watching me. I can feel her hand on my shoulder when I’m out sleepwalking. Guiding me to my own bed. I don’t think it matters if she’s awake or asleep, living or dead. She’ll always know exactly what I’m doing.

And she’ll always know exactly what his feeble excuses and self-deceptions are; she’ll always be right that it’s his fault. She’ll always be looking out for him, but that will never be just a reassuring thing. Spiritualism The line ‘she can read our family and our civic secrets’ becomes a fairly transparent improvisation to get the film to its next subject: spiritualism and the occult in Winnipeg history. Like Mother, ‘Winnipeggers have always been skilled at reading past the surface and into the hidden depths of their city.’ And My Winnipeg plunges into a multitude of accounts of ghostly manifestations, table-rapping, communications with the beyond, and acres of icky ectoplasm. A man named Curious Lou Profeta went around ‘de-spooking furniture,’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ‘always cited Winnipeg as having the greatest psychic possibilities of any city he had ever visited,’16 and in the 1920s various highly placed citizens organized séances in a manner demonstrating just how respectable the activity was. The narrator recites these activities as the film is giving us photographic proof of supernatural events from the period, with subjects in trances and ectoplasm in great swaths flowing from noses and mouths, sometimes with the images of persons amazingly imprinted upon it. These photographs are taken from documentation of sessions at the house of Thomas Glendenning Hamilton17 (described in the film), which achieved a degree of international celebrity in their day, and which were the cause of Doyle’s enthusiasm during his 1923 Winnipeg visit.18 But spiritualism is hardly what it was eighty years ago, when it was nearing the end of a half-century vogue, and what we are presented with looks decidedly outré and even freakish, so that this secret history of Winnipeg almost starts to resemble a tabloid-weirdness exposé literature like that of Hollywood Babylon. As well, the spectacle of strange behaviour by people in expensive dresses and dinner jackets reinforces the film’s kinship with the director’s adored L’Âge d’or. Seeking ties that will bind his materials together, Maddin speculates that all these mystical goings-on may be related to the magnetism of the ‘Forks beneath the Forks’ and the pow-

332

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

erful mysteries of Aboriginal beliefs. It is hard to tell to what extent this whole rhetoric is hokum or self-hypnosis. But the ‘Spiritualism’ section, like so many episodes in My Winnipeg, serves multiple purposes. Here, in addition to the elements already mentioned, there is the fact that Winnipeg actually was a little centre of the practice earlier in the twentieth century, and, perhaps even more important, the fact that on a formal or metaphorical level the whole of the movie is a kind of séance in which things are coaxed back from the dead. The visual presentation has now become more active again, and the evocations of séances and other mystical content occur through multiple exposures, back projections, exclamatory intertitles, and re-enactments. One ‘event’19 strikes the filmmaker forcibly – a 1939 séance conducted in the foyer of the provincial legislative building by Gwyneth Lloyd, ballerina and co-founder that same year of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, one of the true cultural jewels in the city’s crown. Lloyd organized the session and declared that she would dance out messages from the beyond, and around the table Maddin shows us ‘incorruptible Mayor Cornish’ (a gnomelike fantasy figure in comedy white beard and glasses) and local madames, ‘shop stewards of our illustrious brothel collectives’ (one more example of the film’s uncontrollable urge to associate politics with sex). Cornish, as we will see later, is a largely non-existent personage who is Maddin’s representation of a kind of ur-Mayor from all earlier, more interesting eras of the city’s history. The group of distinguished citizens is gathered together in the foyer under the aegis of the Golden Boy (revealed now to be the Greek god Hermes) atop the legislature dome (revealed now to be constructed on a mystical Masonic architectural plan). The subsequent events form one of the film’s important set-pieces: a dramatization in music, dance, and cinematic poetry of a scenario whereby young Viscount Gort is cast into a trance, and ‘under the influence of Broken Head, the spirit buffalo,’ Gwyneth ‘becomes Otter Heart, the Raft Girl,’ and Mayor Cornish’s daughter Althea becomes ‘Estonea-pesta, Cree Princess of the Cold!’ On the soundtrack, the film abandons Jason Staczek’s inventive score to embrace Maddin’s bullseye choice of the Third-Act Prelude of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the perfect accompaniment to a full-scale ballet danced by these three participants, staged amid river reeds and back projections (they are played by members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet). The flowing lyricism of sections of Maddin’s other RWB movie, Dracula, appears again in this set-piece that stands almost apart from the film as a whole, and attains an almost pure expressive force in a context where the absurdities of made-up

My Winnipeg

333

mysticism and put-together heritage culture are no more an obstacle to actual poetic power than similar sillinesses have been in earlier Maddin films. Winter traces Back now to the dark depths of winter – a succession of freezing nocturnal dog-walks of Maddin’s girlfriend’s pug, Spanky, who also appears in the re-enactments and elsewhere and is definitely a dramatis persona.20 These slow traversals of snowbound streets under black skies and cold gleaming streetlights are probably the epicentre of the frozen heart of winter Winnipeg in the film. The ridiculous song that begins the section (‘It’s a moody Manitoba morning / nothin’s really happenin’ / it never does’) gets a sombre response, for, although Spanky seems to be having fun, the cameraman really can’t, owing to the awesome Dantesque desolation of the environment. The landscape is almost lunar. Meditating on how walking in new-fallen snow leaves a raised footprint after the surrounding loose snow has fallen away, the film swerves into the subject another set of traces – faded signs on building walls, discarded signs – as a way of reading the city as a palimpsest. The narrator’s uncategorical statement ‘Another civic law: you’re not allowed to destroy old signage’ is only one more of the film’s many blandly delivered whoppers. Then it’s back to the night-time winter streets, shots through an ice-covered car windshield of snow falling thickly onto an already thick blanket covering everything, and meditations on whether this is oppressive or comforting (it seems to be both, but the narrator doesn’t go in that direction). Now comes a section on the city’s back alleys, a parallel network of passageways as extensive as its streets, and this fits like a glove the film’s themes of secret characteristics and occult explanations, some system impenetrable to the naked eye and the conscious mind that may account for sleepwalking and the inability to leave. As the camera heads down these cramped back streets buried in snow, always at night, the images create a truly alien and isolated landscape, while the narrator is coming out with another ridiculous story about how each of the two major Winnipeg taxi companies has exclusive rights to one of these sets of routes. The Forks beneath the Forks, the reality beneath the reality, the streets behind the streets. Maddin finds time to slip in one more characteristic detail: the ‘hermaphrodite’ Lorette Avenue, half front street, half back lane. Even geography is sexual. To underline the point, a nude woman is seen leaning against a window in the train we are always returning to.

334

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

‘Heartsick Architecture’ Two more Winnipeg anomalies (and there is nothing about Winnipeg in this film that is not anomalous in one way or another) are now revealed in the architectural/topographical realm. The Arlington Street Bridge, manufactured a century ago in England, is a railway bridge of hulking mass. Its manufacturer is identified as ‘the Vulcan Iron Works of London,’ but in fact it was made at the Cleveland Iron Works in Birmingham.21 The abandoned Vulcan Iron Works in Winnipeg, meanwhile, was the soundstage for The Saddest Music in the World. This change of detail is entirely typical of the film’s relentless drive-by fabulation and the consequent production of a dense weave of fact and fantasy affecting even the most trivial matters and almost impossible to unpick. The narrator tells us that the bridge was ‘originally destined for Egypt, where it was to span the Nile, but a mistake in specs made the fit with that river impossible, and the bridge was sold at a bargain price to bargain-crazy Winnipeg.’ Images of the bridge’s ‘enfrosted steel girders’ are juxtaposed with footage of palm trees and desert sands, and those scenes also appear at the window where Darcy Fehr slumbers. The creaking and groaning of the bridge’s spans and joints are then described as a ‘turn[ing] in its sleep, when it is possibly dreaming of its lush and joyous originally intended home, and pops a girder out of place.’ The bridge too is asleep, and sleepwalking; it too regards its condition as one of isolation and alienation. And, since ‘the sounds that groan up from the yard at night resemble the agonies of some colossal arthritis,’ it may be described as suffering from advancing age and sickness, as the city as a whole seems to be felt by the film. The intended-for-the-Nile story is indeed a local legend, though unlikely to be based in fact given the gross discrepancies in width of the two rivers.22 The counterpart and coupled twin of the Arlington Street Bridge then turns out to be Garbage Hill, an accretion of landfill materials that grew into a little mountain and was grassed over for parkland. It is ‘the only hill in otherwise board-flat Winnipeg’ (not strictly true since there is a little river valley), used by children as a sleigh and toboggan run, though ‘it’s not uncommon for kids sliding down this hill to be impaled on a rusty piece of rail or an old car fender that’s been heaved up by the frost.’ So this feature of the landscape is both inauthentic and dangerous, something that is supposed to be natural (a hill) which is constructed of the ugliest detritus, a fake playground that kills kids. It is a fitting companion to a bridge thousands of miles away from where it should be that screams in pain. If one again asks the ques-

My Winnipeg

335

tion of what the criteria for narrativization are in this film, the answer here must again come back: something that symptomatizes the place’s sickness, forgottenness, isolation, inauthenticity, decay, pathology. But those dire qualities are just what make it home, just what make it lovable. Winnipeggers, the city is your mother, and you cannot help but love her; you are experiencing a form of the abused child syndrome in which the child must love the parent who abuses it. Whether this condition is truly that of Winnipeggers, or only of Maddin, is another question. Eaton’s Now, at around the 50-minute mark in this 80-minute movie, come two powerful linked tales of civic loss – the destruction of the grand Eaton’s department store in the heart of downtown, and of the Winnipeg Arena, home to all the important hockey teams in the city’s history. To accompany images of a wrecking ball swinging at the camera and a photo of the Eaton’s building manipulated to slide tragicomically beneath the surface of Broadway like the Titanic after hitting the iceberg of bankruptcy, the narrator informs us that at its height the store accounted for 65% of all retail sales in the city, and inveighs at local government for failing to find a new use for this gigantic building. Period photos provide a brief appreciation of a happier, healthier, more meaningful time – a time when the Winnipeg store was the largest outside Toronto and the centre of the mail order catalogue business to all of western Canada. I would just add that by the 1990s the same sad fate was overtaking Eaton’s stores in every city in Canada, ending in the dissolution of the company itself in 1999, all part of the messy and protracted death of the department store as an institution and its replacement by big-box retail outlets with minimal service and lower prices and specialist stores with less massive overhead. It is an ongoing death, with two of the Big Four chains gone and two (including the Hudson’s Bay Company) still holding on by their fingernails. In the class hierarchy of these stores, Eaton’s was always at the top, even if the Bay had a history that went back to royal charters and the fur trade. Many older people have regarded this commercial evolution as a change for the worse. It may be so in objective terms, but the question is always tied up with personal memory and the past. At least included in what these people lament the passing of is their own earlier life with its experience of these companies as big, impressive, seemingly indestructible features of existence, and there always looms the homology between the disappearance of eternal Eaton’s and the disappearance of their eternal youth.

336

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

In Winnipeg the loss of Eaton’s was perhaps especially poignant, since it could appear as a particularly unmistakeable objective correlative for the long, gradual slide downhill of a city that had not so many decades earlier been so bustling and full of promise. At a certain point in Canadian history, Manitoba, with its romantic past including the Red River Settlement and the Riel Rebellion, had represented the ‘heart’ and staging point of the great leap from the originary colonial provinces of eastern and central Canada to the gigantic remaining spaces of the country and the even more gigantic task of their settlement; and Winnipeg as the hub had for a time stood dramatically for the vast potential of the Canadian west – English Canada’s Chicago, almost. If there is a melancholy that clings to the city itself, and not simply to Maddin’s view of it, it can perhaps be traced to this sense of faded promise, the sense of having once been the coming man, the belle of the ball, but having somehow been passed over and had its place taken by something as inauthentic and depressing as the cowboy oil barons of Calgary. British Columbia thrived, Alberta boomed, even Saskatchewan is beginning to prosper and advance, but Manitoba seems left behind, forgotten, but not forgetting. This is perhaps a fanciful and even a patronizing view, but it does overlap with My Winnipeg’s prevailing mood of regret, loss, sadness. For Maddin, Winnipeg really is ‘the world capital of sorrow.’ Of course it is scarcely an objective standpoint, and the sense of a lost history and lost grandeur is very difficult to maintain if the perspective becomes much broader. Maddin himself remarked as much at the local premiere of the film, when he recounted having viewed it with an audience of Berliners whose great city had not merely lost its leading department store and sports facility, but been flattened from end to end. In any event from a Winnipeg perspective losing an Eaton’s flagship store must have looked like a symbol of something bigger, and if there was nothing to cry about in comparison with real tragedies occurring all over the world, even the drabness and insignificance of this loss could make the whole condition appear the more dreary. In the space left by the razing of the store arose a new building, an allpurpose sports facility – the MTS Centre. Maddin’s scorn for this facility is total: it is ‘a zombie in a cheap suit,’ he is delighted by the happy accident that disables the ‘S’ in its neon sign and leaves it labelled as the ‘MT’ (Empty) Centre, and he delivers the heaviest blow he can muster by showing it in undegraded colour footage, stripped thereby of all truth and meaning.

My Winnipeg

337

The Arena The loss of Eaton’s, though, is as nothing in comparison to the loss of the Winnipeg Arena. As we have seen, this building had already featured heavily in Maddin’s autobiographical writing and been a principal character in Cowards Bend the Knee. Here, we have the story much more barely and factually presented – the story, that is, of Maddin’s father’s connection with the city’s major hockey teams of the 1950s and 1960s, and of his own experiences in the locker rooms as a stick-boy to the players and playing in the vast empty seating area. There are two narratives here, inextricably intertwined at certain points: the ‘objective’ history of hockey in the Arena, the storied past, full of heroes, and Maddin’s childhood history, with his absorption of those legends, his integration of them into his own direct experience of hockey heroes in the building, and finally the connection between all this and Maddin’s sense of his father. In addition, of course, there is the present-day narrative of the Arena’s final destruction. It is in fact that destruction that Maddin uses as a linking point, having remarked ruefully that ‘demolition is one of our few growth industries,’ and going from another shot of the wrecking ball to a title that shouts ‘Blasphemy!!!’ For this demolition is of ‘the most fabled myth- and memory-packed landmark in our city’s history.’ Moreover, ‘for 50 years this ice hockey cathedral fit Winnipeg and its sport like a skull fits its brain. This building was my male parent, and everything male in my childhood I picked up right here.’ Swinging for the fences, he says outrageously that he was actually born in the dressing room during a game between the Winnipeg Maroons and the Trail Smoke Eaters and not even taken home until the end of the game, ‘I grew up here, in the locker room, was breast-fed there in the wives’ chambers.’ And this is where he began his adventures as stick-boy and shower-room denizen as a tyke. The narrator speaks of the smells of breast-milk, and the screen displays images of heroic naked man-butts: here, obviously, a boy could attain a complete range of pre-pubescent sexual experiences. (He is ‘Smitten!!!’ by naked Soviet player Anatoly Firsov.) And another trinity of odours: ‘Urine, breast-milk, sweat!’ The vividness and brio of this presentation melds effortlessly with the larger heroic narrative of the old Winnipeg teams, culminating in the Maroons (Senior hockey) and the Nats (Canadian national amateur team), both of which Chas Maddin helped to run. Arriving in the 1960s, the Soviet hockey teams added one more delirious Cold War, brute-

338

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

masculine element to this already dizzy conglomeration. And here the narrator begins to connect in a wholeheartedly gentle and affectionate way to his father. If the father is all but missing from the re-enactments and in fact the entirety of the domestic scene, here he is the presiding spirit, and the film thus institutes a complete separation of Mother’s realm from Father’s that goes further than any of Maddin’s earlier work. Within ‘the Me Trilogy,’ the father has, as it were, progressed – or regressed – from being the murder victim of his very Ann Savage-like wife in Cowards Bend the Knee to being a robotic and somewhat sinister workzombie who apparently visits his wife equally robotically only by night in Brand upon the Brain! to being a softly powerful priest of the Arena-temple whose only contact with his wife is in family group photos. At the Arena, though, snapshots of Chas with players, other team dignitaries, behind the bench at game time, combine with the narrator’s reminiscences to create a powerful vortex of feeling, with larger than life male-heroic elements at their heart. Photographs of hockey heroes and events from the Arena’s past have a glorious age-of-empire aura, so that the narrative of a descent from the heroic heights into decay and dissolution takes on a familiar mythic arc. Looked at from a more distant perspective, the events captured in the film might look rather different. Winnipeg, like every other Canadian city except Montreal and Toronto, had no hockey teams at the Olympian heights of the National Hockey League during the era of the Original Six.23 The best that all other parts of Canada (where the majority of all professional hockey players were born and raised) could hope for would be to see local boys rise through the ranks of junior and senior hockey teams in Canada, and achieve apotheosis by joining the NHL. The Winnipeg Maroons were at the top level of this lower system. Beginning in the 1960s the NHL began to expand, and this development culminated in the formation of a rival professional league, the World Hockey Association, in 1972, and then seven years later in the folding of a handful of teams from that league into the NHL. Among these teams were the Winnipeg Jets, whose recently retired star player, Bobby Hull, had been arguably the best player in the game and had given the WHA instant credibility when he jumped there in 1972 from the Chicago Black Hawks. So the Jets played in the NHL from 1979 until 1996, when the failing franchise was moved to Phoenix, Arizona. If diehard traditionalist hockey fans regard the Original Six years as something like a Homeric era of professional hockey, then the first stages of expansion would be something like a Hellenistic period, and the present diluted thirty-team

My Winnipeg

339

age, with feeble franchises in Nashville, Columbus, Phoenix, and Raleigh NC, something like a Greeks-squabbling-with-Turks-over-Cyprus period. At any rate such a characterization would blend nicely with Maddin’s narrative of mythic decline. What is striking to my eye is the almost complete absence of the Jets from Maddin’s Arena narrative, and the total absence of what hockey fans in general would regard as the biggest heroes of Winnipeg hockey – Dale Hawerchuk, Thomas Steen, Teemu Selanne, Randy Carlyle, and many other notable Jets players. The biggest omission of all, though, is glamorous superstar Bobby Hull, whom Maddin has described as ‘the best known athlete of his time and sport,’ and whom he once actually pursued seriously to play the role of Count Knotkers in Careful.24 Clearly Hull’s Winnipeg connections were a crucial factor in that wish, and it makes his absence here more glaring. At the end of the film, when the fantasy saviour ‘Citizen Girl’ is restoring everything that Winnipeg has lost, bringing back the Jets is mentioned as part of her work, but at the moment where the subject is actually under discussion they are scarcely there. Perhaps the Jets are too recent, and the memories of them too fresh and painful and anti-heroic, for them to be incorporated into Maddin’s mythologizing project. In the end, it may simply be that the Jets fall squarely between the ancient mythic times of hockey in Winnipeg that ended with the dissolution of the Nats and the arrival of the Jets, and the present dreadful emptiness. The end of the heroic period coincided with his father’s death: ‘When the National Team was dissolved by a federal bureaucrat’s stroke of a pen in 1970, my father died. With nothing left to do, he died.’ (That ‘nothing’ apparently encompasses his actual paying job: his work for the Maroons and the Nats was all volunteer.) After this, the succeeding era can only be uniformly one of desolation and loss, extending from the false-promise arrival of the Jets to the present landscape of devastation. The images of the Arena in the process of demolition are almost unbearably painful in the context of the glow that Maddin has presented it in both historically and for his own father-related experience. The video footage is grim and depressing: outside, the piles of rubble and the wrecking ball crashing into the pillars in dreadful punctuation, and, even worse, inside, the massive score clock sitting on the playing surface surrounded by scattered debris and the grey invading daylight coming through huge holes in the roof. It is a complex and deep loss for Maddin, but he compresses it into a single, fabulous, poetic image (I think the greatest in My Winnipeg, at least until the film’s last episode) – his father’s face gigantically laid out across the playing surface

340

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The dead father’s face projected upon the ice surface of the dead Arena. A multiple exposure. The image poetically encapsulates a complex and extended world of loss.

of the Arena in its rubbish-strewn, semi-demolished state. In My Winnipeg the dead father has made one more appearance, his son’s touch upon him more openly tender and melancholy than ever before. The Black Tuesdays Now Maddin imagines a team of ancient hockey heroes, ‘in their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond,’ gathered together – mostly from beyond the grave – to skate upon the ice of the Arena as a fantasy counterpunch to the forces of the empty and destructive present. These are the Black Tuesdays (so named ‘in defiance of’ the day of the 1929 stock market crash), and the narrator calls the roll of their names as they themselves, in prewar hockey gear, skate purposefully into the camera or engage in scrimmages. We are back in a version of the Museum of All-Time Maroons

My Winnipeg

341

from Cowards, but these heroes, though aged, are not paunchy and sagging. ‘The players are old Jets, Maroons, or from earlier eras: the Warriors, the Victorias, even the Falcons, who won Canada’s first Olympic Gold Medal in hockey in Antwerp, 1920.’ And so we meet: Cec Browne, voted Athlete of Manitoba’s First Century in 1970. Ollie Turnbull. ‘Buster’ Thorstenson. Curly-headed George Cumbers. ‘Smiley’ Dzama (so named for the numerous head injuries that have left him eternally happy). Other veteran greats: ‘Baldy’ Northcott. Fred Dunsmore, greatest of all the Maroons and best athlete in the history of Manitoba.

Frankly, except perhaps for Fred Dunsmore, all of these figures are buried in oblivion to any but a pretty narrow group of enthusiasts. Eventually the roll reaches NHLers Billy Mosienko (well known) and Terry Sawchuk (really well known), though despite the promise of ‘old Jets’ we see none of those. But in one important sense it is a case of the more obscure the better for Maddin – a route back to the forgotten heroes of a dusty forgotten past, the world of The War Illustrated and Archangel. Objectively the Black Tuesdays are seriously overrepresented with figures from early teams such as the Falcons, and a high proportion of the players named were World War I veterans from exactly that Archangel-esque era.25 Even the most famous possible member, Sawchuk, is included perhaps not so much because he was a native Winnipegger as because of his famously intense, overwound temperament, his tragic ‘Scarchuk’ visage acquired by taking pucks in the face, and his early death under mysterious circumstances (is he, asks the narrator, the ‘heavily bandaged’ goalkeeper of the Black Tuesdays, resembling the Mummy in goalie gear?). What will perform the fantasy redemption of the Arena’s destruction, then, is Maddin’s old closet of toys, a mental return to a territory mostly before actual memory and wholly in the land of the imagined. As so often before in Maddin’s cinema, what is remembered is better than what is experienced, what is imagined is better than what is real. Of course this exercise cannot really counteract the dismal actual end of the Arena. News footage shows the ‘final’ demolition, attended by a small group of fans amazingly chanting ‘Go, Jets, go!’ in a self-conscious tone at once sarcastic and sad. The explosion succeeds only in collapsing the newer additions to the building added when the Jets entered the NHL, a wonderfully felicitous development for Maddin for whom the heroic past ended in effect with the Jets’ arrival. His own actual response to the event was utterly characteristic: to sneak back into the

342

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

building not long before the dynamite blasts to take one Last Pee in the Arena’s urinals, and document the deed on video, a homuncular Werner-Herzog-on-Guadaloupe. This little act of self-expression, accomplished ‘with a heavy heart,’ has qualities that are infantile (reacting to negative stimulus with an excretory event), and animal-like (marking the territory that is about to be destroyed), as well as memorial (ritually repeating an act already performed ‘a million times before’ all the way back to childhood). But it is a tiny victory of expression that attends a massive defeat. Though there is nothing visually evocative in the drably recorded images, there is a proto-Surrealistic quality of ‘lower’ protest in the act itself, and a kind of self-lacerating recognition of impotence at the disappearance of a past where all good things are immured. The downward spiral of loss is precisely what Maddin responds to: it is the endlessly repeated outward event that correlates to an inward condition. Under these circumstances, the sports history that appears in My Winnipeg will of course concentrate on what is dead and gone – and will of course have little interest in Bobby Hull, the WHA Jets, or any other manifestation of success that is not ancient and forgotten.26 As this deeply felt ‘Arena’ section of the film comes to a close, the fundamental psychic truth it embodies is expressed in the narrator’s poignant valedictory words: ‘Farewell, beloved father.’ Re-enactment III Now – transitioning as usual through the slumbering Darcy Fehr and a repeated image of blackness flecked with swirling snow – the film moves back from Father to Mother, returning to the family home for a third and last re-enactment. The sense that these scenes need somehow to complement each other is apparent in the narrator’s introduction: It was really rare for me to side with my mother in family disputes. I must revisit an incident that puts her in a sympathetic light, to see if it parses out the same way this time around.

The scene that unfolds finds the three older children gathered around the bed of their sleeping mother, prodding her to wake up and fix them something to eat. They are apparently unable to make even the simplest food for themselves: they don’t know where the pans are, they burn the toast, ‘nothing tastes good unless you make it.’ When she refuses, saying grumpily that ‘my cooking days are over,’ they descend to harsher means

My Winnipeg

343

of persuasion. Playing on her instinctive fear of birds, they threaten to release the family parakeet to ‘spill [its] filth in your hair.’ The menacing semicircle of offspring-turned-extortionists is genuinely creepy in a Village of the Damned kind of way, and certainly creates a revised family picture in which the moody or hysterical tyrant mother is accompanied by children who have very evidently not been cowed or disempowered in any way. The effect is not so much one of counterbalance as of a wild swerve to the other side of the highway. It is not at all clear how this sequence, or all three sequences together, may be ‘parsed out’ to create any kind of three-dimensional understanding; rather, the three re-enactments just sit together in all their heterogeneity and inspire puzzlement rather than comprehension. While the first episode is marked by comic frustration and the second by genuine disturbing craziness, the third mixes its basically light, absurdist tone with elements of cruelty that aren’t light at all – a characteristic Maddin blend. The narrator relates, in a very conversational and unscripted-sounding way, the time his mother lashed out at an old myna bird ‘with an immense vocabulary’ that had landed on her shoulder and killed it with one blow: ‘The thing had been living happily for 75 years, and its life was snuffed out just like that.’ Here again the humorous tone and the sense of neurosis and violence coincide just as naturally for Maddin. Once more it is striking how little Guy is absent from the scene: the children’s-solidarity grouping is missing one member. One is prompted to imagine the boy standing in a corner observing all this, an invisible non-participant, and this image is consistent with that sense of detachment from judgment that is presented in all three of the scenes. He says that he sided with his sister in the second scene, and with his mother in this one, but he says it with a forensic dispassionateness. In fact, throughout the whole film it is as though Guy was not actually an agent in his own childhood. The great majority of reminiscences of that childhood are passive: what he saw, what was done to him. He flips seats up and down in the empty Arena or is amazed at the naked bodies of athletes; he stands in a corner at home and anxiously watches disputes between his mother and his siblings. He is simply a tablet upon which events and impressions are written – a tablet that has preserved all of its markings intact into adulthood and middle age. It is quite usual for memoirists to relate their impressions in a similar way, but it is not so usual that their own role in the events of their lives has been made up so much of sensibility, even of a kind of helpless waxlike impressionableness, and so little of action.

344

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Frozen horse heads The next segment is perhaps the most striking in the entire film – certainly it is the one most often mentioned in reviews and comments, a production still from it the most often reproduced. (Maddin has also called it ‘my favourite episode of the movie.’27) The narrator, talking excitedly over red, orange, and black Reiniger animations and dramatic sound effects, tells us of a fire in the paddocks of the Whittier Park racetrack in 1926. The flames drove horses out into the horrible winter cold snap, where they ran, panicked, into the Red River, were caught in the freezing chunks of ice, and died terribly. Their heads remained above the frozen surface for the entire succeeding winter in attitudes of horrifying death-agony, and curious Winnipeggers took to strolling among them as a seasonal diversion. The locale became a favourite spot for romantic trysts, says the narrator, and adds that ‘the city enjoys a tremendous baby boom the following autumn.’ A series of staged scenes shows these terrible sculptures of suffering interspersed with winter revellers and courting couples. Although the voice-over acknowledges the ‘animal panic’ of the beasts, the closest it will come to an expression of their dreadfulness is to say: ‘We grow used to the sadness – simply incorporated into our days.’ Is there even an iota of historical justification for the occurrences depicted here as fact? The Whittier Park racetrack, a first-rate facility to judge from accounts, opened in 1922, and a serious fire wiped out the stables in 1934 (not 1926).28 Maddin claims to have found archival footage recording the events,29 but there is none in the film, nor any still photos or even newspaper headlines. A Toronto audience laughed out loud during Maddin’s live narration of these scenes,30 although print reviews seemed uncertain whether to take the historical claims seriously – perfectly mirroring the condition the film wants its viewership to be unable to escape. I believe that little or nothing here happened as it is related, and I pointedly disbelieve that frozen horses’ heads dotted the Red River ‘like eleven knights on a vast chessboard.’31 What is truly interesting, though, is to ask why Maddin would either choose or imagine such a series of happenings. Perhaps if it really happened it would simply be unignorable in his actual history of ‘Winnipeg Babylon.’ But there is something powerfully representative about the atrocities, or atrocities-as-comedies, that we see here. Once again Buñuel comes to mind, specifically the dead donkeys of Un Chien Andalou and Las Hurdes. The deliberate cruelty of the former film, and the latter’s grim and

My Winnipeg

345

hideous social freak-show, are both closer to Maddin’s movie than the general reception of My Winnipeg as aggressively quirky but essentially light-hearted entertainment remotely recognizes. Another analogue, perhaps even a closer one because of its fraternal status as Surrealist travelogue, is Vigo’s À propos de Nice, whose satirical and comedic qualities are offset by perspectives of genuine weirdness and genuine anger. Humour indeed is part of the mix in all those Surrealist films, but it is always accompanied by, and ultimately subordinated to, something much darker and more frightening. Maddin’s humour quotient is higher than those predecessors, and his inveterate playfulness is always unmistakable, but there is something dark in his cinema too. For an animal lover such as Maddin to imagine this particular landscape of horror is akin to vegetarian Tobe Hooper’s nightmare slaughterhouse depictions in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and those depictions have their savagely humorous side as well). What the frozen horses heads properly should evoke, in my view, is horror and sadness. Life skates on a surface of horror and sadness, as the narrator more or less spells out but audiences are unlikely to take in; life in Winnipeg especially skates on such a surface; and Maddin’s life really especially does so. As in so very much of his work, the closeness of humour and derisive ridiculousness to pain is central. Maddin’s Winnipeg is a place where people frolic among terrible spectacles, where the effect of atrocities is merely to encourage their libidinous desires. That is as radical a perspective as any chartermember Surrealist’s. The Golden Boy, the Paddle Wheel, the Bay, the Hall of Fame After Eaton’s, the Bay. My Winnipeg turns next to ‘the Paddle Wheel nightclub, which sits atop the brand new department store on Portage Avenue, Eatons’s little sister down the street.’ This narrative too is one that begins in strangeness and progresses towards decline. For what most interests Maddin about this locale are the yearly ‘Golden Boy’ male beauty pageants held there. As young men in period full-torso bathing suits walk up and down in front of an audience of glowing-eyed females and a gay-ly salacious Mayor Cornish, the intertitles shout at us: ‘Man Pageants’ ‘On parade!’ ‘Trotting!’ ‘Desire!!!’ ‘Humid torsos’ ‘Haunches’ ‘Corridor of thighs.’ These events are staged in a newly built set of the nightclub, with luscious tropical vegetation and Blonde Venus-style lighting. The winner will be proclaimed the Golden Boy (after the gold statue of Hermes on the pinnacle of the Legislature dome), and the side bets

346

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

placed on the contest are substantial enough to make or break men financially. The narrator inform us that otherwise incorruptible Mayor Cornish ignores our city’s by-laws, and presides as the one judge at these lurid contests ... The Mayor Cornish era ended in 1940, when scandal erupted over the high number of Golden Boys holding down golden jobs at City Hall.

One notes that the ‘incorruptible Mayor Cornish’ of social register spiritualist sessions has slyly become ‘otherwise incorruptible Mayor Cornish.’ But this bizarre figure, played by Louis Negin in a white wig, sternumlength white beard, and heavy black-rimmed spectacles, is, like his pageant, an invention of the film. Winnipeg’s first mayor was indeed one Francis Evans Cornish (lawyer, Mason, and Orange Lodge member).32 But his only term in office began in 1874 and lasted less than a year, and there has never subsequently been a Mayor Cornish in the city’s history.33 Looking throughout like one of the authority figures in Zéro de conduite, this séance-attending mayor whose daughter becomes the controlling figure in a spiritualist ballet, this Man-Pageant judge who throws sinecures to good-looking young men, is Maddin’s effort to inject some surreal oddness and absurdity, and Surrealist sexual appetite, into the civic administration that has been for the film a mirror of Winnipeg’s rise and fall (not to mention one more entry in the populous succession of gay moments in his cinema). In the past, City Hall is depicted as sponsoring such enlivening events as the Treasure Hunt and, as we shall see shortly, If Day, passing by-laws protecting the rights of sleepwalkers, and, in the person of its mayor, attending séances and judging gay beauty contests. Now all it does is blow up sacred buildings like Eaton’s and the Arena and put up useless pieces of crap in their place, and preside over a universal decline, besmirchment, and ugly prosaicization. From the mayor-supervised parade of forbidden appetite (one more invasion of the realm of politics by transgressive sexuality, incidentally) to a softer, realer, and more personal memorial. The Paddle Wheel has been transformed from the nightclub it probably never was to a poorly patronized department store restaurant. It still serves the orange JellO that, says the narrator, was its hallmark in Golden Boy days (‘these debauched Cornish years were known as the Orange Jell-O days’). We may imagine that its true basis in the filmmaker’s world lies in Maddin’s memories of eating it as a boy in the restaurant of the still thriving Hudson’s Bay store. For the Bay, opened in 1926 as a very modern facility, is

My Winnipeg

347

now something of a walking corpse, with minimal staff and few customers. The film sits in the restaurant, watching the great paddle wheel revolving amid empty tables and other signs of economic ill-health, made melancholy by such a comprehensively deheroicized spectacle. It is a quieter version of the Untergang that has overwhelmed Eaton’s and the Arena, and again it is embodied in flat-looking colour photography to mark the dispiriting transformation from myth to actuality, from vibrant past to dead present, from surreal fantasy to lifeless documentation. The narrator is reduced to pleading pathetically that City Council this time find some creative new use for the landmark building after its impending inevitable failure, instead of torpedoing it and putting up some brand new affront to humanity. In this deathbed Bay, too, sadly, we find the latest habitation of the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame (‘every time it moves into a building, the building goes bankrupt’). Its peripatetic history and present location are an index of its failure to be properly appreciated by the society whose heroic history it commemorates. Now it is just one more forgotten annex in the empty Bay, the pathos of its diminishment once more inscribed in depressive colour photography. As the camera moves sadly around the premises, it finds a picture of Maddin’s sister Janet, former track star, and lights again on Terry Sawchuk and Fred Dunsmore, whom the narrator apostrophizes in tragic tones that lament how the mighty are fallen. The last meditation on the forlornness that is the Bay is a brief recollection of ‘Bay blankets’ – woollen blankets mostly in cream with broad stripes of colour, often made into coats, whose history is very long, which were once ubiquitous in Canada, and which still survive into the present. As the film shows us period footage of these wares (colour film, but because it has been marked by time for once not demoralizing in its effect), the narrator asks plaintively: ‘Will we always have the blankets? The blankets worn by my dad’s teams? The famous point blankets which have been currency for our fur traders since 1670?’34 Answer comes there none. Sherbrook Pool Transitioning once more through Maddin’s semi-conscious alter ego in the railway car, the film urges him to ‘wake up! – you must make one last visit to your beloved Sherbrook Pool.’ Photographs show the building as it is now, and then flashes of architectural plans, while the narrator gives us this history:

348

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Built in 1931 as a Depression-era make-work project, the facility is actually three swimming pools in one building, but stacked vertically, one atop another – perhaps the only building of its sort in the world. Segregated by gender. Segregated by depths. Families swam on the main level, street level. One level deeper, it was girls. Girls only. And deeper still, in the deepest of deepest basements, it was the boys.

