<<< January 21-27, 2005 >>>

Presented in association with MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, On the occasion of the exhibition "The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust," November 2004 to February 14, 2005 at the Pacific Design Center.

The films of Canadian director Guy Maddin are like a waking dream -- a surreal, shimmering landscape where hypnotists walk hand-in-hand with amnesiacs through fields of artificial ice and snow. "I quickly learned that the cheapest prop is a shadow," Maddin has observed with humor -- and if anything, his films are a wild triumph of imagination over budget limitations: transforming an abandoned iron works into the mystical land of Mandragora (TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS); inventing pseudo-Slavic languages and place-names (TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL); revisiting what he calls the "largely disused film vocabulary" of silent movies, including tinted stocks, deliberately-scratchy soundtracks and title cards. Born in 1957 in Winnipeg, Canada (above his Aunt Lil’s Beauty Salon), Maddin was named after two-fisted B-movie actor Guy Madison, star of BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN -- a prophetic beginning, because Maddin’s films combine a lust for all things gaudy and bright ("the flowery dialogue and crazed soap-operatics waft out like incense," critic J. Hoberman once commented) with a passion for movie-matinee enchantment, the feeling of being transported to strange and distant lands.

The retrospective tribute includes Guy Maddin’s TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS, TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, ARCHANGEL, CAREFUL, COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, The Heart Of The World and other features and shorts.

In addition Guy Maddin will present a carte blanche -- a selection of films that influenced him as a filmmaker.

We’re thrilled to welcome director Guy Maddin for an In person Tribute at the Aero Theatre.

"The Guy Maddin film retrospective provides an important backdrop for the exhibition, The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust, currently on view at The Museum of Contemporary Art. Like Maddin, The Royal Art Lodge, a collective of young artists who make drawings, collages, music, performances, and films together, are based in Winnipeg, Canada, and are part of an increasingly visible and lively artistic scene. The Royal Art Lodge's preference for low-tech, low-budget production finds an analogue in the films of Maddin, and both share a penchant for the wacky, outre, and surreal." Michael Darling, curator of the exhibition.

Friday, January 21 - 7:30 PM

Double Feature! COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, 2003, Zeitgeist, 60 min. "Maddin’s masterpiece!" J. Hoberman, The Village Voice "There is something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past." Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Adapted from a ten-part peephole installation, and "jam-packed with enough kinetically photographed action to seem like a never-ending cliffhanger...In this twisted and poisoned wish-fulfillment, the mythomaniacal Guy Maddin casts ‘himself’ (actually, Darcy Fehr) as a hockey player made lily-livered by mother and daughter femme fatales, and resurrects his father as the team’s radio broadcaster and his own romantic antagonist. Set in a shadow-suffused hockey arena and a Mabuse-like beauty salon-slash-abortion clinic, the plot drips with Grecian formula, as sordid family secrets spawn unintentional murder most foul." - Mark Peranson

TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, 1988, Zeitgeist, 72 min. Director Guy Maddin’s first feature (and an underground hit in the U.S.), a hallucinatory, strangely-hilarious vision of a plague-stricken hospital in the bleaker-than-bleak town of Gimli. Tortured souls Einar and Gunnar share adjoining beds and the same mysterious skin ailment -- and in true Maddin fashion, they share something much darker. With Kyle McCulloch. "A distinctively musty, mock-Nordic gothic that has something to do with smallpox, necrophilia and Icelandic butt-pinching." -- J. Hoberman, Premiere. Discussion following with Guy Maddin.

Friday, January 21 - 10:15 PM

Carte Blanche to Guy Maddin:

NAKED JUNGLE, 1954, Paramount, 94 min. Dir. Byron Haskin. Charlton Heston is Leiningen, a tough South American plantation owner who has just accepted delivery on his mail order bride, the stunning Eleanor Parker. But he hadn’t counted on her being independently feisty and a widow to boot. The sparks fly until something more threatening dwarfs their quarrel – a miles-long, miles-wide army of voracious ants known as the Marabunda. Heston vows not to retreat before this plague of nearly-biblical proportions, and Parker insists on staying with him to weather the ordeal. Director Guy Maddin to introduce screening.

Saturday, January 22 - 5:00 PM

Carte Blanche to Guy Maddin:

FORTY GUNS, 1957, 20^th Century Fox, 79 min, Director Sam Fuller had to sacrifice his original title, WOMAN WITH A WHIP but he kept everything else – from Barbara Stanwyck’s black-leather dominatrix gear to the film’s naked gun-lust (Her: "May I feel it?" Him: "It might go off in your face."). Still the most subversively entertaining Western ever made, a surreal dreamscape in which nothing is motivated by natural laws. With Barry Sullivan, Gene Barry. "It’s not even really a Western – I don’t know what it is... FORTY GUNS doesn’t care." – Martin Scorsese. Director Guy Maddin to introduce screening.

