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University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Spring 2011 REVIEW ESSAY: PACKING, UNPACKING, AND REPACKING THE CINEMA OF GUY MADDIN George Melnyk University of Calgary Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the American Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, and the United States History Commons Melnyk, George, "REVIEW ESSAY: PACKING, UNPACKING, AND REPACKING THE CINEMA OF GUY MADDIN" (2011). Great Plains Quarterly. 2683. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2683 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. REVIEW ESSAY Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin. Edited by David Church. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009. xiii + 280 pp. Grayscale photography section, notes, filmography, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper. Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin. By William Beard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. xii + 471 pp. Photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 cloth, $37.95 paper. Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg." By Darren Wershler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 145 pp. Photographs, production credits, notes, bibliography. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. My WinniPeg. By Guy Maddin. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2009. 191 pp. Photographs, film script, essays, interview, filmography, miscellanea. $27.95 paper. PACKING, UNPACKING, AND REPACKING THE CINEMA OF GUY MADDIN Guy Maddin is Canada's most unusual film­ director, allowed him to create a genuinely maker. He also happens to have a global cult unique body of work. The recent spate of aca­ following for his retro b&w films. His stature demic studies on Maddin that are discussed as a cult filmmaker began almost a quarter of here (plus his own text on his 2007 film My a century ago, when his sophomore film, Tales WinniPeg) points to the complementary nature from the Gimli Hospital (1988), was launched at of word and image in his work. He has not only a midnight screening in New York that drew created a cinematic legacy distinct from that audiences for a year. A Winnipegger by birth, of any other filmmaker in the world, but he he has become that city's most famous film­ has also created a literary footprint that tracks maker and one of the few Canadian film direc­ that legacy and coyly de constructs it. Truth, tors with an international following. His New for Maddin, whether it be in film or in text, is York debut led to a regular stint in the 1990s as a marvellous fantasy that his devout followers a film commentator in The Village Voice, which have enjoyed for two decades. in turn led to a literary career of sorts. He went He is known for the uncanny re-creation on to publish From the Atelier Tovar: Selected of archaic modes of film from the period of Writings (2003), a combination of his "jour­ silent and semisilent black-and-white cinema. nals" and assorted other pieces, and Cowards Drawing on the film traditions of the 1920s and Bend the Knee (2003), which combined the 1930s, both American and European, he has "script" from the film of the same name with forged an anachronistic cinematic style that essays on him and an interview with him. He infuses an outdated aesthetics and lost rhetori­ repeated the Cowards format with My WinniPeg cal modes with a post modern sensibility echo­ (the book) in 2009. ing the historical evolution of his native city. His willingness to write personally on his When grain was king, Winnipeg was Canada's films and the filmmaking process makes him third largest city and an economic powerhouse. a special case of Canadian auteurism. It also Today it is an urban Canadian backwater whose suggests that control of both visual and textual glory has long faded. This historic rise and fall elements of a film, which define the auteur parallels Maddin's own efforts at resurrecting 149 150 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SPRING 2011 the filmic glory and discourse of the past in a how this long-term collaboration, comparable to mood of extreme nostalgia. He recreates exag­ that of the Coen brothers, has worked creatively. gerated visual tones and narrative excesses Masterson addresses an important issue when reminiscent of the first thirty years of cinema he tries to decipher how much of a film is Toles's history. For most audiences these long-gone subconscious and how much is Maddin's. While rhetorical devices are difficult to decipher. there is no definitive answer, it is clear that the Maddin had been an auteur feature film­ imaginations of these two men are so closely maker for over a decade before academic intertwined that the perennial themes of sibling criticism of his films began to appear in rivalry that permeate the plots of Maddin's films 1999, and not until this century has this are rooted in a dual autobiographical source. criticism expanded into a significant body. George Toles addresses the issue in his own con­ The four recent books on and by Maddin are tribution, "From Archangel to Mondragora in an acknowledgment of how important his art Your Own Back Yard: Collaborating with Guy has become to Canadian cinematic identity. Maddin," in which he discusses the method of For a quick taste of Maddin's cinematic oeuvre their collaboration. one should first turn to Playing with Memories: Saige Walton (University of Melbourne) Essays on Guy Maddin, edited by the youth­ provides a vital interpretative tool in her study ful David Church, a PhD student at Indiana of two of Maddin's autobiographical films: University, who has compiled the first-ever Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand collection of scholarly writings on various Upon the Brain (2006). Her theory of the films' Maddin films. He brings together fifteen essays baroque qualities and their deixis (orienta­ published between 1999 and 2009 that provide tional features of language) provides some of both an overview of Maddin's work as well as the book's best insights. She concludes that detailed studies of specific films. There was an "Maddin reignites the presentational sensual­ earlier collection by Caelum Vatnsdal (Kino ity of the baroque by privileging the expressive Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin, 2000) that surface of body and film through gesture and offered Maddin's own take on his films rather self-conscious display" (204). Anyone who has than a critical analysis. ever tried to comprehend the archaic acting Church's volume offers insights by scholars styles, film lighting, and "debased" sound and from the United States, Canada, and Australia, image quality that Maddin privileges will be making it an international collection. That grateful for her explanation. so many American film scholars have con­ A complementary theoretical approach tributed to the book is indicative of Maddin's is offered by William Beard (University of stature in contemporary filmmaking. Among Alberta) in his essay on the melodramatic the book's highlights are Donald Masterson's aspects of Maddin's work. Among the descrip­ "My Brother's Keeper: Fraternal Relations in tors Beard draws on to characterize Maddin's the Films of Guy Maddin and George Toles," melodrama are "childlike naivete" (84), Saige Walton's "Hit with a Wrecking Ball, "retro-kitsch" (87), "reckless hyperbole" (89), Tickled with a Feather: Gesture, Deixis, and and "pastiche of impossible earlier idealisms" the Baroque Cinema of Guy Maddin," and Bill (92). Beard's 2005 essay seeks to delve into the Beard's "Maddin and Melodrama." fundamental wellsprings of the Maddin style. Masterson's contribution is important because The essay can be read as a precursor to Beard's it highlights the centrality of the collabora­ major work on the filmmaker, Into the Past: The tion between Guy Maddin and George Toles, Cinema of Guy Maddin. To use a culinary meta­ a professor of film studies at the University of phor, one might think of Church's Playing with Manitoba, in the creation of Maddin's body of Memories as a selection of appetizers or tapas, work. Toles has received cowriting credit on a teasing the diner's appetite through a variety number of Maddin's films, and Masterson shows of tempting, but small, dishes, while Into the REVIEW ESSAY 151 Past is the grand entree on which the chef has least Maddin's public version of that psyche as expanded a great deal of thought and time. In displayed in his writings and pronouncements. terms of Maddin's work, Beard is the master Beard's methodology is useful in that it tries to chef and Into the Past his Piece de resistance. grow organically out of the subject matter and Beard had already distinguished himself characters of the films themselves. He then with an earlier magnum opus on the Canadian links them to the filmmaker's own traumatic filmmaker David Cronenberg, which estab­ family history. lished a whole new benchmark for studies of a A good example of Beard's approach is single Canadian director. So when he turned his discussion of the 2003 film Cowards Bend his attention to Guy Maddin, expectations the Knee, which purports to provide autobio­ were high. Fortunately, he did not disappoint. graphical insight into one Guy Maddin. Beard Like an intrepid Boswell he has delved into describes the film as having a "surreal, fertile every nook and cranny of Maddin's films, the overprinting of past and present . Oedipal filmmaker's mysterious life, and the available confrontations with the father's giant sexual critical material.

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