As we hear this exposition, there are shots of males in old, full-body swimsuits, footage of scullers and swimmers, and, as we reach the girls’ level, another Lolita in a bikini. Since 1966, says the narrator, only a single level remains open. Formerly, however, it was, in the words of intertitles flashed into this scene, ‘Stacked,’ with ‘Depths upon Depths,’ ‘Girls on Girls,’ and ‘Boys on Boys’ (the latter two illustrated with samesex poolside mouth-to-mouth CPR exercises). This tri-level structure has more to do with ‘the Forks beneath the Forks’ and Maddin’s array of youthful sexual stimuli than with fact. The crucial memory locked within it is of little Guy’s locker-room encounter with a group of scarily playful boys somewhere between Our Gang and Lord of the Flies. As kaleidoscopically split images show their shadows dancing and bobbing, the narrator tells us: They stripped naked to cavort, the day long, in the changing rooms. The little savages, in their Saturday trances, wanted me to strip too, surrounded me, aroused with excitements, and threatened to send high-arcing streams of urine onto me unless I joined them in their downy caperings. With engorged little members. Hairless. Why? Why? Why? Why don’t we just swim?

Meanwhile, the intertitles are bombarding us with strange and exciting exclamations, such as ‘Dance of the Hairless Boners’ ‘Savages!’ ‘Naked!’ ‘Engorged!’ ‘Hairless!’ ‘Squealing!’ ‘Urine!’ ‘Dank!’ and ‘Aroused!’ My goodness. This outpouring of (so to speak) ejaculations clearly marks a quasi-traumatic event, equivalent to little Guy’s eye-level encounter with Fran Huck’s heroic penis. The homoerotic elements are inextricable from a childlike pan-sexuality – indeed, insofar as the heterosexual Maddin’s cinema is homoerotic, I would say it is so in this jumbled preadolescent, at times almost infantile, way. It is another symptom of just how fundamentally the filmmaker’s imagination is grounded in childhood memory, and a childish sensibility. ‘Why can’t we just swim?’ is the cry of a child who can sort of see something, but doesn’t know what it is; and there is something in the filmmaker’s tone that looks back to the

My Winnipeg

349

events not only with a belated recognition of their exciting content, but also with a longing for innocence and ignorance. ‘If Day’ Next up is a historical event that looks as if it might have been made up but in fact really occurred – ‘If Day.’ This was a moment in 1942 (February 19) when the pantomime of a Nazi takeover of Winnipeg was acted out as a vivid demonstration of why we fight. Five thousand Rotary Club volunteers dressed as German soldiers arrested the mayor, the premier, and the cabinet, hoisted the swastika flag over strategic locations, and harassed citizens. The city was renamed ‘Hitlerstadt,’ and Portage Avenue became ‘Himmlerstrasse.’ The narrator happily tells us that ‘“If Day” was a huge success, frightening Winnipeggers into colossal warbond purchases,’ and ‘to Winnipeggers, the word “if” is terrifying.’ The film presents everything in a mixture of newspaper headlines, archival footage, and re-enactments staged in front of back projections – the latter featuring drunken leering Huns, ordinary people in shackles, menaced nuns! Make-believe-loving Maddin is delighted, and the fact that all the Nazi uniforms for the original ‘If Day’ were rented from Hollywood studios is especially scrumptious. It is highly appealing to him that Winnipeggers had the daring to make their lives into a movie, and that the subject of that movie should be the invasion and dreadful transformation of their city is more appealing still. Making a gripping movie out of your defeat seems like a more inherently meaningful and convincing thing to do than any more uplifting kind of self-dramatization, and in this respect ‘If Day’ has a discernible resemblance to the practice of My Winnipeg, as well as presenting a more compressed and dramatic version of the malignant civic transformation presented in Maddin’s film. Happiness devastated The film moves now into its final stages. In 1922, we are told by narrator and intertitles, a buffalo stampede was set off by the mating of a pair of gay bison sacred to the Ojibway ‘for their double spirit.’ It sweeps down from Silver Heights and into the Happyland playground, ‘leaving it completely flat in under five minutes.’ Reiniger cutouts present the same-sex encounter and the levelling of Happyland with exclamatory intertitles and screaming Foley animals, and the sequence also features a stock-footage buffalo stampede worthy of Edward D. Wood, Jr. These

350

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

crazed animals are explicitly labelled as an expression of ‘the wrathful nature of this ancient land.’ Another wave of creatures then inundates the wrecked site – this one made up of ‘our forgotten men – our veterans of the Great War’: ‘Joined by our First Nations, those swelling ranks of our heartsick dispossessed, these souls descend on the devastation of Happyland and sweep up every last piece of happiness they can, for they need it!’ This subsequent stampede is also represented in cutouts, but the film reverts to photography for its depiction of the aftermath: the migration of the dispossessed with their scavenged remains to the rooftops of Winnipeg, where they have set up tent cities wreathed in the steam emerging from the buildings’ chimneys. There they stay, ‘out of sight, out of mind, invisible, still to this day’: For Winnipeg has always forbidden the shantytowns and hobo villages which typically pop up in other cities. Still on the books here is a law which keeps our homeless out of sight, up on the rooftops of our city. Above us, an aboriginal Happyland. In the clouds, an aboriginal Happyland. Forgotten Happyland.

It is a complex and circuitous poetic conceit stretched perilously thin. Its forced quality represents, perhaps, the difficulty Maddin is finding in developing his imagery of ancient powers and modern impoverishment, of period culture (Happyland) as a metaphor for emotional satisfaction, of a general sense of angry disappointment at the political realm, to a symphonic climax. What this sequence does succeed in doing, though, is to represent the disappearance of the good as a joint project of nature and culture. ‘Happyland’ is at least a clear metaphor for a period of prelapsarian wholeness and significance, a kind of Platonic Idea of Winnipeg marooned in the past. But it is doomed to fall, given the hostility of nature in this cold and windswept geographic isolation and the irresistible entropy in Maddin’s model of the human psyche, where all things decline from childhood to reality. Veterans of the Great War are indeed forgotten, if they are understood as taking their life from The War Illustrated, and the bitterness of lost meaning may be great enough to lay waste to everything within the physical eye’s view. Citizen Girl And so to the movie’s Big Finish. Back with Darcy Fehr on the train, the narrator ramps up the always-anxious tone of voice almost to des-

My Winnipeg

351

peration: ‘I’m near the edge of town. Time running out. I’m really going.’ (This last assertion echoes LedgeMan’s ‘I’m gonna do it for real this time!’) Trying to reassemble his whole experience of his city, make his emotional disorder into something more comprehensible, seal everything with a symbol, he reaches back to the days of the 1919 Strike and its workers’ collective newspaper, The Winnipeg Citizen. For the last time the Maddin Political Principle is enacted: no politics without sex. So the image that will bind everything up will be the result of an echtMaddin conceit: what if The Citizen had had a page-3 pinup girl? Not ‘just any tabloid pinup’ but an exalted Soviet heroine – a soberer version, in fact, of ‘Anna, State Scientist’ from The Heart of the World. So a gorgeous, full-lipped young woman in military uniform is imprinted in double exposure over the city as its ruling spirit. She gazes, with noble brow and steadfast eye, over the ‘second Happyland’ rooftop shanties and other Winnipeg scenes, ‘straddling our Forks’ (the same Forks that were earlier ‘the Lap’). With a wave of her hand, she undoes the grievous damage and loss chronicled in the movie: the Arena, Eaton’s, the Sherbrook Pool, and the Wolesley Elm are restored. (As the Arena unexplodes in footage run backwards, we are reminded of Maddin’s careerlong delight in cinema’s most primitive special effects.) The appearance of ‘Citizen Girl’ will finally allow Maddin to depart from his home, for it will be in good hands: And then I would know it was OK to finally leave. To leave this city in her hands. Secure. Cared for. Loved.

What a strange idea this is! First, it implies, solipsistically, that it is Maddin himself who somehow until now has been the sole repository of this good, old Winnipeg. Or perhaps he means simply that his ideas of the city need to be safeguarded somehow, not for the city but for him, and they can be entrusted to this fantasy creation. Perhaps he makes no distinction between his conception of Winnipeg and the city itself. In any event, to metaphorize his desire for salvation – of the city, or simply of his imagination of it – in the person of a nubile young woman dressed up like an extra in Archangel is to embody wonderfully so many of the powerful currents of feeling that run through Maddin’s film, and his work as a whole. The desire for emotional and psychic wholeness is personified in a transfigured sexual desire. It is a sexual yearning, for a beautiful young woman, raised to a level of idealized healer of all psychic wounds by her identification with some grander purpose, by a

352

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

Citizen Girl resurrects the Wolesley Elm: a multiple exposure. My Winnipeg employs this superheroine of political idealism to perform tasks of private Maddin-restoration like this and turning on the sign at Clifford’s.

sentimental propaganda politicization whose utopian function is to heal Maddin by healing the world, and yet the Winnipeg that is to be healed is Maddin’s utterly unique and personal one. Perhaps restoring the Arena would also minister to other hurts than Maddin’s, but the Wolesley Elm? the Paddle Wheel? the sign at Clifford’s? And how about the never-existent three levels of Sherbrook Pool? This gesture of the film’s, like so much else in it, demonstrates its absolute unwillingness, perhaps its inability, to distinguish between phenomena in the inner world and phenomena in the outer one. This is certainly a philosophical stance of long standing, but it is peculiar to say the least in a documentary-travelogue full of news footage. That confusion, a completely Surrealist one, between psychic events and objective ones, between Freud and Marx, is consistent from one end of Maddin’s filmography to the other. My Winnipeg demonstrates, by virtue precisely of its documentary qualities – its

My Winnipeg

353

period photographs and protracted relationship however deranged with historical facts – not only the obvious contrast between Maddin’s shallow political sensibility and his deep psychic one, but the amazing extent to which he can process anything into the terms of his private creation. It is in the context of this amazing transformation that Citizen Girl becomes a moving expression of the complexities of his imagination. Among its affecting characteristics are its passionate embrace once again of a childlike innocence, its unwillingness to accept a grown-up analysis or grown-up solutions, and its reaching into the unconscious for an image of desire that will express simultaneously an unreachable past and a present longing that will not be stilled. Citizen Girl surveys and protects all from her position of benevolent omnipotence. The slightly creepy totalitarianism of the image helps to associate it with that of omniscient Mother at the lighthouse telescope in Brand upon the Brain! or at the train window in this film. If Mother herself is always at best an ambiguous figure – both frightening and reassuring – then Citizen Girl, all-seeing guardian of the city and everything Maddin holds dear, represents an idealized reduction of only the positive aspects of that ur-figure. So Citizen Girl can become the Good Mother, beneficent protectress, especially Good because she can be sexually desired without too much complication, and another demonstration of how everything is everything else in the depths of the filmmaker’s unconscious. This figure somehow can deliver Maddin from his paralyzing somnambulistic condition of memory and loss. But of course, as we have seen an uncountable number of times, what is most real to Maddin are precisely memories and what is gone. Leaving Winnipeg means leaving everything meaningful. How can he possibly separate himself from all that? What will be left of Maddin if he leaves his very self behind? It is the same question that the final scenes of Brand upon the Brain! asked. It was unanswered there, and it remains unanswered in My Winnipeg. Or rather, there is an implicit answer in both films, but it is a deeply unnerving one: nothing will be left. Epilogue After Citizen Girl’s grandiose triumph, Maddin is somehow enabled to return to his own mother (or rather, to Ann Savage), and to see her shorn of mythic and frightening power. The film pictures her lying on her dead son Cameron’s grave, cuddling with Cameron himself. The tragedy and sadness of Cameron’s death are entirely visible, but the tone is elegaic. The dialogue between the mother and the ghost of her son ex-

354

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

presses peace and reconciliation with loss, although it, with typical firmness, avoids sentimental airbrushings: mother: It’s better between us. cameron: Yes. mother: Now that you’ve gone. cameron: I didn’t used to like being close. mother: Why? cameron: I just ... wasn’t comfortable. mother: Are you comfortable now? cameron: Mostly. I guess I am. mother: Me too. Perhaps Maddin can achieve this serene standpoint because, for once, the scene that is imagined lacks little Guy’s own agitated yearnings and regrets, and is able to focus entirely on the relation of two of his phantasms, as it were, independent of him. In any event, it expresses, more simply and effectively than Citizen Girl could ever do, a true state of cathartic peace.35 And yet My Winnipeg could scarcely vacate the space of Maddin’s own solipsistic sensibility as its final gesture. For that gesture, the filmmaker has again found a wonderful image. He makes his way to it through a succession of family photos, as he muses at how much of his family life was spent on couches in front of the TV set and confesses that time and memory seem sometimes to be an undifferentiated mass where what is long gone seems still to be present. There is a photograph of his grandmother sitting in the living room, and another of him with his parents, his father stretched on the couch. Then comes a magical succession. First, a sweetly heartbreaking family photo, old and creased, of little preschooler Guy asleep on a divan, his legs crossed, one hand propped under his chin in a pose that suggests that even in the land of sleep there is some kind of rumination going on in that great dome of a forehead. Then a dissolve to a photo of Guy as a young man asleep on a couch. And finally a dissolve back to the sleeping child. The incredible tenderness of these images is not just narcissism, but rather the almost ineffable poignance of a finger touching the most sensitive place of the soul. Although little Guy has been present in photos off and on during My Winnipeg, one has the sensation here that he is at last putting in the central appearance that is so often elided. For this little sleeping personage, more powerfully than Darcy Fehr tossing and turning in the railway car, is the epicentre of

My Winnipeg

355

everything in the film – of everything in Maddin’s cinema. His extreme youth, his vulnerability, and severely partial equipment for dealing with the world around him are painfully evident. But in this little child, too, lies the nuclear engine of apprehension and imagination that continues to power everything up to and including this film. The three-fold succession of photos, at first appearing simply to invoke the sweet sadness that any obviously old photo of a child inspires almost automatically, grows into a metaphor for the whole film, and for the filmmaker’s whole art. The dissolve to and from the more grown-up Guy spells out almost didactically that the child is father to the man. And then, as we recall the film’s incessant, insistent discourse of sleep-states and its cries to wake up, the old photo of this sleeping, ruminating originator-child becomes the one image that captures everything. What if this child who is dreaming Maddin’s whole world like an infant god were to wake up? What if? Perhaps if he woke up he would cease to exist, and Maddin’s cinema with him. Of course we never see Darcy Fehr actually getting out of town, and Guy Maddin still lives in Winnipeg. How to sum up My Winnipeg? Clearly it represents a far more important foray into the field of documentary than My Dad Is 100 Years Old, not to mention Maddin’s other very minor brushes with factuality. Indeed, from a formal standpoint the film is intriguing because of its actual incorporation of ‘reality based’ footage, especially the contemporary reportage material that is like antimatter in Maddin’s all-artifice cinematic world. The fact of its popular success relative to his other work is simply amazing, and it is very heartening to discover that Maddin can find a viewership that extends beyond the hard core festival and ‘alternative’ viewership to which it has hitherto been confined, and bring his very personal feelings out in a way that can be recognized by spectators as not unlike their own. His transformation of documentary and diary-film here have been compared to Werner Herzog’s non-fiction work, which Herzog has termed the pursuit of ‘ecstatic truth,’36 and one can absolutely see the resemblance. I confess to finding it the least completely satisfactory of ‘the Me Trilogy.’ The structural vagaries of this flea market of a film at times seem too arbitrary, and its efforts to connect and unify the incredibly heterogeneous material occasionally strained, while the intense, mantralike poetic repetitions in the narration are less effective for me than they have been for some respect-worthy viewers.37 On the other hand, the movie is absolutely fascinating for the further insights it offers into Maddin’s personal and psychic make-up. It is not a matter of

356

Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

The sleeping little boy Guy, with powerfully dreaming head-dome (family photo).

understanding his actual life, but of seeing with greater clarity the mental structures and emotional motivations that have shaped his films. The fact that I have had occasion to mention Archangel more than once in this chapter is indicative of how these retrospective connections can work. As with Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand upon the Brain! one senses too that Maddin has achieved a real breakthrough to a more direct consultation with his underlying issues and found a way to transport his actual experience more directly into his art. It is this that gives the endings especially of Brand and My Winnipeg their extra charge, their new depth of feeling. It is fascinating, too, to watch Maddin revisiting precisely the subject of Winnipeg just a couple of years after The Saddest Music in the World, which had itself been Maddin’s first real thematization of what might be called the neurosis surrounding his home town. There, as here, the town is weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. Saddest Music’s farcical caricatures of beer-swilling local masses and locally produced art (such as his own)

My Winnipeg

357

become My Winnipeg’s recastings of civic and personal history as mournful surrealism. ‘Sadness’ in Saddest Music has to be worked on incredibly hard to remove the inverted commas around the word; in My Winnipeg there aren’t any there in the first place. For Maddin, ‘My Winnipeg’ is like ‘My Archangel’ or ‘My Tolzbad’ – a place not so much transformed by fantasy as existing only in fantasy. One wonders how much it is anybody else’s Winnipeg, notwithstanding the titters of recognition in local audiences. It exists in a state of perpetual winter and more than ordinary night, where the cold (together with the geographical isolation) produces the sluggish, half-conscious ‘sleepwalking’ condition. One of the film’s most insistently repeated images – one that sums up this place and the mental state it engenders – is of a black screen whose only content is sparsely falling snow. It is an image Maddin has used in many of his earlier films, also often as a transitional device. The effect of this usage, above all in My Winnipeg, where blackness and snow are often seen as ‘documentary’ conditions of the actual world, is to suggest that this is a kind of fundamental or originary space, from which everything comes and to which everything goes: cold and black, with its snowflakes ambiguously both beautiful and desolate. Its sparseness and emptiness can embody simultaneously an inner state and an outer one: the real Winnipeg and Maddin’s Winnipeg (and beneath that, Maddin’s psychic tabula rasa). Why must this place and its personal history be escaped? At one point the narrator talks about ‘all the memories and feelings that enervate me to this day.’ The state that is felt as weakening and pinning him down, then, is precisely the memory-state, the imagination-state. But, again, what else is there? My Winnipeg doesn’t know, and neither did Brand upon the Brain!

Envoi

Very briefly to conclude, we might observe once more that Guy Maddin’s latest projects – the films from Cowards Bend the Knee to My Winnipeg – have brought him to an aesthetic landscape where all the forces of his art have managed to join hands in the most productive way. Looking back over the expanse of his creative career to date, we may have the sense that this arrival at a country where experience and memory may at last be fruitfully accessed in a more straightforward way represents some kind of breakthrough, if not indeed a terminus. In every film of ‘the Me Trilogy’ we see subjects that were formerly latent, such as the family melodrama of Careful or the localism of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, simply emerging into the light. One might imagine that a more direct and literal expression of these matters would lead to a more direct and literal form of art, but the exact reverse has been the case. Archangel and Careful – and even Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and Dracula – were in a way fundamentally carried by the slow train of old-fashioned stage melodrama. Cowards, Brand, and My Winnipeg, without jettisoning melodrama, have managed simultaneously to be more truth-telling and more fantastic. It is a rather strong claim to suggest that anything is more fantastic than Archangel, with its rain of bunnies, or Careful, with its candle-hatted girl miners in frilly underwear, but the most recent films have trumped them in electrifying inventiveness and incorporation of the invention into a much freer and more mobile cinematic style. To take some truly random examples: Guy and pregnant Veronica standing before a background of gnatlike hockey players in Cowards, zombie-Father beckoning at the workbench in Brand, huge Ann-Savage-mother peering through the train window in My Winnipeg. These films have in a sense become more fantastic by becoming more real (that is, openly autobiographical, openly self-ana-

Envoi

359

lytical). The filmmaker’s more direct descent into his source of meaning is a descent into the unconscious; and what he finds there is absolutely more fantastic and surreal than anything outside it. There have been a few drawbacks to this development – sometimes Maddin’s use of the new ‘cubist’ editing and photographic techniques that can get him closer to the centre of a fluttering core of things have seemed too much like an obsessive playing with a new toy or, worse, a substitution of technique for expression; while the movement from baroque Tolesian dialogue to Maddin’s own sometimes almost inarticulate poetic repetitions that embody unreconstructed feelings is not necessarily progress. But altogether it is probably true to say that Maddin’s latest phase is his most powerful and productive. And at this exact moment it is hard to avoid a sense that the place where the director has arrived is a kind of culmination. At the same time it would be rash indeed to believe that Maddin’s most recent modus will be any more permanent than his earlier ones. There is already evidence, in the fragments of information emerging about his latest feature project, Keyhole, that the autobiographical quotient of his cinema is about to take a severe dip, at least in the short run. I personally find it quite impossible to predict where Maddin may leap next, and my sense is that he doesn’t have any kind of detailed notion himself. His filmic output never has borne the marks of premeditation – on the contrary, it has primarily responded to opportunity. The sequence of projects Gimli Hospital – Archangel – Careful – Twilight of the Ice Nymphs may have formed a certain kind of logical development, with each film more ambitious, narratively and technically, than the last. But that progress terminated in the dead end of Twilight, and when Maddin began anew, most frequently the source of his feature projects was a commission:1 from the CBC for Dracula, from the Power Plant Gallery for Cowards Bend the Knee, from The Film Company for Brand upon the Brain!, from the Documentary Channel for My Winnipeg. Even Saddest Music was brought to him by Rhombus rather than self-initiated. With the possible exception of Cowards, he didn’t set out to make any of these projects – all were a response to stimulus. And news of collaborations with John Ashbery or new music festivals in Europe simply emphasize how many fresh prospects there might be out there, and how really unforseeable are the forms that might develop in Maddin’s cinema in the years ahead. Guy Maddin has years and years to go yet, and the prospect that I would bet money on is that he will continue to astonish us in the future as he has in the past.

This page intentionally left blank

Appendix: The Short Films

It was quite natural for a filmmaker with Maddin’s very limited resources to make short films. Looking through the filmography at the back of Caelum Vatnsdal’s Kino Delirium (or indeed through The Internet Movie Database listing for Maddin) one finds no fewer than thirteen short films, complete with casts of local Maddin regulars and plot summaries, that are reported to have been made between 1989 and 2000.1 This potential treasure trove, however, drastically boils down to only two films that have ever been seen outside Maddin’s personal circle: Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1995) and The Heart of the World (2000). The remainder are either lost, unfinished, held back from public viewing, remade, or cannibalized for later shorts, and as a body of work at the present time consist only of their titles and those plot summaries – identical in both Kino Delirium and The Internet Movie Database, and definitely from Maddin’s own pen. Since 2000, there are a further ten or more short films (the number depending on how you enumerate the cluster of films known as the Workbooks), almost all of which have been exhibited – often on television – and most of which are available on video. In this chapter I will try to give a brief survey of this far-flung and highly varied corpus with some critical comment, though of a far sketchier kind than I am extending to the feature films. The lost films Maddin’s ‘lost’ shorts are as follows: Mauve Decade (1989), BBB (1989), Tyro (1990), Indigo High-Hatters (1991), The Pomps of Satan (1993), Sea Beggars (1994), Sissy Boy Slap Party (1995),2 Imperial Orgies (1996), Mal-

362

Appendix

doror: Tygers (1998), The Hoyden (1998), The Cock Crew (1998), and Flesh Pots of Antiquity (2000). The raw footage for some of the films was for a time unavailable owing to a family dispute,3 and many are in fragmentary uncompleted form, awaiting time, money, and/or inclination to be finished or at least incorporated somehow into other work. Maldoror: Tygers and The Cock Crew were eventually cannibalized and reimagined in an entirely different form in the Workbooks (2004), and Sissy Boy Slap Party (2004) was completely remade. I personally have come to rejoice in the status of the remainder which exist only as titles with brief plot summaries – as ideas for films, in short. Here are a couple of citations: Indigo High-Hatters (1991). 34 min.; b/w, 16mm. The true story of a 1920s Canadian jazz band who play their every performance gagged and almost completely immobilized by thick cords bind them hand and foot. The music they produce – from a full range of instruments, yet without recourse to the usual limbs and orifices – is a moving triumph of courage over selfimposed adversity.4 The Pomps of Satan [a.k.a. Through a Man’s Eyeglass] (1993). 5 min.; b/w,16mm. The story of Roulette Ruby, a limping and terrified spinster who ‘works’ the boats plying Lake Winnipeg, taking on any gambler, staking herself against the cold cash of her partner. She loses a particularly high-stakes tourney to a tough old Northern Manitoba fried chicken trader, who takes her as his mistress back up to a frosty little white hell on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. A ‘flying-boat’ aviator makes a forced landing there and immediately falls in love with Ruby. The new couple battle wolves, bears, frostbite and a giant puffin flee the vengeful chicken trader.

The Hoyden [a.k.a. Idylls of Womanhood] (1998, 4 min.) is simply described as ‘an extremely condensed silent remake of Von Stroheim’s lost talkie Walking Down Broadway,’5 while, as we shall see in a minute, Odilon Redon is an extremely condensed remake of Abel Gance’s (at the time) semilost La Roue. All of the unavailable shorts have now themselves reached the status of lost films, and there is something pleasing in this most Maddin-like of concepts: a cinematic past that is out of reach, that must be reimagined – and whose reimagination may be purer and more essential than any actual text can be –and that if it is recaptured by Maddin will be in a form ludicrously yet charmingly shrunken and straitened but still personally expressive in some dimension.

The Short Films

363

Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (1995). 4'00". 16mm, b/w; silent with sound effects. This little film was commissioned by the BBC as part of a series in which filmmakers were asked to create works about or inspired by their favourite artists. Maddin chose the painter and graphic artist Odilon Redon, and the resulting film is his only extant work between 1992 (Careful) and 1997 (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs). This was the period of the aborted Dikemaster’s Daughter project,6 and it was something of a fallow period for the filmmaker. In this context, the BBC commission, which carried a real budget (£10,000) and precise length requirements (4 minutes), probably seemed like a little rock to cling to in a wide sea of inactivity and discouragement, especially when the list of other participants included at the start Tim Burton and Jane Campion and at the finish line Raul Ruiz and Atom Egoyan. The commission was to produce a ‘filmic flight of fancy on any piece of art or artist of my choice,’7 and Maddin chose the Symbolist and proto-Surrealist painter and graphic artist Odilon Redon, and in particular one of the charcoal sketches illustrating Baudelaire’s first French translation of Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Eye Like a Strange Balloon.’ Starting with a general mood inspired by the style of Redon’s graphic work, Maddin then decided to apply something like that modus to the task of remaking Gance’s monumental 1922 film La Roue (which he had never seen), on the flimsy grounds that Redon had illustrated Poe, and Gance had admired Poe. La Roue, which premiered at around seven hours, was successively reduced over the years until only fragmentary versions remained in any kind of circulation,8 and thus occupied something like the same status as Stroheim’s Greed (which, we may recall, was the unlikely first model for the style of Tales from the Gimli Hospital). The notion of taking an imagined conception of Gance’s dropsied masterpiece and cramming its essence into a four-minute time span is laughable in exactly the Maddin vein of childlike innocence combined with ironic self-awareness. Odilon Redon transfers Gance’s long-inthe-making and staggeringly expensive epic melodrama of train wrecks, violin-making, inappropriate sexual longings, family dysfunction, and at last blindness and death in craggy Alpine fastnesses into an environment of toy wooden trains, home aquarium settings, primitive special effects, characters with their names stitched onto their clothing, and action and imagery that seem to mean something but are actually unreadable as anything coherent. The film’s first cut came in at around 5'20", and ac-

364

Appendix

cording to Maddin was quite clear in its action; but in the act of cutting it down to the required 4'00" the plot became completely opaque, ‘so the images get more dealt out to you like a pack of cards.’9 Here is the plot summary included in Kino Delirium: A father and son ride the rails in their powerful locomotive. Witnessing a crash between two other engines, they rescue the lone survivor, Berenice, and make her a part of their family. All is well until the father and son become rivals for the girl’s affections and perform a series of daredevil feats to win her heart. She runs off with a zeppelin pilot, and, after Keller mounts a brief kidnapping attempt, the despondent men are left to their bizarre fates. The son becomes first a droopy marsh flower and then a flying head; the father is left blinded and forlorn upon a mountaintop. Berenice transforms into a spiny cactus. (163–4)

With this summary in hand, it is just possible to see what various images in Maddin’s film are meant to represent, though even then a number of important points are opaque. Without it, Odilon Redon is a set of baffling yet stimulating and intriguing images which indeed recall some features of Redon’s spiky and smudgy monochrome prints. Redon’s ‘sub-aquatic decors’10 are relayed through a process of shooting through a foreground tank of water complete with bubbles rising past the camera, and images of giant clamshells and other molluscs. The heroine emerges from one of these after her unrecognizable-as-such train wreck, and in another shot appears almost as a mermaid, undulating under water while protruding from a large shell. Perhaps these opening and closing shell-creatures have a vaginal overtone, since Berenice’s sexual appeal to the father and son seems to be accompanied by them. Later on, the father is blinded by a too-sudden application of train brakes and goes through the rest of the film like Oedipus after his self-mutilation. Meanwhile the son appears somehow to be decapitated by his situation, and his head appears as a marsh flower (cf. Redon’s print of the same name).11 Perhaps Berenice then picks this flower, because the severed head appears on a silver platter that she carries, Salome-like, and she adorns it by pulling her front teeth out with pliers and placing them on the plate as decorations. At last this platter ascends to the sky suspended beneath a large balloon which becomes the image of the title drawing by Redon. The father and son bear, on little patches of cloth sewed to their jackets, the names of the actors playing them: (Jim) ‘KELLER’ as the father and ‘CAELUM’ (Vatnsdal)

The Short Films

365

as the son.12 Caelum begins as a little boy and later actually traverses puberty upon seeing Berenice, as facial hair appears on his chin, left to right in accelerated stop-action photography. Keller is an old patriarch with Russian-style lambswool hat, Letzte Mann-style doorman’s uniform, and white beard in which little spider creatures sometimes appear in stop action. Caelum, as boy and man, seems wedded to a little pianokeyboard thing which he sometimes plays with his feet (a strange transposition, perhaps, of the violins that Elie makes and plays in La Roue). Both children at different points register excitement or anxiety by a speeded-up stop-action chattering of teeth. At one point Berenice hauls off and punches Keller in the face, a piece of slapstick that gives rise to the one line of dialogue in the film, Keller’s exclamation: ‘Oh, humanity!’ Towards the end Berenice begins to sprout spines and at last rather beautifully turns into a cactus. But there is not much point in accounting for just a few of the film’s torrent of unexplained images as I have just done. As with many of Maddin’s short films, its avant-gardish surrealism requires a microscopic reading or a bluntly macroscopic one. So: Odilon Redon is a strange and charming film, with a quirky aesthetic appeal that oscillates between jokey sketch-staging and surreal poetry. Its photography does have a straightforward refinement of black and white 16mm photography that little of his other work manifests, and a corresponding diminution of the ‘degrading’ processes of blurring, scratching, over- or under-exposure, irising, and vignetting. (A somewhat more simplified and abstract reading of its imagery may be obtained by viewing the many storyboards appended to the DVD issue.) When regarded through the clarifying lens of its plot summary, its basic materials of destructive quasi-incestuous desire, father-son Oedipal rivalry, and bodily mutilation place it squarely within the realm of its immediate predecessor Careful as well as a number of Maddin’s other features. Hospital Fragment (1999). 3'25". 16mm, b/w; silent with music. This film was inspired by Maddin’s thought, seeing Angela Heck and Michael Gottli around town during periods more than fifteen years after the filming of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, that both people looked exactly the same. It revisits their two characters, and is described by the filmmaker as ‘little lost episodes from Gimli Hospital of Gunnar and Snjófridur’s love life.’ He goes on to say: ‘I really like the movie. It’s not about much, but it was really good therapy for me after making a feature

366

Appendix

[Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. And it looks exactly like I wanted it to look.’13 Maddin’s description is only partly recognizable from the film, since although it has opening and closing brackets of Gunnar and Snjófridur in the hospital – Snjófridur gazing at a particularly large scar on Gunnar’s leg as the camera blurs out at the beginning, then back in at the end – it consists mostly of a kind of interpolated fantasy or bizarre mental transposition of scenes of sexual longing and coupling involving completely different people. It’s not clear whether these personages, played by actors such as Brent Neale, Darcy Fehr, and Deborah Axelrod who do not appear prominently in Gimli Hospital, are meant to represent characters from the earlier movie, other citizens of New Iceland, or psychic projections of some kind, but it doesn’t much matter. Hospital Fragment is dark and intense, even anguished might not be too strong a word, and quite lacks the cackling chickens, blackface parodies, buttock grabbings, and various other low-comedy appurtenances of its predecessor feature film. The central episode presents a montage in multiple exposures, low-key lighting, and occasional speeded-up motion of stages of sexual attraction advancing from romantic spooning through eager strippings-off and nude writhings to desperate enmeshings in fishnets wrapped around heads that clearly represent sexual bondage in every sense. The signal for beginning this metamorphosis seems to be the rhythmical whappings of a fish against the side of the building, or of two fish struck together, performed by a shirtless Darcy Fehr, whose expression becomes tormented as the process continues. This sounds comical in exactly the vein of Einar’s fish skinning, fish nailing, and fish squeezing outside his cabin, but in fact it has a sinister power that skates right past ridicule and into surreal foreboding, reflected by the increasingly afflicted expression on Fehr’s face. The music track is very active, with dirgelike tolling bells, an ancient 78rpm recording of John McCormack singing the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann (‘Night of Love’) to signify rapturous romance, and a reprise from Archangel of the dark tread of Boris Godunov’s opening to represent the transformation of this idealist impulse into something oppressive and painful. The final very brief return to Snjófridur and Gunnar puts an end to the disturbing central sequence without quite dispelling its eventual grim mood. Altogether Hospital Fragment quite justifies its creator’s satisfaction with it, and suggests in a very condensed way something of what Maddin’s cinema might be like if it were stripped of its jokiness and encouraged to be simply dark and dreamlike.

