Conversations with Guy Maddin

The screening schedule for the retrospective is at the bottom of the page.

Download the PDF of the booklet

Guy Maddin’s cinema is absolutely unique. That is a claim that is made about a lot of filmmakers, but it is rarely true of them in the way that it is of Maddin. Maddin’s cinema is simultaneously archaic (with its revival of methods and subjects from old melodrama and from silent cinema) and avant-garde (with its sophisticated manipulation of degraded images and soundtracks, and its many disruptions of straightforward storytelling). It is simultaneously satirical of its old narrative forms and very attached to them emotionally, to the point of trying to get them to work in a very functional way. It is simultaneously materially impoverished and conceptually sophisticated. It is simultaneously comedy-sketch heartless and deeply felt. Shooting on 16mm and even 8mm film mostly in black-and-white, constructing elaborate historical settings in disused Winnipeg factories or grain elevators on 12-foot wide soundstages with paper-maché sets and props, using stylized post-synchronized voice recording of his and George Toles’s indescribable mannerist dialogue and voiceover narration, Maddin’s films have a very homemade quality, amateur perhaps in the best sense of the world (he describes himself as a “garage-band filmmaker”). The end result of all these highly idiosyncratic and clashing characteristics is a cinema that can baffle and annoy mainstream viewers (a common reaction: “that guy is crazy”) but has developed a coterie of admirers around the world that includes some of the most discerning film critics in North America and Europe. At the very least he is among English Canada’s most distinguished filmmakers, with a twenty-year track record and more international attention than anybody but David Cronenberg or Atom Egoyan. All of his feature films are available on DVD from indie distributors like Zeitgeist and Kino. Get them. Study them.

The following text is taken from a series of conversations I had with Guy Maddin on August 9-11, 2005, at his home in Winnipeg. All told, there were about 15 hours of interviews — obviously far too much for a publication of this kind. So the selection process has been rather brutal. It is with great regret that I have chosen to omit any of the conversations on general topics—and about Maddin’s films before The Heart of the World in 2000, on the grounds that Maddin’s work before that date is covered in Caelum Vatsndal's fine book-length interview Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2000). So there is nothing below on The Dead Father, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel, Careful, or Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, despite the fact that Maddin kindly trekked over this ground, in somewhat different fashion, again with me. What remains are interviews covering The Heart of the World, his award-winning short commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival, and the feature films he has made since 2000 up to but not including Brand Upon the Brain! (2006, not completed at the time of the interviews) — and this material too has been edited. I also much regret that I was unable to include material from my fascinating conversations at the same period with George Toles, Maddin’s friend and mentor, and the author or co-author of many of the stories and screenplays for his films. (Some of this material is available on my website at http://iceberg.arts.ualberta.ca/filmstudies.)

William Beard

A Metro Cinema Publication

Metro Cinema Publications are an occasional series of short booklets, published by Metro Cinema Society, usually to accompany a specific series of screenings. Previous publications include Denys Arcand: Three Documentaries (Jerry White, Editor), and The Animated Films of Priit Parn (Jerry White & Marsh Murphy, editors). Conversations with Guy Maddin, by William Beard, was published in June 2007, in association with a Maddin retrospective. We welcome proposals for future publications.

Screening Schedule