The story of Canadian surrealist filmmaker Guy Maddin is sure to be relatable to artists across the
globe.
It was the mid-1980s and Maddin was approaching his 30th birthday. One day, he came to the
realization that his job as a bank teller wasn’t fulfilling enough to stoke his creative juices and made the
decision to leave the stuffy office job to pursue his passion. Other artists may have made a similar leap in
their lives to paint watercolours, or write the next great novel.
For Maddin, his passion was film.
His decision turned out to be one that would pave the way for the now 55-year-old to become the most
successful filmmaker to come out of the province of Manitoba, and one of the most respected and celebrated to
come out of Canada.
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Maddin may not have four wins at the Cannes Film Festival like Armenian-Canadian
filmmaker Atom Egoyan or the box-office success of Torontonian David Cronenberg. But what Maddin does have is
the respect of the critics. People may not always agree with film critics but they are paid to know good
movies. So when they speak, we should probably listen. Let’s begin with renowned film critic and Pulitzer
Prize-winning Roger Ebert, whose reviews are syndicated to over 200 American newspapers.
Of Maddin’s nine feature-length films and his 29 shorts, My Winnipeg, an 80-minute homage to the
city of his birth, is arguably his most successful endeavour. Listing not only his 10 best films of the year
but his 10 best films of the decade (2000-2009), Ebert put My Winnipeg, released in 2007, in the
tenth spot, beating out, among others, Crash, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005, and
Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and 2.
“Guy Maddin’s films are like a silent movie dreaming it can speak,” Ebert wrote on his blog in late 2009. “No
frame of his work could be mistaken for anyone else’s.”
The surrealist film, a semi-autobiographical pseudo-documentary, received a 100 per cent rating amongst top
critics on the popular film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and a score of 84 out of 100 on the equally
popular review aggregator Metacritic. Publications such as Time magazine, The Austin
Chronicle and The Globe and Mail placed the film in their top 10 best movies of 2008.
Furthermore, the film won the award for Best Canadian Feature at the 2007 Toronto International Film
Festival.
The film, a black and white tribute to the city he calls his own, involved Maddin casting various actors to
play his family members, including an 86- year-old Ann Savage, who achieved cult stardom as a femme fatale in
various films in the 1940s, as his mother. Wanting to make the film as authentic as possible, Maddin even
managed to sublet part of his childhood home to shoot the movie, which tells the story of a young Maddin
trying to escape Winnipeg. Narrated by Maddin himself, his character is constantly being pulled back
emotionally to the city where he belongs.
Maddin is largely influenced by films from the silent era as well as the early sound era of the 1920s. Fritz
Lang, best known for his 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis, and Leni Riefenstahl, who
directed Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film shot at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, are just two
notable filmmakers who have inspired Maddin’s style.
But for the Winnipegger, there was one film that stood above all the others: Luis Buñuel’s 63-minute
1930 film entitled L’âge d’Or. For Maddin, it was this film that finally inspired him to pursue
filmmaking. The surrealist classic was directed by Buñuel, a Spanish filmmaker who co-wrote the script with
Salvador Dali. The film, which tells the tale of a love story set against the imposing shadow of the Roman
Catholic Church, was the crucial moment for Maddin. It turned out that Maddin saw some of himself in
Buñuel.
“I don’t even know if I would have even known how to begin making movies [had I not seen this film],” Maddin
told Robert K. Elder in the latter’s book The Film that Changed my Life. “[Buñuel] made moviemaking
seem necessary to me.”
He continued, “The excitement of a primitive movie made by people who weren’t slick and didn’t have any
experience or training and yet still told this great mad love story with so much froth excited me because it
made me realize I didn’t need to go to film school. I didn’t need a lot of practice. I even seemed to be the
same age that Buñuel was when he made the movie, and I just thought it was time to make a movie myself.”
Maddin’s first film was entitled The Dead Father. The 26-minute short is not widely known but it did
provide some elements that have consistently made their way into his filmography, including an affinity for
black and white films, the use of a singular light source and purposefully leaving in what traditional
filmmakers might label as mistakes, such as a piece of equipment making its way into a shot.
In terms of plotlines, the stories in Maddin’s films are indeed varied. In the 1988 Tales from the Gimli
Hospital, Maddin’s first feature-length film, two hospital patients suffering from smallpox compete for
the attention of the establishment’s female nurses.
The Saddest Music in the World, a 2003 feature film, tells the story of musicians descending on
Winnipeg during the Great Depression when a beer magnate announces a contest to create the saddest music in
the world.
And Brand Upon the Brain! is a 99-minute silent movie released in 2006 featuring mysterious islands,
teen detectives and a lighthouse orphanage.
His creative efforts, combining film techniques from bygone eras with a strong emphasis on post-modernity,
have prompted many fans and critics to label him as the Canadian David Lynch, the man responsible for
bringing us Twin Peaks and generally considered to be one of the giants of surrealist
filmmaking.
Maddin’s career path is evidence that a fierce imagination, a strong resolve and some basic equipment may be
all you need to succeed as an artist. Maddin was never formally educated in filmmaking, having studied
economics at the University of Winnipeg. But he learned to do what he does simply by watching films that he
enjoyed watching.
One can picture Maddin posing himself a simple question while watching the work of other cinematic legends:
Why not me? The next thing he knew, he went from being behind the counter at the bank to behind the lens, in
his case a wind-up 16 mm camera.
Because Maddin’s unique style of filmmaking could not be characterized as mainstream, he has earned the
respect and admiration of those in alternative film circles. So if watching car chases and explosions is
growing tiresome for you, Maddin’s throwback style of filmmaking may be a welcome change. The man has created
a personal and distinctive style that stands alone, something you can’t say about every director.
So there is little doubt that Maddin fans are anxiously awaiting Keyhole, his first feature film
since My Winnipeg. Starring Jason Patric, best known for his roles in The Lost Boys and
Sleepers, as Ulysses Pick, a deadbeat gangster dad, the film is currently in post-production.
It is clear that Maddin puts his heart and soul into every film he creates, whether it’s a short or a
feature-length production. For a filmography as personal and dear to his heart as his, Maddin’s unique brand
of filmmaking is without equal. In an interview with film journal Offscreen, he summed it up pretty
well.
“I am what I’m making, and I’m making what I am, and it feels pretty good.” •
Theatre photo by Hobvias Sudoneighm (above)