The Short Films

367

The Heart of the World (2000). 6'15". 16mm and Super-8mm, b/w; silent with music and sound effects. The Heart of the World was commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, one of ten commissions for shorts to introduce screenings at the festival from Canadian filmmakers including David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, JeanPierre Lefebvre, and Michael Snow.14 Maddin’s film not only proved the decisive favourite of all these films – it was described by Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star as ‘the most satisfying five minutes you’ll spend with your pants on’ – but made the annual Ten Best lists of J. Hoberman (Village Voice) and A.O. Scott (New York Times) and even received the Best Experimental Film Award from the National Society of Film Critics in the United States among other honours: astonishing achievements for a six-minute film.15 It has become probably Maddin’s single best known and best loved work. One reason for the extravagant enthusiasm it has aroused is that it is entirely without any of the things that make Maddin’s cinema difficult for some viewers. It is completely a jeu, a quick, kinetic, one-note film thrown off like a spark. Into it are crammed Maddin’s unparalleled talent for pastiche of silent film modes and a faultless confidence in its realizaton, the delightful surrealism of his humour, and, now, a turn towards the poster-art propaganda imagery and machinegun editing of a new cinematic model: Soviet montage film. Maddin says that he had been looking to up the tempo of his films ever since Odilon Redon,16 and he certainly succeeded in doing that here. Moreover, because almost all of his films since have followed in its wake by employing far more activist editing techniques and far fewer long-take set-ups, Heart of the World enjoys the status of a major stylistic watershed. A significant figure in this development is deco dawson, a former student of Maddin’s. Maddin relates: The plan was to shoot it entirely on 16, and then I hired deco [...] to keep a [...] Super 8 diary. And what happens a lot of times when I’m in battle is that I can’t hear when my film runs out and I forget to focus and stuff like that. But when the film came back I realized there were some shots that I just didn’t get because the film ran out, and they were really important shots in the story – because I storyboarded the entire movie – but deco got them because he was just filming me filming, and most of the time he framed me out. And he just started trying to get shots [...] When the Su-

368

Appendix

per-8 film came back and my 16 film came back, he not only got the shots I was running on empty for, but he also got sometimes far superior angles than mine did, or the light just halated better or I just liked the grain and texture of that. So I asked him if he wanted to edit in ... Then he started editing sequences together just for fun and sure enough, they did look good – I preferred them over some of the little 16 segments that I had. Pretty soon his diary was making its way into the film. And soon we were just editing side by side. He was editing the 8mm stuff on a little table right beside me while I was editing 16.17

dawson received co-editor and co-camera credits, and went on to work in a similar capacity on Dracula, on which he has the sole editing (as well as ‘Associate director’) credits. dawson’s own avant-garde shorts from this period – quite beautiful at times – show, for all their huge differences of subject matter, a simulation of silent film photography and ‘degraded’ imagery not so far distant from Maddin’s, and a few sequences of rapid editing, but nothing like the constant micro-montage of Heart of the World. There is no mistaking that the master model for the pacing and editing patterns in Maddin’s film is that of Soviet montage cinema: Eisenstein and Dziga-Vertov (there are actually a couple of shots from Strike in the film). These filmmakers, and their subjects, are a far cry from the deliberate, soulful silent melodrama of Stroheim and Murnau – if not quite so far from the often hyperactive Gance who sometimes inspired them. And just as the kinetic delights of Soviet montage have made their way into contemporary advertising, music video, and action cinema, there to be happily consumed without the tiniest backward glance at revolutionary politics or any other complication whatever, so The Heart of the World can jump merrily onto the micro-montage bandwagon unencumbered by anything from Eisenstein or Dziga-Vertov other than a soufflé-like pastiche of their style. Maddin has never been interested in politics, and there is nothing remotely political about The Heart of the World, which brandishes its propaganda signifiers as pure contentless gestures that have no more to do with revolutionary politics – or indeed the world’s heart attack which is the ostensible motivator of the action – than Chester Kent’s fun-filled production numbers have to do with actual sorrow in The Saddest Music in the World. In this the film differs strongly from so much of Maddin’s work that also wants to reference an earlier cinematic model. As silly as much of Archangel is, it really seeks to preserve the power of an older movie visual rhetoric. As exaggerated and mocked as

The Short Films

369

the plot excesses of Careful are, in the end it is trying truly to be a melodrama and carry a real affective weight. Nothing of the sort is going on in The Heart of the World, where Maddin’s task is simplified to what many viewers would probably like it always to be: namely, a brisk, inventive, witty, cinema-retro take-off that can be appreciated with particular zest by anyone with a little awareness of its models. This is certainly not to criticize The Heart of the World, which follows its captivating basic idea to perfection, and is as irresistible as a puppy. The film’s ‘plot’ is a dizzy concoction of nonsensical elements whose whole appeal lies in the way it is abstracted into a set of striking poses, rhetorical gestures, and character and narrative simplifications that exactly resemble what a tourist from the future strolling through Soviet montage cinema would see. The explosive modernist energy of montage, framing, and hyperdramatic intertitles are put to the service of a propaganda message that is completely absurd. Anna (‘State scientist’), a Brigitte Helm-type beauty clad in white helmet-hat with eyes flashing and arms snapping into commanding gestures, sees, through her telescope, the very heart of the earth (a palpitating cheap-monster-movie mass of flesh) on the verge of a fatal crisis. What? Meanwhile, she is finding it difficult to choose between two sterling fellows who both love her: Nikolai (‘Youth, mortician’) and Osip (‘an actor playing Christ in the Passion Play’). What?? Announcing the end of the world to a large crowd of workers and peasants, she creates mass panic. Her lovers begin a contest to see who can impress Anna the most, Nikolai with his elaborate coffins or Osip with his Christlike ministrations. But eventually she is distracted from both of them by the arrival of the rich industrialist Akmatov, a bald, fat, top-hatted, cigar-smoking caricature of a capitalist moneybags18 who showers her with gold and into whose arms she falls. She comes to her moral senses in time to strangle the capitalist and dive down the long telescope tube that leads to the centre of the earth, where she fuses with the ailing heart of the world and becomes its new heart. The energy radiating from this glowing organ – now identified as ‘KINO!’ – revitalizes all the positive impulses of mankind, seen as May Day parades, fluttering banners, and other images of the people triumphant. What??? When I asked Maddin what this conclusion meant, he replied, ‘I don’t know [...] It is a propaganda movie, don’t forget, so it requires specious leaps of logic.’19 This is just another confirmation of the obvious fact that The Heart of the World is a stylistic exercise pure and simple. Maddin succeeds in bringing all of his playful instincts to bear in the film – not only to reduce Soviet propaganda to dolls and dress-up, but

370

Appendix

Anna, State Scientist. Note overexposed subject with severe light-halo and stygian high-contrast background, grain, scratches, giant hairball-insect in the projector gate.

to engage in that intoxicating surreal slippage that seems natural to the heedless appreciation of the amateur enthusiast. To take only one example, it is delectable that, in this environment of godless Communism, Osip should be taking part in a Passion Play, and even more delectable that the cross that he bears and on which he is crucified should be made of girders and rivets. What could express more concisely and wittily the impossible conflations of an atheistic political propaganda that is religious in its intensity, and an aesthetic that is applying modernist industrial imagery to high emotions, than a Constructivist Passion and Crucifixion? This image is one that never existed in history before Maddin imagined it but it manages to be analytical, synthetic, and sweetly irresponsible all at once. Heart of the World offers this kind of perspective with some regularity as it drives at breakneck speed through its six minutes. The actors embody their poster-art gestures and poses admirably, especially Leslie Bais as the beautiful Anna, commanding sexual/political fetish object and ideal manifestation of valiant Soviet womanhood. The film simultaneously occupies the contradictory positions of heroic kinesis and affectionate farce, and generally has the effect of just lifting

The Short Films

371

off from all difficulties and all realities into a realm of pure aesthetic play that produces pure viewer enjoyment. A major component is the terrific musical accompaniment, which consists entirely of Time, Forward!, by prominent Soviet composer Georgy Sviridov, a piece from the 1960s that had been used to accompany a television news show in Moscow.20 It is a driving, perpetual-motion hymn to industrial dynamism of the sort found in Mossolov’s Iron Foundry or Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’acier, and since it doesn’t start anywhere or go anywhere but just pounds along unstoppably in its one energetic mood it doesn’t need to be edited to. As an authentic piece of musical Constructivism, but one that far postdates its original modernist models and has by the 1960s almost reached the status of a Socialist Realist musical officialese, it is culturally perfect while also happening to be a fine, effective example of the forward-looking aesthetic of political optimism about which old Soviets can now feel nostalgic. If nothing else, The Heart of the World unarguably demonstrated at the time of its making how technically adept Maddin could be, how completely the master of form within the range of what seemed so clearly his own proper environment. As a silent film with music and effects-sound, it showed more authoritatively than ever before just how comfortable Maddin could make himself when not having to maintain a complicated creative relationship with dialogue and speaking actors, and the fact that Dracula and Cowards Bend the Knee extended the model so successfully into the domain of the feature film simply confirmed that sense. Simply in technical terms that sequence of three films shows a rising arc of sureness of touch, the confirmation of a cinema that is aesthetically almost completely problem-free, until in Cowards the director could reach the highest point of his achievement yet. The Heart of the World doesn’t solve, or even address, any of the knotty difficulties at the centre of Maddin’s art, but it does seem to have acted as some kind of moment of happy liberation. It’s a Wonderful Life – Sparklehorse (2001). 3'23". Super-8mm, b/w; music video. This, Maddin’s only bona fide music video, for the basically depressed alternative band Sparklehorse, came into being when the girlfriend of one of the band members recommended him.21 The song he has added images to, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ is a beautifully melancholy, not to say despondent, not to say suicidal anthem of minimalist means, an oblique

372

Appendix

look back through a life marked by loss and gentle self-loathing. The simplest of guitar oom-pahs, quietly groaning string pedal notes, the odd colourist stroke from a triangle, repeated oscillations from major to minor that seem to encapsulate happy beginnings and sad endings, and a soft, defeated voice that sings: ‘I’m the only one / that could ride that horse,’ but then, ‘I’m full of beans / that died at sea,’ and ‘I’m a bog / full of poisoned frogs,’ and ‘I’m the dog that ate / your birthday cake.’ Also in the mix are sound effects pointing backwards and forwards: an artificially restricted dynamic range and the fuzzy crackle of an old 78 (certainly this seems up Maddin’s alley), and the beepings of a far-outin-space satellite radio signal. Maddin’s response to this is to ignore the content completely and stage one of those half-readable narratives that characterize so many of his shorts, one that seems quite unrelated to the song. Brent Neale, in a cloth cap, steals flowers from a graveyard to give to a set of girls in period costume who inhabit separate compartments of a revolving diorama. There is another revolving set, containing huge ink sketches of nineteenth-century building fronts, with silhouettes of ladies and gentlemen in front of them. The ladies are, perhaps, selling flowers, and thus would have a need for the flowers young Neale has given them. But at the end the girls appear to be throwing the flowers at somebody – perhaps a parade of returning soldiers, as at the end of Archangel. Really there is too little to confirm these hypotheses, though. We are left with some beautiful photography (by deco dawson, who also did the editing) that is hemmed in with tight irises and constricted frames, sensually chiaroscuro lighting, and a lot of slow motion – and a general effect of a poetic evocation of earlier fragments of visual beauty. As a film, then, it definitely has its successful qualities. But as a music video it is bizarre, since there is a total detachment from the song and its lyrics.22 Fancy, Fancy, Being Rich (2002). 6'14". Super-8mm and 16mm, b/w; silent with music. Maddin’s next short, Fancy, Fancy Being Rich is in effect another music video – a classical music video this time – since its soundtrack is an uncut performance of the ‘Fancy Aria’ from Act I of Thomas Adès’ 1995 opera Powder Her Face. It was made in response to an invitation from Winnipeg producer Danishka Esterhazy and Valdine Anderson, an opera singer and faculty member in the Music program at the University of Manitoba. Anderson is a greatly gifted and internationally respected Hochsopran

The Short Films

373

who performed this role in the premiere of the opera and on the EMI complete audio recording.23 She appears in the film lip-synching to her own recording, just as in any music video. But it is quickly apparent that the actual music and words are the only things from the original that survive into the film. The opera, inspired by the somewhat scandalous life of Margaret Whigham (1912–1993), one-time Duchess of Argyll, has an action that stretches from the 1930s to the 1990s. The section performed in the film is set in 1934, and consists of the dazzled musings of a Waitress at the spectacle of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess and the excesses of consumption that extreme riches enable. What we see in the film is as far from this story as can be imagined, an even greater disconnect than the one in the Sparklehorse video. It is, in fact, a version of Maddin’s unreleased short film Sea Beggars, which had already been recycled once through its inclusion in the unfilmed project The Dikemaster’s Daughter, and was therefore already twice lost. Here is the summary of the short from Kino Delirium: Sea Beggars, or The Weaker Sex (1994). 7 min.; 16mm, green-tinted b/w. The legend of Sea Beggars’ Night, when no man can stay awake and no lock can be fastened against the briny ghosts, crowned in moss and barnacles, who rise from the sea and slosh manfully into darkened homes – where trembling wives await – and cuckold every man as he sleeps. One Sea Beggar falls in love with the Parson’s wife, the town pervert, who drains every last drop of life from the undead and lovelorn spectre of the sea. (163)

In a centuries-old seaside village, we see shots of anxious husbands locking doors and windows, perturbed or excited wives waiting, then men emerging from the sea and walking onto land, then coming into the houses and leaping with sexual fervour onto the women who welcome them avidly. Their night of revelry over, they return to the sea. Inserted into this environment is Valdine Anderson, also in period costume, who entertains in a more demure way a blond-haired youth, her own ‘drowned lover.’ He waves goodbye to her jauntily at the end of the film as she sings ‘Fancy purchasing a Duke. That’s what I want. That’s what you want. You’d love it.’ Only fragmentary shots survive from what existed of the first go-round with this material; almost everything was newly filmed. All the footage is heavily massaged with very activist multiple exposure and editing (credited to deco dawson).24 There is a ‘story idea’ credit for George Toles, the scenarist of The Dikemaster’s Daughter also.

374

Appendix

Nothing at all coheres in this film. Viewers who are able to follow the story – and they must be in a very small minority if they haven’t read the Sea Beggars plot summary – will be simply baffled trying to connect it in any way to the images, and in fact will be drawing false clues from the considerable percentage of the sung text that can be made out. Some of the images are striking, and the performance of the music is excellent, but the two just don’t go together at all. It’s hard to imagine what led the director to try to resurrect the Sea Beggars narrative in this context. He has expressed understandable dissatisfaction with the end product, and has remarked that he didn’t like the music much either.25 Sissy Boy Slap Party (2004). 6'18". Super-8mm, b/w. Maddin’s next trio of short films – Sissy Boy Slap Party, A Trip to the Orphanage, and Sombra Dolorosa – had their origin in a requisition by Niv Fichman, the producer of The Saddest Music in the World, for the director to make some teasers for that movie. Initially they were to be three films shot on the sets, and with the same actors, as the feature. But by the time Maddin got around to filming, the sets had been struck and most of the actors had departed, so what he did was just to make three unrelated short films ranging from 3'50" to 6'20" in length, cut them down to just under 4'00" each, and append to each of them a last title screen (in the visual style of the feature) reading: ‘THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD?’26 In that form they appeared on the Canadian cultural cable channel Bravo! (whose fund for Canadian productions had been utilized), on the website of the Independent Film Channel (a distributor of the feature), and on the eventual DVD issue of the movie. The original ‘director’s cut’ of Sissy Boy Slap Party has been available on YouTube, but that of Sombra Dolorosa may be hard to find. Sissy Boy was originally filmed by Maddin back in 1994, but that version was lost and is unlikely now to be recovered, nor has the director much interest in recovering it. The idea was suggested by a game of the same name that Maddin’s friend Caelum Vatnsdal used to play with his friends, in which everyone was compelled to keep their elbows touching their sides while attempting to slap one another in the face, resulting in ‘very short swings’ that would ‘make you look like a little girl.’ Maddin asked Vatnsdal if he could appropriate the name, and attached it to the working out that appears in the film. The remake was quickly conceived at the time of Fichman’s proposal, and quickly shot. The film is set in what appears to be a Tabu-like tropical island enclave, surrounded by

The Short Films

375

lush vegetation and heavily festooned with fishing nets. It is populated largely by shirtless young gay male beach bums, several of them wearing white naval gob caps or loose straw hats, so that the impression is almost of a kind of latter-day Pitcairn’s Island. This latter day, however, seems rather late 1940s-ish – say, somewhere between On the Town and Kenneth Anger. As the action begins, they are enjoying a siesta, curled up near each other in a kind of picture of childlike innocence – in fact, the suggestion of nap-time at a daycare is not far distant. The boys are awoken by their cranky old patriarch (Louis Negin), also shirtless, who surveys the human landscape and growls: ‘You all better go back to the gym – you look like you’re gaining weight. I gotta go to the shop and buy some condoms. And remember – no slapping!’ But no sooner has he mounted his 1940s-era bicycle and pedalled off than one mischievous lad slaps a fellow lad, and is slapped in return. The practice spreads rapidly, like a food fight, and soon everybody is slapping everybody else, as drummers Native and white pummel their hides or oil drums in a rising tempo of driving excitement. Virtually the whole of the film then records this orgy of slapping, whose participants register glee, aggression, and very often whines of outraged pain. In fact it is the first slapper who begins the crying out, a detail that only confirms the infantile nature of the activity. A pair of ‘dock whores’ (as the end credit identifies them) look on – one of them a particularly priceless study in gum-chewing lassitude. Various duels and rituals start, including a pair of opposing lines who whale away at each other, and a gauntlet which delivers slaps to the white-duck-trousered buttocks of a man who runs it. One of the drummers gives himself over to the obsessive driving rhythms so entirely that he seems about to swoon. Finally everybody is exhausted, and they all fall into a semi-nude pile of sleeping bodies, arms draped over each other, limbs carelessly intertwined, one or two slumberers sucking their thumbs, a few on their elbows and knees, exposing buttock cracks to the air. This is the spectacle that greets Negin when he returns (with a little ring of his bicycle bell), parking his vehicle in the furrow of one of the upturned derrières.27 He can tell instantly from the scene what has been going on: ‘Boys, boys, boys. I turn my back, and there you are, slapping each other again. I couldn’t trust any a you for a minute! You make me sick!’ He turns away with an expression of disgust, and the film ends. The visual presentation is always marked by Maddin’s patented irises, vignettes, and grain, and features what is surely the high-water mark of all of the director’s mimicking of hairs caught in the projector gate.28

376

Appendix

A sleeping heap of gay infant sailors. Lower right foreground: invasion of the giant hair-creatures.

There are a wide variety of lenses on view, with some rather extensive very wide-angle close-ups of characters sticking their faces right into the camera. The editing, meanwhile, is in the hands of John Gurdebeke, who cranks up its pacing until it becomes an orgy of micro-montage to match the increasing mania of the slap-fest. (The longer version of the film extends and intensifies the climax of editing frenzy.) The two little passages quoted from Negin’s character comprise 100% of the words in the film, but since there is at least this bit of spoken dialogue, and also copious sound effects of slapping, drumming, and cries, it might be correct to describe Sissy Boy simply as a sound film, if only because at no point is there a deliberately marked disjuncture between the image track and the soundtrack. Nevertheless, it otherwise proceeds very much like any recent Maddin silent-plus-sound-effects-and-music films. There are no intertitles, but the opening credit screen – like those of its accompanying two shorts – identifies the film as a ‘Photoplay by Guy Maddin.’

The Short Films

377

The musical score (uncredited) is an important factor. It begins with, and then returns at the end to, a passage of relaxed, idyllic ‘descriptive’ music snatched from an ancient 78rpm record titled ‘The Mystery of Night.’ But once the slapping starts, a new score begins – specially written for the film by French composer Denis Frajerman. Scored for a small group of instruments including drums, a few strings, and a flute, it begins in a sinuous mood, then gradually accumulates momentum and drive. It works itself up into passages of climbing, ever-intensifying chromatic twinges of desire like a miniature version of the Danse générale from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë, but without ever leaving the realm of a small ensemble. It is altogether admirable, and really helps to carry the film along in the right way. There is a lot of violence in this film, but it is all in play, all explicitly marked as play. Similarly there are a lot of sexual overtones, but no actual sex either. It seems pretty clear that the ‘slapping’ that the gay archetype older man abjures his harem of ‘boys’ against (while he goes off for condoms) is a code -word for sex, and the orgiastic aggressions and pleasures and finally the post-coital sleep have their own sexual iconicity. But the film in fact creates a surreal collision between adult transgressive sexuality and the magical disarmament conducted upon it through the mechanism of play-staging it as childhood naughtiness. The result of infantilizing the whole troupe of men to the level of preschoolers who got into the peanut butter supply while the parent was away is to evacuate this world of everything but children’s appetites and children’s misbehaviour, to take from these men the burden of their adult sexuality and cast them definitively into a pre-pubertal realm of emotional safety. (According to Louis Negin, ‘the boys were wearing diapers’ in actual fact as well as metaphorically.29) Also the stereotypes of a certain strain of gay culture, one that might be drawn to a ‘female’ form of violence like slapping and the ‘female’ screeches and tears of pain and hurt feeling that are given such an extensive workout here, have their already existing theatricality pushed all the way into dress-up, fantasy setting, and lovable absurdity. At the end of an orgy in which nothing dangerous or even particularly inadvisable is done, we are left with an all-encompassing sense of sweetness and tenderness, as we look at these disobedient boys, sleeping with their gorgeous male torsos carelessly thrown upon each other. Maddin certainly doesn’t want to let go entirely of the other side of this coin – that is, the adult-sexual side – and it is preserved in the typical form of little pokes of vulgarity like ‘I gotta go buy some condoms’ and the butt-crack bike-rack. The basic strategy is purely true to his creative

378

Appendix

practice, to find some childlike play-acted form of restaging, in some setting in the historical past, for everything that might in other, less fantasized, ways be traumatic or hard to look at without pain, and hence to cover it with charm and make-believe. But not very much is at stake in Sissy Boy Slap Party, and the looming adult other lurking offstage is not very big or scary, so this delightful film can offer inventiveness, playfulness, and charm without a cloud of worry. A Trip to the Orphanage (2004). 3'53". Super-16mm, b/w; silent with music. A Trip to the Orphanage is another classical music video, albeit one where both the music and the performer are long gone. The music is RimskyKorsakov’s song ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1866), and the performance, in English translation with piano accompaniment, is by the great soprano Rosa Ponselle (1939). The song has a sorrowful lyric of desire: ‘The nightingale sang to the rose by day and night his song of love,’ but he ‘knows not why he sings so sad and fraught with pain his yearning song.’ The music features minor-key harmonies and ‘oriental’ intervals and decorations. Altogether the mood is one of unchanging melancholy – certainly of the three shorts tagged with the question ‘THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD?’ this is the likeliest candidate by far. The film is very simple. The actress Sarah Constible, dressed in black dress, duncoloured raincoat, and pre-war cloth hat, lip-synchs to the song while standing nocturnally in front of a wall topped by wrought iron fencing. There is a constant multiple exposure overprinting of gently falling snow and softly blowing white lace curtains. Two other sets of images are also appearing, and viewers familiar with The Saddest Music in the World will recognize them as probably out-takes from that film. The first features a young male sleepwalker in Auschwitz pyjamas, who stumbles zombielike along a street; the second shows Maria de Medeiros and a winter-coated little boy, who embraces her desperately as she looks away, and sadly drops his head in close-up. (This image-set derives in part from a deleted portion of Saddest Music involving some orphans.30) Multiple levels of blowing white curtains surround the head of the singer, her own face veiled in sadness. The song comes to an end, the singer fades away, and we are left for a moment with the curtains and the faint sounds of blowing wind. A last scene presents itself: on the street, the sleepwalker meets de Medeiros; she kisses him on the cheek; he utters the words ‘Goodnight, mother’ and proceeds on his way. Fade to black.

The Short Films

379

How is this a trip to the orphanage? Is de Medeiros abandoning her little son when he embraces her and lowers his head? Would that make him an orphan? Is the sleepwalker the grown-up boy, or his counterpart? And is his sleepwalking some kind of symptom of his orphan status? There is no orphanage, unless that wrought-iron-fenced location behind the singer has some such significance. But of course the film has no obligation to make narrative sense when very few music videos do – all it must do is strike a mood. And with its blowing curtains and snowflakes, its gentle wind, its sad actress, and the beautiful melancholy tones of its singer and its song, A Trip to the Orphanage does this very nicely. The imagery is echt-Maddin, and so are the fragmentary tropes and themes: mothers and lost children, the singer who seems in this context almost like a mother who has lost her child, the night, and the snow. Maddin is at pains to point out how off the cuff this, and also Sissy Boy Slap Party, are: That movie isn’t anything. That movie literally took four minutes to film. I just put a camera onto a dolly and tracked into her while she kind of lipsynched to the Rosa Ponselle and then we just cut in some unused footage from the orphanage scene from the movie [...] It’s a beautiful song. I just wanted to use it for something, and then I shot it after lunch on the day that we shot Sissy Boy Slap Party in the morning. I shot two movies that day.31

Well, Sissy Boy Slap Party looks a little more elaborate than that, but one can believe A Trip to the Orphanage didn’t require very much. It is a lovely little mood piece nevertheless, and it certainly has nothing of the arbitrariness of its fellow classical music video Fancy, Fancy Being Rich. Sombra Dolorosa (2004). 6'15". Super-8mm and Super-16mm, colour; intertitles and sound effects, with some Spanish dialogue and singing. This charming film should, says Maddin, bear an additional story credit for actor Mark McKinney, who in the wake of The Saddest Music in the World helped Maddin dream up the events of the narrative.32 It arose originally from Maddin’s desire to make ‘a Mexican wrestling picture,’ and to fill out the cast he turned to the Paz family, whose members, as a band called ‘The Mini-Mariachis,’ formed the Mexican entry into the Saddest Music Contest. He then added Talia Pura (one of the radio announcers in Saddest Music) and dancer Cindy-Marie Small (Mina

380

Appendix

in Dracula) as the grieving mother and daughter, and a cast of dozens. The plot is as follows. In a Mexican village, Don Paramo has died of the plague, and his daughter, Dolores, is suicidal at the loss. In order to save her, the Widow Paramo must be victorious in a wrestling match with the fearsome El Muerto, ‘Eater of Souls’ (Isaac Paz, Sr), and, having defeated him, force him to perform his death-reversing magic by eating the corpse of her husband during the eclipse which is arriving at that exact moment. Dolores leaps into the water to drown herself, but is saved by a passing handsome young peasant, who brings her back to the village on the back of his donkey. Meanwhile, the Widow has defeated El Muerto in a fierce contest, but only after producing a straight razor and cutting him (intertitle: ‘Foreign Object!’). In the longer version, we also see the combat between El Muerto’s tag-team partner The Flaming Claw and a half-dozen village girls. The contest is watched by villagers and a couple of tourists (a crusty old stetson-hatted stereotype American is as splendid a stroke of Eisensteinian typage as the First Dock Whore in Sissy Boy). The eclipse arrives, viewed through pieces of coloured glass by the tourists. The defeated El Muerto now eats the body of Don Paramo, which has been prepared by black-costumed old ladies who rip off its clothing and massage it with rolling pins (intertitle: ‘Preparing the body’). A particularly memorable shot has the toes of a mouthful of foot being stuffed in to finish it. Now, before the end of the eclipse, El Muerto must give rebirth to Don Paramo by having his big belly massaged by the old women, and he emerges in double exposure from the belly button just in time for the arriving Dolores to joyfully see him. The spirit of Don Paramo, however, now must enter the donkey of Dolores’s rescuer, ‘to start his endless wanderings.’ The father-struck girl mounts the animal, caressing its fur, and goes off to parts unknown leaving her sorrowing mother behind, while intertitles tell us ‘Wedding bells?’ and ‘No mothers allowed!’ This is a more elaborate and complete narrative than in any of Maddin’s other short films – more so than Odilon Redon or The Heart of the World, both of which sort of have stories – and more comprehensible also. The made-up-from-scratch farrago of Latin American peasant spirituality/superstition is beautifully deadpan, and its cross-plotting with the iconography of Mexican wrestling is utterly wacky but strangely delicate. To see the Widow Paramo, in formal black mourning headdress, black elbow-length tulle gloves, and wrestling tights, get body-slammed by a 333-pound guy wearing a death’s-head mask and then come back at him just as hard, is to behold the perfect Maddin outrage to a dignity

The Short Films

381

Good to the very last toe. El Muerto just finishing the last mouthful of another Maddin dead father, the second who had to be eaten in order to put his child’s life to rights.

that still somehow survives unharmed, a sublime silliness that effortlessly goes further than anything Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont could produce. Each given of the folk myth – defeating El Muerto, the eclipse, the funeral customs, the cannibalism, the rebirth – is presented with impeccable gravity, each absurdity uncompromised by giggling and kid humour. The underwater ballet, for that is what it is when both participants (Cindy-Marie Small and Johnny Wright) are leading dancers with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, has a lovely coolness and grace that contrast admirably with the heat and violence of the wrestling ring. Indeed, the meeting point of professional actors (Talia Pura), professional dancers, and amateur musicians (the Paz family who perform El Muerto, the Widow’s ringside adviser, and the musicians who eventually sing during the magical rebirth) is held in fine balance. The (uncredited) music works admirably, too – beginning, perhaps faintly in homage to Roderick in Saddest Music, with Saint-Saëns’ ‘The Swan’ from Carnival of the Animals in a cello and piano reduction, and then moving into another finely judged small-ensemble score by Denis Frajerman, before arriving

382

Appendix

at snatches of Ketelby and the chantlike ritual singing that accompanies the rebirth ceremony. Sombra Dolorosa has its own look, for although much of the framing, camera movement, and editing are familiar from other Maddin films of this period (John Gurdebeke a strong contributor again), the colour photography has a relatively straightforward sensual attractiveness that is far less stylized than the director’s earlier forays into colour. It is slightly (for Maddin) muted towards a gouache-like pastel palette, and although there are some shots that are washed out and others that are darkened with grain, most are clear, well defined, and gently vibrant. The settings are minimal – wrestling ring, a muralled village adobe wall, watercolour backdrops for the underwater shots – but again they seem perfectly attuned to the dimensions of the story. Altogether there is a kind of simplicity and straightforwardness to every aspect of the presentation, something that produces in the realm of mise en scène the calm straightforwardness of the narrative. Again: it is more of a story film than any of Maddin’s other shorts, and its presentation has a simpler fabular clarity. Meanwhile, thematically it returns once more to family melodrama, and especially to a nubile daughter’s adoration of her father (Careful, Cowards Bend the Knee); and it carries robustly on with Maddin’s traditions of bodily outrage and mutilation. The action ends in a form of maternal melodrama, as the mother’s heroic sacrifice to save her daughter by confronting and overcoming the male world ends in her own defeat and separation from her child as diagrammatically as Stella Dallas’. This is, I think, an almost perfect little film, and one of my personal favourites among Maddin’s shorter work. Workbooks The 2004 DVD release of Cowards Bend the Knee brought another collection of Maddin shorts: three little films arising directly out of the shooting of that film (Fuse Boy, Audition 1, Audition 2), and another three films with the specific designation of ‘workbooks.’ The DVD title screen for these extras bears the collective title Love-Chaunt Workbooks and the subtitle ‘Short film blueprints from a lost Maddin feature.’ In fact this description applies only to the ‘workbook’ films, Rooster Workbook, Zookeeper Workbook, and Chimney Workbook. The first and third derive from Herman Melville stories ‘Paradise of Bachelors and the Tarturus of Maids,’ ‘Cock-a-Doodle Doo,’ and ‘I and My Chimney,’ which Melville enthusiast George Toles had amalgamated, transfigured, and worked into a script

The Short Films

383

entitled The Cock Crew for a half-hour drama for a contest held by the local Global TV station CKND in 1995. This script did not win the award, but the one that did, The Hands of Ida, was actually assigned to Maddin to direct. (The Hands of Ida [1995, 23'40", 16mm colour], with a realist contemporary setting, is the only Maddin-directed film which saw the light of day that I have been unable to track down. I am not too concerned, since it is evidently completely uncharacteristic, and no one has a good word to say for it, least of all Maddin himself, who has described it as ‘like an episode of The Littlest Hobo’ – the cheaply made half-hour dog adventure drama for children that provided a depressing spectacle to adult viewers of Canadian television in the early 1980s.33) After this, and after the discouraging experience of relatively bigbudget film production on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, he decided to take the rejected Cock Crew script and make a longer film of it himself, employing what he describes as a ‘moronically naïve utopia’ of self-organized filmmaking. The shoots themselves were often awkward and painful, and the results were unproductive and dispiriting, although there was enough footage shot for a feature. Maddin describes the whole project as ‘ill-starred’ and says ‘there’s a reason it was never edited for the longest time.’ Years later the director threw out much of the unedited footage in disgust, and then turned the remains into the Workbooks.34 The middle film, Zookeeper Workbook, derives from another uncompleted film, Maldoror: Tygers, for which there was considerable unedited footage which Maddin also discarded much of. Rooster Workbook (2004). 3'52". 16mm, b/w; silent with music. Chimney Workbook (2004). 3'49". 16mm, b/w; silent with music. Zookeeper Workbook (2004). 3'54". 16mm, b/w; silent with music. Rooster Workbook and Chimney Workbook both derive from The Cock Crew and share filmed materials from it. Maddin gives this plot description of the original The Cock Crew, or Love-Chaunt of the Chimney: It was set at a sort of back-to-the-land hippie handmade paper cottage industry, where some hippie chicks are making some handmade paper, happily, and then the husband of one of the chicks just loves his chimney as much as the Melville character in ‘I and My Chimney.’ And the working conditions were proving to be mysteriously toxic for these women, and then there’s a rooster running around as there would be in a back-to-the-land

384

Appendix

kind of arrangement, maybe – a chicken coop with a rooster. And its crowing would empower the male and weaken the self-empowered women a lot. It just kind of ended in a big orgy of rooster feathers and sperm spilling out of pulp vats, and finally just the wife deciding that she was going to inhale as much musk from the rooster as possible, and then just go up and sexually conquer her husband.35

The ‘sperm’ is the same Melvillian stuff described in the ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’ chapter of Moby-Dick that Maddin also drew on for a chapter title of Cowards Bend the Knee – though it seems that Maddin makes little or no distinction between whale sperm and the human variety. In this script, the women labourers are the Maids in Tarturus and the chimney and the rooster, explicitly sexualized, are tropes from Melville as well. But it would require a pretty psychic viewer to find anything of Melville in these films – or indeed anything from the summary just quoted without the actual aid of that summary. The surviving bits of footage were given to editor John Gurdebeke, who worked them up into a whirlwind of repeated but disconnected and contextless images. In fact the end titles give two final credits, ‘Photographed by Guy Maddin’ and ‘Edited by John Gurdebeke’ – there is no director’s credit at all. The resulting films are more purely avant-garde than anything else in Maddin’s oeuvre in the sense of being the most non-narrative and even sometimes non-representational, especially when the editing is so furious and abstract and seems to really constitute the films in some fundamental way. Because of the specificity of the images, one feels there is a particular narrative to all of these ‘workbook’ films, but it is quite illegible; and of course the reason for this impression becomes clear once their lineage is traced. All of these films are dominated by sexual imagery, but Rooster Workbook features the most explicit, and harshest, varieties. We see naked women slithering down some kind of slide, disappearing head first into a tunnel, receiving massive sprays of white liquid in the face, constantly intercut with a crowing or strutting rooster. Less overtly sexual images of women are also present, but towards the end of the film there is one hysterical sequence of a young woman terrifiedly trying to ward off the pecking motions of the rooster while trapped in this tunnel. Fragments of the paper factory appear, together with a rather sinister huge stamp of a rooster imprinted on a piece of paper. Again, because these images are so unexplained, and edited together using so much slow motion, speeding up, and scrolled repetition, it is impossible to arrive at anything but an impression. And that impression is of some kind of orgiastic or

The Short Films

385

sadistic sexual tyranny connected to the rooster, the cock. It also seems to be one that subjects women to humiliating and/or unwanted sexuality: the unprotected hindquarters of a woman who is burrowing into a narrow tunnel surrounded by brick and dirt, the assault by rooster, and, at best, the porno-shower of white liquid. Rooster Workbook, for once in Maddin’s cinema, seems more fixated on human degradation than image degradation. And this spectacle is so juiced up by the editing that the final effect is almost feral. Chimney Workbook draws on the same image-pile, though choosing different shots. The ‘tunnel’ in Rooster Workbook is now more identifiable as a chimney which a man (Darcy Fehr) seems somehow obsessed with or possessed by. The factory girls are now seen, in some colour footage, dipping their hands into the pulp vats which are Maddin’s attempt to reproduce the sperm vats from Moby-Dick. The man’s fixation on his chimney is again sexual, as he bestrides it, and his anguished or triumphant face is counterposed with images of women in this (again) tunnel, which more and more seems vaginal, until at last he slithers head first into it and disappears. A title keeps reappearing – ‘AILING UNCLE SCROTU’ – which is utterly baffling and remains so even after Maddin’s explanations connecting an ‘Uncle Scrotus’ with a monster-character from Maldoror: Tygers, a completely different film. The other title we see – ‘FATHER’S SECRET VIGIL’ – probably comes from the same source. Also, one of the close-ups of a woman seems to be an outtake of Anna in welding glasses from The Heart of the World. In retrospect, the tunnel in Rooster Workbook may be identified as this chimney. Again it is quite impossible to read a story here, although there seem to be emoting characters (Darcy Fehr, one young woman who keeps reappearing) and some kind of development to a climax. But as with its predecessor, one is left only with a mood. More than either of its companions, even, Zookeeper Workbook gives the impression of trying to tell a coherent story, if only we could grasp it, which we can’t. The story of the source-film Maldoror: Tygers derives from ‘an old Italian folk tale.’ Maddin gives this plot summary and commentary: A daughter notices her father leaving the home every day, and wonders where he is going. She follows him one day, and sees him sitting at the bedside of a strange ugly monster who seems to be on his deathbed. And she can’t seem to break the trance her father is in while he’s just pining for the ailing monster. She notices that the monster is wearing a ring, and

386

Appendix

she steals the ring one day, and then the father switches his attraction from this ailing monster to his own daughter. It was a really strong incestuous one-way attraction from a father for a daughter. In other words whoever possesses the ring gets this man’s undying lust and affection, and attention. And then in a panic, just before being ravished by her own father, she throws the ring into the ocean, and the story just ends with the father just lying on the shore of the ocean pining at the depth of the water. Then I switched it to a zoo, for some reason. I just wanted to shoot a zoo with all sorts of shadow puppets that eventually got into My Winnipeg, but I wanted to have all sorts of shadow puppets of lions and tigers and bears, a very stylized thing. And I wasn’t going to have an ocean, I was going to have a tiger cage instead of an ocean. But we built the monster. And Caelum Vatnsdal, he not only built it, he found a taxidermy deer’s head ... and he built an amphibious suit and stuck it in a cage [...] Kyle McCulloch was pulled out of retirement and came up and played this zookeeper just pining at this monster that Caelum made and dubbed ‘Uncle Scrotus.’36

