Purple majesty: James Quandt talks with Guy Maddin - Interview

JQ: To situate you or your films, critics always invoke three or four directors or movements--you know, "He's Cocteau and Welles and Eisenstein and Bunuel, and German Expressionism and Heimatfilm and Surrealism..."

GM: All I've been doing is gathering up things, carrion basically, from a big scrap heap of old dead masters; it sure seems like these people weren't all that well known when I first started watching them. I've used these "vocabulary units" from the canon-writers and directors-and used their language to tell my stories.

JQ: Citation and homage are part of your arsenal, but I can never put my finger on where your allusions come from. They often seem elusive, indirect, dredged up from some half-remembered dream. "Is this Dreyer's Master of the House?" "Which Murnau film is this from?"

GM: Often, the references are to movies I haven't even seen or that were never even made.

JQ: Manufactured memory, then. But some references are explicit, like Night of the Hunter in Gimli; some are insiderish, private, like the figure of Lillom in Cowards, which refers to your own Aunt Lil but surely also to the films of that name by Fritz Lang and Frank Borzage--which stars Rose Hobart! You say you haven't seen some of the films you allude to. Your first film, The Dead Father [1986], sometimes reminds me of Ordet, but you hadn't seen any Dreyer films before you made it.

GM: No, I hadn't, but I read about the films. For Eye Like a Strange Balloon, I read about Abel Gance's La Roue and thought I'd never be able to see it, so I decided to make my own version. A lot of these are partially imagined or dreamt versions for me, too. Some of them I regurgitated ineptly, so maybe that's why they are hard to recognize. It pleases me that people can't put their finger on it; that's actually the most pleasurable compliment I can get.

JQ: In Lang's Liliom, the central character goes to heaven, where he's shown films, newsreels of his life, that reveal his transgressions, against women in particular. What newsreel of your life would they show you in heaven- would it be Cowards Bend the Knee?

GM: Pretty close, yeah. Although my life story would be something filmed in heaven by Andy Warhol, very long, sort of static. It would be called Nap.

James Quandt is senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto. (See Contributors.)

JAMES QUANDT is senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto, where he organized a Robert Bresson retrospective in 2001, which earned him a special citation from the National Society of Film Critics. Quandt's writing has featured in Montage and Cinemascope, and he edited the indispensable critical compendiums on the work of Bresson, Shohel Imamura, and Kon Ichikawa in conjunction with the cinematheques film series exploring those directors' work. Quandt cocurated the recent survey of the films of Nicholas Ray at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where his Alexander Sokurov retrospective appeared in 2002. In this issue, Quandt talks with Winnipegbased director Guy Maddin, whose installation Cowards Bend the Knee opened in March at Toronto's Power Plant. The subject of a traveling retrospective organized by Cinematheque Ontario, Maddin is now putting the finishing touches on his new film, The Saddest Music in the World, based on a script by Kazuo Ishiguro.

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