I remember the first time I saw Guy Maddin’s work. It was in a college class called Filmmaking Frame by Frame, which was dedicated to animation and optical printing. One student did a short presentation on Maddin and showed scenes from Careful (1992). I was awestruck, and particularly fascinated because I was just learning to use an optical printer at the time, something I would become somewhat infatuated with in my years at Hampshire College. With Careful, I was amazed by the simple yet beautiful optical effects, along with the intense color used throughout. The over the top, somewhat ridiculous performances, and fixation on silent era aesthetics were extremely charming. It made me want to watch German mountain films to see what it was playing on, but more so, it made me want to watch all of silent cinema. It prompted questions in my head--what kind of cinematic inventions have already disappeared? Was color film stock ever used in the silent era? How did that era present sexual material, if at all? At the time, the last question was more abstract, more of a pondering on silents, and only in more recent years have I found the words to articulate these interests.
After Careful I watched Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) and Archangel (1990). At some point soon after I found a copy of Tales from The Gimli Hospital (1988) somewhere as well. I was hooked on Maddin, but why though? He is a filmmaker’s filmmaker. Cinema history is basically the subject matter of his work more than any narrative story or person being portrayed. His films are influenced by his real life, but they are also influenced by characters, actions, costumes, and tropes seen in earlier films. When watching a Guy Maddin film it is like a double escape--being able to escape reality for an hour or two, and then also escape from the conventional precision of mainstream industry movies. It isn’t satire, per se, or pastiche… perhaps there is some irony involved. Maddin can’t help but to show the audience that he knows he is making a film. Any action in it is simultaneously critiquing or bringing attention to all of the similar actions in every film made previously. The joyous and unwavering thesis of his short film The Heart of the World (2000) is that cinema can save us all. The narratives of Maddin’s films are usually delivered through dialogue, but also the artifice with which the words are delivered. The costumes bring attention to their handmade qualities, but also the occasional absurdity of how fashion worked, both a century ago and now. The films are not trying to show a new, seamless way of experiencing images, but call attention to the sometimes cumbersome technology that allowed cinema to flourish in the past. It creates a nostalgia for events and eras that we have never experienced. The reason cinefiles love Maddin’s films so much is because we are watching movies made by someone who also has a profound love of cinema.
The second thing that attracted me to Maddin’s cinema is the approach it takes to sexuality, and how cinema presents sexual material. Whether the films present sexual situations or just imply them beneath the surface, the moonbeams that shine through are preoccupied with transgression, whether it be queerness, or some kind of shadowy fetishism. Maddin’s approach to sexuality is innocent yet mischievous, and always potentially confessional. In Careful we see the incestuous desire a son has for his mother, but unlike other films with that subject matter, it encourages the audience to join in the excitement. The film is not judgemental of this deviance, instead showing it in an amoral way. In Archangel, when Kyle McCulloch’s Lieutenant Boles beats the young boy Geza, we are met with a play on sadomasochism that is clearly aware of itself, and indicating that these tropes have been ingrained in cinema and visual culture for years. In his book Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin, film historian William Beard writes of the scene: “...the socialized submission of the child who begs to assume his position as the beaten malefactor, seems to emphasize that the film is conducting a savage critique of this earlier ideology.” (65) Maddin shows us how ridiculous patriarchal notions are, and how this kind of society shapes the perversion that grows out of it afterwards. Meanwhile, the implied homosexuality starts off as somewhat humorous side notes in Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Careful, only to come back as a queer narrative in Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) By then, the filmmaker is clearly taking on transgender themes and how thoughts and desires pertaining to this exist in our minds as children. Maddin’s work is refreshing in that there is little moralism in Brand Upon the Brain!, just the presentation of a story that feels extremely personal.
Maddin’s films show that he has an understanding of how psychoanalysis works, and examining them in context to Sigmund Freud’s writing reveals the iceberg below the surface. Regarding repression, Freud writes, “It proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression, which when they are translated and presented to the neurotic are not only bound to seem alien to him, but frighten him by giving him the picture of an extraordinary and dangerous strength of instinct. This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an inhibited development in phantasy and of the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction.” (570-1) Maddin’s stories come out of this darkness, embodying the return of the repressed, which had been held back by the shame-wielding, polite Canadian society. Even “normal” sexuality is looked down upon with contempt, which manifests either in psychic cataracts or explosions of desire. Archangel is about Lieutenant John Boles, a Canadian soldier in Russia at the end of World War I, who is experiencing amnesia due to the shock of his lover Iris’ death. We soon learn that many of the characters are experiencing their own kinds of forgetfulness. Beard writes, “Amnesia seems to be Maddin’s code word for an expressionist mental state that is ruled more directly by unconscious desires and fears, and distracted less by rationality and ‘daylight’ perception, than the norm.” (63) The characters in Archangel and throughout the filmmaker’s oeuvre exist in a twilight of repression, never getting what they want, or achieving it at their peril.