And in Zookeeper Workbook we indeed see images of a Nietzsche-moustached zookeeper looking through some bars of a wooden cage, enfolding his pre-adolescent daughter in his arms, embracing a strange stuffed animal, and eventually being attacked by something like a leopard, and the daughter finding the cage. But another character appears, unaccounted for in Maddin’s summaries. This is ‘Maldoror’ (Kyle McCulloch), a lavishly costumed aristocrat of an earlier century who produces a ring from his mouth (and also a miniature crab). We see the ring being dragged on a string through the dirt, and we see Maldoror’s horror and alarm at the spectacle of women being subjected to some kind of sexualized and humiliating transformation – shots of a nude back and buttocks on which some kind of studs seem to be growing, out-takes from The Cock Crew showing one of those women in the tunnel, and a bizarre machinegun montage of images of a woman on her hands and knees looking over her shoulder intercut with shots of Maddin’s girlfriend’s little pug Spanky. It seems – but only after sifting through all kinds of information not on the screen – that the zookeeper has fantasized having doggy-sex with his eleven-year-old daughter and been torn to shreds by a tiger. The last shot shows Maldoror reingesting the ring. Despite its completely cryptic nature, Zookeeper Workbook is perhaps the most approachable of these films, and its weird indigestibility has its own charm. In summary, all three of the ‘workbook’ films combine avant-garde editing and other anti-narrative devices to scramble up what looks al-

The Short Films

387

most like archival – rather than eight-year-old – footage, with personages in period costume enacting indecipherable stories, and soundtracks consisting of dignified old classical 78s,37 to achieve a mixture of retro and modernist aesthetics that is very characteristic of the director. In a highly competitive contest, these films are perhaps Maddin’s most bizarre works. Audition 1 (2004). 5'00". Super-8mm, b/w; silent with music. Audition 2 (2004). 2'26". Super-8mm, b/w; silent with music. Fuse Boy (2004). 5'03". Super-8mm, b/w; silent with music. These three shorts are directly related to the Cowards Bend the Knee shoot. Audition 1 is subtitled ‘Louis Negin – Fusi,’ and consists purely of Negin, wearing only white briefs (and possibly sneakers), a ring, and a chain medallion, performing a series of facial emotions and gestures of arms and hands in stark black and white. This footage, taken by Maddin’s sometime producer/cameraman Jody Shapiro, is then subjected to the John Gurdebeke digital editing machine, which slows down, speeds up, stutters, and scrolls the images. On the soundtrack is an old performance of the opening movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Maddin was not even present for the shooting, which took place in Toronto, nor directly for the editing, and his name does not appear in the credits, so it might occur to someone to query the degree to which it belongs in Maddin’s filmography at all. But actually watching it, this seems like a slightly absurd question. It looks like a Maddin film and nothing else, and in order to claim a place for it in his output one does not need to descend so far as to point out that Shapiro was given some long-distance instructions by Maddin, or that he spoke to Gurdebeke about the editing and approved the results. Despite his long career on stage and screen (he even appeared in an episode of The Littlest Hobo!), Louis Negin seems almost like an invention of Maddin’s. He appears suddenly in the great burst of Maddin films of 2003, and in everything (Cowards, Saddest Music, Sissy Boy Slap Party, and these shorts), and then as one of the alternate narrators for Brand upon the Brain! and even in a bit part in My Winnipeg. One is tempted to call him Victor Cowie’s replacement as the Maddin older man, although of course the two have very different visual presences and styles of delivery. The face that sprang into Maddin’s mind when he first saw Negin was that of Cesare Gravina,38 an Italian supporting actor of the silent period

388

Appendix

whose most memorable appearances, perhaps, were in Stroheim’s Foolish Wives and The Wedding March, but who did quite a lot of work in Hollywood in the late 1920s, including The Man Who Laughs (another absolute favourite of Maddin’s). Negin shares with Gravina a craggy middle-aged face of great character, deeply marked by time and experience, capable of great pain and anger: from the first glimpse, a striking countenance. And in this short film the face is put through a series of emotions that span nobility, tragic grief, anxiety, horror, fear, and harsh laughter. In all of these moods, the effect is rather extraordinary, through the sensuous low key of Shapiro’s cinematography, through Negin’s ability to project these larger than life feelings so expressively, and through the very abstraction and simplicity of the concept. The actor’s hands are given special attention – obviously a particular test for Maddin’s intention to concentrate on hands in Cowards – and they become vehicles for the supporting projection of the same emotions. What is especially remarkable is the fact that these classically serious feelings absolutely survive the costuming of Negin in nothing but his briefs, and, later, a pair of comically clumsy rubber garden gloves. This pointed meeting place of the sublime and the ridiculous is, of course, Maddin’s special aesthetic landscape. Then Gurdebeke’s editing massage is wholly successful. If in the ‘workbook’ films it sometimes seems that the cubistic editing and the shot-content are not necessarily very connected, here the ability to concentrate on a single subject shows how repetition, juxtapositions, and alterations of pace can take a very minimal action and turn it into something rich. Quite a success, although the intertitles’ insistence that he is ‘Dr Fusi’ is somewhat at odds with the actual, on the whole rather underemoting, Fusi in Cowards. After this, Audition 2 is less imposing. It subjects four other actors from Cowards to something like the same treatment: David Stuart Evans, Darcy Fehr, Mike Bell, and Melissa Dionisio. The men are, like Negin in the first film, in their skivvies, though Dionisio is fully clothed. Evans and Fehr are rather evocative, Bell somewhat less so, and Dionisio – whose performance in the feature is so remarkable – seems a little perfunctory and at a loss, and not given much time, either. The charming musical accompaniment is a sweetly swinging a capella number entitled ‘Cuban Tango’ by The Viennese Seven Singing Sisters, recorded circa 1928. There is more to Fuse Boy than to Audition 2, though perhaps not much more. Maddin has Evans, Fehr, and Bell, still in their underwear, horsing around with an old fuse box in some basement or other, again in low-key black and white. Maddin has intercut this Winnipeg footage with shots

The Short Films

389

from Negin’s Toronto audition (casually reproducing the Kuleshov experiment that relocated the White House to Moscow). Now Negin appears to be trying to restrain, or else dramatically bemoaning, the folly of these youths in trying to electrocute themselves by sticking fingers into the fuse socket, while Maddin juices up the ‘narrative’ with the repeated intertitle ‘SOCKETS OF FIRE!’, and the state of undress of the participants suggests some kind of game of sexual daring. Under these circumstances, echoes of Sissy Boy Slap Party become distinctly perceptible, although Chopin’s Mazurka in B Minor (Op. 33 No. 4) provides an underpinning of gravity and grace. My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005). 16'56". 16mm, b/w. Isabella Rossellini asked Maddin to direct, from her own script, this documentary film about her father, Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), on the upcoming occasion of his birth centenary: She thought that I’d be perfect for it because she actually saw a lot of similarities between me and her father. I couldn’t believe it because I never thought of myself as a neo-realist at all. But she said that there was [a similarity with his method], and that if they didn’t have a studio he’d shoot something in his kitchen. Just do it, don’t worry about the money or the law or anything.39

Between a consortium of Maddin-connected producers and the Documentary Channel in Canada, the project was financed and shot in Winnipeg in an abandoned movie theatre, and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Oddly, it has never (to date) shown on television in Canada, although it was broadcast on the Sundance Channel in the United States and on Italian television. It is a one-woman show, with Rossellini appearing as herself and talking to the camera about her father, conversing with representations of both her parents (Roberto and Ingrid Bergman), and taking the roles of various personages of film history who are dramatized and brought in as epitomes of different filmmaking tendencies (Hitchcock, Fellini, Selznick, Chaplin). It is both a personal reminiscence of her parents and an attempt to consider Roberto’s ideas about the proper role of cinema, mostly by means of a counterposing of them with those of the other creative giants of the medium, who each argue a different position. Isabella fondly recalls her childish thought that her father must be

390

Appendix

pregnant because he had such a big stomach, of his regret at being unable to nurse his children, and of their delight in ‘our favourite game [of] throwing ourselves on your belly like piglets.’ Moreover this stomach and its owner seemed always to be in bed, thinking and conserving energy for great struggles. The man is personified through the whole film, then, as a big, bedridden belly, quivering in speech, embraced and addressed by his daughter in her exploration of his life and art. Photographs of Roberto scarcely appear in the film: he is just this fat stomach. This surreal basis is certainly something that Maddin can respond to. By drafting in Isaac Paz Sr’s belly to play Roberto’s, Maddin is even indulging in a sideways glance of personal repetition: the same Paz belly (as El Muerto’s) gave birth to the father in Sombra Dolorosa, and now again it gives birth to the spirit of another father to answer the emotional need of another daughter. Amid thunderclaps, wind, and the sound of oceanic waters raging, this belly emerges from a primordial visual blur, and it speaks in an imposing, slightly echoey voice. It enunciates Roberto Rossellini’s manifesto of cinema, in effect the manifesto of Italian Neorealism: cinema must tell the truth baldly and without decoration, it must embody the fact that ‘reality is stronger, more extraordinary, than anything our human mind can imagine,’ and it must take up its revolutionary new tools of representation to relieve ordinary people throughout the world of their ignorance by telling the truth plainly. But then, says his daughter, Rossellini’s cinema is slow, stark, documentary-like, maybe even boring. And the array of spokesmen for opposing attitudes, all gathered in an empty cinema auditorium, argue their cases. The silhouette of Hitchcock says that cinema is for manipulation, diversion, entertainment. David O. Selznick, waving a cigar and hoisting his feet onto his desk, more or less agrees, while also stating that good films should just be transcriptions of good novels. Fellini, in trenchcoat, fedora, and neckerchief, breezily talks about the importance of dreams in cinematic creation. Each of these figures, incidentally, has some connection to the story: Selznick brought both Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman to Hollywood; Bergman worked memorably with Hitchcock, and her last film before scandalously running into Rossellini’s arms and ending her American career was Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn; Fellini had begun as a Neorealist and was Rossellini’s ‘best friend’ who then ‘betrayed me.’ Roberto thunders back at them: ‘Artists revere their own imaginations. Narcissists! I am not an artist’ and says that pandering with illusions is like ‘masturbating instead of making love.’ Isabella herself appears puzzled by this debate at times. Her childhood adoration of her father, her

The Short Films

391

child’s belief in his genius, is stacked against the fact that ‘all my friends preferred Hollywood movies,’ and when she asks the question ‘were my father’s films ridiculous or sublime?’ it seems like a real question, even though ‘their simplicity and starkness move me profoundly.’ Although the issues are among the biggest surrounding cinema, the articulation of them seems pretty elementary, and sometimes just misleading. Maybe if you believe Hitchcock’s own pronouncements you will believe that he thought of cinema only as diverting and entertaining, but the films themselves say something else. Notorious, with Bergman, is a strong case in point, and there is something a little odd about Maddin relaying this idea of Hitchcock when Vertigo is possibly his favourite movie of all time, and emphatically not for reasons of diversion and entertainment. Perhaps this film is not saying that Hitchcock’s cinema is like this, only that this is the popular idea of Hitchcock, but this seems too arcane. Meanwhile Fellini says nothing about cinema except that one sentence about dreams, and putting in a word on behalf of sex while accusing Rossellini of prudery. The rest of the time he is just throwing up his arms with a ‘mamma mia!’ at some of his former colleague’s stronger statements, and swooning with love and admiration when Chaplin appears in tramp’s costume, and flies around the auditorium in the angel’s wings of the dream sequence from The Kid. Chaplin is the one figure that everybody, even Rossellini, can sentimentally agree on. But he doesn’t help the clarity of the debate, especially when so many other potential viewpoints are missing. Nor does it help that the rendition of Rossellini’s own cinema is so inadequate. After repeatedly talking about the slowness and documentary-ness of his films, My Dad confines itself to two clips from Rome–Open City: one where, after socking a Nazi guard, Anna Magnani is shot down on the street in front of her little boy and an appalled crowd of onlookers, and the other an all-action prisoner rescue. Both scenes are accompanied by the crashings of Renzo Rossellini’s über-dramatic musical score. There is nothing remotely slow, stark, etc. about either of these scenes, and in fact they exemplify very well the often almost operatic melodrama of Open City, which is the one Rossellini film that nobody has ever accused of being boring. There is a long line of movies – from Paisà through his collaborations with Bergman to the late historical films for television – that do embody a unique and aesthetically important simplicity and absence of overt dramatizing, but if you are not aware of these films going in, you won’t get even a hint of them from My Dad Is 100 Years Old. To the extent that the film is trying to build an argument about what cinema should, or might, be – or even to convey Rossellini’s argument

392

Appendix

– the crucial Rossellinian counterexample to the cinema that everybody knows is simply missing. Taking all the parts except that of the belly, Isabella Rossellini plays dress-up with them all, and watching her as Hitchcock, Selznick, Fellini, and Chaplin is a bit like watching Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets (or, considering the outlandishness of some of the accents, maybe Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in various disguises). The minimalness and, in a way, amateurishness of these impersonations is right up front, though when the caricatures of them extend also to caricatures of what they stand for, the effect is not so charming. The best moments in the film coincide with the arrival of Ingrid Bergman, projected as a giant image on the decayed-to-shreds screen of this abandoned cinema. Naturally she too is portrayed by her daughter, but now the resemblance is not caricatural but almost spookily exact both vocally and visually, and the staging of life-sized Isabella talking to her fifteen-foot-close-up mother is striking and beautiful. Her conversations with her mother, like her childhood memories of her father, have a touching credibility of feeling, and a kind of directness and honesty that the debate about cinema can’t get to. At the end, the film effects a kind of reconciliation of personal and aesthetic debate, with a child-sized Isabella embracing the huger than usual belly, and saying to it sadly: ‘After 100 years of filmmaking, ignorance in the world is still undefeated. And your films? They’re slowly being forgotten. Nothing of what you preached happened.’ She notices the camera moving up and around, and yells at it to assume ‘the perfectly simple Rossellini framing.’ Then come her last words: ‘I don’t know if you’re reaching us or not, dad. But I love you.’ This line, more than anything else in the film, encapsulates the film’s intellectual tentativeness and its emotional fullness. Maddin’s treatment of all this is, much of the time, straightforward, though it does engage in ‘fantastic’ shots of starry heavens, roiling primordial soup, many double exposures, and a heartfelt presentation of the corporeality of the belly. The editing is by John Gurdebeke again, but it is highly restrained. The thought occurs that perhaps Maddin is attempting something like his own version of Rossellini simplicity in filmmaking, but of course the effect is far from Rossellinian. Isabella Rossellini looked to Maddin to direct this project because she admires his uniqueness, his great distance from the mainstream, his artistic courage – qualities that he shares with her father. But there remains something odd and uncomfortable about the bracketing of such diametrically opposed cinematic sensibilities.

The Short Films

393

Isabella Rossellini in propria persona talking to herself as a giant onscreen version of her mother, Ingrid Bergman.

Nude Caboose (2006). 2'28". Cell phone; silent with music and sound effects. In what looks like a dance studio scattered with persons standing still, Mike Bell, shirtless but wearing a railway engineer’s cap and kerchief, starts up a conga line. On the soundtrack, Xavier Cugat’s cover of the theme from Zorba the Greek, together with a host of very loud railway sounds: steam whistles, diesel horns, bells, chugging, squealing brakes, and especially the crash of cars slowly colliding and coupling in the switchyard. Pulling down on his imaginary steam whistle cord, then starting up a rhythm with a pair of maracas, he navigates through the sculpturally motionless occupants of the room, spotting a bare female bum that then serves as his inspiration. This anonymous personage is the only one in the room not fully dressed, except for Mike. Perhaps his nude top and her nude bottom seem like complementaries (although she doesn’t seem to be wearing any clothes at all). One by one, people

394

Appendix

fall in behind the engineer with a thump, until he has assembled a whole train, including the naked woman who has fallen in as the last in line, the ‘nude caboose.’ His attempt now is to catch up with her naked behind. If he can couple with it, the line will become a circle. Slow motion shots of his pleasured face accompany some of car-couplings as they occur, especially the last one, which his outstretched fingers at last make contact with. It seems that Engineer Mike doesn’t want really to couple with these buttocks, but to pummel them with punches. As each one lands, there is a fleshy thwack, and then, more forcefully, a serious dull thud of a violent collision. (What I have been describing is the ‘original’ version. The one shown, for example, on the Sundance Channel and YouTube has another musical score with roughly the same rhythm and instrumentation but no Zorba, and final sound effects which substitute soft choochoo strokes for the last thudding punches. This substitution certainly makes the end of the film less disturbing.) Nude Caboose is a trifle on every level. Shot on a cell phone, its dreadful visual resolution and pixelating image are Maddin’s ultimate low-water mark in terms not so much of degraded image as of degraded apparatus. The content is sexual but also infantile, simultaneously mildly orgasmic and pre-pubertal, and the film has the tone of a little kid’s dirty joke. Playing choo-choo and fixating on bare bums, it is almost at a preschool level, although of course with the addition of maracas and conga line from a tacky middle-class singles club of thirty years ago. The IMDB credits list a director (Maddin), producer (Jody Shapiro), two cameramen (Maddin and Shapiro), editor (Gurdebeke), and composer (Jono Grant), and no fewer than four writers (Maddin, Shapiro, Ian Handford, and George Toles) and three executive producers. That is funny. In fact the film was intended for Canadian television, via shorts-making Marble Media and the National Film Board. The editing again intercuts and slows down, playing tricks with the image, though not very extreme ones. Mike Bell is the only cast member of any note at all, and, after his appearances in Cowards, Audition 2, and Fuse Boy, he almost looks to be turning into the latter-day Michael Gottli as Maddin’s resident jolly fat guy. Here his primitively lubricious appetites and childish oh-boy glances of dumb desire are just right and kind of depressing all at once. Altogether Nude Caboose seems like an exercise in deliberate vulgarity: vulgarity of means, almost punitive vulgarity of music, ‘story line,’ and action, ending with a set of punches that, in the more interesting original version, at least express a certain kind of anger to mitigate the self-conscious indulgence in triviality and crassness.

The Short Films

395

Odin’s Shield Maiden (2007). 4'30"; Super-8mm, b/w; silent with music and sound effects. This film was commissioned by the Winnipeg Film Group in celebration of its thirtiethth anniversary, and in view of Maddin’s long if not always idyllic association with that group it was an appropriate commission. It consists of a group of women in timeless black costume – probably a mother and children – on the seaside sands searching for and lamenting a drowned man, Mundi. In another return to the poetry of hands, the film concentrates on their arms and hands expressing grief and longing superimposed and scroll-edited with images of the water, and accompanied by intertitles in high-flown diction (‘O, Celibate ocean! Wet with Death!’). On the soundtrack is Jan Kubelik’s 1910 recording of a Paganini Capriccio for solo violin. The title is a little opaque. Odin’s Shield Maiden appears to be the wife/mother figure, and then the younger girls would be the ‘shieldings’ referred to in the intertitles. This nomenclature seems to be there simply to give a vaguely Norse-mythological aura to the scene. Those Scandinavian overtones and the Gimli location, not to mention the echoes of the Sea Beggars narrative, situate the film in a Maddin tradition, as does the visualization and the intertitles. The daughters (if that is what they are) are given over to ‘unrequited longings,’ so there is a kind of family melodrama going on here as well. The film was at one level inspired by an actual Gimli fisherman named Mundi who drowned, and Maddin reveals that he and his daughter were afraid to put their faces in the water of the lake until the body was recovered. Maddin also expresses some dissatisfaction with the film, and reproaches himself with ‘poor direction of hands.’40 The end result doesn’t really quite come together. The women’s whole appearance fails the period test, so that they do look rather like people who have been asked to dress up and gesticulate by the shore – perhaps a stronger application of the director’s familiar repertory of blurrings, over- and under-exposures, and other forms of visual ‘degradation’ would have disguised this condition. And the Gurdebeke treatment also seems somewhat less than fresh in this instance. Altogether, there is unfortunately a somewhat tired or automatic quality to the film. Footsteps (2008). 9'14". Super-8mm, b/w and colour; with music and sound effects. This is one of the two Maddin shorts included with the Criterion DVD

396

Appendix

release of Brand upon the Brain!, and it is more or less a documentary about the work of the Toronto Foley effects team ‘Footsteps,’ who performed live with public showings of that film. It is not a record of any of those performances, but rather a whirlwind tour through various of their activities that shows the origins of some of the film’s specific sound effects, and mimics the laying down of the theatrical version’s soundtrack, together with some cut-ins from Brand that demonstrate how the sound effects work in place. The black and white photography (with a few colour inserts), music, and intertitles reproduce much of full-length film’s aesthetic here as well. The excellent, enlivening musical score is by Jason Staczek, who provided the music for Brand, and it also melds at times into the musical score from the film when scenes from it come up. And John Gurdebeke makes a splendid contribution with a highly active editing approach that often positions the footage near the borderline between perceptible documentation and avant-garde expression. While many of the effects are straightforward – a wind machine, a tub of water, and a creaking sawhorse for the sounds accompanying Guy’s boat journey back to Black Notch – others are less so. Crunching celery (in vivid colour) serves for icky brain-juice operations and rigor mortis bone-cracking alike, a pitchfork drawn across wires creates the Frankensteinian sounds of electrical reanimation, and a violin bow drawn over a metal cup to create swooning sounds (which don’t, of course, objectively exist). But the film becomes most Maddin-like when it leaves the rails completely, though without signifying that it is doing this. So, in preparation for recording the sounds for a man’s face being scraped by a straight razor, we see someone tying on a hockey skate to his foot, and then applying that skate to a man’s face to produce the sound. The sounds for Guy’s little tushy being kissed by mother are provided by a Foley technician in white lab coat kissing a horse’s buttocks in a wintry barnyard (a few trailing shots showing the horse following the man around afterwards). A squeakie-toy sound is seen to emanate from a man’s hairy breast being squeezed by fingers. Like all the tall stories about Maddin’s home town in My Winnipeg, these whoppers are given to us in a fashion completely indistinguishable from the true stories, and things are flying by so fast that the comic effect is very light and elegantly counterpointed to the rather lowbrow nature of the jokes themselves. Footsteps looks like it was a joy for everyone to make, and it is a joy to watch, too. Its umbilical cord to Brand upon the Brain! works beautifully

The Short Films

397

to evoke that film even as its sound effects are being deconstructed. Of course this deconstruction was an integral part of the live Foley show in theatres, and it is some compensation for viewers of Brand who were unable to witness one of those events. It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today (2008). 5'32". Super-8mm, b/w; with music and sound effects. This little film, included as an extra in the Criterion DVD of Brand upon the Brain!, is Maddin’s way of expressing some appreciation for Dov Houle, ‘the Manitoba Meadowlark,’ who sang the songs in a number of live performances of Brand billed as a ‘castrato.’ Houle does not appear on the DVD issue, where the two songs are sung by children. The film’s little scenario, credited to George Toles, has Dov in his kitchen with a large, candle-filled birthday cake, while on the soundtrack we hear Arthur Tracy’s 1938 recording of the song ‘It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today.’ Dov boils up some eggs as he uncovers the bird cage with its chirping inhabitant. A montage of two of the eggs, a shot of a pair of elastic briefs being ripped violently, and Dov’s grieving face seem to add up to an exposition of the ‘medical condition’ that has kept his voice in a pre-pubertal condition. If you are unlucky, you may flash back to Cain Ball’s tale of being emasculated by a chair nail in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. Dov slices up the two testicular eggs (another Buñuelian sexualconfusion image) and is about to eat them in a sandwich when he hears something. His flashlight guides him down into the basement, where he finds a crowd of children in nightshirts – dead ringers for the orphans in Brand – whom he embraces. When one little chap has a severe coughing fit and collapses, Dov cradles him concernedly and gives him oldfashioned arm-rowing CPR. The end of the film finds him again at his kitchen table. John Gurdebeke has edited this footage together using the now-familiar ‘scrolling’ technique, in a relatively restrained tempo. Maddin says he wanted to comment on Houle’s childlike vocal range and essential sweetness of character by showing him as having a caring affinity with children. As for what those children are doing in the basement, he simply says his philosophy is to ‘always treat basements and attics as they should be, as states of mind.’41 This film, characterized by one online commentator as ‘essentially goofy,’ is certainly a minor entry, though it does add one more item to the large Maddin catalogue of sexual surrealities.

398

Appendix

Spanky – To the Pier and Back (2008). 3'54". Super-8mm, b/w; with music. A record of Maddin’s walk to the pier and back in Gimli with his pug – formerly his girlfriend’s dog – Spanky, shortly before the latter’s demise. There are many, many separate shots of the road, the lake, flocks of gulls overhead, leaves shaking in the wind, the houses and streets, and pier-side structures, and of course Spanky, who trots along, stops to look or sniff, laps at some stream water. There are little pans and zooms as well as relatively static shots. Thick black smashed-up projector-gate hairs seem permanently affixed to the bottom of the frame. All of the raw footage is digitized and heavily manipulated, mostly through acceleration and rapid shot-succession, so that the effect is very close indeed to avant-garde practice – so close that it would just be simpler to call this an avant-garde film. At the same time, however, the content is clear. The final half-minute or so consists of a few shots repeated from earlier in the film, now separated by stretches of black screen, in what seems a mimicking of memory’s recollection of images from the walk itself, or perhaps a gesturing towards the blackness of death. Under it all is Matthew Patton’s grand, sombre music, an organlike synthesizer score of slow, impressive melancholy that transforms the film into something like a requiem: it is emotionally big music for a little film about a little dog. The jumping image-rhythms work like music of a different kind, in a different tempo and register, and that counterpoint is close to the film’s aesthetic centre. Too, the film’s hyperartifice and hyperconsciousness are always contradicted, as it were, by the animal’s naturalness and unself-consciousness. Between this almost philosophical dichotomy and the way the music pulls the dance of images into a realm of deeper, darker affect, Spanky – To the Pier and Back becomes grave and moving. A gem. Berlin (2008). 1'00". b/w found footage; silent with music and sound effects. This minute-long film was commissioned by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery as part of a series of artists’ reflections on the region. Maddin took the earliest surviving film footage of the town, dating back to 1916, and incorporated bursts of it into this film. Until 1916, the city of Kitchener, Ontario, had been known as Berlin, Ontario, owing to the large representation of German (chiefly Mennonite) immigrants among its citizens. During the First World War, however, anti-German outrage

The Short Films

399

prompted the city to change its name to that of Imperial Britain’s most prominent living military hero (the adjoining city of Waterloo already had a hyperpatriotic name). At this time a film was commissioned to celebrate the newly named city’s war effort, and it is from surviving pieces of this film that Maddin has assembled his own film – subjecting the 16mm42 footage to digitization, editing, and alterations of speed. We catch sight of troops drilling and manoeuvring and conducting firing exercises and march-pasts, and we also see close-up shots of unidentified individuals as well as a travelling shot taken from the streetcar as it moves down main street (this last given a real Gurdebekian scrolling). Transforming this film material into something more dramatic and bellicose are the repeated title ‘BERLIN’ in large caps against billowing war clouds, shots of ordnance firing, a roiling and sinister musical accompaniment (the Kromy Forest scene from Boris Godunov, with lots of groove-noise), sound effects that include artillery fire and marching feet, and superimposed flames that break out over the picture. The last shot, repeating in slow motion an earlier one, shows a little boy in miniature officer’s uniform reaching out his hand to touch a real officer standing near him. Two things are particularly noteworthy about this tiny film. The first is how extensively in its ultra-brief length it manages to return to aspects of Archangel: of course the period and uniforms, but also the aura of patriotic propaganda, the sound effects, the music track (probably from the same record that provided such memorable service in the earlier feature), and the flames that consume the image. The second is that Berlin is Maddin’s first found-footage film, and, given how much of his artistic career has been given over to mimicking old films, there seems to be something almost epochal in the fact that he is at last actually using them. Glorious (2008). 12'12". Super-8mm, b/w; with music and sound effects. This film, in eight sometimes very short chapters, was commissioned by the Toronto Images Festival as part of a Canada/Netherlands artists’ cooperative event whereby five Canadian filmmakers were paired with five composers to produce short music-accompanied films for live performance in the Netherlands and Canada. Maddin’s film is accompanied by a score by the distinguished British composer Richard Ayres, a pupil of Louis Andriessen now living in Holland, and received its premiere in Amsterdam on 21 November 2008. George Toles is again credited as co-writer, and the photography is by Brand’s Seattle cinematographer,

400

Appendix

Ben Kasulke.43 Glorious is a fascinating piece of work that creates the impression of being based on a very elaborate scenario which has been boiled down to only very partially legible narrative fragments. And that is exactly what it is. In effect it is a teaser for Maddin’s planned next feature project, entitled Keyhole. The scenario for this movie was still undergoing major changes at the time of writing, but it will involve a house full of 1930s-style gangsters, comprising a male gang and a girl gang in conflict with each other, surrounded (or possibly only believed to be surrounded) by a posse of armed police, ruled by a patriarch, and presided over by a naked ghost who haunts the house and can influence the behaviour of its inhabitants. It will have lots of sex and violence, says Maddin. Judging from Glorious, Keyhole will be the first surrealist gangster porno movie. In the first chapter, ‘Father’s Dream,’ the patriarch (Nihad Ademi) dreams he is being shot by all of his gangster children, who have assembled by his bedside. The naked ghost (Louis Negin) appears dramatically by the bed over the father’s bullet-riddled body and puts his hand over his face. In ‘Desktop Family Organizer,’ the patriarch shuffles through the children’s locket-sized photos which are imbedded in a wonderful Svankmajer or Quay Brothers revolving flatbed gizmo with gears and compartments. ‘The Shoes’ lasts only a few seconds, barely long enough to show the shoebox-sized mesh cages, containing some kind of spark-emitting device, that the children put onto their feet. ‘Obedient Children’ then shows them clumping zombielike through the house, wearing these sparkling foot-cages and chained by the ankles, tossing their guns down a chute. In ‘Grandpa’s Bengal Fire,’ the patriarch exults at a fiery furnace grate that is apparently the receptacle for the discarded firearms, which seem now to be exploding their ammunition. It is dominated by a stirring image of dots of light engulfing his face. ‘Spent’ is another ultra-brief chapter, showing the collapse of the father. Then ‘Den of Loins’ depicts the ghost apparently weaving some kind of spell that brings the six sons to a wall with convenient holes in it through which they can insert their erect penises. And in ‘Six Shooter’ the ghost, in double exposure, sucks all of them off one by one. All of this is conveyed vividly in Kasulke’s noirish low-key photography, beautifully rhythmed Gurdebekian digital montage, and Ayre’s impressive quasiminimalist score. The gangster boy-children (in undershirts, suspenders, and hats) and their girl counterparts (in corsets and garters, and often less than that) prowl atmospherically through the almost gothic house, while the whole thing seems periodically to resolve to a fever-dream of

The Short Films

401

the father’s. The mood, with its evocation of Dillinger-era shootouts, has the pastiche and dress-up overtone of lightness so familiar in Maddin’s work, but more crucially there is a genuinely disturbing surrealism, a darkness, even a sense of savagery. If Keynote is going to be an extension and expansion of this imagery and these fragmentary events, it will be a new destination for Maddin: a continuation of the dynamic, excited-dream silent cinema methods of (especially) Cowards Bend the Knee, but in a sensationalist quasi-genre narrative that will have not so much to do with the memoirism and confessionalist self-probings of ‘the Me Trilogy.’ Maddin has said that he would like to connect both the feature and the several ancillary short films and possibly gallery events to elements of live performance, perhaps involving simultaneous alternate story lines and multiple narrators.44 I can hardly wait.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction 1 ‘Kino Kink.’ 2 These words, like all the material in this paragraph, come from a conversation I had with Maddin in November 2008. 3 To borrow the name of William Wees’ excellent little book that gives an overview of this stream of avant-garde cinema, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. 4 ‘Maddin and Melodrama.’ 1 The Dead Father 1 Personal interview, August 2005. George Toles is a professor of literature, theatre, and film at the University of Manitoba, and Maddin’s most important and prolific future collaborator. 2 Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 32. Kino Delirium, a book-length interview with Maddin conducted by a friend and collaborator, is the best account of the backgrounds to all the early films. In a personal interview of July 2008, Maddin added the detail that his father had ‘died of his medication.’ 3 Ibid., 31. Schulz’s story appears in his 1937 collection of the same name. 4 Ibid., 30. 5 Personal interview, July 2006. 6 Maddin gave Vatnsdal this account of the origin of the production company’s name: ‘One series of chaste misadventures led John Harvie, Ian Handford and me to the pier at Gimli, and we all agreed, while looking at the Lord Selkirk – the one luxury liner still sailing Lake Winnipeg at the time – that whatever the name was, there should be a boat in the logo, and that the

404

Notes to pages 20–30

name of the company should be ‘Jumbo Productions.’ We went over to the pizza joint in Gimli to celebrate the decision by ordering a jumbo pizza ... but all they had were extra large pizzas, so we had to order that, and change the name of our company as well’ (Kino Delirium, 31). 7 To be precise, the device dates from the late 1920s/early 1930s, thus straddling the introduction of sound. The device may be seen in many silent films, but also in sound films as late as 1933 and 1934, for example, in musicals such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. 2 Tales from the Gimli Hospital 1 Tales from the Gimli Hospital DVD commentary. 2 The Quad had specialized for some time in offbeat and ‘underground’ films, and had previously run David Lynch’s Eraserhead for an equivalent length of time. 3 Personal interview, July 2006. In that conversation, Maddin described the amount of money actually spent on the film as ‘between ten and thirty thousand dollars’ – an indication of how casual and drawn-out the process was. The New York Times review of the film by Stephen Holden states the cost as $25,000, which is probably what Maddin was telling people at the time, and may be a more accurate figure. 4 In the DVD commentary, Maddin describes this as ‘the garb of a Fjallkona or the Icelandic Maid of the Mountains, usually a more senior woman in the Icelandic-Canadian community who’s elected each year as spokesperson for what’s up in Icelandic-Canadian affairs – it’s usually a speech involving, uh, good will.’ 5 This is the film’s rendition of the epidemic of smallpox that devastated New Iceland in Manitoba shortly after its foundation in 1874. The lesions of Maddin’s disease, however, are more spectacular and more horror-movie-like than those of smallpox, and smallpox is never named in the film. 6 Maddin says in the DVD commentary: ‘Virtually all the girls in the movie are 13 years old. I had this curious pesky belief that you could never tell the age of a girl or a woman if they were just treated as adults ... And so I just thought “why not try this experiment?”’ 7 As happens a number of times in Maddin’s work, this surreal detail turns out to have a factual basis. Maddin’s Aunt Lil recalled it as her earliest memory from her childhood in a log cabin in New Iceland. Director’s DVD commentary. 8 This character, another patient in the quarantine (and played also by Kyle

Notes to pages 30–4

9

10

11

12 13 14

405

McCulloch), is a very ‘low’ parody of eye-rolling, lip-smacking Negro caricatures from earlier moments in American culture. In the DVD commentary Maddin remarks that, after having some doubts about it, ‘I ended up being fairly proud of the inclusion of the minstrel, just because it’s one more vocabulary unit from a musty, dusty, forgotten archive of filmic vocabulary units ... I don’t have a simple and pure nostalgia for the past, as you might think from watching this picture. I felt we had to throw in something a little bit hurtful, and painful, and uncomfortable, like the blackface, just to remind you that you can’t simply go back in a time machine and expect everything to be wonderful. In most ways, we were socially worse off back in the 20s.’ Later on, he reveals that the character of Gunnar’s Indian friend John Ramsay, played very obviously by a white actor, is deployed to make a similar point. Maddin identifies this last stroke as an imitation of or homage to the scenes at the end of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) where the protagonist is haunted by his dead lover and her lover. Maddin reveals in the DVD commentary that seeing a single photograph of two men with the label ‘Glima Wrestling’ was enough for him to extrapolate this contest in detail for his film. ‘And I was amazed, a few years after making this movie I went to an Islendingadagurinn [Icelandic Festival in Manitoba] Glima Wrestling demonstration ... watched two Icelandic imports, two men, two blond beasts, grappling with each other’s derrieres, flipping each other around, in precisely the fashion that I had filmed it without any real expertise a couple of years earlier. So I was very pleased – and a little bit disappointed, too, that I had actually just, through miraculous guesswork, created something as mundane as something that really existed.’ A clear and lively summary of these historical events can be found in the 1993 prize-winning essay by Manitoba high school student Brock Arnason, entitled ‘Nya Island I Kanada: The Icelandic Settlement of the Interlake Area of Manitoba,’ available online at http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_ history/27/icelandicsettlement.shtml as part of the Government of Manitoba website. DVD director’s commentary. So too is the use of fish oil as pomade – or so says Maddin in the DVD commentary. Once again, though, Maddin claims a historical foundation for this extraordinary scene: ‘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

406

15 16

17

18

19 20 21

22 23

Notes to pages 36–42 epidemic or whatever, certain nurses or volunteers would put on little puppet shows.’ Personal interview, August 2005. Personal interview, August 2005. ‘I was determined that it would look exactly like Erich von Stroheim’s Greed because there was something in Greed that’s silly and yet grounded in some sort of sober reality. And Icelanders are soberly grounded in literal-minded reality much of the time in spite of the fact they can ... believe in all those elves and myths that they made famous. There’s just something in my Icelandic relatives that was always so humorless – determined to trace back our genealogies and recount tales of privation in the most serious tones all the time. There was just something Stroheimian about this. I was determined to make a movie that looked like von Stroheim’s Greed. When the first few days of shooting came back way too dark (Greed is set almost entirely in the daytime), I forgot about Greed altogether. I also realized that my sets were, like, eleven feet wide.’ Personal interview, August 2005. This and the preceding two quotations come from the DVD director’s commentary. Maddin goes on to point out how in the last stages of what was an 18-month shoot he rarely needed to leave his backyard, simply collecting cast members in ones and twos for night-time shots. ‘I showed it to [friend and future producer] Greg Klymkiw, when it was about 45 minutes long, and I showed it to George [Toles], just for some feedback. They said ... “You’ve got to make it a feature now. It’s so close to being feature-length, and it’s too long to be a short, really.”’ Personal interview, August 2005. The principal means of accomplishing this lengthening was to introduce some new scenes, but there was also the reverse of a drive to tighten scenes up. As Maddin remarks in the DVD commentary, ‘in many ways it’s a short story that’s just languorously stretched out to feature length ... which is why I hold the shots so long.’ Personal interview, August 2005. DVD commentary. Maddin describes this performer as ‘a sort of comedian with a thick accent’ and says that ‘apparently people who speak fluent Icelandic can’t even understand this guy.’ Personal interview, August 2005. In Maddin’s collection of writing From the Atelier Tovar, 184. ‘Amma,’ incidentally, was the family name given to Maddin’s mother Herdis, whom Maddin remembers as having been far less openly grieving than his aunt at the time of his brother’s death. Personal interview, July 2008. One could write a small book on Maddin’s characterizations, direct and indirect, of his mother, and perhaps the Amma here and the mother in The Dead Father (also played by Margaret Anne MacLeod) are the first two entries.

