Cogitations on the Hockey Rink Aphorist
THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
Could someone please classify the films of Guy Maddin for me? I can't figure it out myself.
This would be especially helpful to me, as I am writing a book about him and need to know (in a shameless self-plug, I will add that the book is for the University of Illinois Press, and, assuming they like it, due out in late 2005).
Maddin is, as everyone knows, the Winnipeg-based director whose collected films comprise one of the oddest yet most interesting filmographies in the history of cinema. The son of a hockey team manager, he was raised in the morbid familiar hothouse atmosphere of an apartment above his grandmother's beauty shop. Graduating from college in Economics, he has co-written most of his films with George Toles, a college film professor whose book A HOUSE MADE OF LIGHT (Wayne State University Press, 363 pages $22.95, ISBN 0 8143 2946 2) is a delightful collection of essays on filmmakers from Hitchcock to Jean-Claude Lauzon, and concludes with a memoir about working with Maddin, which turns into a sensitive, almost delicate probing of the Maddin Mystery Box.
Imagine someone who decided to make movies, but instead of attending film school, sat down to figure out from scratch and on his own how they were made, as if the reality of nearly one hundred years of technological advances had not existed. That's how Maddin's films feel. The mainstream movie that comes closest in feel to Maddin's self-motivated, Martha Stewart approach is Francis Ford Coppola's version of DRACULA, in which the filmmaker refused the temptation of CGI and instead did as many special effects as he could "in camera." On the other hand, Maddin's films have also been likened to those of David Lynch and John Waters (comparisons which are both helpful and misleading).
The baroque titles of Maddin's films alone promise the complexity of a lace doily or a spider's web. He has four feature films to his credit. TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988) is a comical tale of romantic rivalry set in the Canadian Icelandic community at the turn of the century. ARCHANGEL (1990) is a World War I story that adopts the style of world cinema when the art form was transitioning from silence to sound.
CAREFUL (1992) is the one that makes puzzled auditors who momentarily can't place the director go, "Oh, yeah, that guy." It's an incest tale set in an alpine region where everyone must whisper in order to forestall avalanches. TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS (1997), arguably Maddin's least successful film — and surely the one neophytes to his work should not start with — is a TEMPEST-esque melodrama staring comedian Frank Gorshin, Altman-favorite Shelley Duvall, and art house babe Alice Krige.
In terms of the styles he has been raiding as templates for individual films, Maddin has been walking himself methodically through cinema's early history. At this pace, Maddin should be making films in the style of Hollywood's so called classical era by, say, 2020. Right now, he's up to the 1930s. His latest film, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, is set in Depression-era Winnipeg, and adopts some of the snappy dialogue and melodramatic situations of '30s Hollywood films — along with Soviet shock editing, studio-confined German Expressionist-inspired sets, and '70s novelty casting.
Maddin's work comes across like lost silent films that have somehow found their way into another cinematic realm. ARCHANGEL shows the influence of, among several hundred films and filmmakers, Pudovkin and other silent Soviet filmmakers. CAREFUL is obviously inspired by the German mystical mountain genre whose main expositor was Leni Riefenstahl. Scrape away the comically mannered surface of Maddin's films, however, and there are equally hilarious, truly outrageous narrative lines matched to rigorously intellectual meditations on movies, family life, relationships, art, and society.
Take CAREFUL, for example. Set in an Alps village called Tolzbad, it concerns three brothers, one mute and confined to a wheelchair, the other two attending butler school. While the ghost of his dead father haunts the mute brother, another is having erotic dreams about his mother and the third is driven to a duel by a complex interlocking series of events, secrets, and passions. Filmed entirely in a studio, like most of Maddin's films, CAREFUL is lush and hysterical. In its framing, editing, and sound production, CAREFUL could easily fool an inattentive viewer into thinking that he is indeed watching an artifact from Cinema's early days. But the film adds up to more than just Lynchian bizarreness for the sake of the bizarre. There is a real confrontation with the enveloping, suffocating nature of western family life and a cunning dissection of the disastrous effects many mother have on their sons.
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Which brings us to the present, and Maddin's latest film, SADDEST MUSIC. A hit at the Sundance film festival, the film is receiving much more mainstream critical attention than any of Maddin's previous films, including lavish (if skeptical) coverage in the NEW YORKER by Anthony Lane, accompanied by an Avedon portrait of the director. But along with SADDEST MUSIC comes two other recent Maddin's, DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN'S DIARY, his photographic record of a ballet set to Mahler by the Winnipeg dance company, and COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, an autobiographical film cum art installation. And all three of these works arrive after a long hiatus in Maddin's output.
Details are sketchy, but after TWILIGHT there was a long silence from Maddin. The experience of making that film was apparently unpleasant, and until SADDEST MUSIC filming TWILIGHT was the most like working on a regular commercial film in terms of its production style and demands. The experience appears to have worn him out and disillusioned him about filmmaking in general. Maddin seemed angry in interviews at the moviemaking process, and he "retreated" to short subjects often no longer than two minutes (SISSY BOY SLAP PARTY is one, available for viewing at the IFC website). Yet the almost-50-years-old Maddin roused himself from the Slough of Despond to tackle that daunting edifice Cinema three times in quick succession.
