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Guy Maddin (Canada, 1956) debuted with
the 25-minute black-and-white short
The Dead Father (1985).
His first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), was also shot in black-and-white on 16-mm film, as was the second,
Archangel (1990), a World War I movie that marked his first collaboration with screenwriter George Toles.
Maddin evokes the feeling of watching a silent movie with a
shaking black-and-white screen, intertitles, blurred contours, etc.
The trick is intriguing but the plot is just very weak, too much of an implausible and superficial melodrama.
The story is set in 1919 in Archangel, the northernmost tip of czarist Russia.
World War I ended three months earlier and civil war has erupted between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
It is snowing on a ship. A one-legged soldier is hugging the urn that contains
the ashes of his beloved Iris. The captain mistakes it for a bottle of liquor
and throws it overboard.
We then hear a voiceover discuss love over documentary-style images of historical love stories, with the feeling of a
Sergej Eisenstein-era
Soviet movie.
The one-legged soldier, John Boles, arrives in Archangel and stays with a local
family headed by mother Danchuk and father Jannings.
He is a Canadian soldier fighting alongside the Mensheviks.
The teenage boy of the family, Geza, has a seizure. John helps out and
grandmother Baba offers him the leg of her deceased husband, which turns out to
fit perfectly.
A woman dressed in black, Veronkha, walks in and John faints because she looks just like his dead Iris.
Now it's granma Baba who takes care of John.
A man walks in and claims to be Veronkha's husband but she accuses him of
torturing her. A psychiatric doctor introduces the man as his patient Philbin who suffers from childhood traumas. A
marriage certificate proves that they are married. We see a documentary-style
flashback of Philbin's life. Philbin has amnesia: he doesn't remember anything
that happened after the wedding and thinks that every day is his wedding day.
The doctor then takes him away.
John tells Danchuk and Jannings that Veronkha is a resurrected Iris, and in vain they explain that Veronkha was a brave soldier.
Geza tries to steal John's medals and his mother Danchuk flogs him.
John is outraged that the mother and not the father has to do it, so he takes
over the flogging.
Geza is masochistically attracted to him.
Later the people of Archangel reenact famous battles in painting-like tableaux.
They need someone to impersonate the hated German and the crowd picks
Jannings, a notorious coward.
When they set up something about Canada, John walks on stage.
John approaches Veronkha calling her Iri. She corrects him that she's not Iris but at the same time doesn't discourage him from pursuing her.
She leaves him a treasure map (in the back of her marriage certificate) to find where she lives.
Walking back home, John has an accident and is again unconscious.
Danchuk tenderly cares for him, causing Jannings to cry of jealously.
All able bodies are summoned to war.
John, Jannings, and even Danchuk and Veronkha, grab a rifle and march with thousand others to the battlefield.
John and Danchuk march together and
mourn the soldiers who lie dead on the battlefield but it turns out they all rise up when touched.
One is truly dead.
Returning home, John decides to follow Veronkha. He witnesses how
Philbin's doctor and his assistant hypnotize her to bring back her memories of the wedding.
She recalls the airplane flight and then the hotel.
Philbin left her in the room and she was pitied by the hotel women.
She looked for him and found Philbin sleeping with the front-desk girl.
The doctor claims that the husband is innocent because he doesn't remember the girl.
John confronts Philbin calling him an impostor but he ignores him, repeating his routine about the wedding day.
Then John returns to spy on the hypnosis and hears the
doctor claim that Veronkha had a child. John decides that it is his child, conceived before Iris disappeared. Worse: he thinks the child is Danchuk's baby.
John dreams of Veronkha handing out treasure maps to a lot of suitors.
It starts snowing. John follows the treasure map, looking
for Veronkha's home. He passes by a number of couples making love in the snow.
John and Danchuk return to the battlefield, while the coward Jannings find an excuse to stay home.
The soldiers are caught by surprise by the Bolsheviks in the trenches while they are sleeping.
While the battle rages on, Bolsheviks enter Jannings' house and are about to rape Geza, but Jannings finally becomes a hero and strangles them with his own bowels, a fact not witnessed by Geza who instead comes to believe that
Philbin saved his life just because Philbin is the first person he sees.
At the end of the battle John tries again to seduce
Veronkha but she's annoyed that he keeps calling her "Iris".
Veronkha finally accepts Philbin as her legitimate husband while
Danchuk and Geza bury Jannings believing he died a coward.
Veronkha and Philbin are flying to the hotel of their wedding, to reenact the same day, but she is plotting her revenge: to claim that she's in love with John.
Meanwhile, a desperate John rides to the same hotel.
