Guy Maddin in Person

Inspired by the aesthetics and melodramatic flourishes of silent cinema, Central European literature, and the desolation of his native Winnipeg, Guy Maddin has fashioned a career like no other. A Super 8–cranking modern-day Eisenstein, filming plots that would make John Waters blush, Maddin embraces a cinema in which expressionism, somnambulism, and lurid sexual neuroses unite-and conquer! We've chosen some of his best shorts for this program, with Maddin appearing in person to answer questions. My Dad Is 100 Years Old (Canada, 2005, 16 mins): Maddin's newest film is a collaboration with Isabella Rossellini to commemorate her filmmaker father Roberto's centennial. Rossellini plays all the parts-her father, herself, and peers such as Hitchcock, Chaplin, and Fellini-in this tribute to one of cinema's greatest directors and to cinema itself. Love-Chaunt Workbooks (Canada, 2004, 15 mins): In these short film blueprints from a lost Maddin feature, past loves and desires are polished to a fetishized gleam: fragmented, slowed to a crawl, and unusually lurid. In Fuse Boy, a janitor's lust becomes his nightmare. Women's bodies, or parts thereof, make up the fevered scrawls of other workbooks. The Heart of the World (Canada, 2000, 6 mins): Commissioned for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, this furiously edited, breathless parody of silent Russian cinema is a tribute to the very heart of the world: KINO! Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity (Canada, 1995, 5 mins): Asked by the BBC to create a short film inspired by a favorite artwork, Maddin chose a charcoal sketch by French Symbolist Odilon Redon. Emulating the smudgy charcoal look of the original, Maddin feverishly retells the story of Abel Gance's La Roue in five minutes (the original was eight hours). Plus more Maddin shorts to be added!