Chapter One
Very Lush and Full of Ostriches
I can never read reviews of my own movies. I'm terrified to find
out what the barbaric world thinks of my trembly filmic dreams
and, by extension, my overly frangible soul. As a hedge against
catatonic depression, for years I gave all the print reviews to my
nonagenarian Gramma, who would translate them out loud into
Icelandic to her big brother Hjalmar, who in turn would
promptly translate them sentence by sentence, with a shrill
dental whistle, right back into his own archaic approximation of
English, while I listened in a cold sweat. By the time my review
went through this two-stage process, it no longer frightened me,
having acquired the flavours of a bowdlerized Nordic folktale.
Most of the cruelties were recouched in quaint hearthside
metaphors with more charm than stomp. Even better, the not
infrequent praise warbled out in the singsong falsetto peculiar to
Icelandic typically depicted me as a mighty storytelling slayer of
Hollywood ogres, a fair-haired god with wisdoms infinite, or
some kind of mischievous lava sprite - all good things!
I never suspected generous mistranslation, but when these
two handy ancestors of mine recently climbed up to Valhalla, I
hauled out my clippings to reread the encomia. Without fail, I
was shocked at the sorry level of writing in the original English
text, film journalism as sloppily hammered together and painted
as a kid's klubhouse - no grace of line, no awareness of harmony,
no evidence of an eye. And this was the positive press! Really!
(I've actually received very little, or no, bad press that can't be
easily explained off as reviewer's insecurity.)
If this well-meaning but unfortunate scrivening is the best
America's top film critics (some of them very nice people) can
come up with, and if I want a fair shake in the press, then I am
left no choice but to review, with great reluctance, my own
movies, starting right now on the eve of a mini-retrospective of
my four features, along with a short, at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music.
Made while he was practically still a child, Tales from the Gimli
Hospital (1988) is Guy Maddin's primitive first feature. Setting
out to be not juvenile but wilfully childish, Maddin shot the
movie in the vernacular spoken by film in the year of its own
glorious second childhood - namely 1929. He mixes black-and-white
with toned sequences, mime with talking, locked-down
expositional tableaux with bumpily fluid musical numbers. His
moral sensibility is strictly precode. His mono soundtrack
drones and hums out a comfy wool blanket of ambience - the
viewer can sense his own mother tucking him in beneath a
sweetly decaying quilt. The director eschews sharp focus in
favour of oneiric portraiture and dismisses the literal-mindedness
of continuity as inimical to dreaming. He seems
always careful to throw the picture together carelessly, with the
delirious glee of a finger-painting preschooler.
Gimli's story takes the director back to his own ethnic
prehistory in a 19th-century Icelandic settlement in rural
Canada, where an epidemic (cleverly unnamed to invite
comparison with ) has paved the pioneers with unsightly
fissures and landed them all in a makeshift hospice shared with
invaluable heat-generating farm animals. Here, in the titular
hospital, dark but bouncy tales of death and jealousy exchanged
between two men eventually pit the endomorphic raconteur
Gunnar against the necrophiliac Einar in a buttock-shredding
climax that is probably the most autobiographical moment of
Maddin's career.
Though finding a Canadian Ned Sparks or Guy Kibbee for
this project proved impossible (virulent strains of Berkeleyism
infect almost every frame of the picture), the filmmaker did find
a stalwart actor in Kyle McCulloch, whose ability to pitch his
mannered performances perfectly to each anachronistic script
won him the starring roles in this and the next two features.
The fluency with which Maddin speaks a dead movie
language suggests he suffers from a most plangent nostalgia, that
he has spent most of his life looking backward through misty
eyes and with absolutely no idea where he is going.
Travelling through a film in this fashion, he bumps into and
rearranges much narrative furniture, often standing still to weep
while he and his viewers get their bearings.
In Archangel (1990), all of Maddin's backward-gazing characters
grope about in the murk of their memories in a sad attempt
to regain loves and comforts lost. Archangel is a full-blown amnesia
melodrama set deep in the confused winter immediately
following the Great War - the last war designed exclusively for
the pleasure of children. (The uniforms worn in battle made all
the combatants look like scaled-up toy soldiers, and Maddin
himself described the movie as a 'Goya painting etched upon a
child's windowpane in frost.') Another part-talkie, this is
Maddin's most delirious feature; there is a narrative, but it lies
buried somewhere beneath a fluffy snowfall of forgetfulness. All
the characters, being amnesiacs, have forgotten the war is over,
and between naps continue to fight. They fight painful facts,
they fight the love gods, they fight through thick mists of
Vaseline. (The Archangel camera crew went through a whole keg
of this unguent.) Soldier and viewer alike fight confusion,
unsuccessfully. This is said to be the director's favourite among
his movies.