A couple of years later in Careful, the story takes place in the snowy mountain village of Tolesbad, where everyone must whisper for fear of causing an avalanche. Even expressions of strong emotion are enough to rupture the sheets of snow--psychogeography indeed. Tolesbad is a physical world that represses its inhabitants just as much as shame caused by a highly moral society. This leads to tortured and sometimes horrific actions which spiral into injury and suicide. We should keep in mind that this all takes place in a framework of silent film aesthetics, creating a distinctive clash of visual styles and meaning. Beard writes, “The violence is so extreme, and usually presented in such a low-tech manner, that its referentiality to cheap horror movies is hard to miss, while the sexual transgressions may likewise be seen as escalations in explicitness of elements already present in traditional melodrama… Nudity and explicit sexual deviancies are always markers that the old forms of melodrama and silent film that Maddin paraphrases are being discordantly updated.” (10) This could be said about all of the films I am focusing on this month.
Over the years I have occasionally noticed other films that have similar aesthetics to Maddin’s cinema. This combines cheap filmmaking, adoration of cinema history, attention to the mechanics of the medium, and strange sexuality. Perhaps these filmmakers are influenced by each other, perhaps not. For example E Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1989), relies on silent aesthetics, severe degradation of the image, and sexual shock tactics. There is also Maria Beatty’s Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926 (2004), of which there is very little writing on, perhaps because of its specific designation as an erotic film. In it, we see the decadence of 1920’s Weimar culture, along with drug use, dominance, and submission. The most recent and perhaps strongest comparison to Maddin’s work is that of Bertrand Mandico, with his list of fantastic shorts and the features The Wild Boys (2017) and After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (2021). Mandico’s films also show a clear influence from people like William S Burroughs and Walerian Borowczyk, going full force into the lands of queerness that Maddin mostly just dipped his toes into. Mandico’s films are unapologetic and powerful in their fantastic candor. Aside from that, Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century (2019) is a recent Canadian picture that basically just feels like a Guy Maddin film. It doesn't have the frenetic editing style that his recent work displays, but its focus on history, fetishism/queerness, and beloved technicolor film tropes, make me wonder what Rankin’s relationship to Maddin is.
All of these makers associate early cinema with some kind of torrid perversion. It almost makes you wonder if the invention and proliferation of film is perverse in and of itself. As Freud says, “in scopophilia and exhbitionism the eye corresponds to an erotogenic zone.” (257) While movie-going is generally understood to be an innocent and acceptable act, it also has the potential for deviance. Otherwise, there would be no rating system. Some of this cinema-related sexuality is now more acceptable, but much of it is still considered kinky or taboo. Near the end of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, two men fight ritualistically--even fetishistically--grabbing each other’s asses while wrestling, so aggressively that they rip through the pants, only to pass out, face to face in a kiss. Careful has a complex and colorful plot involving incest. Coward Bend the Knee (2003) eroticizes hockey and so much more. In Brand Upon the Brain!, perhaps Maddin’s most mature work, the plot hinges on a young woman disguising herself as a man in order to seduce the girl she is attracted to.
Meanwhile, Merhige’s Begotten opens with an excruciatingly long, painful-to-watch scene in which a bound man slashes his body with a straight razor. Beatty’s Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926 opens with a woman injecting something into her leg, only to reveal her pierced genetalia slightly out of focus in the background. The Wild Boys casts a group of adult women to play the titular boys. Their journey begins with the sadistic rape of their teacher, only to continue on with a ship captain securing them in bondage. Once they get to a mysterious island in which plant life seems to ejaculate all over the place, we are introduced to a woman who becomes a man. All of these stories are told by way of heavy film grain, degradation of the image, vaseline covered lenses, and raw, filtered audio. But why though?
None of these films even remotely try to represent reality. They are films about films, in love with the history of the medium, both narratively and technologically. They exist in an insulated world that comments on how we view cinema. They are about fetishization of the moving image in displays of supreme scopophilia. Perhaps these movies do what films of the 1920s were afraid or unable to do because of industry censorship. Of course, there are numerous displays of queerness in silent cinema, from the fantastic Italian film Filibus (1915), about a gender bending supervillain, to the woman/woman dance scene between Louise Brooks and Alice Roberts in Pandora’s Box (1928). But there is something different about these newer films in question here. Writing about Maddin, Beards words can sometimes be applied to the other filmmakers mentioned above: “Maddin’s confections are attempts not to construct a historical past, and not even to construct a parody of a historical past, but rather to invent something unique--a fantasy on themes from the historical past.” (65) The films embody a kind of psychosexual nostalgia, frozen in celluloid.
Beard, William. Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1989.