Fiercely Primitive: Guy Maddin

10/8/04 to 10/31/04

  • Twilight of the Ice Nymphs|October 16

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Tales from the Gimli Hospital

    Friday, October 8 7pm
    Guy Maddin in Person. Set during a smallpox epidemic in turn-of-the-century Manitoba, Maddin's first feature is a stew of sexual jealousy, Icelandic sagas, visual poetry, and Buñuelian oddity. "Irresistible."-Film Comment. With short The Dead Father.
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  • West of Zanzibar

    Friday, October 8 9:20pm
    Introduced by Guy Maddin. A paralyzed vaudevillean rules a sleazy African ivory-poaching operation. "An orgy of revenge and retribution from Tod Browning and Lon Chaney-this may be the meanest of films from those two meanies."-Guy Maddin
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  • Cowards Bend the Knee

    Saturday, October 9 7pm
    Guy Maddin in Person. The Bay Area premiere of Maddin's latest, an autobiographical phantasmagoria involving ice hockey, beauty salons, femmes fatales, and severed hands. With celebrated short The Heart of the World.
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  • The Face Behind the Mask

    Saturday, October 9 8:45pm
    Introduced by Guy Maddin. "Peter Lorre has never exploited his sensitive face to more heartbreaking ends than in this tragic noir about an immigrant watchmaker who turns to a life of crime."-Guy Maddin
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  • The Saddest Music in the World

    Sunday, October 10 5:30pm
    Guy Maddin in Person. In 1933 Winnipeg, beer baroness Isabella Rossellini sponsors a contest to discover which nation has the most sorrowful song. "Unfailingly outlandish, hilarious, odd, wistful and genuinely, unappeasably disturbed."-The Nation
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  • La Ronde

    Sunday, October 10 7:50pm
    Introduced by Guy Maddin. An all-star French cast in Max Ophuls's elegant romantic roundelay, "a wistful tribute to syphilis."-Guy Maddin
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  • Leave Her to Heaven

    Wednesday, October 13 7:30pm
    "Veteran proto-Sirkian melodramatist extraordinaire John Stahl...creates this most propulsive tale of daddy-complex jealousy with the help of flawless snow-queen pulchra Gene Tierney and Academy Award–winning Technicolor cinematography by lens god Leon Shamroy (available for gawking in a newly minted print)."-Guy Maddin
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  • Archangel

    Friday, October 15 7:30pm
    An ambient amnesia seems to have settled over a village in northern Russia at the end of WWI. "Stylized, convoluted, visionary, Archangel is a deadpan whatzit of the highest order....At once tacky and accomplished, dynamic and fusty, willfully off-putting and bizarrely romantic."-Village Voice
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  • The Road to Glory

    Friday, October 15 9:20pm
    Directed by Howard Hawks from a Faulkner script, "a gorgeously mudded-and-mustard-gassed and outright oneiric war melodrama."-Guy Maddin
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  • Twilight of the Ice Nymphs

    Saturday, October 16 7pm
    "Maddin steps out of film history altogether with [this] luridly gold and lavender confection. Set in a wholly imagined NordiKitsch Arcadia, Twilight is something of a pastoral-the midnight sun frying the brains and libidos of a tormented sextet, including Shelley Duvall as a lovelorn ostrich farmer."-Village Voice
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  • Cowards Bend the Knee

    Saturday, October 16 8:50pm
    Maddin's latest is an autobiographical phantasmagoria involving ice hockey, beauty salons, femmes fatales, and severed hands. With short Odilon Redon.
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  • Seventh Heaven

    Sunday, October 17 5:30pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell as impoverished lovers who create their own heaven in Frank Borzage's exquisite melodrama. "The final staircase sequence should be as famous as any climax in film."-Guy Maddin
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  • Nightmare Alley

    Wednesday, October 20 7:30pm
    "Wildly unpredictable circus and penthouse noir with gorgeous scumbag Tyrone Power, at the height of his doomed charms....After viewing this picaresque and cathartic film, you will never again misuse the word 'geek.'"-Guy Maddin
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  • The Sign of the Cross

    Wednesday, October 27 7:30pm
    Cecil B. DeMille's fabulously decadent spectacle features Fredric March, Claudette Colbert, and Charles Laughton as "the most debauched Nero ever essayed on film....A must-see for anyone who's ever felt special in a toga."-Guy Maddin
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  • Careful

    Saturday, October 30 7pm
    Maddin's deadpan, demented pastiche of German mountain films and Wagnerian bombast is set in an imaginary Alpine village where repression rules-until an incestuous act unleashes a Freudian maelstrom. "Laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end."-Village Voice
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  • The Naked Jungle

    Saturday, October 30 9pm
    Charlton Heston is a pathologically jealous South American plantation owner plagued by armies of red ants. "I feel like [director Byron] Haskin has been reading my mail."-Guy Maddin
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  • Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

    Sunday, October 31 7pm
    Yes, you heard right, it's a ballet-but you've never seen a dance film like this before. Both deliriously silly and earnestly beautiful, steeped in the aesthetics of silent cinema, this Dracula is thoroughly, deliciously Maddin. With shorts It's a Wonderful Life and Sissy-Boy Slap-Party.
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