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Purple majesty: James Quandt talks with Guy Maddin - Interview
ArtForum, June, 2003 by James Quandt
"CULT" AND "COTERIE" CLING LIKE BARNACLES to the reputation of Winnipeg director Guy Maddin, a situation that may change with the release later this year of his new film, The Saddest Music in the World, starring Isabella Rossellini and scripted by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Maddin's work--five previous features, eighteen short films, and an installation piece commissioned by Toronto's Power Plant, where it debuted in March--is eccentric, even hermetic in its pursuit of the filmic primeval. "I work under the banner of primitivity," Maddin has proclaimed, and for the past two decades he has invoked the codes and forms of silent cinema and early talkies, of the film noirs and color-coded melodramas of the '40s and '50s, in his search for the cinematic sublime. Such Maddin classics as Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990), and Careful (1992) aim to look exhumed, their tales of amnesia, incest, death, and transfiguration decked out in low-rent expressionism and dime-store surrealism. Whether shot in high-contrast black and white or aggressively artificial color (as in the exquisitely tinctured Twilight of the Ice Nymphs [1997]), the films rely on such superannuated devices as the iris, the lap dissolve, and superimposition, and on the cheap, dreamy blur provided by Vaseline, store-bought fog, and fake snow. The radical anachronism of this style is wedded to empurpled dialogue, crackly, muffled sound tracks, and a playhouse aesthetic in costume and set design, in which everything looks handmade, outsize, and illogical, keyed to the (soap) operatic passions and masochistic emotions of Maddin's bushy-browed characters. Non sequiturs and convolutions proliferate in both narrative and style, until one is left adrift in an obscure, obsessive spectacle conjured up from disinterred art forms and private compulsions. (Though Maddin is frequently compared to David Lynch and the Quay Brothers, his funny, puzzling, and often overstretched first films have surprising affinities with the early work of German director Werner Schroeter.)
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Maddin insists that no matter how outlandish his films are, they are all in some way autobiographical. Born in 1956 in Winnipeg, he escaped the laconic, Lutheran culture of the prairie Icelanders by watching films in the local cinemas, on late-night television, and, later, at home after he discovered a trove of 16 mm silent films. This mock-Canuck Cinema Paradiso account of his childhood underscores the semi-apocryphal nature of Maddin's biography, whose formative events--his father's Willy Loman life and early death, his brother's suicide on the grave of his girlfriend, his own youth as a slacker surrounded by equally slothful male friends called "drones"--sometimes sound "heightened," to use a favorite Maddin locution. An artist who invents the traditions that inspire him, is influenced by films he hasn't seen, and makes versions of films that don't exist and whose stock-in-trade is imagined memories and fake nostalgia, Maddin often rebuffs analysis, leaving the true believer in the sorry role of chump or g ull. So it is with Cowards Bend the Knee, 2003, his first foray into installation art. Structured as a ten-chapter film projection viewed through sequential peepholes in a wall, it recounts the life of one Guy Maddin. The director claims, with disarming sincerity, that this lurid work about a botched abortion, a ferocious Electra complex, and transplanted murderous hands contains the "poetic truth" of his life story.
The following interview took place in Toronto as Maddin was beginning to edit the forty-four hours of footage he had shot for The Saddest Music in the World into a "penetrable" feature to be unveiled this fall on the festival circuit. Despite its stars (Rossellini, Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros), its "big" budget ($2.5 million), and its literary script, Music sounds, on paper, like another mad Maddin fantasia. The characters include Lady Port-Huntley, an amputee bar owner whose glass legs are filled with beer; an amnesiac nymphomaniac; and the motley bands (including a klezmer/flamenco/Afro orchestra) competing in a display of mass masochism to play--what else?--the saddest music in the world. Enjoying a brief moment of Maddin mania, with a director's spotlight at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January; the critically acclaimed installation at the Power Plant this spring; retrospectives of his films in Vienna, Toronto, and (next fall) Washington, DC; and the release of his superb ballet film, Dracula: Page s from a Virgin's Diary, at New York's Film Forum last month, the director nevertheless maintains his persona of immoderate mildness. Self-deprecating, boyishly nervous, Maddin punctuated his thoughts on cowardice, artistic influence, and the revival of melodrama with the occasional fusty Fauntleroy phrase, enough to remind us that, chez Maddin, artifice is all.
JAMES QUANDT: Isabella Rosseilini says that your films remind her of her father's, which is surprising since Roberto Rosseilini was the father of Italian Neorealism. But his films, though it's rarely remarked on, are full of artifice and melodrama--making them all the more moving. You've often said that "ultrarealism"--you cite Harmony Korine as an example--is a kind of falsity, or contrivance, and that such modes as fairy tales are often more emotionally resonant. What are your notions of melodrama and realism and how each gets at truth?