Notes to pages 45–52

407

24 The idea for this episode was suggested by George Toles (personal communication, June 2006), who got it from the Third Story of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. In that context it is also an interpolated tale, which ends: ‘Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead? The scent of the flower says they are corpses; the evening bell tolls their knell.’ Anderson, 8. 25 This is an idea advanced quite forcefully by Eric Bentley in The Life of the Drama (1964) and elsewhere, as an exposition of one of the moving principles of comedy. Maddin has cited Bentley’s views on melodrama as important in helping him formulate his own attitudes to that form. Personal interview, August 2005. 3 Archangel 1 Personal interview, July 2006. 2 Personal interview, August 2005. 3 It was reviewed favourably in, among other venues, the New York Times (Stephen Holden), Chicago Tribune (Dave Kehr), Village Voice (J. Hoberman), Chicago Sun-Times (Lloyd Sachs), and Cahiers du cinéma (Olivier Joyard). 4 DVD commentary. 5 DVD commentary. 6 International House is set in an opulent hotel catering to Westerners in China, and revolves very loosely around the invention of a form of super-television by a Chinese scientist in mandarin outfit who is resident in the hotel. It features a vaudevillian grab bag of performers including Burns and Allen, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Bela Lugosi, Rudy Vallee, Cab Calloway, Baby Rose Marie, and most notably W.C. Fields as an alcoholic globe-hopping ‘professor’ who travels by autogyro. Apparently the only survival of the International House remake idea in Archangel is the Murmansk Hotel, which however has few if any perceptible resemblances to its model. Another influence in the Murmansk Hotel honeymoon sequences, according to John Harvie in the DVD commentary, was the Busby Berkeley ‘Honeymoon Hotel’ dance number from the 1933 Warner Brothers movie Footlight Parade (and that film was to return in The Saddest Music in the World as the inspiration for the name and personality of the hero, Chester Kent). 7 The temperatures ensured that cast and crew emerged sticky and stinking from the daily downpour of instant mashed potato flakes that Maddin habitually uses for snowfall. Personal interview, August 2005. 8 Personal interview, July 2006. Maddin said that his copy of the Renoir

408

9 10

11

12

13 14

15 16 17

Notes to pages 54–61 ‘looked like a movie that had been Xeroxed about a hundred times by the time I got my print’ and Reimer’s new footage was some distance from that, but ‘much better.’ ‘Later,’ he added, ‘I learned about contrast ratios.’ John Harvie notes on the DVD that he had had a relative who had served in Archangel in 1919. Quoted in World War I: The Complete Story (26-part CBS television series, 1963), Episode 25, ‘Allies in Russia.’ John Harvie cites this series episode as one source of inspiration for the idea of a Maddin/Harvie movie set in Archangel (DVD commentary). Maddin, Toles, and even John Harvie (in the DVD commentary) have noted that the creation of Archangel was in some way influenced by Knut Hamsun’s novel Mysteries (1892), which portrays the brief stay of a hypersensitive, hyperimaginative, and hyperimpulsive young man in a small Norwegian town: he throws himself into volatile and dramatic relationships with some of the inhabitants, falls violently in love with one of them, and at last commits suicide. Harvie opines that some of the ‘tension between the male and female leads of the book’ has survived into the film. Personally, I find this hard to see. But Maddin’s response to Harvie’s remark in the commentary is: ‘Oh, for sure. And the book opens on a boat, which is why this movie opens on a boat, actually ... It might be one of the last vestiges of the book in the movie.’ Another Hamsun novel, Pan, is an important model for Maddin’s later Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. The narrator’s voice is that of Victor Cowie, though it has no relation to the captain Cowie had silently appeared as shortly before, and probably none to the organizer and raisonneur of the Illumination soon to come (this figure is also played and spoken by Cowie). This image, though, is inspired by a photograph of the Kaiser printed in The War Illustrated of 22 May 1915 (vol. 2, 319). Maddin and Toles are having their typical fun with names. ‘Jannings’ is obviously the German silent star Emil Jannings, while ‘Boles’ is both Maddin’s inspirer-friend John Boles Harvie and the Hollywood 1930s star John Boles (a Maddin favourite who was often cast in roles of wooden rectitude and performed them that way), and ‘Geza’ is named for one of Maddin’s many favourite continental European authors, the Hungarian Geza Csáth (who was also a psychiatrist, musician, and morphine addict, and who wrote stories involving transgression and perversion before killing himself at the age of 32). DVD commentary. DVD commentary; also personal interview, August, 2005. The situation is also reminiscent of that of Buñuel’s Cet Obscur objet du désir

Notes to pages 62–5

18

19

20 21 22

409

(1977), where the protagonist is so blindly obsessed by his own desire that he fails to notice that the object of it is played by two different actresses. (Buñuel’s film in turn is based on Symbolist writer Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin, which was also adapted by Josef von Sternberg as The Devil Is a Woman. Maddin loves both Sternberg and Louÿs, and the latter’s Twilight of the Nymphs is one of the several Symbolist influences on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.) It is tempting here to see Boles/Philbin as a separated version of the schizoid Maddin hero ‘Guy Maddin’ in Cowards Bend the Knee, who has his own Philbin-amnesia and his own Boles-lostness. Maddin expanded a little on these ideas in a personal interview (August 2005), in response to my remark that Archangel was ‘a symphony of amnesia’: ‘That was our goal, to make a movie in which every character had at least one form of amnesia. But some of them you kind of have to rationalize. You have to say, someone’s forgetting his duty to his country, or something like that. The more interesting forms of amnesia are when you’ve forgotten you were dumped, or you forgot someone’s dead, like in Vertigo.’ DVD commentary. This is a detail noted by all of the participants of the DVD commentary (Maddin, Toles, Harvie). George Toles has quite a lot to say about this scene in the DVD commentary, and in addition has written an extended interpretation of it in ‘From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Back Yard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin’ (collected in his book A House Made of Light). This commentary shows exactly how such a mechanism may operate, and even be recognizable to us, as well as showing the personal basis for Toles’ imagination of the scene: ‘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 in this knowledge [...] Strangely, I felt more fully acknowledged by my father after these rare ceremonial summons to intimate violence than at most other times’ (328). Of course in Archangel both the ideological system and the characters are too caricatured to sustain this kind of solid, Gregory-Peck-in-To-Kill-a-Mockingbird, kind of substance, and so the event cannot be received in this clear and rational way by us.

410

Notes to pages 66–72

23 This Archangel activity, like the whole northern Russia military escapade as it is represented in the film, has typically strange and half-grounded sources of inspiration. Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries features some amateur tableaux enacted by members of the community, but they are not dwelt upon or even described, and they have no patriotic function – although they are cited by Maddin and Toles as a source for the film. John Harvie’s accounts to Maddin of ‘illuminations’ in the context of the American Civil War were another source. But these ‘illuminations’ are not original wartime patriotic tableaux. Rather, they are anniversarial memorial events of candle-lighting (hence ‘illumination’) on the fields of some Civil War battlefields – Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and most famously Antietam (where, annually, a separate candle is lit for every fallen soldier across the site of the battle). Needless to say, both of these sources are a long way from what is, then, the film’s essentially complete invention, even though the ceremony in Archangel is also accompanied by candles. 24 There is actually a historical basis for the reference to soldiers too sick and old for other assignments (or, felicitously, other ‘theatres’). Soldiers who had served their term and were suffering from battle fatigue or worn-down health were in fact assigned initially to northern Russia from the Allied armed forces. Later they were replaced by fitter detachments. 25 Played by the film’s producer, Greg Klimkiw. 26 Compare this with (among a number of similar passages in different stories) the following passage from Schulz’s story ‘A Night in July’(Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, 85): ‘A night in July! The secret fluid of dusk, the living, watchful, and mobile matter of darkness, ceaselessly shaping something out of chaos and immediately rejecting every shape. Black timber out of which caves, vaults, nooks, and niches along the path of a sleepy wanderer are constructed ... The night air, that black Proteus playfully forming velvety densities streaked with the scent of jasmine, cascades of ozone, sudden airless wastes rising like black globes into the infinite, monstrous grapes of darkness flowing with dark juice!’ 27 To test whether the hypnosis is working, the hypnotist asks Veronkha, ‘What is the worst thing that you have ever done?’ She replies, ‘I made my baby brother blind in one eye, and said it was an accident.’ Here we have an echo of the Maddin family trauma in which Maddin’s father, Chas, had an eye accidentally put out by his own mother when he was a baby. The motif reappears more elaborately in Careful. 28 This device is clearly modelled on the listening-horn array depicted in The War Illustrated of 16 October 1915 (vol. 3, 215). 29 In the DVD commentary Maddin relates that the Telefilm Canada assess-

Notes to pages 74–82

30

31

32

33

34

35 36 37

411

ment of the script budgeted $40,000 for the design and building of the Murmansk airport. ‘They were only $39,300 off,’ Toles drily remarks. This is the story in a nutshell of Maddin’s whole relation with the filmmaking establishment: a constant attempt to fit him into conventional production models. Sternberg, though, is mischaracterized as a chiaroscuro filmmaker. The Scarlet Empress demonstrates perhaps better than any of his films how Sternberg ran the gamut from low-key to high-key lighting, from the wonderful chiaroscuro textures of the darker-toned scenes to the dazzling radiance of the whiter-toned ones. The film is truly a lexicon of stunningly refined black and white cinematography. Catherine’s Prussian birth might accord with Dietrich’s accent, but that way lies madness, for her childhood self spoke American, and moreover any attempt to try to impose even an instant of verisimilitude would cause the whole movie to come crashing down. When I asked Maddin about this scene, he said, ‘I thought he should be rendered literally gutless [...] I was literally thinking very programmatically. You know, how should he die? He should be gutless, he should be gutted. But then there should be some sort of redemption or something like that. Something heroic. He should use his guts for something. They’re there.’ Personal interview, August 2005. When Veronkha says to him, ‘Philbin, I don’t love you – I love someone else,’ George Toles responds amusingly on the DVD commentary: ‘Scriptwriter clarification: she’s lying. She’s trying to make him jealous. But unbeknownst to her, the person that she’s speaking to is actually the person she’s speaking of ... Now why wasn’t that clear to everyone?’ Again, La Règle du jeu comes tangentially to mind, with its similar use of the tools of farce – mistaken identities, costume swapping – to enact a tragedy. Obviously it would be unwise to make any extensive comparison of this film to Archangel. DVD commentary. See the picture of this device in The War Illustrated, 24 July 1915 (vol. 2, 544). A translation from the Latin of Horace’s Ode (III, 2, 13), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country). In this context we must certainly remember Wilfrid Owen’s great poem of the horrors of First World War combat, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est,’ which, in view of some notable details of similarity to this scene in Archangel, I quote in full: Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

412

Notes to pages 84–5 Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime ... Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

38 Or, as happened at the Lumière Institute in Lyon some years ago, taking out the Lumière brothers’ old 1890s camera, cleaning and loading it, and taking beautiful films. 39 It is not quite purely silent. Rather, it is of a faintly hissing ‘white noise’ that is like – and in fact is – the ambient background of a television soundtrack that began as silence but has been boosted by an automatic TV broadcast audio-levelling device into audible noise. Maddin told me that the source for these faint-noise scenes in Archangel was the soundtrack to ‘silent’ sequences in a television broadcast of The Scarlet Empress (interview, August 2005). The effect is almost an auditory equivalent of the snow, fog, and soft focus of the image track. 40 Europe’s band was important in the early history of jazz, and his 1919 recordings include such fascinating titles as ‘All of No-Man’s Land Is Ours.’

Notes to pages 88–9

413

Maddin gives the title of the number he has used as ‘One of These Days,’ but I am unable to trace this recording. Personal interview, July 2006. 4 Careful 1 ‘Very Lush and Full of Ostriches,’ From the Atelier Tovar, 93. This is part of Maddin’s own ‘review’ of the film, provided to the Village Voice (1–7 August 2001) together with reviews of his other films to date, and reprinted in From the Atelier Tovar. 2 Caelum Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 75. 3 See Stephen Cole, ‘Catching the Eye of the Apple,’ where producer Greg Klymkiw gives many reasons for the box office failure of the film in Canada, including the fact that the distributor Cinephile went out of business before it could do publicity or marketing for the film. This interesting piece is mostly about Telefilm Canada’s unwillingness to fund The Dikemaster’s Daughter project to Klymkiw’s and Maddin’s satisfaction. 4 Personal interview, August 2005. 5 Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 78. 6 From my July 2006 interview with Maddin: gm: I always described myself to Telefilm as a person who was a work in progress, much like a minor league baseball player. I often describe myself as a guy who started off in the low minors in A-ball. I started, you know, shooting non-synchronized sound and just a narrator and moving up to some dialogue and then a little more dialogue and more elaborate sets and costumes. And then with Careful moving up to colour and more conventional story and that sort of thing and that this was kind of representing a kind of developmental arch that would result in my making mainstream big budget movies some day. And I guess I kind of believed my own line of bullshit. wb: Do you still think that? gm: No, and I’m happier for it. But I didn’t ever expect to make people come back to silent movies or anything like that. I was happy to leave them behind myself. You know, I was talking in my pictures. And I guess I sort of expected at some point maybe to be offered a script that maybe that would be an easy transition for me from the film festival world to the mainstream world. And that never happened and so I struggled for a few years and then re-found myself just happily on this side of the great divide. So if I ever happen to have a mainstream success it would be one of those flukey one-offs, a crossover, like Peter Greenaway had with The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover.

414

7

8

9

10

11

12

13 14

Notes to pages 89–94 These remarks do indicate that Maddin was quite complicit in the constant impetus from Telefilm to move him towards more ‘normal’ production. Kino DVD commentary. The commentary dates from 2000, well before the release of The Saddest Music in the World. Note that all ‘DVD commentary’ citations in this chapter refer to the 2000 Kino Video Region 1 NTSC release. When this book was already in the final revision phase, there was a second Region 1 NTSC DVD release (2009) from Zeitgeist Video, with a new commentary track from Maddin and Toles, which I was not able to hear in time to incorporate any materials from it in this study. There is no internal evidence as to a Swiss setting, and one might as much assume an Austrian or a Bavarian one. But Maddin casually remarks in the documentary 97 Per Cent True (an ‘extra’ on the DVD issue of the Brand upon the Brain!) that the setting is Switzerland. I wonder if there is an echo here of Maddin’s boyhood sense that his grandmother was kept isolated in the basement room of their house? Cowards Bend the Knee stages this reminiscence. Maddin has related this event a number of times. The version in the movie’s DVD commentary, in response to Toles’ remarks that there seem to be a number of one-eyed fathers in Maddin’s cinema, goes like this: ‘My father did lose his eye, on his first birthday, when his mother did clutch him to her bosom, where an open pin gouged out the ocular juices.’ The reasons behind this mangled spelling of what is normally (most notably in Wagner’s Die Walküre) ‘Sieglinde’ are obscure. Everyone in the movie pronounces the name as in the normal spelling (‘Seeg-lin-deh’ rather than ‘Si-glyne-deh’ as the spelling might prompt). Also, the more frequent ‘Grigors’ (or the even more frequent ‘Grigor’) gets an extra ‘s’ or two as ‘Grigorss’ – although again pronounced as the more ordinary name is: ‘Grigorz.’ Caprice and the desire to add that extra curlecue might be the best explanations here. Of course the actual Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary (conceived without original sin), not the immaculate conception by the Virgin Mary (conceiving a child without sex). The latter understanding is a popular misinterpretation, and it certainly fits the circumstances of Careful better than the theologically correct one. See ‘From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Back Yard: Collaborating with Guy Maddin’ (collected in A House Made of Light), 331. This recalls Maddin’s autobiographical accounts of crawling into the heating and ventilation ducts of his house-cum-beauty salon as a little boy,

Notes to pages 95–103

15

16

17

18 19

20

21 22

415

as recounted in ‘The Child without Qualities’ (printed in From the Atelier Tovar): ‘The hair-chute [from the salon] led into the basement, where the trimmings collected ... He [the child without qualities] liked to empty out the chute, just big enough for a boy of his age, and climb up its inner ribbing until his eyes came level with the baseboard trap door, which he opened as a vantage point on the ankles of the gynocracy raging above’ (181). A similar scene occurs again in Brand upon the Brain! As Johann is maniacally peeping at his mother, Maddin remarks in the DVD commentary: ‘Here’s something from my childhood, which I’m confessing now for the first time, but we’ll leave it at that.’ The corpse is played by George Toles, who in addition to looking admirably grotesque must endure the trial of having hot candle wax dripped onto his immobile face. Maddin reveals in the DVD commentary that his Alpine names are all those of baseball players: ‘Mount Uhlander here is named for Ted Uhlander, the center fielder for the Minnesota Twins. All the papier-mâché mountains were named after the starting lineup of the 1969 Minnesota Twins. I know I sound smug with this little piece of trivia, but it was just a very important childhood link, to me – that mediocre lineup immortalized, at least in my own picture. So George Mitterwald, the catcher, becomes the namesake of Mitterwald’s Tongue and Tony Oliva gets a mountain named after him.’ We also read in an intertitle about ‘the snow shoulders of Quilici’ (second baseman Frank Quilici), though I can find no trace of Mount Oliva. The Twins, of course, are the ‘local’ major league baseball team for Winnipeggers. Maddin points to this source in the DVD commentary. He also says there that ‘if you were to compare the two fight scenes you’d see they barely resemble each other.’ Maddin gives it this description on the DVD commentary track, and credits the idea to Kyle McCulloch. On the DVD commentary, Maddin remarks to Toles at this point: ‘I know your original script called for a llama to be pulling his wheelchair, but they’re hard to come by in Winnipeg.’ In personal interviews in August 2005, Toles pointed to Bigger Than Life, and Maddin singled out Imitation of Life, as forms of complex and challenging movie melodrama where the problems raised by the narratives were decisively not settled by the nominal happy endings the films arrived at. DVD commentary. Maddin reacts to the suggestion by modestly declaring that he could never hope to be in that class. Both Maddin and Toles testify that some of Robert Walser’s writings – specifically Jakob von Gunten – were in their minds when they were imagining

416

23

24 25

26

27 28

29

30 31 32

Notes to pages 105–21 the butler school (DVD commentary). Another Walser echo, perhaps, is found later in the film, when Grigorss ask his mother for ‘a brimming mug of cow-warm milk’ – recalling a moment in the 1908 prose-poem ‘Mountain Halls’: ‘You’re just taking a sip of your cow-warm mountain milk’ (Masquerade and Other Stories, 34). Or, as Linda Williams has argued, actually are forms of melodrama. See her ‘Melodrama Revised,’ in Nick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres (California, 1998), 42–87, where she argues, almost, that ‘melodrama’ and ‘narrative’ are practically synonymous. Maddin too said something like this to me in an August 2005 conversation: ‘There’s a little bit of melodrama in everything. This is my favourite philosophical dictum: everything tastes more or less like chicken. And every story is more or less melodramatic.’ As pointed out in the DVD commentary by Toles. Toles reveals in the DVD commentary that this particular scene was inspired by one from Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother (1927): ‘That scene where Harold Lloyd climbs up in a tree higher and higher just to see his girl leaving in the distance and waving to her again.’ Maddin replies that he would have duplicated it, but it was too hard to get a tree into the studio. Maddin’s reply to Toles here reveals a somewhat different perspective (and one that is very different from mine): ‘Yeah, that’s what families do: families inculcate each other with their own house rules and end up killing each other in the process. There’s that great moment in Clement’s Forbidden Games where after the death of a son, the mother is concerned about saving that unused teaspoon of castor oil, getting it back into the bottle.’ He says: ‘It’s pure melodrama here. Here you are sitting in the front row, the proscenium just out of camera view.’ Maddin says in the DVD commentary that the source of this tune is ‘Huguette’s Waltz’ (written by Rudolf Friml for the 1925 operetta The Vagabond King), which he had used as temp music for the scene, and whose melody line McCulloch now subjects to an exact inverted transposition to arrive at the entirely satisfactory outcome we hear in the film. Of course this event has nothing of the luxuriant sinking-into-death of the actual Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. It more resembles Senta’s death-leap at the end of The Flying Dutchman (or indeed many other operatic suicides). But it is a ‘love-death,’ and it does have a certain Wagnerian quality. Toles, ‘From Archangel to Mandragora in Your Own Back Yard,’ 330. The comparison is even more apt when we recall that the unnamed guilt which haunts Manfred is possibly of some incestuous crime or desire. DVD commentary. In a personal interview (August 2005), Toles made the point again, articulating it slightly differently: ‘It seemed to me that there

Notes to pages 121–4

33

34 35 36 37 38

39

417

was this peculiar hothouse dialogue in Pierre that seemed to exist very close to the realm of parody but not quite. The book seemed to be about something desperately important, but the language in which he did it – He felt that he needed to have a parody language as a kind of cover story for the things he was trying to engage with. So the book has not even a controlled hysteria.’ Personal interview, August 2005. A chapter of Toles’ Ph.D. dissertation (entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Confusion’) at the University of Virginia was devoted to Pierre. Charles Gordon Greene, Boston Post, 4 August 1852. Reprinted at http:// www.melville.org/hmpierre.htm. Herman Melville, Pierre, the Kraken Edition, ed. Hershel Parker (New York: HarperCollins 1995), 74. New York Herald, 18 September 1852. Reprinted at http://www.melville.org/ hmpierre.htm. Pierre, 162. DVD commentary. The Betacam video circulating in Canada for theatrical screenings (the film version is no longer available in Maddin’s own country) reproduces this ‘tobacco’ tint, but 2000 Kino the DVD, supervised by Maddin, is redder. The 2009 Kino DVD is closer to the Betacam. Maddin gave a fuller account of the process to me in an August 2005 conversation: gm: I got my way [in discussions with the cinematographer] anyway because I was the production designer and I painted everything a certain way. And he was really open to experimenting as well. And we agreed that we would basically [...] overexpose everything by three stops and then have it darkened later back down to proper exposure. It was kind of to repress the colour; we thought we’d go for a ‘Repressovision.’ wb: When you overexpose it, it removes colour content? gm: Yeah, like I painted the sets. Like the blues, I got the deepest blue possible and the turquoises literally looked like [...] the most colour saturated. And I had everyone’s faces painted apricot. All the Caucasians in the movie – everyone was Caucasian – they got apricot plus rouge; it was a really saturated flesh colour. The colour was just really saturated, like you took the first colour TV and turned the colour dial all the way up to 11. So I was doing this on the set. Literally the equivalent of Antonioni’s painting a park green to get a greener green. I was just doing that with my sets. Sometimes just reducing the amount of colours in a frame to two or three, and just controlling it with paint. And then by overexposing it, it would repress it. You know what I was hoping to get was – and I kind of

418

Notes to pages 127–34 forgot to do it – was either wobble the aperture or wobble the frames per second, so that the colour, the saturation, would wobble a bit. Like it was trying to come out, as if it were a close-up of a robin’s egg with that beautiful robin’s egg blue and not a baby birdie, but the actual blue was trying to be born. And it was trembling and pecking at the shell and becoming more or less saturated as its little blue beak gained and lost energy in this exhausting process. 5 Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

1 ‘Strange Frontiers: Twenty Years of Manitoba Feature Film,’ 254–5. 2 New York Times, 6 June 2007, reviewing a DVD box of Martin and Lewis movies. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/movies/ homevideo/05dvds.html?8dpc. 3 The phrase – and the facts and figures – are Maddin’s. Personal interview, July 2006. 4 See, for example, Steven Shaviro, ‘Fire and Ice,’ 220. 5 Near the beginning of the DVD commentary, Maddin introduces it in this way: ‘This place, Mandragora, doesn’t really exist, and I thought, why not stick it underground, like a sunken Atlantis? [...] A place where if you go deeply enough the sun actually starts shining again.’ 6 Brad Oswald’s report on the shoot, ‘Maddin shines bright light on love,’ calls him ‘a political prisoner’ – a description Oswald may have gotten from Maddin or Toles. The double credit is explained below. 7 Personal interview, June 2007. 8 Toles has since somewhat regretted the fact that the quality of impulsive and irresponsible extreme youth, which at one time was important to the basic conception of Juliana’s character, has been somewhat lost in the resulting film – for a number of reasons, some of them quite good. Personal interview, June 2007. 9 Toles outlines some of this in the DVD commentary. 10 DVD commentary. 11 Personal interview, August 2005. 12 Journal entry for 5 January 1996. From the Atelier Tovar, 19. 13 In the DVD commentary, Maddin remarks that just before starting the project he had taken a visit to the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris and vowed that his next film was going to take something from those paintings. 14 Of particular interest, I think, are Laforgue’s Moral Tales, which are not only Symbolist in their purple language and fantasy-invention, but also incorporate their own self-mocking parody of Symbolist whimsy in a way that is very Maddin-like. See especially, ‘Lohengrin, Son of Parsifal.’

Notes to pages 135–53

419

15 Toles calls attention to this in the DVD commentary, and confirmed it to me at some length in personal conversation, June 2007. 16 For awhile in the vicinity of 2005, Maddin and Toles were considering a remake of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby. 17 Indeed, her creation was inspired by aspects of Toles’ own spinster aunt. Personal interview, June 2007. 18 Toles remarks in the DVD commentary that Peter is ‘attempting to relieve himself from this strain of light, and that unwelcome requirement – we all think that light is beneficent, but who wants, anyway, to see anything too clearly?’ When Peter is flooded with light after Juliana’s affectionate receipt of the two green feathers and then sticks his head into the beach sand, Maddin remarks: ‘I wanted Peter Glahn to need to bury his head in the earth like an ostrich, just to find some darkness, just some cooling darkness. Just to cool his hot head.’ 19 Shaviro is especially struck by the absurdity of this scene. ‘Fire and Ice,’ 217–18. 20 Although even in its new form as a church bell it continues to be a maleficent influence. The last sentence of the story is: ‘Since the bell rings at Ille the vines have twice been frozen.’ 21 Toles reports this in the DVD commentary as Frank Gorshin’s summing up of the character he plays. 22 Inspired, says Maddin, by the invocation that raises the dead soldiers in Abel Gance’s 1919 film J’accuse! Personal interview, August 2005. 23 Maddin’s account of this tangled and painful situation is told in Caelum Vatnsdal’s Kino Delirium (116–17) and also in the DVD commentary. See also Doug Saunders, ‘Mystery Man Stars in Latest Maddin Film,’ and Linda Rosborough, ‘Film Star Mad.’ 24 The DVD commentary includes the following exchange: maddin: Once again, encouraged by Josef von Sternberg’s great precedents of coming up with a choir of accents ... toles: The Scarlet Empress effect. maddin: Right. Where the Empress Dowager is from Brooklyn and Marlene’s from Germany, etc. etc. And C. Aubrey Smith is from wherever [...] So here we have the voice, Ross McMillan, who’s from Edinburgh, Shelley Duvall is from Texas, Frank Gorshin from Pittsburgh, Pascale Bussières is French-Canadian, R.H. Thomson has a kind of stylized Lithuanian accent [...] And Alice Krige’s from South Africa. 25 Maddin dwells on this point repeatedly, especially with regard to McCulloch’s performances, in the DVD commentaries for Gimli Hospital, Arch-

420

Notes to pages 154–65

angel, and Careful and elsewhere, including my interview with him in July 2005. 26 In Kino Delirium (how aptly named!), Caelum Vatnsdal quotes the following entry from Stephen Snyder’s production diary of Careful: ‘A propos of almost nothing, Guy strolls by and remarks, “I don’t want to grow anymore; I want to go back to the the womb.” This is code for “I want to shit-can all these people and shoot this film just like I did the last one”’ (90). 27 Personal interview, July 2005. The conversation went, in part, like this: wb: You were reluctant to use 35mm for Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and you haven’t used it since. gm: I don’t like its lack of portability … [The producer] and the cinematographer ended up outvoting me to go to 35. wb: You didn’t know this was possible. gm: I didn’t know there were votes being taken. When I hired both those people, and I hired them, they both promised me that … wb: You’d be the boss. gm: Yeah. And then they outvoted me on this 35mm. 28 29 30 31

Journal entry for 7 April 1996, From the Atelier Tovar, 22–3. Kino Delirium, 110. Ibid., 142. For example, in the DVD commentary (and also in a conversation with me in 2005), Maddin is rather critical of the effect made by the statue of Venus – something he also relates partly, again, to the too-much-truth-telling medium of 35mm. 32 McCulloch’s score, put together under severe time constraint (Maddin personal interview, June 2007), isn’t always as effective as his score for Careful, with some ‘marking time’ passages and some cues that are jarringly jaunty. Some cues, including the main title music, are just as impressive as anything in his work for Careful. 6 Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary 1 2 3 4 5

Personal interview, July 2006. This film is treated in the ‘Short Films’ Appendix (p. 361). Personal interview, July 2006. Personal interview, August 2005. Maddin relates in the DVD commentary that this decision of the choreographer dated back to a requirement that the ballet be stageable in two distinct

Notes to pages 170–9

6 7 8

9

10

11

12

13 14

421

and separable parts for greater flexibity when touring. In the event, however, the ballet has never been staged except in its complete form. Royal Winnipeg Ballet e-mail response to enquiry, July 2007. DVD commentary. Personal interview, August 2005. In the DVD commentary, Maddin refers to sound editor Russ Dyck’s request for a ‘goat-glanding’ credit (this being the term employed during the earliest days of sound for effects that were inserted into a silent film to boost vividness). Inspired, Maddin tells us in the DVD commentary, by the similar shot of Bela Lugosi’s zombie-master giant gaze in the cult classic White Zombie (1932). 10 For a detailed account of the technical particulars of cinematography and camera movement of the Dracula shoot, see Jean Oppenheimer, ‘Timeless Films of Modern Vintage.’ Unless maybe a little bit like Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 Metropolis, which deluged a truncated version of Fritz Lang’s silent classic with deafening synthesizer rock. In August 2005 Maddin told me (à propos Dracula): ‘The pacing was something that after Twilight of the Ice Nymphs I was going around – like, during Q&A on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs I was saying, I now pledge that all my films from now on will be fast.’ For the falling-out that occurred when dawson wanted more credit for his creative contribution, see Randall King’s Winnipeg Free Press article, ‘Maddin-dawson Split Plays Like a Film Tragedy.’ On the DVD commentary track, Maddin credits this idea of reverse-shooting to Mark Godden. Of course the Good/Evil melodramatic narrative tool survives – in modernist Soviet montage cinema, and in anti-modernist Socialist Realism also – but in the form of ‘objective’ Marxist political values. Already Pudovkin and Eisenstein strove to use moral shorthand to assign political value to characters standing in for social classes and political actors. Eisenstein’s method was to use ‘typage’ (representations of character that called forth instant reflexive positive or negative responses) as a Pavlovian device to operate instrumentally on viewers with the aim of political education. These Good or Evil characters were at least as simplified and polarized as anything in the hoariest melodrama, and in fact derive from them (recall Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for Dickens and Griffith). In later Socialist Realism, there is something like a basic reimportation of these polarized melodramatic forms to provide clear and easily understood (and subtextless and un-misinterpretable) ‘revolutionary’ lessons that will battle the politically enervating

422

15 16 17 18

19 20 21

Notes to pages 182–93 complexities of the more nuanced bourgeois novel and its theatrical and cinematic descendents. Bram Stoker, Dracula, 256. Ibid., 154. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976). At one point she makes a laughing mention of the ‘New Woman,’ as the early feminists of the era were called (110), but although she hardly includes herself in the category, she practically does belong to it by any measure of her capacities and behaviour. Stoker, 73. All of these remarks are from the DVD commentary. DVD commentary. 7 Cowards Bend the Knee

1 Interview with Robert Enright, ‘Chicken Soup for the Stone Baby: Interrogations towards an Elusive Autobiography,’ appendix to the published script of Cowards Bend the Knee, 132. Maddin must be referring to an earlier stage of the film’s conception, given the virtual overlap between the shoots of it and The Saddest Music in the World. 2 DVD commentary. 3 J. Hoberman, ‘Hardcore Hallucination: An Experimental Peep Show.’ 4 Personal interview, July 2006. 5 Guy Maddin, Cowards Bend the Knee, edited by Philip Monk (Toronto: Power Plant, 2003). 6 But unlike with other bare-bones, quasi-amateur productions (including Maddin’s own Tales from the Gimli Hospital), the actors and other key personnel in Cowards were actually paid. Maddin estimates that ‘had it been made with a typical “not paying the actors” method, I think it could have been made for about $16,000.’ Personal interview, June 2006. Because Maddin paid for it himself, Cowards Bend the Knee is the only one of his features that he owns the rights to, and that continues to trickle some money back to the filmmaker. 7 Maddin says in the DVD commentary that ‘this is the first movie I’ve shot without storyboards or even shot-lists, I would just show up in the morning with all the actors and start shooting my life.’ 8 These are phrases Maddin uses in the interview with Robert Enright in the published script (134, 131, and 139). 9 Personal interview, June 2007. Dennis Lim also quotes the line in his book-

Notes to pages 193–200

10 11

12 13 14

15 16

17

423

let notes for the Criterion DVD of Brand upon the Brain! so it is clear the Maddin has used it many times. Personal interview, August 2005. Before 1963, Canada had sent its best amateur hockey teams to the Olympics and the World Championships. When several European countries began to surpass the level these amateur club teams were capable of, a Canadian national team was formed to compete in these most important of international tournaments. Since professional athletes were not eligible for the Olympics, this new national team was still made up of amateur players, a situation that lasted until 1977, when professional players were allowed to compete. See, in addition to THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES, the essay ‘The Womb Is Barren,’ also in From the Atelier Tovar, 87–90. ‘Rover’ is an actual player position which has, however, long disappeared from hockey. Maddin made it clear to me in August 2005 that in using the title ‘All-Time Maroons’ he intended a reference to the old term of abuse, signifying ‘idiot’ or more directly ‘moron,’ apparently invented by Bugs Bunny in his oft-used phrase ‘what a maroon!’ The celebrations are clearly fatuously excessive when the Maroons goal has pulled the score back to a 9–1 deficit. ‘On herdis’s birthday, gramma sang “Happy Birthday” up into the heating duct of her room, which carried the frail and feeble tune up through the vents and into the upstairs kitchen’ (205). Among those visible in the wax museum are ‘Julian Klymberger’ (= Julian Klymkiw of the Maroons, father of Maddin’s first producer Greg), ‘Ring Holohan’ (= Bud Holohan, president of the Maroons and a particular friend of Chas Maddin), ‘Harry Pinder’ (= Gerry Pinder of the Canadian Nationals), ‘Hind Bauer’ (probably = Father David Bauer, founder and coach of the Canadian national team, whom Maddin in a journal entry describes as once sleeping in his bed (From the Atelier Tovar, 58), and who delivered the eulogy at Chas’ funeral). Guy later takes up his place as ‘Red Dunsmore’ (= Fred Dunsmore, captain and star player of the Maroons). An anomaly is ‘Frank Quilici’ (= player and later manager for the Minnesota Twins major league baseball team 1965–75, and already referenced in Careful as one of the mountain locations). Fran Huck, little Guy’s hero from the national team, is absent – even though, as Maddin told me in 2005, ‘actually, when I was writing the original [of Cowards], before the Power Plant became involved, the main character was going to be named Fran Huck.’

