playing with memories: essays on guy maddin

Google Books.
Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg(2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin's work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.

Pevere’s selection as forewordsmith is no doubt a nod to his early role in the mythologisation of Maddin’s career (something the filmmaker assuredly no longer needs any help with), a fact that is revealed in the book’s third chapter, written by Pevere. In “Guy Maddin: True to Form”, it emerges that Pevere was party to the Toronto International Film Festival’s acceptance into its program of Maddin’s filmmaking debut The Dead Father (1986), and its rejection of his debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), a rejection which ultimately served Maddin’s self-mythologisation and promotion rather well.

In “Thoroughly Modern Maddin”, David L. Pike argues that Maddin is a “garage” (Church, p. 97) or “retro-modernist” (Church, p. 116), his vampiric obsession with cinematic modernism’s glory days – even commencing his analysis with a quote from Maddin that opens “I do feel a bit like Dracula in Winnipeg” (Church, p. 96) – suggesting a unique relationship between Hollywood and Canadian cinema. It also distinguishes Maddin from such varied fellow pasticheurs as Todd Haynes or Quentin Tarantino.

From Senses of Cinema, Cerise Howard, March 18 2012

Playing with Memories

Church’s introduction to Playing with Memories begins with a quote from Maddin’s unfilmed treatment The Child Without Qualities, an ur-text rich in autobiography that is returned to regularly in both books. This isn’t the last we hear from it in this essay either: “Sometimes he intentionally separated himself from his favourite toys,and played with the memories of them. And then played with the memories of the memories. There were inexhaustible powers of renewal within these two homes for the CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES.” (Church, p. 1)(2)

There is an explicit organisational principle expounded in Church’s book. As he explains: “In a nod to the collage-like qualities of Maddin’s movies, both new and previously published essays appear […], sketching various lines of exploration that form a detailed image of his oeuvre and the responses it has garnered” (Church, p. 17).

Reflecting the richly inter- and extra-textual nature of Maddin’s cinema, many of the pieces in Playing with Memories cite the same sources – certain ones, like The Child Without Qualities, several times over. Notably, they also regularly reference one another, making for a richly dialogical exploration of Maddin’s cinema, if one uniformly originating from a point of admiration. (Maddin certainly has his detractors, some even venomous, and it might have been interesting, if indecorous, to grant some of them a say in this volume.)

Playing with Memories opens with a foreword by Geoff Pevere, who asserts that “These days, on those rare occasions when people talk about ‘the Canadian cinema’, they cannot help but talk about Guy Maddin” (Church, p. xii). He muses over the nature of Maddin’s Canadianness, situating it – in what I consider a stretch – in Maddin’s “sheer beaverishness” (Church, p. xii) – the beaver being a Canadian national emblem. His claim then is that Maddin’s cinema is Canadian by simple dint of his utter bloody-mindedness, in his obstinacy in persisting with what is often a most uncommercial vision.

Pevere’s piece is the oldest in the book – Careful (1992) was Maddin’s newest release at the time – but he already nails a key element of the director’s cinema: “Maddin’s work, if nothing else, is a series of elements locked, much like the clumsy duels he loves, in the form of head-butting, dialectical opposition” (Church, p. 50). Words to this effect also come up time and again in other contributors’ essays.

In his 2002 essay, “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful”, Will Straw gives prominence to Don Gillmor’s observation that Maddin, in his trajectory from Tales from the Gimli Hospital, via 1990’s Archangel, through to his third feature Careful, has replicated the course of cinema’s early history:

Maddin’s oeuvre, viewed in sequence, is like the first term of a film-history course, beginning in the silent-film era: spare, unsynched dialogue, odd movements, black-and-white stock, claustrophobic sets […]. WithCareful we are moving into the 1930s, using the two-strip Technicolor of Maddin’s childhood, colour that didn’t look real. Everything looked like a movie. (Church, p. 61) (3)

But Straw, indebted to Keir Keightley (4), notes that in recuperating long abandoned genres and aspects of filmic style, Maddin is performing the very sort of archaeological work that film scholars have largely forgone. I think it’s pretty clear, though, that that is simply a happy by-product of Maddin’s filmmaking. Church thinks so too. Back in his introduction, he notes, citing the example of the Bergfilm (the German mountain film), a form adopted in Careful, that Maddin excavates bygone genres “whose place as a container of cultural memory is long past, allowing [him] to obsessively transform [them] into a mnemonic for more personal issues.” (Church, p. 9)

Straw is much less on the money when he claims that “investment in the ponderous rituals of classical cinema is one of the qualities of Maddin’s films which work against the interpretation of them as surrealist” (Church, p. 61, emphasis mine). This is something I’ll take up below.

Balancing that error of judgement, however, Straw astutely observes that family is a cause of perversity, and never a refuge from it, in Maddin’s cinema. This is also true of the concept of “home”, whether that be Maddin’s actual childhood home, extensible to the family hair salon run as an adjunct to the family house, and his father’s home-away-from-home, the Winnipeg Hockey Arena, as well as the greater, increasingly fabled city of Winnipeg.

In his 2001 essay “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin”, Steven Shaviro reduces Maddin’s cinema to 29 bullet points, some of which present an almost lone voice championing Maddin’s little loved and famously self-loathed Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). Some of his other bullet points forthrightly rebut one another, as when he avers that “Maddin’s images belong to a cinema of spectacle, or a ‘cinema of attractions’ (in Tom Gunning’s well- known phrase), rather than to any sort of narrative impulse”, only to rejoin it immediately at the head of his next point with “At the same time, Maddin’s films are chock full of narrative, even to excess” (Church, p. 71).