First he made a "comeback" with the brilliant, comical short film THE HEART OF THE WORLD, commissioned by the Toronto Film Festival. Since then he seems to have been working with all the pistons firing. Before that,
If I were to recommend one work to someone who had never seen a Maddin movie it would be SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD. The film concerns a contest held in Winnipeg by a beer magnate (what is the feminine form — magnatte?) who, aware that Prohibition in the States down below is almost over, wants to impress her brand on the American consciousness. The worldwide sad music contest is complicated by the fact that some of the people returning to Winnipeg to participate have complex relationships, either with her or with each other.
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The magnate is Lady Port-Huntly (a game Isabella Rossellini). The Lady lost both her legs in a bizarre auto accident involving Dr. Fyodor Kent (David Fox) and his son, Chester (Mark McKinney). Lady P-H appears to have been having an affair with both of them. In the present tense (or tension) Chester has reappeared in Canada after a failed foray into America, where he attempted to start a career as a Broadway producer. With him is the amnesiac Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros), a mysterious woman not disinclined to provide hand jobs at the merest invitation. Fyodor, by contrast, is now a bus driver. Also returning to perform in the contest is Roderick Kent (Ross McMillan), now living abroad under the guise of a Serbian cellist (everyone else in the world knows him as Gavrillo the Great, festooned in an elaborate head dress). Suffice it to say that all the family members hate each other.
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It is important to note that most of this is funny. It's comical to see the mutually loathing Roderick and Chester, and their imploring father Fyodor bump into each other in Fyodor's cramped hovel. The buffoonery of the contest announcers invokes BEST IN SHOW. The allusions are gently amusing: the hypersensitive Roderick reminds us of Usher in his house. The contrasting musical brothers harks back to FIVE EASY PIECES. And the final conflagration offers happy memories of HANOVER SQUARE. But most of the humor is not guffaw-inducing. The film is more likely to inspire something akin to delight, a swooning love for the loony residents of this cockeyed caravan.
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But beneath the humor is something greater than seriousness, or even tragedy. As in many of Maddin's films, the "real" story below the rococo hysteria is about the sexual competition among family members for the same woman. Chester and Dad vie for Lady P.; Roderick and Chester compete (unknowingly) for someone else. Maddin posits a world so terrifying, so cruel to innocent lovers than massive amnesia is the only viable condition for continued living.
Maddin describes himself as a primitivist, but I'm not sure he means that the same way the term is understood in art history. He is not a Grandma Moses showing an intuitive affiliation with the sweeping, crowded vistas of Bruegel, or a Picasso inserting African tribal masks into his work. And though it is close, his is not folk art, localized art made from materials at hand and lacking surface complexity. Nor is he a Miro, Paul Klee, or Chagall, purposely embracing childlike rendering. Maddin may mean that he practices "outsider art." Maddin's craft is more like that of Henry Darger, the isolated Chicago janitor who died and left behind some 150 water colors of eerie and childlike beauty, ornate works pored over with manic attention. Maddin has often been compared to Lynch and others. But the film that is most like Maddin's work is Jim Blashfield's ethereal yet industrial THE MID-TORSO OF INEZ.
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Maddin is not for everyone; or, to put it another way, he may be more of an acquired taste, demanding that his connoisseurs have a thorough knowledge of silent cinema, a grounding in European art films of the pre-war era, and in the case of this movie, a love of Tin Pan Alley. If Ebert and Roeper are any yardstick, viewers of SADDEST MUSIC will be divided between those who loved its satirically sincere charms and those who find the film boring and repetitious. This second group cannot imagine what others are seeing in his films. But those beguiled by Maddin's rococo style will want to immerse themselves in all things Maddin.
Fortunately, at least three of Maddin's earlier films are available on DVD. TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL and CAREFUL can be had from Kino Video on separate discs, and each comes festooned with important extras. GIMLI bears an audio commentary track from Maddin along with two of his early, hard-to-find shorts. CAREFUL has a yak track by both Maddin and writer Toles, and a very good hour-long documentary about Maddin called WAITING FOR TWILIGHT, made while the disheartened Maddin was making ICE NYMPHS. Each disc has a solid transfer supervised by Maddin. ICE NYMPHS, ARCHANGEL, and the marvelous short THE HEART OF THE WORLD, are also available on one disc from Zeitgeist.
If these DVDs aren't enough to quench the Maddin thirst, there's also an interview book with him called KINO DELIRIUM, by Caelum Vatnsdal (Arbeiter Ring, 175 pages, $17.95, ISBN 1 894037 11 1). Among its many amusements is a tour through Maddin's eclectic videotape collection (on TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN, he says, "I ordered it off the Internet, and when it came two days later I fast-forwarded though the whole movie to find this scene [he remember from in his youth]. It wasn’t anywhere to be found … So here. You take it").
Maddin has had some dedicated supporters at publications such as THE NATION, THE VILLAGE VOICE, and FILM COMMENT, the last two of which also publish his occasional films reviews. In fact, Maddin is a rather prolific writer, and his various musings have been gathered together into a book called FROM THE ATELIER TOVAR: SELECTED WRITINGS (Coach House, $19.95, ISBN 1 55245 131 3), which includes reviews, profiles, and a diary. In his depth of knowledge, his insight, and his lush writing style, Maddin is unofficially one of the culture's best living movie reviewers.
There is also a documentary about the making of SADDEST MUSIC, called TEARDROPS IN THE SNOW: THE MAKING OF THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD BY Matt Holm (no relation), which I hope will show up on the DVD, and Maddin kept a diary of the film's making that has been serialized in the VILLAGE VOICE. Here's hoping that Maddin makes more movies, and then writes about them. The Cinema need more rigorous weirdness, not less.
NEXT TIME: THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, two weeks hence.
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