Careful (1992) is a pro-incest mountain traumerei 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 longtime
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. (Careful is actually
much closer in feel to its source than the recent adaptation by
Leos Carax.) Prairie-bound Maddin was obsessed by mountains,
which he had never ever seen, when he shot it. McCulloch
gives his strongest performance as a Butler Gymnasium student
who must endure paddy-whacks of Oedipal privation to win his
beloved's heart. Both violent and cozy! The colours are extremely
lurid.
Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) drifts away from the familiar
confines of the archaic film (it's shot in 35mm full colour with
a contemporary aspect ratio and nary an intertitle) and into the
deep waters of language, and therefore decadence. The dialogues
are drawn from the ascetic Knut Hamsun's Pan, then corrupted
by dollops of Prosper Merimée. The theatrical decors are
inspired by fevered Gustave Moreau. Toles gave actors Frank
Gorshin and Shelley Duvall plenty to say, and Maddin let them
say it all as musically as possible. Very lush and full of ostriches!
Has the strongest final reel in the auteur's filmography.
Running before each feature at the retrospective is the five-minute
agitprop pastiche The Heart of the World (2000). Some
have described this frenzied feature-compressed-into-a-short as
a call to arms meant to topple the complaisantly flaccid cinema
of today, a plea to reinvent movies from scratch, or a reverent
myth which finally places film at the very centre of the universe
where it belongs. Maybe Guy Maddin, that great lava sprite, has
been expressing all these impassioned sentiments since the very
beginning of his career. Who am I to say?
Originally published in The Village Voice, August 1, 2001
* * *
Journals
15 Feb, 1998
Last Tuesday I went to a fashion show at Betelstadur. Perhaps
my earliest memory is of my mother modelling in a fashion
show. My mother, who was beautiful to my young eye, even
though I was born in her fortieth year. So this memory has her
in her early or even mid-forties. She decided I would model with
her, on some sunny afternoon at the dawn of recollection, in the
rec hall at the Lutheran Church on Victor - a function
- DORCUS must be an acronym for something. I can't believe my
mother actually went to church quite often when I was young,
finding less reason to go after a cruel eulogy delivered upon the
sins of dead son Cameron. At least this eulogy being the stated
reason for her churchy truancy, but in fact her attendance did not
trail off until half a dozen years later. But of course I'm confusing
church functions, on a Wednesday night or such, and actual
Sunday church services. Which I don't think my mother ever
went to, either before or after Cameron slid into the vague
Lutheran version of hell.
This early fashion show was very crowded, my mother full
of performance intensity, the kind she showed when one of her
children readied itself for competition. There was much daubing
of my face with the maternally spittled Kleenex, much concern
over my 'cowlick' - a word married forever by such occasions to
wet Kleenex - a little bleached peacock's tail of blonde bristles
which splayed across one topmost corner of my forehead. And
which, perhaps because of much wishing on my part, has now
fallen out completely, by far the most salient bald spot on a
patchy coif.
I think the attention I received from the audience, however
polite, scared me into reclusiveness for years. And the whole
incident - a little boy with face glazed by saliva doggedly following
the voguings of his mother - was somehow completely
forgotten until Tuesday's announcement by Herdis that she
would once again, this time seven sizes larger and about forty
years older, be strutting the catwalk. This earliest memory
popped into spit-licking freshness, and superstition - a fear of
symmetry - took over. Would this first memory of Amma make
this new modelling foray my last memory of her, by means of
cosmic laws of symmetrical fate? Would the removal of the last
bits of my caul sit forever as a companion episode to my mother's
last touches, toes lightly grazing runway as she tips calcified-
Achilles-over-teakettle into an open grave at the end of her
mannequin's stroll? Would the fashion show, to put it simply, kill
my mother? I've made a study of what kills fathers, but suddenly
I developed a layman's hunch on what could spell Amma's end.