424

18

19 20

21

22

Notes to pages 201–2 Also, Guy’s first strangulation victim, Shaky, is Shaky McLeod, playing coach of the Nationals, and his second, his best friend Mo Mott, is named after another Nats player. Enright interview in the published script, 142. Of course, the actual premises themselves had been used as the hospital location for the shooting of Tales from the Gimli Hospital. Ibid., 137–8. Personal interview, August 2005. Some other particulars of this relationship make it into the published script, but are only vestigially present in the finished film. The most notable, probably, is the fact that in the script Meta jealously tries to keep Guy from playing hockey. One trace that remains is the title in Chapter 6 that describes Guy as ‘DESPERATE TO PLAY HOCKEY AGAIN.’ Perhaps Meta’s reclaiming of ‘her father’s hands,’ thus making it impossible for Guy to grasp a hockey stick properly, is some kind of version of this prohibition. Perhaps the abortion, which leads to the death of the mother and the fetus, and which, when Veronica comes back as a ghost, is actually replayed, has such haunting force because Maddin himself had once gotten a girlfriend ‘in trouble.’ He told Robert Enright: ‘For an autobiography it’s strange that the most important person in my life – my daughter Jilian – isn’t even in it. It was later that I realized [...] that the most horrifying thought I’ve ever had is that my daughter, who was an unplanned pregnancy, could have been an aborted fetus’ (138–9). Although ‘Guy Maddin’ in the film is an accomplished hockey player, we are told in THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES that little Guy couldn’t skate at all, a source of great shame to him. huck jovially invited the child without qualities to come for a skate with the team. Normally, this would occasion great thrills in any Canadian boy, but a surge of shame almost smote down the son of chas. A previously repressed fact had just been unloosed within him – he could not skate! He had tried skating a number of times, but it had been too hard, or way too cold, and the constant pain and humiliation of falling onto the pavement-like playing surface, often cracking his already misshapen head so that it felt like an egg breaking from the inside, had made the child without qualities run and hide whenever anyone suggested skating. This humiliation was aggravated by his father’s celebrity status with the hockey team [...] The constantly distracted chas did not help matters the few times he did attempt to teach his last afterthought son; he actually tied the kid’s skates onto the wrong feet, introducing a new species of pain to the already unbearable rite. (200)

Notes to pages 202–3

23 24 25 26

27

28

29

425

Maddin later mastered the art sufficiently to play plenty of casual hockey, including a couple of outings with R.H. Thomson during the shooting of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. With apologies to Woody Allen, whose thus-titled episode in New York Stories (1989) is also referenced in the chapter on My Winnipeg. In the DVD commentary Maddin says: ‘Chas the sort of impotent patriarch of this hairdressing family.’ DVD commentary. In the Enright interview in the published script, Maddin says: ‘Aunt Lil was a sweet old spinster filled to the brim with equanimity and generosity and auntish love for her nieces and nephews. She didn’t have a soiled mark on her record. My mother was far more volatile and unpredictable but my Aunt Lil was the one who died in bed with me not visiting her enough. I was out carousing too much and I always felt bad about that. So I consciously made her a Clytemnestra figure. I thought this is a post-mortal gift I can give to my Aunt Lil, just to give her a brief taste of that life’ (141). Something similar happened with Maddin Sr: ‘I just wanted [...] to think of Vic Cowie as what my father could have been – a big intimidating guy. A guy from Turgenev’s First Love that steals his son’s lover.’ Personal interview, July 2006. To Robert Enright in the published script interview (140), regarding Meta’s feelings about her dead father, and recalling his own feelings about his own dead father: ‘I know how Meta is reacting because I guess I’m her.’ (Among other things, this suggests that Maddin blames his mother for his father’s disempowerment and death.) He also goes on to say, skating past all the doubling and ghosting of different roles and different psychological aspects: ‘That’s the strangest thing, I’ve written an autobiography in which the character played by me, isn’t me.’ One can hardly take this statement literally. In the DVD commentary, Maddin says: ‘I wanted this movie to have a melodrama hysteria that Strauss’s opera Elektra has – just, in this case, an opera without shrieking.’ Meta, as the daughter of Chas and Liliom, is also the filmmaker’s sister, Janet. There is one trace of this affinity in Liliom’s categorical command to her daughter as she is licking her sugar-coated finger: ‘No sugar before pie!’ This is not the only time that Liliom is depicted as the presenter of pie – a very incongruous role for this criminal boss. Only retrospectively, after seeing Brand upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg, can one work out that what are depicted here, cryptically, are Herdis Maddin’s battles with her daughter, and little Guy’s sense that he was being rather suffocated with pie and other goodies. Liliom’s ‘No sugar before pie!’ is surreally nonsensical, and that

426

30 31 32

33

34

35 36

Notes to pages 204–8 too probably corresponds with the child’s sense that his mother’s rule was baffling to reason. Personal interview, August 2005. James Quandt, ‘Purple Majesty.’ I employ the term ‘castration’ here and elsewhere in a loose, broadly Freudian fashion to refer to a condition in which a male subject appears to be, or feels himself, stripped of power before the giant social and psychologically internalized requirement that he act in a masculinely powerful way or suffer humiliation. Needless to say, such a condition does not have to reflect any actual, objective set of facts that might survive rational scrutiny. It is enough for Guy to feel himself disempowered and humiliated in the arena of sexual relations, by his submission to strong women or his own feelings of inferiority vis-à-vis Maddin Sr, for him to experience this condition – it is basically something he is doing to himself. Freund had been probably the most distinguished cinematographer working at UFA (for Lang, Murnau, and Dreyer among others), and in Hollywood he became a director for three years in the early 1930s, beginning with The Mummy (1932) and ending with Mad Love. A further remake was The Hands of Orlac (U.K./France 1961), with Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee, and this one appears to be closer to the Wiene film than to the novel, since in it the whole thing is a hoax. In 1966, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote the novel Et mon tout est un homme (Choice Cuts), which had a dead criminal’s entire body being parcelled out to a number of recipients with surreal and horrifying consequences. That book was adapted in part for the 1991 film Body Parts, which reverts mostly to one man getting one homicidal arm and thus actually resembles more closely the original Maurice Renard novel than most of the actual adaptations of it. This little collection of titles certainly does not exhaust the iterations of this ever-attractive basic idea. And we may recall, as well, the scars encircling Peter Glahn’s wrists in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a precursor of the severing of Chas’ hands, ‘tightly bound by wire’ (Meta tells us in an intertitle). Personal interview, August 2005. He added that ‘they’re all kissing cousins – surrealism, fairy tales, and melodrama.’ There is a good deal of material on Chaney, but for a brief, pungent overview of his career, and his collaboration with Tod Browning, see Gary Morris, ‘Lon Chaney Sr, Super-Masochist’ in Bright Lights Film Journal 15. Morris notes that ‘Chaney’s films are filled with images of physical repression, submission, mutilation, and castration, and his taste for such motifs dovetailed perfectly with Browning’s own world-view.’

Notes to pages 210–19

427

37 Personal interview, August 2005. 38 Enright, 147. Maddin had his sights on just such a film noir, Detour (1946), when he brought in its octogenarian femme fatale star, Ann Savage, to (once again) play his mother in My Winnipeg. 39 In August 2005 I said to him, ‘You could have called [the film] 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.’ And he replied, ‘He gets exactly what he deserves.’ 40 DVD commentary. 41 When Maddin insisted, during our 2006 interview, on the factually autobiographical nature of the film, we exchanged the following words: wb: And you actually murdered two people just in order to not get out of this relationship? gm: I was willing to… yeah you kill off a friend and you kill off a parent or something. 42 Here is a complete list of the selections: 1. SPERM PLAYERS – Wagner, Tannhäuser, ‘Wie Todesahnung,’ Act III recitative, arrangement for cello and piano. 2. A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND – Beethoven, Symphony No. 7, second movement (‘Allegretto’), orchestra. 3. UPON A PILE OF HOCKEY GLOVES – Gluck, Orphée et Eurydice, ‘Dance of the Furies,’ orchestra. 4. META’S BEDROOM – Chopin, Waltz in C# minor Op. 64 no. 2, solo piano. 5. FISTY – Brahms, Concerto for Violin and Cello, first movement (‘Allegro’), violin, cello and orchestra. 6. WAX TRYST – Verdi, Macbeth, ‘Ballabile’ (ballet music), orchestra. 7. THE BLUE HANDS OF VENGEANCE – SaintSaëns, Samson et Dalila, ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,’ mezzo-soprano and orchestra. 8. ANOTHER WAX TRYST – Liszt, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 15 in A minor (‘Rákóczy March’), piano solo. 9. HANDS OFF! – Dvormák, Cello Concerto, third movement (‘Finale: Allegro moderato’), cello and orchestra. 10. THE FURIES – Schubert, song ‘Erlkönig’, arrangement for piano solo. Most of these selections seem to my ear to come from the 78rpm electrical era (roughly 1927–50), but some may be from the earlier acoustical era, and one or two may even be from the magnetic tape era (post-1950) but in technically limited recordings. 43 He remarked to me in 2005: ‘I never even really asked myself whose sperm it was. I know that in practical terms, you need a hand. I was going to direct somebody’s hand and then I thought, no I’ll just film my own.’ 44 A small exception is the deliberately puerile comedy short Nude Caboose

428

45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52

Notes to pages 219–24 (2007), which was shot on a cell phone. This medium has exactly the same relation to high-resolution digital movie technology as 8mm film has to 35mm. There are also some digital sequences in My Winnipeg. E-mail communication, 28 June 2008. Personal interview, July 2006. DVD commentary. Maddin recounts that ‘early on we decided on this editing style, and then I just left him alone, and he just cut the picture one chapter at a time’ while Maddin was on his way to the daily Saddest Music in the World shoot. When he says that Gurdebeke is the first close to 50-50 collaborator, he is undoubtedly referring to the post-production phase, or at any rate the visual dimension. Clearly, George Toles had a role of considerable importance in the scripts for some earlier Maddin films, most notably Archangel, Careful, and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. Toles contributed thoughts and advice for the script of Cowards as well, and even receives the, it would seem, slightly inflated screen credit ‘based on a script by George Toles.’ Personal interview, July 2006. Ibid. Booklet essay, ‘Out of the Past’ for Criterion DVD issue of Brand upon the Brain! Maddin has talked about this in several venues. For example, in the DVD commentary he says: ‘And I really wanted to ... fetishize, it’s a lame word to describe what I wanted to do with hands in this movie. I noticed when I made a ballet version of Dracula a year earlier how expressive ballet dancers’ hands were, and how I ended up using their hands by the end of the shoot as much as their faces for expressive close-ups. And so I thought it might be fun to tell a story using hands as much as faces, for close-ups. And by coincidence, organically enough, I made a story in which hands feature as prominently as any other element.’ In the DVD commentary Maddin says this title is copied from ‘a chapter in Moby-Dick, my favourite chapter,’ and recommends that we read it. In that chapter, Ishmael revels in the task of kneading out the lumps in big tubfuls of fragrant oily spermaceti: A sweet and unctuous duty! [...] Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize [...] I almost begin to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatever. Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! [...] I squeezed that sperm

Notes to pages 225–32

429

till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, – Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy? (Penguin edition, 1972, 526–7)

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60

Note that this chapter of the film follows right upon the heels of the first chapter, ‘SPERM PLAYERS,’ and that the origin of the term ‘spermaceti’ dates from a time when this substance was incorrectly thought to be the sperm of the whale (hence Melville’s Paracelsan reference). It is doubtful that Melville really thought the substance to be actual sperm, but the idea of immersing one’s hands in vats of actual sperm for hours at a time, and the consequent experience chronicled by Melville, is certainly a very Maddinlike thought. A staging of these tubs of sperm had already been featured in Maddin’s uncompleted quasi-feature The Cock Crew, and fragments of it survive in his short film Chimney Workbook. I think also of all the various girl-tyrants in Frank Baum’s Oz novels. DVD commentary. Personal interview, August 2005. Maddin’s description in the DVD commentary of the real-life Dr Fusi, the Maroons’ team doctor, has this detail: ‘when I hung around the Winnipeg Arena Dr Fusi and Dr Waugh were always performing stitches on the players recently cut by flying hockey pucks, and they never used anaesthetic and usually would ceremoniously cauterize the stitches with cigarette ashes afterwards, just rubbing them in, claiming that this reduced the likelihood of permanent scarring.’ Recalling, too, the hockey parlance for a player who is absolutely without ‘soft hands around the net,’ namely, ‘he has no hands.’ Universal, 1928, directed by Paul Leni, adapted from Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit (1869). Cowards Bend the Knee published script, Enright interview, 144. At one point in THE CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES, Maddin refers to the Child’s thing without qualities (195). 8 The Saddest Music in the World

1 All three comments are from interviews in Teardrops in the Snow: The Making of ‘The Saddest Music in the World’ (2004), directed by Caelum Vatsndal and

430

2

3

4 5 6 7

8

9

10

11

Notes to pages 233–7 Matthew Holm, special feature on all English-language DVD issues of the film. For an extensive account of Rossellini’s attitudes to Maddin and to her performance, see her interview with Robert Enright, ‘Isabella Rossellini: Close to the Maddin Crowd.’ Maddin’s own description, in the DVD commentary. Note that this commentary track appears on the Canadian TVA release, but not the American MGM/UA one. Personal conversations, August 2005 and July 2006. See also various testimonies in Teardrops in the Snow. Fichman interview in Teardrops in the Snow. ‘I’ve grown more and more obsessed with the idea of mythologizing Winnipeg,’ Maddin says in Teardrops in the Snow. This character is referred to in the DVD commentary as ‘the Blind Seer’ and as female in sex, but neither blindness nor femaleness is particularly apparent in this figure dressed in robes and a deer-antlered headdress (and rather predictive of images from the spiritualist ballet sequence in My Winnipeg). It is hardly worth mentioning that ‘The Song Is You,’ which was not written until 1932, could not be being performed in this family scene that must logically take place probably some time between 1910 and 1920. Serbia was not a country at all in 1933, of course, having been folded into Yugoslavia, which was a 1918 creation of the Treaty of Versailles. All these members of the highly Anglo-sounding ‘Kent’ family – including the proud British war veteran Fyodor – have, though, possibly changed their names from ‘Kokoc2,’ or something like it, for that is the name by which Roderick is called in the dream-swoon he experiences after re-encountering his wife. This might indicate that there was something Yugoslav about the family after all, something perhaps descending from Ishiguro’s script. But the detail is so tiny and marginal that it is difficult to construct anything solid on it. These items may seem merely examples of the ridiculous hyperbole of seriousness and grief that accompanies all of Roderick’s manifestations – and they certainly are that. But in the DVD commentary Maddin says: ‘There’s the jarred heart. It’s something I’d been trying to work into a script for a long time [...] Something I’d actually read about in some German Romantic literature. I don’t know if it was actually done, but according to the writings, grieving parents carried around the most beloved organ of their child in a jar.’ The song, by Jimmy Kennedy and Will Grosz, dates from 1938 and so – in a fashion similar to the Kent family performance of ‘The Song Is You’ – post-

Notes to pages 238–49

12 13

14

15

16

17 18 19

20

21 22

431

dates the historical setting of 1933 in which it is supposed to be taking place. This too is hardly worth mentioning. Sic., though the name should be ‘Lindbergh.’ Babe Ruth’s stomach complaint, which sidelined him for a substantial stretch of the 1925 baseball season and possibly cost the New York Yankees the pennant, was described as an ‘intestinal complaint,’ but it has been suggested in many places that it was in fact a case of syphilis. Certainly this is how Maddin (a serious baseball fan) interprets it in the DVD commentary, since as the titles of Chester’s numbers flash past he remarks that of all these American ‘tragedies,’ ‘for many people Ruth’s syphilis was the worst.’ A line that recalls at least to older Canadian listeners a ubiquitous series of commercials for Canada Dry Ginger Ale from the 1980s in which Louis Jourdan was repeatedly heard to exclaim: ‘It’s like your country – it sparkles!’ Maddin says in the DVD commentary that he couldn’t get anybody on the set to perform this sad and dreadful task, so he had to do it himself. The animal origins of the organ itself are unknown. DVD commentary: ‘That’s a film noir moment ... being stabbed by a woman. It’s just a great American tradition. And, you know, this Canadian boy – never is he more American than when he gets stabbed by a woman.’ One notes the fact that, as documented in My Winnipeg, there are several family photographs of little Guy Maddin wearing a sailor suit. See Randall King, ‘Bizarre Business as Usual.’ The street-hockey game that Narcissa wanders past is being played between teams outfitted in the Maroons’ and Soviets’ uniforms from Cowards Bend the Knee. It is highly diverting to think of an international match being played on these frozen streets in 1933 without even an audience. In the DVD commentary, Maddin cites Rouben Mamoulian as a model for the way this number develops, with the theme passing from one place to another, and one set of performers to another. It is the 1932 Maurice Chevalier–Jeanette MacDonald movie Love Me Tonight he is surely referring to, in particular the big number near the beginning, ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ Maddin goes on to say that ‘recording this with [Maria de Medeiros] was great, because she realized that she could miss the notes a little, be a little “pitchy” (as they say on American Idol), but somehow she sings the way her character talks. I was really pleased. It felt like I was making a musical when I was recording her.’ Personal interview, August 2005. DVD commentary. He goes on to add: ‘My producer Niv Fichman took the film to Bangkok, and they attacked him in the Q&A afterwards, because

432

23

24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31

Notes to pages 249–62 clearly this man is not Thai. He’s playing Chinese music, and not wearing any costume that’s familiar to the country, but I just felt it was an attitude it was important to adopt.’ Perhaps the most surreal single moment in this buffet of ethnic confusions occurs in a shot that is part of the montage of bands of musicians all around the world making their way to Winnipeg: a group of musicians in sombreros is seen against a backdrop of a Gothic cathedral buying railway tickets in front of a wicket labelled ‘FAHRKARTEN’ (the German word for ‘tickets’). The line is Helen’s, delivered while she is pitching the contest to her board of directors. In 2005, George Toles gave me this description of Chester’s fate: ‘It’s too late. Well, for me in Saddest Music it’s a case of Chester being caught. He’s a gingerbread man and sadness catches up with him and he begins to configure rapidly in his fading sight the emotions that he has outmanoeuvred, outrun – experiencing certain things as they might have been properly felt in a lost present tense.’ The latter wardrobe item, incidentally, gets an extended discussion in the DVD commentary, and was also used in Cowards Bend the Knee. Maddin told me in August 2005, ‘that wig cost eight bucks and we used it in two movies – four bucks per picture.’ Personal interview, August 2005. Maria de Medeiros, a heat-seeking Portuguese, was reportedly intensely discouraged by the cold, especially after Maddin (as he confesses himself) simply lied to her during the casting process when she expressed worries about low temperatures. She has apparently since forgiven him, though – and it must be said that her performance shows no visible signs of the adverse conditions. DVD commentary; personal interview August 2005; Teardrops in the Snow. Marie Losier and Richard Porton, ‘The Pleasures of Melancholy,’ 22. Personal interview, August 2005. Ibid. For a detailed account of the technical particulars of cinematography, staging, and camera movement of the Saddest Music shoot, see Oppenheimer, ‘Timeless Films of Modern Vintage.’ There, the film’s Director of Photography Luc Montpellier is quoted as saying: ‘Nobody in the world is doing what Guy is doing. He marries opposing styles as a dramatic tool, as well as to create a sense of discontinuity. The scenes between Chester and Helen are constructed with the extremely melodramatic movies of the 1930s in mind, only to be interrupted with handheld reaction shots characteristic of Pudovkin and Eisenstein. Helen’s last number is shot in the spirit of a classical Hollywood musical but is intercut with camera angles found in German Expressionism’ (26).

Notes to pages 262–71 32 33 34 35

36

37

38

39

433

Personal interview, August 2005. DVD commentary. Personal interview, July 2006. See David Church’s essay ‘Brief Notes on Canadian Identity in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World’ for some other thoughts on this question. The situation is quite different in Quebec, where, despite many economic constraints, the French language serves as a barrier to full American cultural colonization, and there is a real appetite for representations of local culture. It is not that there were no feature films in English Canada before that time, but their existence was intermittent and scattered, like the coughings of an engine that wouldn’t really start and run. Beginning in that 1960s–1970s period, the engine began to run, albeit in a feeble and basically powerless way, and it has continued more or less in that mode ever since. For the earlier period of Canadian cinema, the best account is still Peter Morris’ Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema 1895–1939 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1978). The national flag of Canada from the 1890s until 1965 was the Red Ensign, a Union Jack quartered on a red field, with a crest featuring a sprig of three maple leaves. Careful DVD commentary. 9 Brand upon the Brain!

1 Personal interview, June 2007. 2 97 Per Cent True, Criterion DVD documentary bundled with Brand upon the Brain! 3 The Film Company’s initial aim was to finance six films a year through donations and other fundraising measures, but to date it has only succeeded in producing Brand upon the Brain! and another 2006 feature entitled We Go Way Back. 4 Personal interview, June 2007. 5 Personal message from Maddin, September 2008. 6 Maddin told Andrea Richards of Helio Magazine: I always wanted to make a Grand Guignol film – I remember reading a book of Grand Guignol plays about 15 years ago, and one of them was set in a lighthouse. It had father and son lighthouse keepers who had just said good-bye to the supply ship that wouldn’t be returning for two weeks. Turns out they’d both been infected with rabies, which ballooned in

434

Notes to page 271 them as soon as the supply ship went away. Then there’s some shipwreck and a beautiful woman is washed on shore and they take her in, and then the rabies took over. Grand Guignol plays are pretty linear – something horrible starts, it gets more horrible, and then it ends with something the most horrible. I always liked the simple craziness and insanity of the Grand Guignol. Maddin’s source book for the lighthouse play is Mel Gordon’s The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror, which contains, among its 100 plot summaries of Grand Guignol plays, that for the piece Maddin refers to, The Keepers of the Lighthouse (Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin, 1918) (38). The Ashbery essays are in his Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (2004), whose influence on the creative process of the film Maddin described to me in 2007 like this: What I was reading most of all was John Ashbery’s prose, which is actually just an anthology of introductions and forewords to poetry collections or to books like Fantômas or Raymond Roussel, things like that. So I’d been reading all these really well-written and very enthusiastic appetizers for these other things that quite often pulled the highlights of those books right out and just presented them to me in one paragraph morsels. I was ... getting lots of ideas from there and quite often [...] something would remind me of something in my own childhood, and so I would just write that down [...] It would just be a way of helping me remember something of my own, so it was a really interesting exercise.

7 Personal interview, June 2007. 8 ‘I needed some sort of artificial setting. I had some things that I’d just happened to be reading about and then happened to be enthused about, like teen detectives, I read an article in the New Yorker about the origins of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys on an airplane.’ Personal interview, August 2007. The article must be ‘Nancy Drew’s Father,’ by Meghan O’Rourke, New Yorker, 8 Nov. 2004. 9 Maddin felt he had to evade one stricture, namely, that the editor provided by The Film Company must be used. After Cheryll Hidalgo had done some preliminary editing, Maddin felt he must entrust the main task to his regular collaborator John Gurdebeke. He told me (August 2007) that he did this with regret and that it was no reflection on Hidalgo. Certainly, it is clear from looking at Maddin’s later films that Gurdebeke performs a very distinct and essential part in their creation, one that is not possible to be substituted.

Notes to pages 271–3

435

10 ‘Newfangled Silent Movie with a Bit of Old Barnum.’ 11 Maddin has given different accounts of just when it was decided that the movie would be a performance piece. In the DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True, he says that is was known during shooting, but in September 2008 he told me in a personal conversation that it was as I am relating it here. 12 DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True. 13 There are three studio narrations (by Rossellini, Negin, and Maddin himself), and five captures of live narrations at the East Village Cinema in New York (by Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Eli Wallach, and Rossellini again). Listening to some of them is an odd experience, as one hears the speaker definitely ‘performing’ the text in a way that just seems strange while watching the film in the privacy of a personal viewing. 14 Maddin to Dennis Lim: ‘It’s like we’re putting on something that’s competing not with other movies but with the Blue Man Group. I now know what it might have been like to be P.T. Barnum.’ ‘Newfangled Silent Movie with a Bit of Old Barnum.’ 15 Maddin’s own feelings on the matter are, not surprisingly, rather different. He was just so delighted to be removed from the anxiety that viewers would be bored or would walk out, events that he had experienced too many times in the past. In an interview at the time of the Buenos Aires performances (posted on the film’s official website), he said: ‘I’m not afraid the live performers – the orchestra, conductor, sound effects artist, narrator, and castrato – will distract from the movie experience. I look at them as boredom insurance.’ Available at http://www.branduponthebrain.com/ blog/2007/04/interview-with-guy-maddin-in-buenos.html. 16 In the ‘director’s statement’ on The Film Company’s website for the movie, Maddin says: ‘I’ve wanted to do a silent film with live music for a long time, really give the people what they used to get all the time in the twenties, the real Grauman’s Chinese Theater experience! A lavish spectacle for the masses, only more lyrical than what we’re used to now!’ Available at http:// www.thefilmcompany.org/BUTB.html. In the Buenos Aires interview and the DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True, he traces his fascination with live narrators to reading Luis Buñuel’s accounts of the performances of explicadores accompanying silent films in Saragossa in the early years of the twentieth century (My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel, New York: Vintage, 1984, 32), as well as to the important personage of the benshi in Japanese silent cinema. Of course the contributions of Maddin’s narrator, unlike the activities of those forebears, are completely scripted and synchronized. 17 In the DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True, Maddin describes the period of his own life that is the basis for this as ‘a time when I was about ten or twelve.’

436

Notes to pages 281–303

18 Blog, The Pinocchio Theory, 27 July 2007. Available at http://www.shaviro .com/Blog/?p=589. 19 Personal interview, June 2007. 20 And whom Maddin would certainly have cast as the adult Guy in Brand as well if he had not been obliged by contract to use a member of The Film Company roster. 21 Personal interview, June 2007. 22 Maddin himself pointed this out to me (August 2008): ‘It’s a theft from and a tribute to Leech Woman, a grade D science fiction movie ... It’s really a fantastic film.’ He also says that it is ‘comprised of about 80 per cent African jungle animal stock footage.’ Indeed it is a fascinating if undeniably trashy film, allegorizing gender anxieties and passions in just as transparent a way as its sibling I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), encoding the asymmetrical field of gender relations in a surprisingly even-handed way, and, despite its several minutes of stock footage from Darkest Africa, not inhabiting anything like the deepest Ed Wood pools of alternate-universe cheapness. 23 Steven Shaviro writes, ‘A Freudian depth-psychology reading of Brand upon the Brain! would make no sense, precisely because all the Freudian motifs are right there in front of us. They so fill up the overt, manifest content of the film, that there is no sense in looking for a hidden, latent meaning behind them.’ Blog, The Pinocchio Theory, 27 July 2007. 24 Personal interview, July 2006. 25 Blog, The Pinocchio Theory, 27 July 2007. 26 When I asked Maddin specifically about this plot development – Sis’s new regime, the exile of Mother, the sending of Guy away with new parents – he just replied, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Personal interview, August 2008. 27 ‘Newfangled Silent Movie with a Bit of Old Barnum.’ 28 For a detailed description of her appearance in Gimli, and the events that inspired the ‘spin the bottle’ scene where Wendy kisses Neddie several times, see Maddin’s journal entry for 14 May 1998, in From the Atelier Tovar, 53–4. 29 DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True. He elaborates: ‘I think my mother tried, with a hammer of Thor, to pound every single pubic hair back into my sister, so that she would never reach adolescence. And my sister, with all the young, sprouting power that a pubic hair possesses – you know, like how a bean sprout can move the Parthenon over – fought back the strength my mother had. And I just sort of got caught in all the friendly fire ... For me it was especially terrifying in a kind of Greek myth sort of way, because the gods were really rumbling the sky in those days.’

Notes to pages 304–14

437

30 DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True. 31 Ibid. 32 In the DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True cinematographer Ben Kasulke reveals that parts of the shoot reduced Maddin to tears, and adds, ‘We were shooting the final vision of his mother just disappearing, and he told me that he was sad because we got exactly what he wanted.’ 33 Personal interview, June 2007. 34 DVD documentary 97 Per Cent True. 35 Toles, A House Made of Light, 331. 10 My Winnipeg 1 Steve Erickson, ‘Guy Maddin on My Winnipeg.’ 2 Personal interview, June 2007. Burns had also been an executive producer, and the Documentary Channel had been the production company, on My Dad Is 100 Years Old. In MY WINNIPEG Live in Toronto, an extra featurette accompanying the Seville Region 1 DVD issue of the film, Burns says: ‘Isabella told me a story about how she met Guy and decided to do The Saddest Music in the World. She liked the script, but knew nothing of Maddin. She flew up to Winnipeg in February to meet him. This is a prescription for disaster. But he picked her up at the airport and took her on a tour of his city. That was it – she was enchanted. So I knew immediately what we should do: a director-narrated film about Winnipeg. I said, “You’re the cab driver, I’m the fare; off you go.”’ 3 Personal interview, November 2008. 4 Erickson, ‘Guy Maddin on My Winnipeg.’ See also Dan Persons, ‘Guy Maddin Makes My Winnipeg Everyone’s Winnipeg,’ where Maddin says that most of the HD video ‘just got embedded in the images in the rear-screen projection’ and that ‘a lot of the stuff that was edited into the movie in HD just didn’t sit well with me as HD stuff. I finally just projected it onto my fridge and filmed it with a 16mm film camera, and just converted it to film emulsions, which is where most of that stuff really belongs.’ 5 Its first non-festival Canadian screenings occurred on Air Canada flights – in many ways a rather appropriate venue for this oneiric and visually ‘degraded’ work with its links to the travelogue genre. 6 Here I should just state clearly that despite enjoying a number of opportunities to do so, I have never asked Maddin about the truth of any of My Winnipeg’s assertions, although I will make some statements on that subject below. It seemed like a perverse and destructive thing to ask such questions

438

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15

Notes to pages 314–26 in an interview when it is clear that one of the filmmaker’s basic aims is to blur the line between documentary and fantasy. Trying to pin him down on these things would be asking him to undo his own work. Maddin says he has noticed at screenings a significantly older component of audience cross-section, with many viewers even well into retirement age. Personal interview, July 2008. Or so says the film. Maddin told a Winnipeg audience after the film’s premiere that he heard about these Aboriginal beliefs from his friend and fellow filmmaker Noam Gonick, adding: ‘I have no idea if it’s a geographical or geological fact.’ The Saddest Music in the World also includes somnambulating Winnipeggers. Maddin (and he’s not alone) has often used this phrase to describe Winnipeg. It has been used with greater or lesser degrees of humour. The Winnipeg electronic musician Venetian Snares has a 2005 album entitled Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole (which samples music from The Saddest Music in the World), some of whose other typical track names are ‘Winnipeg Is a Dogshit Dildo’ and ‘Die Winnipeg Die Die Die Fuckers Die.’ Winnipeg isn’t among the top twenty coldest cities in Canada, and even in the often-cited category of ‘coldest major city,’ where it is more competitive, in a worldwide context it can’t hold a candle to Ulan Bator, which is more populous (1 million) and quite a few degrees colder. Within its own country, the distinction has to be achieved by precise category definition. It is indubitably the coldest city with a population of over 600,000, but not over 200,000 (Saskatoon) or over 700,000 (Edmonton). These particular distinctions are minor anyway – a matter of a couple of degrees in yearly average temperature. What is particularly nasty about Winnipeg winters is the wind. See the Environment Canada (federal government) website with comparative listings of Canadian cities at http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/weather/winners/ intro-e.html. ‘Age-appropriate,’ that is, vis-à-vis Maddin’s mother in 2007, not in the earlier time periods revisited by the film, for which she is much too old. See Rozemeyer, ‘Guy Maddin’s Docu-Fantasia.’ My Winnipeg was Savage’s last hurrah, for she passed away on Christmas Day 2008. Maddin to Rozemeyer, ibid. Chas Maddin worked for Manitoba Pool Elevators, where he was, in Maddin’s words, ‘a lowly clerk.’ Personal conversation, July 2008. That situation too puts in a momentary reappearance in My Winnipeg, in the second re-enactment, where the mother responds to her daughter’s fervent wish that she were an orphan with the following words: ‘Don’t tempt me! Every night I look at my pills. One little push is all I need.’