Philbin leaves the hotel room just like he did on their wedding day.
John arrives and enters her room. She cannot see him.
She thinks she's talking to Philbin when she says that she loves John.
John lights a match and she faints realizing that she has been talking to John.
She now suffers of amnesia just like Philbin.
John takes advantage and brainwashes her to believe that her name is Iris and they have a baby.
John takes "Iris" (i.e.
Veronkha
to Dunchak's home and tells Iris that Danchuk's baby is their baby, but then
Veronkha
disappears.
John uses the treasure map to find her. They are making love on the floor when
Philbin knocks at the door while we hear the noise of battle. Upon seeing him,
Veronkha remembers that she's Philbin's wife and rejects John.
John returns to the front, still convinced that Danchuk's baby is his own
(he comically asks Danchuk to take care of the baby).
Geza dies in battle. We see his ghost leave the body and reunite with the ghost of his father, who clarifies who saved his life.
John, wounded, follows the treasure map which leads him
where Veronkha and Philbin are endlessly getting married.
John leaves Archangel to return to Canada.
His first color film was Careful (1992), inspired by the German "bergfilms" of the silent era.
His first film shot in 35 mm was
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), also in color and
again scripted by Toles, a sort of erotic fairy tale (inspired by Knut Hamsun's novel "Pan", and perhaps by Shakespeare's The Tempest).
The affected acting is hard to digest, the dialogues are tedious and the
development of the plot is erratic and even preposterous.
The film is a visual tour de force, but, given the plot's grotesque unfolding and the amateurish acting (worthy of a Roger Corman B-movie), the Pre-Raphaelitian visuals become more of an annoying distraction than an intriguing attraction.
It would have been a good 20-minute video. Instead it's one hour too long.
The film opens on a ship. Peter has just been released from prison and tells
a fellow traveler, a young attractive woman,
that he is going back to Mandragora, where the sun never sets.
They make love but she refuses to tell him her name.
Peter walks to the family farm where her sister Amelia raises ostrichs.
Peter causes an argument between Amelia and
Cain Ball, Amelia's old foreman who believed that he was going to buy
the farm, because now Amelia needs Peter's approval.
Amelia tells Peter that she is in love with scientist Isaac Solti.
Peter goes hunting into the forest. When he returns to his tent, he finds a
a pregnant, woman inside: Zephyr, who introduces herself as a
fisherman's wife who hunts for berries and seems to live in the woods.
Peter falls asleep. Zephyr prays a statue of goddess Venus (the ice nymph ) that she may gain
Peter's love and leaves a wedding ring as an offering.
We see a nightmare in which she is being tortured to death.
A seductive Zephyr (who is either a widow or abandoned by her husband) and a feverish Peter (who still think of the mysterious woman on the ship) do become lovers on a rainy day, and he faints.
They make love in a room that gets slowly flooded.
Amelia tells him that the angry Cain moved out of the house.
Peter finally meets Solti, who limps due to having lost a leg. He shows up
with his assistant Juliana, who is the mysterious woman of the ship.
Both Peter and Amelia are uncomfortable with the couple.
Solti invites them to see the restored statue of the ice nymph, which he thinks is a marvel despite the fact that it was the cause of the amputation of his leg when it crashed.
Juliana is jealous of the statue.
Juliana demands a chat alone with Peter and, after referring to her conversation on the ship, and showing that she knows of his fling with Zephyr, kisses him.
Solti, alone with Peter, tells him the tragic past of Juliana.
Solti is teasing Peter by having Juliana seem in love with him.
Peter realizes that both Juliana and Amelia are being manipulated by Solti.
Solti takes them to his place and shows them the skulls of two sisters who hated each other to death.
Solti hypnotizes Juliana and Peter snaps and beats up the crippled Solti.
Peter then jumps from the terrace into the woods, and Juliana follows him,
while Amelia remains infatuated with Solti.
Juliana denies to Peter that she's Solti's lover and she truly loves Peter.
Zephyr finds them kissing in the forest and interrupts them.
Peter rejects Zephyr.
Zephyr tries to take the ring back from the ice nymph and then sees Solti climb to the statue and kiss it.
She too tries to kiss the statue but the statue bites her.
Amelia, who fears that Cain wants to kill her, surprises Cain by handing him the farm for free. Cain is ecstatic.
Zephyr visits Solti, revealing that she too is mesmerized by him.
Solti confesses he is in love with the goddess.
Zephyr re-lives again how her husband died in a pit of snakes, but Solti tells her that her husband will find her when the baby is born.
Meanwhile, Peter and Juliana are still making love in the forest.
Juliana confesses that she had sex with Solti, and Peter is briefly disgusted.
