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PROVINCETOWN GUIDE
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| DIRECTORY |
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Provincetown :: Friday, February 10th 2012
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The Myths of Maddin
Filmmaker on the Edge for 2009
By Rebecca M. Alvin of Provincetown Magazine
June 17th, 2009
The streets were abuzz after last year’s Provincetown International Film Festival. Sure, it was fun to see Quentin Tarantino and Gael Garcia Bernal around town, but the talk was about an obscure little film by Guy Maddin called My Winnipeg that seemed to make everyone’s informal “best of the festival” list. This year, the festival has tapped Mr. Maddin for its annual Filmmaker on the Edge Award, which includes a screening of another Maddin film, The Saddest Music in the World, and a live discussion moderated by John Waters.
| “I’m not a household name yet, but you know [My Winnipeg] really helped me a lot. It really helped spread the tiny trace elements of gospel about me. I could feel my celebrity quotient ratcheting up from an H to a G or something.'' |
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“I’m not a household name yet, but you know [My Winnipeg] really helped me a lot. It really helped spread the tiny trace elements of gospel about me. I could feel my celebrity quotient ratcheting up from an H to a G or something,” he says with surprise.
The film is very specifically about Winnipeg, a place Maddin says is “even an obscure city to most Canadians,” and yet it seemed to strike a chord with everyone in the audience. Maddin’s intermingling of autobiography, fact, and mythology create an astounding portrait of a mysterious place. A field of horse heads frozen into the icy landscape, remnants of Maddin’s mythology, as explained in his dramatic narration; the filmmaker’s statement early in the film that he cannot escape the town where he was born and raised, but “what if I film my way out?” These are the sounds and images that stick.
His conceptions of truth versus fact, fiction versus myth call to mind the philosophy of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who has actively promoted the idea of “ecstatic truth” in documentaries – a truth that goes beyond facts and gets to the essence, the truth of a matter, even if reconstructions are used in the process. For Maddin, the truth inside myths is intriguing.
“There’s something in the heightening and uninhibiting and erasures that happen when someone is mythologized or something is mythologized, and America’s just got such a great matrix of mythology. You can’t even tell what really happened, which people really existed - Johhny Appleseed, Daniel Boone, Paul Bunyan, you know,” he explains. “My goal is that by the time Winnpeggers themselves have seen the movie a few times or read the companion book, which I just released, they’ll forget what city they really live in and go by the city of this movie.”
Maddin’s work echoes a number of earlier film traditions and filmmakers. His use of small gauge film formats (16 mm and Super 8, for example), black-and-white, and what appears to be a single light source creates a high-contrast, grainy look that evokes the silent era of cinema, German Expressionism in particular. But the work also references more modern experimental filmmakers ranging from George Kuchar’s camp sensibilities to David Lynch’s neo-surrealist explorations of the human psyche.
“Eraserhead I saw when I was just starting to pick up a camera for the first time. What young man with a camera in his hand could be unaffected by Eraserhead?... It did point me in a direction.”
Clearly, a love of film itself is apparent. But Maddin didn’t actually become a filmmaker until he was in his thirties. He found his calling while hanging around other Winnipeg friends who were filmmakers. It seems to have rubbed off on him and he made his first film The Dead Father in 1986.
He went on to make a number of films, more recently bringing his family into the spotlight with his semi-autobiographical works. Asked about the troubles of dealing with his own family on film, Maddin says, “Well, it’s easier in films than in real life. In real life they have rebuttals and all that.”
He says it just started with putting himself out there in the films and then that naturally led to “outing” his family in subsequent projects.
“It was pretty insensitive and self-indulgent, and I promised I wouldn’t do it again. Something happens when you hold a camera, though; you just get so selfish and self-centered, it’s unbelievable,” he confesses.
While the film medium has been a key element in Maddin’s work, he says he’s ready for digital video. In fact, a good portion of My Winnipeg was originally shot on video, before he went back to doing it on film at the last second.
“I just realized there’s something in the writing in this movie that’s more film emulsion than pixels. So I projected [the video] onto my fridge and re-shot it on film.”
The result is a soft, ethereal look that is neither pure film nor plain video. He will continue to use film, but he will also work in digital video – he just sees them as two different things, appropriate for two different kinds of movies. For his next project, he has been given a grant to create an “Internet interactive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure labyrinth,” due out next year.
Maddin, who has never been to Provincetown, says he can see the mythology of the town playing out in his mind already. “I even have a pre-disposition about Provincetown that will probably be in some kind of pleasant struggle with the real place once I get there. And I’ll probably never really fully free myself from the preconception. So, Provincetown for me will be this odd hybrid of what I think it should be and what it really is.”
Guy Maddin will receive the Filmmaker on the Edge Award and participate in an interview with John Waters on Saturday, June 20th at the Provincetown International Film Festival Awards Ceremony, 6 p.m. at the Provincetown Theater. “The Saddest Music in the World” will show at the Whalers Wharf Cinema on Saturday, June 20th at 11:30 a.m., preceded by Maddin’s 2009 short film “Glorious.” For tickets and information call 508.487.FILM or visit www.ptownfilmfest.org. for mor articles or info, visit Provincetownmagazine.net.
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