Notes to pages 331–41

439

16 This is Maddin’s reduction of the actual quote, which is rather less sweeping: ‘When I considered the wonderful psychical phenomena of the one circle [Thomas Glendenning Hamilton’s] seen with my own eyes and the religious atmosphere of the other [a Spiritualist church gathering], I came away with the conclusion that Winnipeg stands very high among the places we have visited for its psychic possibilities. There are several Spiritualist churches and a number of local mediums of good repute.’ Our Second American Adventure (Boston, 1924), quoted in Michael W. Homer, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures in Winnipeg,’ Manitoba History No. 25 (Spring 1993). 17 The University of Manitoba has a large archive of materials from the Hamilton family, of which the most notable are the documents relating to the spiritualist sessions. A selection of photographs from the archive, including several included in the film, may be viewed at http://www.umanitoba.ca/ libraries/archives/hamilton.shtml. 18 Doyle devoted much of the last thirty years of his life to preaching spiritualism. For a complete account of his spiritualist actives in Manitoba, see Michael W. Homer, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures in Winnipeg.’ 19 I use inverted commas here because I have been unable to document this inherently dubious occurrence. 20 Spanky, who died in the summer of 2008, is also the subject of Maddin’s elegaic short film of that year, Spanky – To the Pier and Back. 21 See ‘Winnipeg’s Historic Bridges’ on The Winnipeg Time Machine website. Available at http://winnipegtimemachine.blogspot.com/2007/02/ winnipegs-historic-bridges.html. 22 See ibid., where it is flatly stated that the bridge was built specially for Winnipeg. 23 The Original Six, comprising the NHL between 1942 and 1967, came from these two cities and four northerly U.S centres: New York, Chicago, Boston, and Detroit. Before 1942, the league’s history was more chequered and changing, and afterwards, expansion eventually brought it all the way to its present thirty teams, including additional Canadian representation in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Ottawa. 24 See Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 85. Maddin adds, ‘I still to this day [2000] have Bobby Hull’s phone number.’ He relates the negotiations with Hull’s son that fell through and ends with the sentiment, ‘I was honoured that he even considered it.’ 25 The Falcons, founded in 1911 and winners of the first Olympic gold medal in hockey in 1920, had their roots in a pair of teams of the Winnipeg Icelandic community (themselves formed in reaction to prejudice which barred

440

Notes to pages 341–2

Icelandic players from other Winnipeg teams). I have been unable to trace their history after 1920, which suggests that they did not long survive that date. They have been commemorated in the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame, and have a little base of local devotees in the Icelandic community and among local historically interested hockey fans. Players from that team cited in My Winnipeg are ‘Buster’ Thorsteinson (spelled as ‘Thorstenson’), George Cumbers, Konnie Johannesson, Frankie Fredrickson, and Huck Woodman. Ollie Turnbull played for the rival Winnipegs. Many of these players served in the 233rd Battalion of the Canadian Army, and Thorsteinson, Cumbers, and Turnbull all died in Flanders. Cec Browne was a multisport athlete, playing on the Winnipeg Monarchs in 1915–16, then serving in the Royal Winnipeg Flying Corps, returning to play hockey in Regina and Selkirk, playing competitive football and baseball, and becoming a member of the first Chicago Black Hawks NHL team in 1928. Calgarian ‘Baldy’ Northcott played over 400 games for the NHL Montreal Maroons in the 1920s, and briefly coached in Winnipeg at the end of the 1930s (I am not sure what he is doing on the Black Tuesdays). Dunsmore’s history is given in the chapter on Cowards Bend the Knee, wherein he is the All-Time-Maroons persona for ‘Guy Maddin’ himself. I cannot trace ‘Smiley’ Dzama, although there is a prominent young Winnipeg-born artist named Marcel Dzama whose videos and installations transform childhood memories. Information on the Falcons may be found at http://www.winnipegfalcons.com/ and http://www.winnipegfalcons.com/prevfalcons/ with all their links, especially to a reprint of a 1996 article from the Icelandic Canadian Magazine entitled ‘The Romance of the Falcons.’ 26 Completely missing in action are the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. The Bombers are highly viable members of the Canadian Football League, have won its championship Grey Cup many times (though not recently), and have a storied history going back to the 1930s that certainly entered my own mythical childhood experience of sports in Canada (I am a decade older than Maddin). Moreover, owing to the vagaries of the small and shifting membership of the CFL, they have found themselves in recent decades sometimes part of the Western Conference, sometimes part of the Eastern – and that could certainly have been used in this film as part of Winnipeg’s strange symbolic identity and the decay of old verities. I know for a fact that Maddin’s actual Winnipeg includes the Bombers. But from the perspective of the film, they suffer from crucial drawbacks: they can’t be connected with the Arena, they aren’t dead, and they don’t play in midwinter.

Notes to pages 344–55

441

27 Maddin to Rozemeyer, ‘Guy Maddin’s Docu-Fantasia.’ 28 The construction company that restored the facility the following year commemorates this rebuilding on its website at http://www.bockstael.com/ Bockstael%2095th%20Anniversary.pdf. 29 He has made the claim many times, including at the Winnipeg premiere. 30 See the MY WINNIPEG Live in Toronto featurette accompanying the Seville Region 1 DVD issue of the film. 31 In a blog about his recent trip to Iceland (posted 2 October 2008), Manitoba artist Cliff Eylund reported the following exchange from the Reykjavik premiere of the film: ‘During the screening Q&A, Björk [the well-known singer] had asked if the frozen-horses-in-the-river scene in the movie was based on a true story. Yes, said Guy, AND you can be fined fifty dollars for propping up a frozen corpse against a wall in Winnipeg, especially if you try to get yuks by folding its stiff hands around a newspaper to make it look like it’s reading.’ Available at http://www.akimbo.biz/akimblog/?id=229. Maddin’s friend and collaborator Caelum Vatnsdal reported the same story in the same words for Lögberg Heimskringla: The Icelandic Community Newsletter, but that online posting has disappeared. 32 Cornish had only moved to Manitoba from Ontario in 1872. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online has this to say of his tenure as mayor of London, Ontario, from 1861: ‘Cornish had a popular following but gained a reputation as the “rowdy” mayor, being charged by opponents with bigamy, assault, drunkenness, and boisterous public disputes. He was defeated in 1864, it is said, when members of the city council called out the militia to ensure an honest election.’ Available at http://www.biographi.ca/ 009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=4917. 33 Maddin told Rozemeyer, ‘Guy Maddin’s Docu-Fantasia,’ that the city has ‘had a long history of gay mayors who held these pageants.’ 34 According to the Bay’s own literature, however, the actual Hudson’s Bay point blanket was first introduced in 1779. 35 And it is certainly far from the kind of guignol pain that Maddin was planning to include at one stage in the creation of the film. He told me in July 2006, after principal shooting, that ‘I’ve got my brother walking around with a hole in his head, and things like that.’ 36 This comparison was made in Andrew O’Hehir’s rather grudging review of My Winnipeg, paired with one for Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, in Salon (‘Maddin and Herzog: Brothers of the Ice,’ 19 June 2008). 37 Robert Enright, for example, talked about the film’s ‘very tight poetic script’ at the Winnipeg premiere.

442

Notes to pages 358–64 Envoi

1 This is also true of his most important short-film projects: Odilon Redon was a BBC commission, My Dad Is 100 Years Old came from Isabella Rossellini, and, probably most transformingly, The Heart of the World was a Toronto Film Festival commission. Appendix: Short Films 1 Kino Delirium even has stills documenting the original Maldoror: Tygers and The Cock Crew shoots. 2 There is, of course, an actually existent Sissy Boy Slap Party, dating from 2004, but this is in fact a remake of the decade-old lost film. The 1996 version has the added subtitle The Coming Terror and is summarized in Kino Delirium (164) as a ‘musical mantra derived from machine-gun micro-montage.’ 3 Maddin told me in 2005 that a number of the films were being held by a cousin in pawn for monies lent by his Aunt Lil to make the films in the first place. The cousin has recently died, and perhaps this material will find its way back into the filmmaker’s hands. 4 Vatnsdal, Kino Delirium, 160. Vatnsdal adds the following note: ‘Sadly, the picture seems to have been lost to the mists of time; though Maddin suspects it might be in “the shed down at the lake, or maybe Ian Handford has it in his closet.”’ 5 Ibid., 166. 6 The frustrating history of this project is related in Kino Delirium, 97–102, and there is more information in Stephen Cole, ‘Catching the Eye of the Apple,’ where Geoff Pevere, who had read the script, provides this tantalizing description of it: ‘[It is] an amazing fusion of the Frankenstein myth and Gilbert and Sullivan. It takes place in a Winnipeg set in the middle of an ocean. There, a woman falls in love with a man with a lovely singing voice, while being pursued by this muscular vulgarian who works on the dikes that protect the city. Both men are eventually killed, but her lover is revived with the heart of a vulgarian. Soon her lover begins to take on some of the characteristics of the man she hates.’ 7 DVD commentary. 8 La Roue has recently become widely available again in a 270-minute restoration, the longest version since the premiere. 9 Odilon Redon DVD commentary. He adds: ‘I’ve decided I like that.’ 10 Kino Delirium, 103. There are several Redon prints depicting little fantasy

Notes to pages 364–73

11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

443

creatures consisting of large humanoid heads and body-length swimming tails in subaquatic settings. No. 2 of Hommage à Goya. Though ‘BERENICE’ is played by Brandy Bayes. Kino Delirium, 124. Maddin’s satisfaction with the film is somewhat in contrast with his mixed reaction to the cut-down Odilon Redon, of which he says: ‘For the first time since I started making movies, I had no idea what I’d made. I must have watched it seven times and still didn’t know what I had or whether I liked it or not.’ A full list may be found at http://www.tiffg.ca/content/aboutus/ postmillenium.aspx. Pevere cited in Vatnsdal, 123. Archangel had also won the same National Society of Film Critics award in 1992. In addition, Heart of the World won a Genie Award and prizes from festivals in San Francisco, Miami, Aspen, and Brussels. Personal interview, August 2005. Ibid. In the film script published as an Appendix to Kino Delirium, Maddin says that this character ‘resembles Mr Monopoly in the Parker Bros. game’ – a description that is realized in the film, but with the salutary addition of a sweating physical rapaciousness that the actor, Greg Klimkiw, seems to be really happy to provide. Klimkiw, of course, is Maddin’s old producer (Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful), and had been equally happy to perform as a monstrous Hun in Archangel. Personal interview, August 2005. Maddin says: ‘What I’m told is that around 1968 he composed this piece called “Time (comma) Forward (exclamation mark)” for the evening news in Moscow, or a newsmagazine, or a spy show. I’ve heard varying things.’ The piece was suggested to Maddin by a Russian named Vladimir Gabyshev, whom he’d been put in touch with by Rhombus producer Larry Weinstein. Personal interview, August 2005. Personal interview, August 2008. There exists another, very good, music video of the song, also commissioned by Sparklehorse, that consists largely of old photographs heavily scarred by film scratching. The only music credit that appears on the film is to ‘BBC Music © 2002,’ and perhaps dates to a BBC television presentation of the opera from around this time, although the existing DVD of the opera (Digital Classics 2005) does not include Anderson. The peformance in Maddin’s film certainly sounds very close to the one on the EMI CD.

444

Notes to pages 373–83

24 Maddin says he just gave the raw footage over to dawson, presented him with his full director’s fee, and offered him a director credit, which he obviously declined. Personal interview, August 2008. 25 Personal interview, August 2005. 26 A personal interview in August 2008 provided these and most of the other details recounted here about Sissy Boy Slap Party. 27 This particular crass jape dates, says Maddin, to a ‘Little Moron’ joke he heard as a child. ‘Q: Why did the Little Moron get buried in the cemetery with his rear end sticking into the air? A: So visitors could park their bikes.’ 28 When I interviewed Maddin in August 2005, we had the following exchange: wb: This movie sets the bar at an all-time height for crap in the projector. These giant swirls of – gm: The hairy gate. I began to think of Harry Gate as a great porn pseudonym. 29 Rita Zekas, in ‘A Special Brand of Genius: Guy Maddin’s silent film gets musical treatment’ (Toronto Star, 7 Sept. 2006), reports: ‘Maddin is hysterically funny, according to Negin. “When we did Sissy Boy Slap Party, I was on the floor,” he chuckles. “I was wearing low-cut sailor pants and the boys were wearing diapers.”’ 30 Talking about the Saddest Music shoot, Maddin told me in August 2005: ‘There’s this scene that was cut out of the movie of these little orphans (I reused some of that footage in A Trip to the Orphanage, not much), there’s this orphanage scene where the little kids are just wearing these little shoes with toes sticking out of them, who were just walking on concrete at –45.’ 31 Personal interview, August 2005. 32 A personal interview of August 2008 is the source for the production information about this film. 33 In August 2008, Maddin told me: ‘I threw myself into it. I really tried to make it good. I was welcoming the opportunity to just be forced to shoot a contemporary Canadian subject, you know, Winnipeg in 1995. And I tried my best. But I came up with something that’s a typically bad Canadian television show.’ 34 When I spoke to him about this production in August 2008, Maddin gave elaborate, blackly comic descriptions of people who got paid in advance and then skived off, disappointments from the art department, volunteers he had to fire, and problems caused by the constantly crowing rooster who disturbed all the other arts organizations in the Winnipeg Film Group’s building (‘everybody hates Guy Maddin and his rooster’), and then all of Caelum Vatnsdal’s neighbours, for months. Pre-production lasted a month,

Notes to pages 384–401

35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

445

shooting five days – ‘exactly the same as Cowards Bend the Knee.’ Toles’ script now rests, with many other Maddin materials, in the library of the Toronto International Film Festival. Personal interview, August 2008. A related summary of The Cock Crew appears in Kino Delirium, 167. Personal interview, August 2008. Again there is a related but somewhat different summary in Kino Delirium, 167. These are: Wieniawksi’s Second Violin Concerto, opening movement, for Rooster Workbook; Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, second movement, for Chimney Workbook; and Jeanne Gerville-Réache singing an aria from Bernardin SaintPierre’s opera Paul et Virginie in an ancient acoustic recording for Zookeeper Workbook. Personal interview, August 2005. As it happens and for what it is worth, I had been looking at Foolish Wives again as part of my preparation for this interview, and I made exactly the same association quite independently. Personal interview, July 2006. See also Michael Posner, ‘Isabella Channels the Past.’ Personal interview, August 2008. Personal interview, November 2008. In fact the original footage was 35mm, but that nitrate material was later transferred to 16mm safety stock. Kasulke flew up to Winnipeg and worked for nothing, Maddin told me. Personal interview, November 2008. Ibid.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Addiego, Walter. ‘Guy Maddin’s “My Winnipeg” Takes Him Home.’ San Francisco Chronicle, 20 July 2008, N24. Anderson, John. ‘Old Stomping Grounds, Hallucinated [on My Winnipeg].’ New York Times, 8 June 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/ movies/08ande.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=guy%20maddin&st=cse. – ‘“Goodbye Iris,” Horse Brushes, and Other Disquietudes: Guy Maddin.’ Film Comment 34/2 (1998): 63–7. Andrews, Nigel. ‘Pastiche Reaches New Peaks’ [review of Careful]. Financial Times, 30 Sept. 1993, 17. Ansen, David. ‘“Saddest Music” Is a Sweet Movie.’ Newsweek, 27 May 2004. http://www.msnbc.com/id/5077186/site/newsweek. Ashbery, John. Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Atkinson, Michael. ‘The Saddest Music in the World.’ Film Comment 40/2 (2004): 70. Austin-Smith, Brenda. ‘Strange Frontiers: Twenty Years of Manitoba Feature Film,’ in Loiselle and McSorley, eds., Self Portraits, 237–69. Barefoot, Guy. ‘East Lynne to Gas Light: Hollywood, Melodrama and TwentiethCentury Notions of the Victorian.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 94–105. Beard, William. Conversations with Guy Maddin. Edmonton: Metro Cinema 2007. Also available online at http://www.metrocinema.org/publications/. – ‘Maddin and Melodrama.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 14/2 (2005): 2–17. Beard, William, and Jerry White, eds. North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. Bergman, Brian. ‘Maddin Madness.’ Maclean’s 115/51 (2002), 50–1. Bradley, John. Allied Intervention in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

448

Bibliography

Bradshaw, Peter. ‘My Winnipeg’ [review]. Guardian, 4 July 2008. http://www .guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/jul/04/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic3. – ‘Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.’ Guardian, 12 Dec. 2003. http://www .guardian.co.uk/0,3858,4816765-110760,00.html. Bratton, Jacky. ‘The Contending Discourses of Melodrama.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 38–49. Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1992. Brooke, Michael. ‘Cheap Wigs and Arsenic’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. Sight and Sound 14/5 (2004): 32–4. – ‘The Saddest Music in the World’ [review]. Sight and Sound 14/5 (2004): 67–8. Brooks, Peter. ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 11–24. – The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Church, David. ‘Brief Notes on Canadian Identity in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World.’ Offscreen 10/1 (2006). http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/ essays/saddest_music1/. – ‘Dissecting the Branded Brain: An Interview with Guy Maddin.’ Offscreen 10/1 (2006). http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/essays/branded_brain/. Cole, Stephen. ‘Catching the Eye of the Apple.’ Globe and Mail, 24 Aug. 1993, C1. Conlogue, Ray. ‘What Can a filmmaker Do in a Five-Minute Festival Tribute?’ Globe and Mail, 17 Sept. 2000, R7. Csáth, Géza. Opium and Other Stories. [1908–12]. Trans. Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers. London and New York: Penguin, 1983. Curti, Roberto. ‘Transplant, Consumption, Death, or: Disease, Pathology, and Decay in Guy Maddin’s Cinema.’ Offscreen 30 Sept. (2004). http://www .horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/maddin_curti.html. Curtiss, Thomas Quinn. Von Stroheim. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Dargis, Manohla. ‘Marks Mysterious and Foundlings Sad: O, Tangled Web!’ [review of Brand Upon the Brain! live performance]. New York Times, 9 May 2007. http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/ movies/09brai.html. – ‘Seeing the Shadow of the Past’ [interview with Maddin about The Saddest Music in the World]. Los Angeles Times, 16 May 2004, E14. – ‘The Past Flickers to Life Once Again’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Los Angeles Times, 7 May 2004, E6. Deussing, Ryan. ‘Maddin Voyage’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Village Voice, 10 Sept. 1996, 76. Dunfield, Allison. ‘Aiming for the Tragically Hip’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. Globe and Mail, 26 March 2003, R1.

Bibliography

449

Ebert, Roger. ‘Old-Time Feel Makes for Sweet “Sadness.”’ Chicago Sun-Times, 14 May 2004, 41. – ‘“Virgin” Territory; Erotic ballet “Dracula” Gets the Glorious Silent Film Treatment.’ Chicago Sun-Times, 3 July 2003, 25. Edmonds, Scott. ‘Maddin Shifts Gears for TV Drama’ [interview with Maddin about The Hands of Ida]. Globe and Mail, 5 July 1995, N10. Enright, Robert. ‘Home Movie: Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World.’ Border Crossings 23/2 (2004): 16–17. – ‘Isabella Rossellini: Close to the Maddin Crowd’ [interview]. Border Crossings 22/2 (2003), 44–52. – ‘Adventures in Maddinland’ [on the Saddest Music in the World shoot]. Modern Painters 16/3 (2003): 86–9. – ‘Telling the Dancer from the Dancing Film: Set Pieces from Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary’ [interview with Guy Maddin and Mark Godden]. Border Crossings 20/4 (2001): 54–65. – ‘5 1/2 Minutes’ [on The Heart of the World]. Border Crossings 20/2 (2001): 16–17. – ‘Chicken Soup for the Stone Baby: Interrogations towards an Elusive Autobiography.’ Interview with Maddin, in Maddin, Cowards Bend the Knee, 129–51. Erickson, Steve. ‘Guy Maddin on My Winnipeg.’ Studiodaily, 12 June 2008. http://studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/9577.html. Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–30. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Foss, Krista. ‘A Dance of the Undead.’ Globe and Mail, 19 Sept. 2001, R3. Foundas, Scott. ‘Brand Upon the Brain!’ [review]. Variety, 27 Sept. 2006. http:www.variety.com/story.asp?1=story&r=VE1117931712&c=31. French, Philip. ‘Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.’ Observer, 14 Dec. 2003. http://guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_review/ 0,,1106526,00.html. Fuller, Graham. ‘Shots in the Dark’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Interview 34/4 (2004): 70. Garrett, Daniel. ‘The Saddest Music in the World.’ Offscreen, 30 Sept. (2004). http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/saddest_music.html. Gefter, Philip. ‘The Essence of the Dust Bowl, at 40 Below’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. New York Times, 25 April 2004, 22. Gerould, Daniel. ‘Melodrama and Revolution.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 185–98. Gerstel, Judy. ‘A Gimli State of Mind’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Toronto Star, 30 Aug. 1997, H1.

450

Bibliography

Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987. Gillmor, Don. ‘Start Making Sense’ [on the Careful shoot]. Saturday Night 107/7 (1992): 34+. Goddard, Peter. ‘If Guy Maddin Were a Different Kind of Film Maker ...’ [on Archangel]. Toronto Star, 26 Jan. 1991, SA2. Gordon, Mel. The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror. New York: Amok, 1988. Green, Henry. Back, a Novel. London: Hogarth Press, 1946. Grimsted, David. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Groen, Rick. ‘Divine Dance of the Undead’ [review of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary]. Globe and Mail, 6 June 2003, R6. – ‘Stealing with Panache’ [review of Careful]. Globe and Mail, 10 Oct. 1992, C7. Gunning, Tom. ‘The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 50–63. Hamsun, Knut. [1894]. Pan. Trans. Sverre Lynstad. London and New York: Penguin, 1998. – Mysteries. [1892]. Trans. Gerry Bothmer. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1971. Harris, Christopher. ‘Director More Normal than His Celluloid World’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Globe and Mail, 26 Sept. 1997, E3. – ‘Maddin and His Careful Touch’ [on Careful]. Globe and Mail, 9 Oct. 1992, D3. – ‘Of Mustard Gas and Fluffy Rabbits’ [on Archangel]. Globe and Mail, 26 Jan. 1991, C3. Harris, Paul. ‘Careful, Heavy Work in Movie Mountains.’ The Age, 6 Jan. 1995, 14. Hays, Michael, and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds. Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996. Hillis, Aaron. ‘Maddin Bowl’ [review of Brand Upon the Brain! live performance]. Village Voice, 8 May 2007. http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-05-01/ film/maddin-bowl. Hinson, Hal. ‘“Careful”: Teetering on the Edge.’ Washington Post, 19 Nov. 1993, D06. Hoberman, J. ‘Werner Herzog and Guy Maddin Go into Deep Freeze’ [review of Encounters at the End of the World and My Winnipeg]. Village Voice, 10 June 2008. http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-06-10/film/werner-herzog-and-guy -maddin-go-into-deep-freeze/. – ‘Hardcore Hallucinations: An Experimental Peepshow’ [Cowards Bend the Knee DVD review]. The Village Voice, 30 September 2005. http://www .villagevoice.com/screens/0538, dvd3, 68395,28.html.

Bibliography

451

– ‘Kino Kink’ [review of Cowards Bend the Knee]. Village Voice, 3 Aug. 2004. http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-08-03/film/kino-kink/. – ‘The Sorrow and the Ditty’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Village Voice, 20 April 2004. http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/film/ the-sorrow-and-the-ditty/. – ‘Use Your Illusions’ [review of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary]. Village Voice, 14–20 May 2003. http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0320,hoberman ,44013,20.html. – ‘Bloc Busters’ [review of The Heart of the World]. Village Voice, 21 Feb. 2001. http://www.villagevoice.com/film10108,hoberman,2240320.html. Hoffmann, E.T.A. Tales of Hoffmann. [1815–19]. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale et al. London and New York: Penguin, 1982. Holden, Stephen. ‘Eerie, Flickering Images of a Vulnerable Dracula. New York Times, 14 May 2003, 3. – ‘Love Is Blind and Memory Is Bluffed’ [review of Archangel]. New York Times, 19 July 1991, E3. – ‘“Gimli Hospital,” Mock Saga of Iceland’ [review]. New York Times, 28 July 1989. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res =950DE2DD1639F93BA15754C0A96F948260. Homer, Michael W. ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures in Winnipeg,’ Manitoba History No. 25 (Spring 1993). http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/25/ doyleinwinnipeg.shtml Hooper, Barrett. ‘After the Title, the Movie Just Happened’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. National Post, 11 Sept. 2003, AL3. Horton, Robert. ‘New Bridges’ [report on the 30th New York Film Festival, including Careful]. Film Comment 28/6 (1992): 68–70. Howe, Desson. ‘“Careful” Adrift in Alpine Oddity’ [review]. Washington Post, 19 Nov. 1993, N50. Howell, Peter. ‘Tears, Beers, Woe and Winnipeg’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Toronto Star, 30 April 2004, D02. Hunter, Stephen. ‘“The Saddest Music” Hits the Right Notes.’ Washington Post, 14 May 2004, C05. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. À Rebours. [1884]. Trans. as Life Down Below by Robert Baldick. London and New York: Penguin, 1959. – À rebours. [1884]. Trans. as Against the Grain (unnamed translator). New York: Three Sirens, 1931 (rep. New York: Dover, 1969). Ide, Wendy. ‘Such Sweet Sorrow’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. London Times, 8 May 2004, Weekend Review, 22. Jackson, Robert. At War with the Bolsheviks: The Allied Intervention into Russia, 1917–1920. London: Tom Stacey, 1972.

452

Bibliography

Joyard, Olivier. ‘La vie des morts’ [reviews of Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel]. Cahiers du cinéma No. 511 (March 1997): 76–7. King, Randall. ‘Director Maddin a Wild and Crazy Guy’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. Winnipeg Free Press, 6 March 2004, C1. – ‘Maddin-dawson Split Plays Like a Film Tragedy.’ Winnipeg Free Press, 19 Sept. 2003, D4. – ‘Bizarre Business as Usual: Legend Inspired Maddin to Give Rossellini Odd Disability in Film’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. Winnipeg Free Press, 17 March 2003, A3. – ‘L-l-lights! C-c-camera! Ac-ction! Maddin Movie Shoot Frozen Fun’ [on The Saddest Music in the World, with reaction from Mark McKinney]. Winnipeg Free Press, 26 Feb. 2003, D6. Klawans, Stuart. ‘Love and Theft’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Nation, 10 May (2004): 36–7. – ‘Magnificent Obsessions’ [review of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary]. Nation 276/21 (2003): 34–5. Knight, Chris. ‘To Winnipeg, for an Ale and a Song’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. National Post, 30 April 2004, PM2. Koszarski, Richard. The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Lacy, Liam. ‘The Best Thirties Musical of 2004’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Globe and Mail, 30 April 2004, R1. – ‘Twilight Hovers in Another Dimension’ [preview of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Globe and Mail, 26 Sept. 1997, E3. – ‘Something Wild inWinnipeg.’ Globe and Mail, 26 March 1991, C1. Laforgue, Jules. Moral Tales. [1887]. Trans. William Jay Smith. New York: New Directions, 1985. Lally, Kevin. ‘Wizard of Winnipeg.’ Film Journal International 107/5 (2004). Canadian Reference Centre 1529884. Landy, Marcia, ed. Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Lane, Anthony. ‘Looney Tunes’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. New Yorker, 10 May 10, 2004. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/ 05/10/040510crci_cinema. Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse). Maldoror. [1869]. Trans. Alexis Lykiard. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994. Lim, Dennis. ‘Out of the Past.’ Booklet essay for Criterion DVD issue of Brand Upon the Brain! 2008. – ‘Newfangled Silent Movie with a Bit of Old Barnum’ New York Times, 7 May 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/movies/ 07madd.html?scp=2&sq=brand%20upon%20the%20brain&st=cse.

Bibliography

453

– ‘A Guy Thing: The Maddest Interview in the World.’ Village Voice, 10–16 Sept. 2006. http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0337,lim3,46911,20.html. Loiselle, André, and Tom McSorley, eds. Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada since Telefilm. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2006. Losier, Marie, and Richard Porton. ‘The Pleasures of Melancholy: An Interview with Guy Maddin.’ Cineaste Summer (2004): 18–25. Louÿs, Pierre. The Twilight of the Nymphs. [1925]. Trans. Phillis Duveen. London: Fortune Press, 1928. MacInnis, Craig. ‘It Could only Come from Winnipeg’ [on Archangel]. Toronto Star, 25 Jan. 2001, D14. – ‘Off-beat Winnipegger in Danger of Becoming Famous’ [on Careful]. Toronto Star, 6 Oct. 1992, C3. MacKinnon, Kenneth. Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Macnab, Geoffrey. ‘A Visionary on Ice’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Independent, 27 March 1998, 9. Maddin, Guy. ‘I Cast Ann Savage as My Mother.’ Guardian, 4 July 2008. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/jul/04/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic. – ‘The Curious Incident of My Hand in the Dog’ [on The Saddest Music in the World and Isabella Rossellini]. Guardian, 29 April 2004. http://www .guardian.co.uk/film/2004/apr/29/1. – Cowards Bend the Knee. Ed. Philip Monk, with an interview by Robert Enright. Toronto: Power Plant, 2003. – From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings. Toronto: Coach House, 2003. – [Production diary for The Saddest Music in the World published in five parts]. Village Voice: Part One, ‘Sad Songs Say So Much,’ 7–13 May 2003, http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0319,maddin,43873.html; Part Two, ‘Twilight of the Ice Nymphs,’ 3–9 March 2004, http://www.villagevoice .com/film/0409,maddin,52489,20.html; Part Three, ‘Fever Dreams and Funeral Scenes,’ 22 March 2004, http://www.villagevoice.com/ film/0412,maddin,52025,20.html; Part Four,‘Wait Until Dark,’ 5 April 2005, (http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0414,maddin,52414,20.html); Part Five, ‘The Saddest Diary in the World,’ 26 April 2005, http://www.villagevoice .com/film/0417,maddin,52995,20.html. – ‘Very Lush and Full of Ostriches.’ Village Voice, 31 July 2001. http://www .villagevoice.com/2001-07-31/film/very-lush-and-full-of-ostriches Matwychuk, Paul. ‘The Wonderful, Wonderful World of Winnipeg.’ See Magazine, 14 Aug. 2008, 25. Mead, Julia C. ‘Rossellini, Surrealism and a Polite Smile’ [interview with Isabella Rossellini on The Saddest Music in the World]. New York Times, 6 June 2004, 14.

454

Bibliography

Meisel, Martin. ‘Scattered Chiaroscuro: Melodrama as a Matter of Seeing.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 65–81. Melnyk, George. ‘I’m Shockingly Unchanged since I Picked Up a Camera’ [interview with Maddin]. In Melnyk, ed. The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2008, 39–54. Melville, Herman. The Complete Shorter Fiction. London: Everyman’s Library, 1997. – Moby-Dick. London: Penguin, 1972 [1851]. – Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. New York: Signet, 1964 [1852]. – Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. The Kraken Edition, ed. Hershel Parker [reconstruction of putative ‘original version’]. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Mérimée, Prosper. ‘The Venus of Ille.’ [1837]. in The Venus of Ille and Other Stories. Trans. Myndart Verelast. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Meyer, Andrea. ‘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. Milroy, Sarah. ‘Peeping Guy’ [review of Cowards Bend the Knee Power Plant installation]. Globe and Mail, 29 March 2003, R14. Monk, Clare. ‘Careful’ [review]. Sight and Sound 3/10 (1993): 41–2. Morice, Jacques. ‘Dracula: hybride et vénéneux.’ Beaux arts no. 236 (Jan. 2004): 16. Morris, Gary. ‘Lon Chaney Sr, Super-Masochist.’ Bright Lights Film Journal 15 (Nov. 1995). http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/15/chaney.html. Morris, Wesley. ‘Beauty of Comic Melodrama Is Found in “Saddest Music.”’ Boston Globe, 7 May 2004, D4. – ‘Lust and Lost Limbs’ [review of Cowards Bend the Knee]. Boston Globe, 5 May 2004, D6. Nestruck, J. Kelly. ‘The Saddest Music Brings a Smile to His Face.’ National Post, 30 April 2004, PM1. Neville, Brian, and Johanne Villeneuve, eds. Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory. New York: SUNY Press, 2002. Newman, Kim. ‘The Twilight of the Ice Nymphs’ [review]. Sight and Sound 8/5 (1998): 58. Niederauer, David J. Pierre Louÿs: His Life and Art. Ottawa: Canadian Federation of the Humanities, 1981. O’Hehir, Andrew. ‘Maddin and Herzog: Brothers of the Ice’ [review of My Winnipeg and Encounters at the Edge of the World]. Salon, 19 June 2008. http://www .salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/06/19/winnipeg/index.html. O’Kasick, Jeremy. ‘Canadian Cult Hero Guy Maddin: “I Have Plenty of Sadness

Bibliography

455

in Reserve”’ [interview]. IndieWIRE, 17 Feb. 2004. http://www.indiewire .com/people/people_04217maddin.html. Onstad, Katrina. ‘He Shoots, He Scores’ [review of Cowards Bend the Knee Power Plant installation]. National Post, 27 March 2003, AL5. Oppenheimer, Jean. ‘Timeless Films of Modern Vintage.’ American Cinematographer 85/8 (2004): 20–6. Ostria, Vincent. ‘Les contes de Guy Maddin.’ Cahiers du cinéma no. 511 (March 1997): 16–17. – ‘Attention, Fragile’ [review of Careful]. Cahiers du cinéma no. 500 (March 1996): 20–1. O’Sullivan, Charlotte. ‘Twilight of the Ice Nymphs’ [review]. Observer, 12 April 1998, 7. Oswald, Brad. ‘Maddin Shines Bright Light on Love’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Winnipeg Free Press, 23 July 1996, D1. – ‘Guy and Nymphs’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Winnipeg Free Press, 16 July 1996, D1. Peranson, Mark. ‘The Mouthwash of the Past.’ Believer, Aug. 2003, 39–52. Perreaux, Les. ‘Far from the Maddin Crowd.’ National Post, 11 Sept. 2001, B01. Persons, Dan. ‘Guy Maddin Makes My Winnipeg Everyone’s Winnipeg’ [interview with Maddin]. Cinefantastique, 11 June 2008. http:// cinefantastiqueonline.com/2008/06/11/interview-guy-maddin-makes-my -winnipeg-everyones-winnipeg/ Pevere, Geoff. ‘Blood, Sweat and Fears; Guy Maddin Injects Cinematic Life into an Old Bloodsucker.’ Toronto Star, 30 May 2003, D01. – ‘Bend at the Knee and Think about the Pain Popular Cinema Inflicts’ [review of Cowards Bend the Knee]. Toronto Star, 11 April 2003, B02. Pike, David. ‘Thoroughly Modern Maddin.’ CineAction 65 (2004): 6–16. – ‘Canadian Cinema in the Age of Globalization.’ CineAction 57 (March 2002): 2–10. Porton, Richard. ‘Cowards Bend the Knee’ [review]. Film Journal International 107/9 (2004): 57–8. Posner, Michael. ‘Isabella Channels the Past.’ Globe and Mail, 18 June 2005, R5. Quandt, James. ‘Purple Majesty’ [interview with Maddin]. Artforum, Summer (2003). http://artforum.com/inprint/id=4889. Romney, Jonathan. ‘He’s Not Unhappy, Just Obsessed’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Independent on Sunday, 9 May 2004, 18. – ‘Profile – Guy Maddin.’ Guardian, 3 April 1998, 11. Rooney, David. ‘The Saddest Music in the World.’ Variety, 11 Sept. 2003, 12. Rosborough, Linda. ‘Mainstream Maddin’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Winnipeg Free Press, 5 Feb. 1998, D1.

456

Bibliography

– ‘Film Star Mad’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs]. Winnipeg Free Press, 22 Aug. 1997, C9. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. ‘My Dad Is 100 Years Old,’ Chicago Reader, June 2006. http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/moviereviews/060616/. Rozemeyer, Karl. ‘Guy Maddin’s Docu-Fantasia: “My Winnipeg.”’ Premiere Magazine. (2008). http://www.premiere.com/features/4616/guy-maddins -docu-fantastia-my-winnipeg.html. Rubin, Mike. ‘“Dracula” Takes Dancing Lessons.’ New York Times, 18 May 2003, Arts, 23. Ruskin, John. Praeterita. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [1885–89]. Sachs, Lloyd. ‘Surreal “Careful” Cuts Like a Knife’ [review]. Chicago Sun-Times, 14 Jan. 1994, 36. – ‘Surreal “Archangel” Awaits Its Cult Following’ [review]. Chicago Sun-Times, 1 March 1991, 44. Saunders, Doug. ‘Mystery Man Stars in Latest Maddin Film’ [on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs], Globe and Mail, 20 Aug. 1997, C1. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981. Schulz, Bruno. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. [1937]. Trans. Celina Wieniewska. London and New York: Penguin, 1978. – The Street of Crocodiles. [1934]. Trans. Celina Wieniewska. London and New York: Penguin, 1977. Scott, A.O. ‘Permafrost Makes the Heart Grow Stranger in a Haunted Snow Globe’ [review of My Winnipeg]. New York Times, 13 June 2008. http:// movies.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/movies/13winn.html?scp=14&sq =guy%20maddin&st=cse. – ‘New Videos Resonate Darkly’ [review of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary]. New York Times, 19 July 2002, E1. Semley, John. ‘From Big Snow to Big Sadness: The Repatriation of Canadian Cultural Identity in the Films of Guy Maddin.’ CineAction 73–4 (2008): 32–7. Shepherd, Simon. ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation.’ In Bratton, Cook, and Gledhill, Melodrama, 25–37. Shaviro, Steven. ‘My Winnipeg’ weblog entry 15 July 2008. http://www.shaviro .com/Blog/?p=650. – ‘Brand Upon the Brain!’ weblog entry 27 July 2007. http://www.shaviro .com/Blog/?p=589. – ‘Guy Maddin’ weblog entry 24 May 2004. http://www.shaviro.com/ Blog/?m=200405. – ‘Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin.’ In Beard and White, North of Everything, 216–21. Shone, Tom. ‘Twilight of the Ice Nymphs’ [review]. Sunday Times, 12 April 1998.