We hear a shot and see Peter fall.
Meanwhile, Amelia brutally kills Cain by hammering a giant nail in his head and
sets his body on fire. She has gone completely mad.
Zephyr meets Peter alone after Peter concluded that Juliana works for Solti.
Peter confronts Solti and Juliana in the forest with a delirious speech.
Looking down, Peter realizes that Amelia is lying under the leaves, sick.
Solti pulls out the nail from Cain's head and cain comes back to life.
Cain and Amelia lie in two beds next to each other, cared for by Peter and Solti
in the ostrich farm.
Zephyr confronts the statue and demands her ring back. The statue topples over
and crushes her.
At the same time Cain dies (again). Amelia is still mad.
Solti leaves Mandragora, followed by Juliana.
Peter and Amelia move to a cave.
After the seven-minute short The Heart of the World (2000), inspired by Soviet constructivism of the silent era, Maddin created a silent
black-and-white documentary of a ballet performance of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula", shot like in his early days in the style of silent cinema:
Dracula - Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2002).
Not a word is spoken the whole movie.
This is Maddin's boldest experiment and at the same time the peak of his visionary visual style.
The film opens with a series of brief danced scenes that summarize the story.
Then the story begins with the arrival of
Count Dracula into the London mansion of Lucy Westenra, who is engaged to
Lord Holmwood.
She is bitten by Dracula and becomes a devil. The doctor examines her.
Her behavior worsens and she even bits her fiance.
At night she is visited again by Dracula.
The doctor sees the bat fly away and finds the dots of the bite on her neck.
The doctor diagnoses that she has become a vampyre and prescribes the protection of garlic.
All the while we have seen a madman behind bars scream in desperation.
The madman, Renfield, escapes from the madhouse while demons breaks into Lucy's bedroom.
Lucy's mother sees them, panics and opens a door that neutralizes the power of the garlic. Dracula returns. The doctor finds both women dead.
The newspapers report murders credited to a "Bloofer Lady".
Renfield is recaptured but bites his doctor and screams "the graveyard"!
Dracula has in fact resurrects Lucy from her grave.
The doctor and and Lucy's friends spy on them.
Later, the doctor opens Lucy's grave to kill her for good, Lucy fights back against the men who surround her, and eventually the doctor manages to decapitate her.
The doctor knows that the madman Renfield is actually a clairvoyant.
Renfield tells him that the vampyre's next victim will be Lucy's best friend Mina, who is going to a convent to nurse her fiance's Jonathon who is writing a diary of how he was raped inside Dracula's castle by three female demons and imprisoned.
Mina is a simple and innocent soul who wholeheartedly loves her Jonathon but, reading the diary that Jonathon himself offers to her, she learns that Jonathon had sex with Dracula's brides.
She not only forgives him but even tries to have sex with him.
Disturbed by her transformation, Jonathon leaves.
Dracula appears, kidnaps her and dances with her in his castle.
The doctor is watching them with binoculars.
The doctor is leading a group of men including Jonathon who are advancing towards the castle in the darkness.
Just when Dracula bites Mina on the neck, the men break into Dracula's castle, armed with flashlights.
The men are attacked by Dracula's brides but kill them.
As they go on a rampage, smashing coffins and placing crucifixes everywhere,
Dracula in person attacks them. The doctor breaks a window, letting light in,
and Dracula collapses. However, Dracula takes Mina hostage so that the doctor
cannot kill him.
Dracula shows to the doctor that he has taken Mina's virginity.
The doctor closes the window to restore darkness.
Mina begs the doctor to kill her and decapitate her.
The doctor, holding a crucifix, fights with Dracula but the stronger Dracula seems to win.
Then Jonathon, who had been subdued, wakes up and Dracula kills him.
Then he dances again with Mina, who seems enslaved to him.
But Mina stabs him and then confronts him with a crucifix.
All the men wake up and surround Dracula, impaling him
mid-air on a long stake.
Jonathon and Mina are reunited. The castle is destroyed it.
The Saddest Music in the World (2003), adapted from
an original screenplay by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro,
was his first film featuring
Isabella Rossellini.
The ten short films of Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) were conceived
for an art installation, shot on Super-8mm film and feature a character named "Guy Maddin". It sticks with Maddin's specialty (silent and black-and-white) but
it increases the frenzy of the montage.
An old man looks into a microscope and sees a hockey game.
Guy Maddin (played by someone else) is one of the hockey players.
Mo is his best friend,
Veronica his girlfriend,
Shaky is the captain and captain of the police,
and doctor Fusi the team physician.
Guy gets injured during the game.
