1956, Winnipeg, Manitoba


Shelley Duvall, who starred in Guy Maddin’s whimsical feature, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), described the filmmaker as a cross between Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles – all rolled into one childlike man. It is an entirely apt description for this most eccentric of filmmakers whose encyclopedic knowledge of the most dimly lit crannies of cinema history would give Martin Scorsese a run for his money. Indeed, Maddin’s oeuvre – five feature films and 16 shorts to date, all shot in his beloved Winnipeg – is a testament to this knowledge, recuperating and resurrecting as it does the entire early history of film, veering with giddy delight from the silent era to German expressionism to part-talkies to Soviet agitprop.

The Prairie auteur was born above his Aunt Lil’s beauty salon, which was also where his mother worked. His father was general manager of the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team. The relentlessly self-deprecating Maddin described himself as a lazy kid; “I think I slept through my 20s,” he told journalist Michael Posner, but he eventually drifted into the University of Manitoba to study economics. In 1985, he made his first film, The Dead Father, a surrealist black-and-white, 16mm short, inspired by his cinéaste pals and a gentle competition with the burgeoning Winnipeg Film Group.

Maddin’s next film, and first feature, was the cult classic Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), written with his former professor and soon-to-become regular co-writer George Toles. Virtually silent and almost plotless, Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a hallucinatory tale of smallpox and necrophilia, scored with a scratchy blend of Jean Vigo soundtracks and Icelandic folk tunes. Maddin himself did the lighting and camerawork; his admiration for silent film and own inexperience often dictating his primitive cum postmodern aesthetic. Archangel (1990), his follow-up to Tales from the Gimli Hospital, was, if anything, stranger — even if it did usher Maddin into the scheduled, budget-minded world of “real” filmmaking. Influenced by the brief shining moment between the silent and sound era, Maddin set out to make a part-talkie (Buñuel’s L’age d’or was a major inspiration) that included intertitles, mime, dialogue and voice-over in a saga about love and amnesia in WWI.

In 1992, with his slender budgets inching upwards, Maddin made what might be his most successful feature to date: Careful, a fusion of Robert Walser and Leni Riefenstahl, among other things. His first colour film, Careful told a darkly comic tale of lust, incest and repression in and around a butler school, precariously nestled in the Alps. Maddin spent the next few years on a number of projects that he aborted, a handful of shorts (including the dazzling Odilon Redon, 1995, commissioned by the BBC) and an ill-advised flirtation with Hollywood. And in 1995, he became the youngest filmmaker to win the prestigious lifetime achievement award at the Telluride Film Festival.

His 1997 film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs failed, however, to please either audiences or the filmmaker; the relatively big-budget and star-studded melodrama (Duvall was joined by Pascale Bussières, R.H. Thomson, and The Riddler himself, Frank Gorshin) spiralled out of Maddin’s control and received the worst notices of the director’s career. A dispirited Maddin retreated from the limelight until September 2000 when he premiered a new short, commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival for its 25th anniversary. The Heart of the World (2000) is a stunning piece of Soviet-style filmmaking, packing hundreds of shots and a typically hilarious and heartrending story of romantic rivalry and apocalypse into its five-minute montage. The film garnered international raves, and it won a Genie in 2001 for best short film.

Buoyed by this revived recognition, Maddin threw himself into his work, adapting the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary for the CBC (which broadcast in 2002) and developing several new projects. He has also worked as a journalist, his resolutely purple prose turning up regularly in the pages of Cinema Scope, Montage and the Village Voice.