Out of the past
Maddin mania invades the PFA.

By Max Goldberg

WINNIPEG HAS FOUND its auteur. For film mavens, the frosted Manitoban metropolis has become synonymous with Guy Maddin's quixotic sensibility. This is curious given that the majority of his films don't actually take place in Winnipeg. Indeed, it seems strange to extensively ponder Maddin's home base when his work occupies a fundamentally cinematic space. With melodrama and stylistic verve cramming every frame, there's precious little room for reality; as a character in the Winnipeg-set Saddest Music in the World exclaims, "It's all showbiz!"

Yet Maddin is proud of his billing as Winnipeg's finest, and somehow it all fits. His relentless referencing of the city in print has been elemental to his outsider status: descending from the icy quiescence of the north country comes Maddin! While this is personal mythmaking on a Welles-ian scale, the Winnipeg fix is nonetheless revealing of an aesthetic that's admittedly different. His anachronistic mode of filmmaking couldn't have been born out of the relentless forward motion of an arts and entertainment hub. These are, after all, films made in the past tense. If film noir can be characterized by the atmospheric presence of an insuppressible past, then Maddin's work is unquestionably noir. In a Maddin film, though, this weight isn't just the stuff of a character's past life. It's the weight of all film history.

Maddin isn't the first filmmaker obsessed with film history, but where others deify past achievements from afar, he actually inhabits the abandoned film languages of yesteryear. When Martin Scorsese lifts a Sam Fuller moment or when George Lucas takes a cue from Akira Kurosawa, it amounts to an appreciative nod. The newbie gives credit where it's due before forging a style all his or her own. The new auteurs are, of course, also staking their claim within film history, tracing a carefully plotted line of influence. Maddin is interested in no such neatness. Rather than paying homage to his heroes' finished masterpieces, he fixates on the films that, for one reason or another, were impossible to make.

This, in large part, is what makes his oeuvre so difficult to describe. The movies are purposefully made to feel like long-lost oddities, almost otherworldly in their prehistoric approach to the medium. The film stock creaks and cracks, bizarre tints occasionally wash out the frame, expressionistic shadows roam freely, and Vaseline smudges sometimes reduce our vision of a character's face to an ethereal haze. For those well versed in a historical spectrum of film styles, it all plays like a strange dream: vaguely familiar but impossible to pinpoint.

It's a sensibility that requires more than a little chutzpah. Indeed, Maddin's lesser efforts demonstrate the difficulty of sustaining an audience's interest for a feature's worth of such heavy stylization. That said, his most concentrated films (The Heart of the World, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Cowards Bend the Knee) and essays ("Death in Winnipeg," "Very Lush and Full of Ostriches") challenge a linear reading of film history with exceptional creativity. Maddin's task is nothing less than a full-on pursuit of the innumerable aesthetic and technological innovations left behind as unexplored dead ends because of the medium's industrial drive. At its best, his work gives the sense of an artist who has gotten ahead of himself, not mastering technology so much as ad-libbing with it. Such sublime moments express the limitlessness of film form: that at any point in its history, cinema has the potential to shoot off in countless directions.

The pervasive relationship between Maddin's films and cinema's past makes the Pacific Film Archive's upcoming retrospective (Oct. 8 through 31) a delicious prospect. Each night's program pairs a Maddin film and a long-forgotten feature hand-picked by the maestro. With Maddin, such a carte blanche offers a unique potential. Instead of simply gleaning an older film's impact on the new master, our vision of the new might actually affect the way we experience the old. His best work burrows so deeply into our consciousness of cinematic form that our perspective cannot help but be changed. The organizers at the PFA have programmed the retrospective accordingly, always arranging the double features so that the director's choice is screened after the Maddin original.

Consider, for example, one of the retrospective's centerpieces: the Bay Area premiere of Cowards Bend the Knee alongside a sparkling print of Robert Florey's determinedly melodramatic Peter Lorre vehicle, The Face Behind the Mask. Seeing them separately, one wouldn't connect Maddin's electrifying silent feature with the languid doom of Florey's 1941 proto-noir. When taken as a double feature, though, the two films converse with one another, each pushing the bounds of narrative logic in its own bizarro way. Expect more of the same from the retrospective's other deranged pairings. To Kino!

'Fiercely Primitive: The Films of Guy Maddin' runs Oct. 8-Oct. 31. Maddin introduces Tales from the Gimli Hospital (7 p.m.) and West of Zanzibar (9:20 p.m.) Fri/8; Cowards Bend the Knee (7 p.m.) and The Face Behind the Mask (8:45 p.m.) Sat/9, PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-0808. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for additional show times.