Guy's father congratulates him for his team winning the cup, but reminds him to
visit his dying mother at the hospital. Due to the head injury, Guy can't remember his own mother.
Veronica is depressed and we soon realize why: she is pregnant.
Fusi and
Guy escort her to Liliom's beauty salon that becomes a brothel by night.
There Veronica gets an illegal abortion from Fusi.
Guy is seduced by Liliom's Chinese-looking daughter Meta (Liliom is Caucasian) and leaves Veronica alone with Fusi. Veronica, who was already depressed, is devastated.
Guy and Meta swear love to each other but she refuses to have sex with him until he kills the murderers of her father.
Meta tells Guy the story of his father Chas, a black man (the Chinese girl is the daughter of a white woman and a black man?), murdered by Liliom
and her lover, police captain Shaky, Guy's teammate. Meta keeps her father's hands in a jar.
Veronica leaves the brothel/clinic but dies alone in the hockey arena.
Meta takes Guy to the graveyard and he sees Veronica's ghost.
Meta lives with her blind (Caucasian) granma, her father's mom, and takes Guy there.
At night Meta can hear her mother Liliom and Shaky make love in the next door.
She hates them.
The sinister doctor Fusi arrives and sedates Guy. Meta has bribed him to perform an operation on Guy: replace his hands with her father's hands, which are blue.
Fusi, however, only pretends to do it: he throws away her father's hands and simply paints Guy's hands blue and then bandages them.
When Guy wakes up, Meta is ecstatic.
She undresses herself and lets Guy touch her breasts with his blue hands.
Meta sends Guy to kill her mother Liliom, but instead he is seduced by her beauty, and thinks that his hands have memory of when they were touching Liliom.
Liliom hires Guy for his hair salon. At the same time
Veronica's ghost has materialized and she too finds a job at the salon.
Guy doesn't recognize her but all the mirrors collude to make him fall in love with her.
Both Liliom and Meta see it and get jealous.
One day Guy accidentally stumbles into an abandoned
wax museum of hockey players and realizes that Meta's father was one of them.
While he is there, Veronica shows up and seduces him.
Guy kept postponing the visit to his inferm mother and one day Guy's father announces that his mother died.
Meta is still pressuring Guy to kill Shaky.
Guy strangles Shaky to death during a hockey game and Meta stands up to cheer for him.
Nobody else notices the murder. Fusi finds the dead body.
In the shower the naked
Guy tries to confess his crime to his best friend Mo, who is also a cop,
but Mo refuses to accept his confession. Frustrated,
Guy strangles Mo too, convinced that he doesn't have control over his hands anymore (the other cops don't seem to care).
Guy is abused by Liliom and masochistically accepts it.
Veronica is pregnant again, this time of Guy's own father whom she flirted with briefly.
Guy now re-lives the abortion scene and this time he tries to stop Fusi from performing the abortion, but both Liliom and Meta prevent him from entering the room.
In the fight Guy finally strangles Liliom to death. Guy has now carried out Meta's revenge on Liliom and Shaky, but against his will, and he blames it on the blue hands, so he asks Fusi to restore his hands, and Fusi confesses that he never
transplanted the dead man's hands: Guy killed with his own hands.
Meta is jealous of Veronica. Guy confesses that he loves Veronica. Meta demands
her father's hands back. Fusi cannot tell Meta that he threw them away and so
sedates Guy and amputates his hands.
Guy tries to play hockey without hands while Veronica flirts with his father.
Guy is jealous of his father, and Meta is jealous of Veronica.
During the game, Veronica wanders above the game.
Guy, following her, reenters the wax museum.
He finds Guy's father and Veronica who announce their engagement: Veronica is to become Guy's stepmother.
Guy invokes the help of the wax players, who come to life and corner Veronica
and Guy's father.
Meta recognizes her father Chas and runs to hug him.
Meta behaves like a child but Chas no hands and lets her fall to her death.
The players return to be waxmen in the museum.
Guy's father explains that the museum is actually a hiding place for coward
husbands afraid to face the burderns of family life.
Guy has become one of them: a wax statue in the museum.
The silent movie Brand Upon the Brain (2006) too features a character with his name.
My Winnipeg (2008) is an autobiographical work.
Keyhole (2011) was his first digital film.
Toles was still his chief collaborator for feature films.
His work for art galleries resulted in
the installation series Hauntings (2010) and
the installations Only Dream Things (2012)
and Seances (2016).
The Forbidden Room (2015) was co-directed with Evan Johnson.
He and Johnson employed a collage technique for
The Green Fog (2017),
"a scene-by-scene reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo comprised entirely of Bay Area film footage from a variety of sources".
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