I arrived in high emotion, wearing all my nerves on the
outside, a gallon of tears behind each eye and brimming over.
The show took place in the Betelstadur multipurpose room.
Portable chairs traced out an imaginary runway. Widows of various
states of 'here-ness' filled these chairs. Racks of clothing
closed off the back end of the room, offering privacy to the
gaggle of octogenarian models who fussed energetically - to
judge by the bobbing together of so much hair-sprayed helmet
visible in back. I spotted my mother's unique species of
meticulous 'do - a neat and comforting rococo nest of platinum
maternity - among other drab models of fendered and fibre-glassed
stylings. Eighty-nine-year-old Uncle Ron and I sat at
the end of the imagined gangplank; the feared open grave gaped
at our feet in spite of my knowledge that the whole room was
carpeted every inch in brand new broadloom. I suppose this
senior's home will forever punish me with its newness. I so much
feared the squalid decrepitude of Gimli and old Betel, and was
so comforted by my response to the newness of my mother's new
home these last ten years that I suppose it is this newness that
will let go something like a wrecking ball and destroy me when
it chooses to.
Well, the show started, and prose fails me. The entire piece
lasted precisely one hour. I was assailed, delighted and ruined by
humours from all points of the compass; as the minute hand
went round so did all feelings. There was dignity, senility,
warmth, dewlaps, laughs, delirium, loss, widowhood, flirtations,
cackles. Old women feeling fabric, old women feeling for dead
children, old women wandering off track. When my mother
appeared, I thought I would sob out loud. When I told her I
would like to come to the show she beamed, like Dickie Moore
in Blonde Venus - 'That would be so nice!' - and so she was proud
to see me there, one of two males, the only person under eighty
in the room. And I was proud of her, for looking so poised, for
selecting such beautiful clothing for herself and I guess for her
being proud of me, and tears welled up in my eyes because of self-pity
and because of self-pride, too, for cleverly thinking up the
dangers involved in this symmetry thing. (Steve Burke had told
me I was treading into dangerous emotional territory here; I
likened it to a hot curling iron up the ass and he protested: 'But
that heals!')
One model wore a skirt, unfortunately, for elephantitis of
the ankles gave her galoshes of flesh to wear for the rest of her
life. She seemed terribly sheepish in this unflattering state, her
face drawn in behind its glasses beneath a nicotine-washed perm
and trim. Still another stopped halfway to lift her blouse and
have her elasticized waistband extended by an arm's length to
demonstrate how comfortable the slacks she displayed would be
after a huge meal. Or, by sinister implication, after mysterious
bloatings unique to the aged, or maybe worse still, after tubes and
bags had been appended to one's digestive system and needed a
practical if not discreet hiding place in the clothing of the
broken-down.
But always there was dignity, even if there was a clenched
fist of veins coming out of a new sporty top where a head should
be. I love my mother and I think I can actually feel it in the
present. I've mourned my inability to feel appropriately in the
present, needing dreams to love later, on the installment plan.
But as I sat with Uncle Ron, I felt a hot and tear-gushing love for
him, he who sat beside me suavely flirting with each model, only
spoiling it when he repeated his lines without variance to each of
the eight. I loved him, too, simply and silently.
By the end I was shaken, but eager to get out, because, like
all children of elderlies, I was bored, too. Through the strangest
ringer and bored.
9 Apr
At Facets, I purchased Possessed, Seven Chances, Dreyer's Joan
and, for the fourth time, Imitation of Life. In NY, I purchased
Dishonored, Betty Boop Vol. 1 and DeMille's Whispering Chorus; in
Boston, Sabrina bought The Cheat, while I nabbed Lon
Chaney's Shadows and I can't remember.
David Schwartz was a wonderful host at NY's American
Museum of the Moving Image. Mike Rubin was an ultra-enthusiastic
conversationalist at a first-time director's fest
sponsored by MOMA and Interview magazine. I had my picture
taken with Gariné, a wonderful idea until it shows up. A man
scheduled to do a phoner with me from Kansas City called forty-five
mins. late today and I refused to answer. Another triumph
for passive aggression!!! Why didn't I buttonhole J.
Continues...
Excerpted from From the Atelier Tovar
by Guy Maddin
Copyright © 2003 by Guy Maddin.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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From the Atelier Tovar