Purple majesty: James Quandt talks with Guy Maddin - Interview

ArtForum, June, 2003 by James Quandt

JQ: Curators and critics anguish over how to present installation work that is durational or narrative so that viewers actually attend to it. Ironically, Cowards is your most linear and structured story, so, perversely, it has to be seen sequentially. In Rotterdam, somebody was always at holes one or three or eight, and if I didn't elbow Dutch people aside, I couldn't see it in order. It's a very provocative and evocative title, as "bending the knee" has associations with supplication, contrition, praying, begging, even blow jobs.

GM: I wanted them to make the holes large, cocksize, so they would at least be eye friendly.

JQ: Somewhere between an iris shot and a glory hole. The title and the way the installation forces one to crouch a little to see into the peepholes implicates the audience as cowards. You're a coward, I'm a coward... but cowardice is a tricky idea.

GM: It just feels like the male state of mind somehow. In the battles of the heart, men are cowards. 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 lowly little sperm trying to get at the egg--maybe I'm getting into CREMASTER territory here!--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. It feels cathartic to just say, "I'm a coward" and to let you peep at me. It's an illicit, lurid, horrible, shameful confession, but I'll make it. It feels good to tell the truth, and people with really tough eyeballs can check it out. Much to my surprise, the thing came out in one piece, in five effortless days of shooting, just burning through film on a Super-8 camera, as a wildly elliptical but cohesive melodrama full of feverish hyperbole.

JQ: Do you feel any affinity with Joseph Cornell? I often think of your films as little nostalgia boxes, in which you put your private mementos, your trinkets and obsessions, dreams and desires all lovingly arranged.

GM: My first encounter with Cornell was his movie Rose Hobart, with the actress he fetishized. He took the much derided jungle adventure melodrama East of Borneo, which I love, and he tore out scenes like a boy tears out pictures of his favorite actress and puts them on his bedroom wall. There's a joyous sloppiness to the way he assembles it that is intoxicating. I like the way the records of the Brazilian sambas that are played with the images are so random. It reminded me of the way Bunel DJed his own screenings of Un Chien Andalou and roughly scored L 'Age d'or with a bit or Beethoven here, some tangos there. That's the banner I wanted to work under. I knew I would never be a neat and tidy craftsman. It's a thrill to be a primitivist.

JQ: Your love of the primitive seems to have no bounds--you collect 78s, for instance--and words like "musty" and "fusty" and "curio" are not pejorative to you. Ken Jacobs said what seems to be a paradox: "Advanced fllmmaking leads to Muybridge." You resurrect a lot of tropes of early cinema.