Using Shaviro’s essay as a springboard, Beard contributes “Maddin and Melodrama” to Playing with Memories, an updated article from 2005. Beard’s chief assertion in this essay is that Maddin works with “melodrama” – those are Beard’s scare quotes, not mine, suggestive of the contrariness of Maddin’s adoption of the most heightened of registers to pitch narratives in so deadpan and absurd a fashion that it’s not often easy to grasp what he’s problematising or ironising in the first place. Beard, though, makes an important distinction, positioning the excessiveness of Maddin’s melodrama as “symptomatic not of an ideological sickness but of a cultural one” (Church, p. 88, emphasis in the original), a malaise at odds with society’s tendency to disallow the expression of “fundamental aspirations and primal feelings, in its repression of innocence, pathos and yearning” (Church, pp. 88-89).

Meanwhile, insider knowledge is brought to bear in essays from two of Maddin’s best friends and mentors, Stephen Snyder and George Toles. Toles has been a major collaborator with Maddin across his career as a scenarist of some of the purplest dialogue ever committed to celluloid.

Snyder contributes a piece on how sexuality is tantamount to an affliction in Maddin’s cinema. He argues that, following the inspirational example of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or (1930), the consummation of this desire is most… undesirable.

Toles reflects on the nature of his collaboration with Maddin, asserting that when that unholy alliance began, he found his most fruitful scriptwriting strategy to be pretending to be Maddin when he wrote, because “[t]he ideas and impulses that came to me were so much more deliciously unsavoury, unsightly, and extreme when I saw them swimming merrily up from Guy’s unconscious rather than my own” (p. 145). Toles’ list of Maddin’s firm filmmaking requirements also makes for enlightening and amusing reading: “Keep the dialogue fragrant, like honeyed wine” (Church, p. 146), for example.

Along this line, Donald Masterson contributes “My Brother’s Keeper: Fraternal Relations in the Films of Guy Maddin and George Toles”. He finds something akin to sibling rivalry in Maddin and Toles’ working relationship, uncovering plenty of echoes of the director’s troubled relationships with his older siblings in his films, not least the trauma he experienced in the wake of his elder brother Cameron’s suicide (committed on Cameron’s girlfriend’s grave, no less – Guy has clearly not been the only Maddin with a flair for melodrama!)

Dana Cooley’s “Demented Enchantments: Maddin’s Dis-eased Heart” is a highlight of the book. She argues that “Maddin’s forays into the forgotten realms of film exquisitely perform [Walter] Benjamin’s hopes for the medium, fusing form and content, theory and practice” (Church, p. 175). She goes on to explore the antecedents of Maddin’s ostentatiously tragic cinema in the baroque, allegorical Trauerspiel – “sorrow play” – a form popular in 18th century Germany, astutely arguing that “Maddin often makes the abstract of allegory literal” (Church, p. 177). She gets it right too, I feel, when she claims that “for Maddin, film acts more as a séance [sic] than an exorcism” (Church, p. 183), declaring that she “find[s] the idea of the uncanny [in Maddin’s films] a productive one” (Church, p. 179).

Elsewhere, Carl Matheson suggests that Maddin’s narratives can and should be read as dreams (though he insists he has to rebut his central thesis with the case of My Winnipeg [2007] before even really getting his argument fully underway!) Milan Pribisic analyses Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), positioning it as a “theatre film”, a cross-pollinated product of a dialogue between (at least) two art forms and demonstrative, in a coinage worthy of Toles, of a “palimpsestuous originality” (Church, p. 168). And Saige Walton’s “Hit with a Wrecking Ball, Tickled with a Feather: Gesture, Deixis and the Baroque Cinema of Guy Maddin” considers the phenomenological reception of Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain!(2006), and examines how “Maddin and the baroque partake in highly gestural displays of emotion” (Church, p. 213). In so doing, she charts the course of affect from its origins in the extravagant hand gesturing found on-screen through to the receptive, and affected, viewer.

While Walton’s essay successfully straddles the delicate line between theory which illuminates both cinema and itself, and theory which exploits its subject as proof of a particular concept, Darrell Varga’s “Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful” is far less successful in its examination of the director’s third feature as filtered through Nietzsche’s writings on tragedy. I’m afraid I feel none the wiser about Maddin’s cinema after reading Varga’s contribution and am not convinced it warranted inclusion in the book.

Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson’s “‘I’m Not an American, I’m a Nymphomaniac’: Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World” is, to be honest, a bit of a trifle. Born expressly of student responses to screenings of Maddin’s near-crossover-hit from 2004, it does nevertheless impress by highlighting that Maddin’s outré cinema is on the Canadian curriculum! But it is to Easton and Hewson’s credit that their essay engages in a queer reading of a Maddin film, in which respect it is surprisingly singular in this volume. It does, however, seriously overreach in its reading, not least when suggesting that the confederation of Canada in 1867, and the same-year addition of “nymphomania” to The Oxford English Dictionary, might be more than mere coincidence.

Beard’s second contribution to Playing with Memories, and its final chapter, is a very entertaining interview with Maddin himself (one of many undertaken by Beard in preparation for his monograph).