Still from Guy Maddin's Saddest Music in the World
A child of the 50s, Guy Maddin remains stuck in the 20s. Since 1985, Canada's most idiosyncratic film-maker has made nine highly personal features and about a dozen shorts that, despite their surrealist trappings and affinity for silent cinema, resist all pigeonholing. Remaking part-talkies that never existed and reimagining his autobiography, this prodigious myth-maker is never far removed from a movie reference or supposed childhood dreams and anxieties. His riotous, emotionally masochistic curiosities entertain and confuse, delight and dislocate.
Maddin's Super-8 and 16mm primitivism traces back to the limited resources of his halcyon days at the Winnipeg Film Group. Back then, the slothful Maddin - raised above Aunt Lil's beauty salon - home-schooled in rabid cinephilia, watching classics borrowed from local libraries, traces of which speckle his filmography. (Vertigo, for one, haunts Maddin's oeuvre like a holy whore.) But Maddin never allows other artists to cohabit his space for too long, nor lets viewers dwell on his twisted narratives, equally sourced from cinema and literature.
Haunted by obsessed, lovelorn amnesiacs, Maddin's films forsake allusion and allegory: it's all on the surface, bubbling with overwrought, illogical grippes of passion. "The only real themes that matter to me are how humans love each other, hate each other, or are envious of each other," Maddin has said, and sexuality breeds psychosis in these most noir of worlds, sweeping viewers prettily towards death and disappointment.
These tongue-in-cheek, studio-bound moving pictures (many co-written by film professor George Toles) never become camp, nor play on nostalgia. Maddin smuggles a grain of sand in each oyster: something's off in these culturally toxic works. Yet they remain (art-) designed towards that rarest of endgames: fun. Welles famously dubbed the studio "the biggest electric train set any boy ever had," and nobody approaches film-making with such a tinkering sense of pubescent experimentation and exuberance as Maddin.
While parodying the stereotypical Canadian thematic of sexual repression, Maddin is charter member of an unofficial Internationale of film-makers representing independent, dreamlike fiefdoms. Alongside true visionaries like Lynch, Svankmajer and the Quays, he's a spirited conductor of sublimely heart-thumping concertos of movie mayhem.
Mark Peranson
Guy Maddin
1-23 July
BFI
London
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