Saturday, January 22 - 7: 30 PM

Double Feature: ARCHANGEL, 1991, Zeitgeist, 90 min. Dir. Guy Maddin. Set in a crystalline Russian city at the close of World War I and revolving around the insane love triangle between a Canadian soldier, a Belgian aviator and a Russian nurse -- all three suffering from a rare memory disorder that makes them forget who they’re in love with! With Kathy Marykuca, Ari Cohen, Michael Gottli. "An obscurantist delight, a ghost of silent movies" -- Interview. "Filled with outlandish fin-de-siecle frou-frou, romantic Russian music of WWI, dementedly baroque Slavophile interiors, and German helmets with spread-winged eagles" -- L.A. Weekly.

CAREFUL, 1992, Zeitgeist, 100 min. Guy Maddin’s most deliriously deranged film recreates the 19th-century Alpine village of Tolzbad, a seismic volcano of incestuous desires and suicidal passions -- where even the smallest noise will set off a massive avalanche. Maddin’s first film in color was painstakingly tinted to evoke the luminous feel of early 2-strip Technicolor movies. With Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Brent Neale. "Maddin’s aesthetic honors European silent cinema’s technical limitations as much as its terrible beauty" -- Graham Fuller, Interview. "Sometimes I lose a little bit of sleep wondering what it is I’m doing" -- Guy Maddin. Discussion in between films with director Guy Maddin.

Sunday, January 23 - 5:00 PM

Double Feature: DRACULA: PAGES FROM A VIRGIN’S DIARY, 2002, Zeitgeist, 73 min. After garnering widespread acclaim with his mini-masterpiece "The Heart Of The World," director Guy Maddin concocted one of his most ravishingly stylized cinematic creations. Beautifully transposing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s interpretation of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire yarn from stage to screen, Maddin has forged a sumptuous, erotically charged feast of dance, drama and shadow. The black-and-white, blood-red-punctured film is a Gothic grand guignol of the notorious Count and his bodice-ripped victims, fringed with the expressionistic strains of Gustav Mahler. Bruce Diones in The New Yorker declared that "Maddin has discovered a new kind of cinema, the welding of silent-film technique, avant-garde imagery, and 21st century technology....Victorian sexuality and melodrama are brought together in a shadowy world of expressionistic images and an athletic, almost rabid, choreography."

Carte Blanche to Guy Maddin: A WOMAN'S FACE, 1941, Warner Bros, 106 min. George Cukor directed this remake of a 1938 Swedish film originally starring Ingrid Bergman. Here Joan Crawford plays the scarred woman whose life experiences a startling metamorphosis once she goes under the plastic surgeon’s knife. Unfortunately, she still has sinister Conrad Veidt to deal with! With Melvyn Douglas. Plus Maddin’s shorts: "Sissy Boy Slap Party," 2004, 4 min.; "A Trip to the Orphanage," 2004, 4 min.; "Sombra Dolorosa," 2004, 4 min; The Heart of the World, 2000, Zeitgeist, 6 min. Discussion following with Guy Maddin.

Wednesday, January 26 - 7:30 PM This screening is cancelled.

TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS, 1998, Zeitgeist, 91 min. "It’s so strange a place at this time of the year -- when the sun never quite leaves the sky," murmurs the goddess-like Juliana (Pascale Bussiéres), as she approaches the island of Mandragora, timeless land of lost dreams and forbidden passions. Guy Maddin’s hypnotic, visually-stunning fantasia -- A Midsummer Night’s Dream as envisioned by illustrator Maxfield Parrish, -- with an equally-fantastic cast led by Shelley Duvall, Frank Gorshin and Alice Krige. The entire set was built inside the abandoned Vulcan Iron Works -- and more than any of Maddin’s films, TWILIGHT has the feel of a gorgeous, inescapable hothouse, filled with naked dream-hunters, scheming alchemists and showers of ostrich-feathers.

WAITING FOR TWILIGHT, 1998, Zeitgeist, 60 min. Dir. Noam Gonick. Narrated by Maddin-fan Tom Waits, a fascinating, typically-endearing portrait of Maddin and the making of his latest epic fantasy. "I realize that not many people share my sense of humor -- but I still think that’s better than trying to adopt someone else’s" -- Guy Maddin.

Thursday, January 27 - 7:30 PM

Carte Blanche to Guy Maddin

THEY WON'T BELIEVE ME, 1947, RKO (Warner Classics), 95 min. Dir. Irving Pichel. Susan Hayward and Jane Greer are part of Robert Young's harem of seduced beauties. An unusual story for the period about a married Lothario whose sex addiction leads to murder and an attempted cover-up. A shattering climax, literally.

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, 2003, IFC Films, 100 min. Visionary Canadian director Guy Maddin returns with a visually-stunning feature - a Depression-era, musical fable centering around Port-Huntly Beer Company’s international contest to find the world’s saddest music. Isabella Rossellini sizzles as Beer Baroness Lady Port-Huntly, the broken-hearted, amputee/diva host of the $25,000 competition. As musicians from all around the globe (West Africa, Scotland, Mexico, Siam, etc.) flock to Winnipeg to compete, a dysfunctional family composed of an alcoholic Canadian father and his two dramatic sons (both posing as foreigners) squares off against each other in hopes of landing the prize money - and the hearts of both Lady Port-Huntly and Narcissa, a self-proclaimed nymphomaniac with a talking tapeworm. With Mark McKinney, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan and David Fox.