Bibliography

457

Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Sitney, P. Adams. The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: NYU Press, 1978. Smith, Graeme. ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Maddin world.’ Globe and Mail, 17 April 2004, R1. Smith, James L. Melodrama. London: Methuen, 1973. Sotinel, Thomas. ‘Les sombres fantasmes d’un hockeyeur’ [review of Cowards Bend the Knee]. Le Monde, 29 Dec. 2004, 19. – ‘Quand le désir des femmes fait apparaître le prince de la nuit’ [review of Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary]. Le Monde, 31 Dec. 2003, 21. – ‘Guy Maddin, réalisateur “nostalgique du futur.”’ Le Monde, 31 Dec. 2003, 21. Sterritt, David. ‘Director Makes Weird, Wonderful’ [review of The Saddest Music in the World]. Christian Science Monitor, 30 April 2004, 16. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003 [1897]. Straw, Will. ‘Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful.’ In Walz, Canada’s Best Features, 305–20. Sweitzer, Charlie. ‘Guy Maddin: Eclectic Filmmakers Weds Ballet and Dracula.’ Independent, June 2003, 15–16. Swettenham, John. Allied Intervention in Russia, 1918–1919, And the Part Played by Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967. Thabourey, Vincent. ‘Dracula, pages tirées du journal d’une vierge’ [review]. Positif no. 515 (Jan. 2004): 47. Thomas, Kevin. ‘“Careful’ a Carefree Pastiche of Early Cinema’ [review]. Los Angeles Times, 5 Nov. 1993, F12. Thomson, Desson. ‘“Saddest Music”: Playing an Offbeat Tune.’ Washington Post, 14 May 2004, H04. Toles, George. A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Totaro, Donato. ‘Guy Maddin: My Dad Is 100 Years Old.’ Offscreen 10/1 (2006). http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/essays/100_years_old/. – ‘Guy Maddin: Tales from a Maverick’s Diary.’ Offscreen 30 Sept. (2004). http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/maddin_intro.html. Valens, Gregory. ‘Et les lâches s’agenouillent’ [Cowards Bend the Knee]. Positif no. 528 (Feb. 2005): 49–50. Varga, Darrell. ‘Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8/2 (1999): 56–70. Vatnsdal, Caelum. Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2000. Walker, Morley. ‘Maddin Set to Break into Movie Mainstream; Screenwriter

458

Bibliography

Toles “Optimistic” about New Film’ [on The Saddest Music in the World]. Winnipeg Free Press, 20 Aug. 2003, D3. Walser, Robert. Masquerade and Other Stories. [1896–1933]. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. London: Quartet Books, 1993. – Selected Stories. [1907–29]. Trans. Christopher Middleton. New York: Vintage, 1983. – Jakob von Gunten. [1908]. Trans. Christopher Middleton. New York: New York Review of Books, 1969. Walz, Gene, ed. Canada’s Best Features: Critical Essays on 15 Canadian Films. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. The War Illustrated. London: Amalgamated Press, 1914–1919. 9 vols. Wees, William C. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1994. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1970. Zekas, Rita. ‘A Special Brand of Genius: Guy Maddin’s Silent Film Gets Musical Treatment.’ Toronto Star, 7 Sept., 2006, D3.

Index

32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (François Girard 1993), 232 42nd Street (Edward Sutherland 1933), 21, 23, 404n7 97 Per Cent True (video documentary 2008), 312, 414n8, 433n2, 435nn11, 12, 16, 17, 436n29, 437nn30–4 Adebimpe, Tunde, 272 Ademi, Nihad, 400 Adès, Thomas, 372 L’Âge d’or (Luis Buñuel 1930), 7, 36, 39, 328, 331 Allen, Woody, 318, 425n23 Alliance Pictures, 127, 153, 155, 160 Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein 1938), 69 Anderson, Laurie, 272, 435n13 Anderson, Valdine, 372, 373, 443n23 Andriessen, Louis, 399 Angel Face (Otto Preminger 1952), 211 Anger, Kenneth, 8, 375 Animal House (John Landis 1978), 46, 227 À Propos de Nice (Jean Vigo 1930), 345

The Arabian Nights, 54 Arnason, Brock, 405n11 Ashbery, John, 271, 272, 359, 434n6, 435n13 Atala and René (François-René de Chateaubriand 1802), 133 Austin-Smith, Brenda, 127 Axelrod, Deborah, 366 Ayres, Richard, 399 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 196 Back (Henry Green 1946), 61, 63, 69, 73 Bais, Leslie, 370 Barnum, P.T., 273, 435nn10, 14, 436n27 Barrymore, Lionel, 208 Baudelaire, Charles, 363 Baum, Frank, 241, 429n53 Beardsley, Aubrey, 134 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 216, 387, 427n42 Bell, Mike, 388, 393, 394 Belle de jour (Luis Buñuel 1967), 46 Bergman, Ingrid, ix, 138, 389, 391–3 Berkeley, Busby, 20, 407n6

460

Index

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray 1955), 101, 183, 415n20 Birtwistle, Tara, 175–6, 186, 198, 226 Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock 1929), 277 Blind Husbands (Erich von Stroheim 1919), 120 Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg 1932), 74, 345 The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg 1930), 74, 119 Boris Godunov (opera, Modest Mussorgsky 1872), 70, 84, 366, 399 Brahms, Johannes, 216, 427n42 Brakhage, Stan, 8, 39 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola 1992), 168 Brecht, Bertholt, 273 British Broadcasting Corporation, 363, 442n1, 443n23 Brooks, Peter, 184, 273, 422n17 Brown, Norman O., 328 Brown, Sullivan, 273, 283, 307 Browning, Tod, 169, 208, 426n36 Buñuel, Luis, 7, 36, 39, 46, 119, 328, 344, 397, 408n17, 409n17, 435n16 Burns, Michael, 313, 437n2 Burroughs, Jackie, 103 Burton, Tim, 363 Bussières, Pascale, 128–9, 150–2, 419n24 Byron, George Gordon, 94, 99, 113–5, 123 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene 1919), 256, 288 Cade, Brendan, 323 Cade, Wesley, 323 Cagney, James, 235, 251 Campion, James, 363

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 163–4, 313, 359 Carlyle, Thomas, 122 Carnival of the Animals (Camille SaintSaëns), 381 Chaney, Lon, 8, 207, 208, 237, 244, 426n36 Chaplin, Charlie, 389, 391–2 Chaplin, Geraldine, 272 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 133 The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille 1915), 183 Chekhov, Anton, 7 The Child Without Qualities (Guy Maddin), 42, 194–7, 200, 415n14, 423n12, 424n22, 429n60 Chopin, Frédéric, 216, 389, 427n42 Cinephile, 52, 88, 413n3 Clair, René, 118 Clement, René, 118, 416n26 ‘Cock-a-Doodle Doo’ (Herman Melville 1853), 382 Cocteau, Jean, 39, 262 Cohen, Ari, 62 Coppola, Francis Ford, 168–9 Cornell, Joseph, 8 Corzatte, Clayton, 279 Corzatte, Susan, 279 Cowie, Victor, 56, 66, 91, 118, 153, 197, 387, 408n12, 425n26 Cox, Paul, 88, 92, 118, 150, 154 Crawford, Joan, 118 Cregar, Laird, 240 Criterion Collection, xiii, 272, 395, 397, 423n9, 428n50, 433n2 Cronenberg, David, 266, 367 Csáth, Geza, 7, 408n14 Cugat, Xavier, 393 Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry David 2000), 253

Index Curle, Howard, 88 Dali, Salvador, 7, 36, 39 ‘Dance of the Furies’ (Christoph Willibald von Gluck), 216, 427n42 Daphnis et Chloë (Maurice Ravel), 377 dawson, deco,165, 172, 178, 222, 269, 367, 368, 372, 373, 421n12, 444n24 Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer 1943), 274 Decasia (Bill Morrison 2002), 9 Delacroix, Eugène, 158 Delpeut, Peter, 9 Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer 1946), 322, 329, 427n38 The Devil Doll (Tod Browning 1936), 208 The Devil is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg 1935), 74, 409n17 Dietrich, Marlene, 71, 74–5, 169, 305, 411n31 Dionisio, Melissa, 198, 388 Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg 1931), 74 Disney, 178, 253 Dobrowolska, Gosia, 88, 92, 118, 150, 154 The Documentary Channel, 313–4, 359, 389, 437n2 Dorge, Claude, 245 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 7, 30 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 331, 439n16, n18 Dracula (Bram Stoker 1897), 180–9 Dracula (Tod Browning 1931), 169, 208 The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (Edwin S. Porter 1906), 112 Dresser, Louise, 74

461

Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 7, 18, 27, 154, 177, 196, 274, 279, 426n33 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson 1886), 207 Drumroll Symphony, no. 103 (Joseph Haydn), 38 ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (Wilfred Owen 1917), 411n37 Duvall, Shelley, 128–9, 150–1, 419n24 Dvormák, Antonin, 216 Dziga Vertov, 179–80, 368 East of Borneo (George Melford 1931), 8 Eddy, Nelson, 22–3 Egoyan, Atom, 234, 266, 363, 367 Eisenstein, Sergei, 69, 178–80, 222–3, 368, 380, 421n14, 432n31 Electra (Euripedes), 8, 203, 211 Elektra (Richard Strauss 1909), 203 Enright, Robert, 201, 211, 422n1, n8, 424n18, n21, 425n26, n27, 427n38, 429n59, 430n2, 431n37 Epstein, Jean, 8, 39 Eraserhead (David Lynch 1976), 5, 26, 42, 404n2 ‘Erlkönig’ (Franz Schubert), 216, 427n42 Ernst, Max, viii, 168, 170 Esterhazy, Danishka, 372 Et mon tout est un homme / Choice Cuts (Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac 1966), 426n33 ‘The Eternal Husband’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky 1870), 30 Euripedes, 9, 98, 203, 210, 225 Europe, James Reese, 85 Evans, David Stuart, 198, 388 Extra Large Productions, vii, 20, 27, 51, 404n6

462

Index

Falkenberg, David, 59 Fanck, Arnold, 118, 120 Le Fantôme de la liberté (Luis Buñuel 1974), 46 Faust (F.W. Murnau 1926), 119 Fehr, Darcy, 197, 236, 259, 283, 307, 315, 318, 325–6, 334, 342, 350, 354– 5, 366, 385, 388 Fellini, Federico, 4, 389–92 La Femme et le pantin (Pierre Louÿs 1898), 409n17 Feuillade, Louis, 276 Feydeau, Georges, 209 Fichman, Niv, 234, 374, 430n5, 431n22 The Film Company, viii, ix, 270, 359, 433n3, 434n9, 435n16, 436n20 Findlay, Ritchard, 127 First Love (Ivan Turgenev 1860), 203, 425n26 Flagstad, Kirsten, 23 Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim 1921), 4, 5, 388, 445n38 Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon 1933), 235, 407n6 Fox, David, 235 Frasier (television series 1993), 47 Frajerman, Denis, 377, 381 Frankenstein (James Whale 1931), 285 Freaks (Tod Browning 1932), 208 Freud, Sigmund, 44, 96–7, 105, 206, 300, 328, 352, 426n32, 436n23 Freund, Karl, 207, 426n33 From the Atelier Tovar (Guy Maddin), 14, 194, 228, 406n22, 413n1, 415n14, 418n12, 420n28, 423n12, n17, 436n28 Galeen, Henrik, 37 Gance, Abel, 362, 363, 368, 419n22

Gardner, Katya, 93 Garland, Judy, 256 Gimli Saga (Gimli Women’s Institute 1975), 12, 32, 405n14 Glorifying the American Girl (Millard Webb 1929), 118 Glover, Crispin, 272, 435n13 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 216, 427n42 Godden, Mark, 164–6, 171, 174, 184, 186, 189, 421n13 Goin’ down the Road (Don Shebib 1970), 268 Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy 1933), 404n7 The Gong Show (television series 1976), 192 Gonick, Noam, 157, 438n8 Gorshin, Frank, 128–9, 150–1, 153, 419n21, n24 Gottli, Michael, 29, 59, 118, 153, 365, 394 Grant, Jono, 394 Gravina, Cesare ,387–8 Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter 1903), 111 Greed (Erich von Stroheim 1924), 36, 363, 406n16 Green, Henry, 7, 61, 63 Griffith, D.W., 59, 83, 169, 421n14 Gurdebeke, John, 178, 222, 269, 308, 376, 382, 384, 387–8, 392, 394–7, 428n47, 434n9 Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (Noam Gonick 1997), 157 Hamilton, Thomas Glendenning, 331, 439n16, n17 Hamlet (William Shakespeare), 23, 88, 93, 96, 117, 119

Index Hamsun, Knut, 7, 127, 131–4, 142, 146, 161, 408n11, 410n23 Handford, Ian, 4, 394, 403n6, 442n4 Handler, Daniel, 272 Handling, Piers, 17 The Hands of Orlac / Les Mains d’Orlac (Maurice Renard 1920), 143, 206, 207 The Hands of Orlac (Edmond Gréville 1961), 426n33 Hangover Square (John Brahm 1945), 240, 255 Hard Core Logo (Bruce McDonald 1996), 268 Harvie, John, 17, 51, 77, 403n6, 407n6, 408n9, n10, n11, n14, 409n21, 410n23 Haydn, Joseph, 38 Heck, Angela, 29, 365 Helmolt, Vonnie Von, 163 Der heilige Berg (Arnold Fanck 1926), 119 Hernani (Victor Hugo 1830), 99 Herrmann, Bernard, 118 Herzog, Werner, 342, 355, 441n36 Hewak, Don, 29 Hitchcock, Alfred, 7, 277, 389, 390, 391, 392 Hoberman, J., 3, 4, 192, 367, 407n3, 422n3 Hockney, David, 163 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 7, 133, 336 Hook, Jamie, 272 Houle, Dov, 272, 397 A House Made of Light (George Toles), 409n22, 414n13, 437n35 Hugo, Victor, 9, 227, 429n58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley 1923), 208 Huysmans, Karl-Joris, 133, 134, 161

463

I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy 1932), 118 ‘I and My Chimney’ (Herman Melville 1856), 382, 383 Illustrated London News, 54 I Love a Man in Uniform (David Wellington 1993), 268 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk 1959), 101, 415n20 Inland Empire (David Lynch 2006), 273 International House (Edward Sutherland 1933), 51, 407n6 Iron Foundry (Alexander Mossolov 1927), 371 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 233, 234, 240, 430n9 Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein 1944), 69, 263 I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini 1953), 4, 313, 315 Jackson, Anne, 272 Jakob von Gunten (Robert Walser 1909), 415n22 Le Journal d’un curé de champagne (Robert Bresson 1951), 113 Kafka, Franz, 7, 85, 119 Kamenoi-ostrow (Anton Rubinstein), 74 Karloff, Boris, 22, 30 Kasulke, Ben, 305, 307, 400, 437n32, 445n43 Keaton, Buster, 102, 119 Keeler, Ruby, 21, 23 Kehr, Dave, 127, 407n3 Kern, Jerome, 234–5 The Kid (Charles Chaplin 1921), 391 Kier, Udo, 272 The King of Jazz (John Murray Anderson 1930), 8, 119, 124

464

Index

Kino Delirium (Caelum Vatnsdal), 157, 361, 364, 373, 403n2, 404n6, 413nn2, 5, 419n23, 420nn26, 29, 30, 439n24, 442nn1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 443nn13, 18, 445nn35, 36 Kino Video, 414n7 Kleist, Heinrich von, 9 Klimkiw, Greg, 51, 80, 127, 410n25, 443n18 Krich, Gretchen, 274, 307 Krige, Alice, 128,129, 150, 151, 152, 226, 419n24 Kuchar Brothers, 8, 39 LaForgue, Jules, 133, 418n14 Land without Bread / Las Hurdes (Luis Buñuel 1933), 119, 344 Lang, Fritz, 37, 405n9, 421n11, 426n33 Larson, Kellan, 274, 308 Last Night (Don McKellar 1998), 232 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Ducasse), 7 Lawson, Maya, 274, 293, 307 Leave It to Beaver (television series 1957), 44 The Leech Woman (Edward Dein 1960), 285, 436n22 Lefebvre, Pierre, 367 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls 1948), 255 Life of Brian (Terry Jones 1979), 252, 253 The Life of the Drama (Eric Bentley 1964), 407n25 Lil, Aunt (Lil Eyolfson), 27, 42, 195–6, 200, 203, 211, 318, 404n7, 425n26, 442n3 Lim, Dennis, 223, 271, 302, 423n9, 435n14

Liszt, Franz, 21, 216, 427n42 Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy 1930), 38 The Lives of the Gods (Alberto Savinio 1914–1948), 133 Lloyd, Gwyneth, 332 Lloyd, Harold, 118, 416n25 Lodge, John, 74 Lorre, Peter, 207 Louÿs, Pierre, 133, 134, 158, 159, 161, 409n17 Loviska, Andrew, 273, 308 Lubitsch, Ernst, 225 Lugosi, Bela, 8, 407n6, 421n9 Luhrmann, Baz, 177 Lynch, David, 8, 26, 39, 273, 404n2 Lyrical Nitrate (Peter Delpeut 1991), 9 Macbeth (William Shakespeare), 243 Macbeth (Giuseppe Verdi), 216, 427n42 MacDonald, Jeanette, 225, 431n20 MacLeod, Margaret Ann, 18, 29, 406n23 Maddin, Cameron, 42, 195, 197, 229, 323, 353, 354 Maddin, Chas, 92, 196, 198, 202–3, 208, 210, 214, 218, 291, 293, 324, 337–8, 410n27, 423n17, 424n22, 425nn24, 29, 426n34, 438n14 Maddin, Guy: – Archangel, 6, 8–9, 12–4, 50–89, 91, 100, 102, 104, 106, 112–3, 116–8, 123, 126, 128, 140, 144–8, 150, 153, 156, 158, 161, 164, 172, 177, 179, 186–7, 189, 190–1, 194, 197, 207, 213–9, 233, 241–2, 248–9, 252, 255, 259–61, 263, 266, 269, 282–3, 291, 305, 309, 311, 317, 328, 341, 351, 356, 358–9, 366,

Index

– – –

–

– –

–

368, 372, 399, 428n47, 443nn15, 18 BB, 361 Berlin, 398–9 Brand upon the Brain!, 9, 12, 14, 25, 50, 63, 113, 143, 154, 173, 177–8, 180, 189, 193, 195, 200, 203–4, 219, 223, 230–1, 248, 259, 270–312, 314, 316, 318, 321–4, 326, 329–30, 338, 353, 356–59, 368, 387, 396–97, 399, 414n8, 415n14, 423n9, 425n29, 428n50 Careful, 9, 13–4, 47, 65, 80, 88–126, 128, 137, 140, 144, 146–8, 150, 153–4, 156, 158–9, 172, 177, 179, 186–7, 189–91, 202–3, 207, 213–4, 219, 225, 227, 233, 239, 241–2, 244, 248, 261–2, 266, 269, 276, 282–3, 290–2, 294, 304, 308–9, 311, 322, 339, 358–9, 363, 365, 369, 382, 410n27, 420nn25, 26, 32, 423n17, 428n47, 433n39, 443n18 The Cock Crew, 362, 382–3, 386, 429n52, 442n1, 445n35 Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands, 9, 12, 14, 25, 47–8, 50, 98, 118, 125, 137, 141, 143–4, 146, 153–4, 177–8, 180, 192–34, 243, 246, 248, 256, 259, 261, 266, 269, 270–1, 276, 282–3, 285, 289–95, 298, 301–3, 305, 307–11, 315, 318, 323, 337, 338, 341, 356, 358, 359, 371, 382, 384, 387, 388, 394, 401, 409n18, 414n9, 431n19, 432n26, 440n25, 445n34 The Dead Father, 5, 14, 16–27, 31, 38, 41, 44, 45, 47, 51, 55, 128, 167, 173, 177, 193, 200, 216, 218, 227, 255, 290, 299, 309, 324, 406n23

465 – The Dikemaster’s Daughter, 363, 373, 413n3 – Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary – 9, 14, 47,144, 154, 163–91, 207, 216, 219, 222, 224, 226, 233, 256, 261–3, 269, 283, 305, 308, 311, 332, 358–9, 368, 371, 380, 428n51 – Fancy, Fancy, Being Rich, 372–4 – Flesh Pots of Antiquity, 362 – Footsteps, 272, 395–7 – Glorious, 399–401 – The Hands of Ida, 383 – The Heart of the World, 8, 163, 165, 176–9, 190, 215–6, 219, 222, 233, 257, 261, 269, 351, 361, 367–71, 380, 385, 442n1, 443n15 – Hospital Fragment, 365–6 – The Hoyden, 362 – Imperial Orgies, 361 – Indigo High-Hatters, 361–2 – It’s a Wonderful Life, 371–2 – It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today, 397 – Keyhole, 359, 400 – Maldoror: Tygers, 362–3, 385, 442n1 – Mauve Decade, 361 – My Dad is 100 Years Old, 161, 313, 355, 389–393, 437n2, 442n1 – My Winnipeg, 2, 4, 14, 25, 27, 63, 154, 161, 164, 193, 204, 219, 231, 234, 248, 256, 258–60, 302–3, 307, 313–59, 386, 387, 396, 425nn23, 29, 427n38, 428n44, 430n7, 431n17, 437nn2, 6, 438nn12, 15, 440n25, 441nn30, 36 – Nude Caboose, 393–4, 427n44 – Odilon Reden, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts towards

466

Index

Infinity, 361–5, 367, 380, 442n1, 442n9, 443n13 – Odin’s Shield Maiden, 395 – The Pomps of Satan, 361–2 – The Saddest Music in the World, 4, 14, 27, 52, 89, 117, 123, 144, 146, 154, 161, 193, 207, 219, 222, 227, 232–69, 271, 273, 279, 283, 291, 306, 309, 324, 334, 356–7, 359, 368, 374, 378–9, 381, 387, 407n6, 414n7, 422n1, 428n47, 437n2, 438nn9, 10, 444n30 – Sea Beggars, 361, 373–4, 395 – Sissy Boy Slap Party, 361–2, 374– 80, 387, 389, 442n2, 444nn26, 29 – Sombra Dolorosa, 374, 379–82, 390 – Spanky, 398, 439n20 – Tales from the Gimli Hospital, 5, 12, 26–52, 55, 57–8, 65, 68, 76, 86–7, 89, 99, 113, 118, 129, 143–4, 146, 148, 150, 153, 156, 161, 172, 177, 187, 189–90, 194, 197, 214, 216, 218–9, 221, 227, 238, 249, 255, 260, 278, 283, 290, 306–7, 311, 317, 328, 356, 359, 363, 365, 366, 422n6, 424n18 – A Trip to the Orphanage, 374, 378– 9, 444n30 – Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, 14, 47, 90, 117, 123, 127–63, 187, 189, 190–1, 207, 214, 219, 233, 241–3, 256, 260–1, 269, 274, 283, 311, 358–9, 363, 366, 383, 397, 408n11, 409n17, 421n12, 425n22, 426n34, 428n47 – Tyro, 361 – Workbooks, 361, 362, 382–9 Maddin, Herdis, 27, 32, 195–6, 197, 200, 203, 406n23, 423n16, 425n29

Maddin, Janet, 195, 323, 329, 347, 425n29 Maddin, Jilian, 56, 424n21 Maddin, Ross, 195, 201, 323 Madeiros, Maria de, 233, 267 Mad Love (Karl Freund 1935), 207, 208, 426n33 Mahler, Gustav, 166, 167, 169, 173 Mahs, Erik Steffen, 273, 307 ‘Paradise of Bachelors and the Tarturus of Maids’ (Herman Melville 1855), 382 Manitoba Arts Council, 27, 88 Manitoba Film and Sound, 88 The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni 1928), 227, 388 Marshall, Mike, 88 Marykuca, Kathy, 61 McCormack, John, 366 McCulloch, John, 125, 158, 416n28, 420n32 McCulloch, Kyle, 29, 55, 92, 106, 118, 153, 386, 405n8, 415n18, 419n25 McKinney, Mark, 234, 379 McLeod, Margaret Anne, 59 McMillan, Ross, 129, 150, 151, 232, 235, 419n24 Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli 1944), 256 Méliès, Georges, 256 Melville, Herman, 7, 88, 119, 120–3, 127, 153, 382–4, 417nn34, 35, 36, 37, 429n52 Mérimée, Prosper, 133, 144 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 133 Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1926), 286, 293, 421n11 Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare), 147, 273 Milton, John, 208

Index Mitchum, Robert, 211 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville 1851), 120, 384, 385, 428n52 Mogatas, Henry, 198 Monty Python, 41, 252, 253, 254, 310 Moore, Todd, 274 Moral Tales (Jules Laforgue 1887), 133, 418n14 Moreau, Gustave, 134, 158, 161, 418n13 Morocco (Josef von Sternberg 1930), 74 Moroni, David, 175 Morrison, Bill, 9 Mossolov, Alexander, 371 The Mummy (Karl Freund 1932), 426n33 Murnau, F.W., 5, 7, 13, 22, 27, 36, 38, 84, 119, 154, 156, 169, 178, 257, 263, 306, 368, 426n33 Musil, Robert, 7 Mussorgsky, Modest, 70 Mysteries (Knut Hamsun 1892), 408n11 The National Film Board of Canada, 265, 394 National Society of Film Critics, 8, 51, 367, 443n15 Neal, Tom, 322 Neale, Brent, 92, 118, 153, 169, 366, 372 Negin, Louis, 198, 234, 272, 346, 375– 7, 387–9, 400, 435n13, 444n29 Neville, Sarah, 59, 93, 118, 153 New York Stories (Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen 1989), 318, 425n23 New York Times, 302, 367, 404n3, 407n3, 418n2, 435n10

467

‘A Night in July’ (Bruno Schulz 1937), 410n26 ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), 378 Night of the Living Dead (George Romero 1969), 22, 45 Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau 1921), 169 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock 1946), 391 O’Malley, Cathleen, 276 ‘One of These Days’ (James Reese Europe), 412n40 Ophuls, Max, 7, 119, 154, 157, 255 Ordnance Pictures, 55 Orlacs Hände (Robert Wiene 1924), 207 Orton, Joe, 209 O’Sullivan, Michael, 62, 118, 153 Otto of the Silver Hand (Howard Pyle 1888), 119 Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton 1923), 102 Ovid, 133 Owen, Wilfrid, 411n37 Pabst, G.W., 119 Paddlewheel Productions, vii, ix Paglia, Camille, 118 Paizs, John, 4, 5, 17 Pan (Knut Hamsun 1894), 127, 131, 132, 133 Paperback Hero (Peter Pearson 1973), 268 Paramount Studios, 75, 156 Parrish, Maxfield, 158 Le Pas d’acier (Sergei Prokofiev), 371 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer 1928), 254, 255 Patton, Matthew, 398

468

Index

Paz, Isaac, 380, 390 The Penalty (Wallace Worsley 1920), 8, 208, 237, 244 La Petite marchande d’allumettes (Jean Renoir 1928), 52 Pevere, Geoff, 5, 17, 367, 442n6, 443n15 The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian 1925), 186, 208 Pierre (Herman Melville 1952), 88, 120–23, 127, 153, 417nn32, 33, 35, 37 Pitfall (André De Toth 1948), 211 Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls 1952), 157 Plan 9 from Outer Space (Edward D. Wood, Jr. 1959), 118 Poe, Edgar Allen, 363 Ponselle, Rosa, 378, 379 Porter, Cole, 22 Porter, Edwin S., 222 Powder Her Face (Thomas Adès), 372 Powell, Dick, 21, 23, 211 The Power Plant Gallery, 193, 359, 422n5, 423n17 Prokofiev, Sergei, 371 Proust, Marcel, 113, 119, 272 The Public Enemy (WilliamWellman 1931), 16, 21 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 69, 421n14, 432n31 Pura, Talia, 245, 379, 381 Pyle, Howard, 118 Quandt, James, 204, 426n31 Quay Brothers, 8, 400 Ravel, Maurice, 377 Ray, Man, 8, 39 Ray, Nicholas, 101 Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock 1954), 118

À Rebours (Joris-Karl Huysmans 1884), 133, 159 Redon, Odilon, 158, 363, 364, 442n10 ‘The Red Maple Leaves’ (song), 237, 250, 267 The Red Violin (François Girard 1998), 232 Reed, Lou, 272 La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir 1939), 77, 411n34 Reich, Wilhelm, 328 Reimer, Terry, 52, 408n8 Reiniger, Lotte, 314, 328, 344, 349 Renard, Maurice, 206, 426n33 Renoir, Jean, 7, 52, 77, 119, 407n8 Resurrection Symphony (Gustav Mahler), 167 Rhombus Media, 232, 234,359,443n20 Richter, Hans, 8, 39 Riefenstahl, Leni, 99, 119–20 Rimmer, Vince, 92 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 378 Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald 1998), 313 Romeo and Juliet (Baz Luhrmann 1996), 177 Rome—Open City (Roberto Rossellini 1945), 391 Rosalie (W.S. Van Dyke 1937), 22, 23 Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell 1936), 8 Rossellini, Isabella, 233, 235, 268, 272, 313, 389, 392, 393, 430n2, 435n13, 442n1 Rossellini, Roberto, 389, 390 La Roue (Abel Gance 1923), 362, 363, 365, 442n8 Royal Winnipeg Ballet, 163, 164, 177, 256, 332, 381, 421n5 Rubinstein, Anton, 74 Ruiz, Raul, 363

Index Ruskin, John, 7, 119 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 216, 381, 427n42 Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (Bruno Schulz 1937), 17, 410n26 ‘The Sandman’ (E.T.A. Hoffmann 1817), 133 Saturday Night Live (television series 1975), 41 Savage, Ann, 315, 322, 325, 329, 338, 353, 358, 427n38, 438n12 Savinio, Alberto, 133 Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg 1934), 73–5, 119, 150, 154, 156, 169, 263, 411n30, 412n39, 419n24 Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945), 405 Scharhon, Katherine, 274, 307 Schiller, Friedrich, 9, 90 Schnitzler, Arthur, 109 Schubert, Franz, 216, 427n42 Schulz, Bruno, 7, 17, 70, 403n3, 410n26 Sebald, W.G., 313 Seinfeld (television series 1990), 47 Selznick, David O., 118, 389–90, 392 Seville Pictures, 437n2, 441n30 Shakespeare, William, 147, 177, 243, 295 Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg 1932), 59, 74 Shapiro, Jody, 387–8, 394 Shaviro, Steven, 281–2, 293, 300, 418n4, 419n19, 436n23 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 21 Sibelius, Jean, 109 Sibley, James Watson, 39 Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952), 238 Sirk, Douglas, 9, 101

469

Sitwell, Sacheverell, 134 Small, Cindy-Marie, 175, 379, 381 Smith, C. Aubrey, 74, 419n24 Snow, Michael, 8, 160, 367 Snidal, Dan, 17 The Snow Queen (Hans Christian Andersen 1845), 407 Snyder, Stephen, 4, 5, 420n26 “The Song is You”, 235, 236, 239, 240, 246, 250, 430nn8, 11 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1774), 311 S.O.S. Eisberg (Arnold Fanck 1933), 119 Sparklehorse, 371–2, 373, 443n22 Spitting Image (television series 1984), 253 Splendours and Miseries (Sacheverell Sitwell 1993), 134 Staczek, Jason, 308, 332, 396 Steele, Barbara, 272 Sternberg, Josef von, 7, 27, 59, 73–5, 119, 150, 154, 156, 263, 409n17, 411n30, 419n24 Stewart, Amy, 197, 229, 323 Stoker, Bram, 9, 14, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 180–5, 186, 188, 189, 422nn15, 19 Strauss, Richard, 148, 203, 425n28 Stroheim, Erich von, 4, 7, 13, 22, 36, 37, 64, 119, 120, 208, 362–3, 368, 388, 406n16 Stürm über dem Mont Blanc (Arnold Fanck 1930), 119 Sunrise (F.W. Murnau 1927), 5, 38, 119, 154, 156, 159, 256, 257, 263, 264, 306 Svankmajer, Jan, 8, 400 Sviridov, Georgy, 371 Swinburne, Algernon, 133

470

Index

Swing Time (George Stevens 1936), 171 Szöke, Donna, 55 The Tales of Hoffmann (Jacques Offenbach), 366 Tannhäuser (Richard Wagner), 217 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 177 Tarr, Béla, 177 Teardrops in the Snow: The Making of ‘The Saddest Music in the World’ (Matt Holm and Caelum Vatnsdal 2003), 258, 260, 429n1, 430n4, n5, n6, 432n28 TelefilmCanada, 51, 88, 89, 153, 155, 160, 267, 410n29, 413nn3, 6 Tell, Olive, 74 The Iliad (Homer), 311 They Won’t Believe Me, 211 Thomson, R.H., 128–9, 150, 151, 419n24, 425n22 Tiefland (Leni Riefenstahl 1954), 99, 120 Time, Forward! (Georgy Sviridov), 371 Titanic (James Cameron 1997), 61, 253 Toles, George, 4–5, 11, 16, 25, 50, 51, 52, 61, 65–6, 86, 88–90, 94, 102–4, 107–9, 113, 115, 116- 23, 126–8, 131, 133, 138, 139, 144, 147, 149–50, 153–4, 157, 159, 161–2, 232–4, 241, 246–7, 250, 255, 269, 271, 282, 309, 313, 359, 373, 382, 394, 397, 399, 403n1, 406n18, 407n24, 408nn11, 14, 409nn21, 22, 410n23, 411nn29, 33, 414nn7, 10, 415nn15, 19, 20, 22, 416nn24, 25, 26, 30, 32, 417n33, 418nn6, 8, 9, 419nn15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 24, 428n47, 432n25, 437n35, 445n34

Toronto International Film Festival, 5, 17, 252, 367, 389, 442n1, 445n34 Tristan und Isolde (Richard Wagner), 21, 38, 332, 416n29 Turgenev, Ivan, 202, 425n26 TVA Films, 430n3 Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare), 295 Twilight of the Nymphs (Pierre Louÿs 1925), 133, 409n17 Ulmer, Edgar G., 322 Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali 1929), 46, 344 Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock 1949), 390 Under the Hill (Aubrey Beardsley 1894), 134 Universal Pictures, 51, 284, 429n58 University of Manitoba, 4, 17, 88, 271, 372, 403n1, 439n17 The Unknown (Tod Browning 1927), 208 Valse triste (Jean Sibelius), 109 Vatnsdal, Caelum, 17, 157, 361, 364, 374, 386, 403nn2, 6, 413nn2, 5, 419n23, 420n26, 439n24, 441n31, 442nn4, 5, 443n15, 444n34 Veidt, Conrad, 118, 207, 227 ‘The Venus of Ille’ (Prosper Mérimée 1837), 133, 144 Verdi, Giuseppe, 78, 115, 216, 427n42 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock 1958), 63, 391, 409n19 Vidor, King, 84 Vigo, Jean, 7, 345 Viridiana (Luis Buñuel 1961), 328 Von Helmolt, Vonnie, 163

Index Wagner, Richard, 21, 24, 38, 111, 119, 217, 250, 332, 414n11, 416n29, 427n42 Walking Down Broadway (Erich von Stroheim 1932, unfinished), 362 Wallach, Eli, 272, 435n13 Walser, Robert, 7, 119, 415n22 The War Illustrate, 54, 57, 75, 80, 228, 341, 350, 408n13, 410n28, 411n36 Warner Brothers Studios, 48, 235, 407n6 Way Down East (D.W. Griffith 1921), 183 Webber, Melville, 39 The Wedding March (Erich von Stroheim 1928), 388 Wees, William, 403n3 Die weisse Hölle von Piz Palü (Arnold Fanck and G.W. Pabst 1929), 119 Whale, James, 105, 119, 169 Whiteman, Paul, 124 White Zombie (Victor Halperin 1932), 8, 421n9

471

Whitman, Walt, 183 Whitmey, Nigel, 129, 150 Wiene, Robert, 37, 207, 426n33 Winnipeg Film Group, 5, 395, 444n34 The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming 1939), 112, 119 A Woman’s Face (George Cukor 1941), 118 Wood, Edward D., Jr., 118, 349, 436n22 Wright, Johnny, 175, 381 Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk 1956), 183 Young, Robert, 211 Zeitgeist Video, 414n7 Zéro de conduit (Jean Vigo 1933), 307, 346 Zhang, Wei-Qiang, 166, 175 Zola, Emile, 137, 175 Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis 1964), 393–4