 |
| Photo © Valerio Greco |
Below is the introduction I gave to welcome Guy Maddin on stage, followed by a video recording of our conversation, which you can watch below.
Guy Maddin is a Canadian filmmaker, writer, and artist. I reckon many of you will have seen or at least heard of some of his films, including Careful, The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg.
Guy Maddin is Il Cinema Ritrovato in the form of a filmmaker. His work revisits, renews, and reconfigures the techniques and aesthetics that once belonged to the cinema we celebrate at this festival—from early cinema, even pre-cinema, through the great silent era, to the melodramas of the 1950s and experimental films throughout the life of the medium.
There are many filmmakers—some of whom have passed through Bologna—who look to the history of cinema as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. For them, filmmaking is a dialogue with the past: with traditions, forgotten styles, neglected masterpieces, and underappreciated ways of making films. Guy Maddin goes one step further. For him, a film exists because other films have existed. Each new work is like a flower pollinated by other flowers; an eccentric member of a vast family; a son or daughter hidden away in an attic for a hundred years.
His films are like Kaspar Hauser. They emerge from that attic and look upon the world with astonishment. Their encounter with a tree or a horse feels unique because they have never been exposed to the gradual erosion of language that has rendered the sight of a tree or a horse, almost banal. In his cinema, the ordinary regains its capacity to astonish.
Deeply inspired by periods of film history, national cinemas, and filmmaking practices that are no longer considered “fashionable”, his fascination—one might even say obsession—finds an entirely organic expression, infused with daring visual invention and a unique sense of humour.
His films also look as if they have been stored for decades in a damp family barn; mishandled by incompetent projectionists; traded and re-traded countless times by 16mm collectors on eBay; duplicated in the wrong aspect ratio by bootleggers; and screened endlessly at a shabby Lisbon cinema with sticky seats specialising in midnight movies, frequented equally by the curious about the strange and the unsettling, and by couples seeking somewhere dark.
Guy Maddin poses an existential challenge to one of the central missions of this festival: film restoration. No matter how meticulously you restore his films, they continue to look as though they are crying out for restoration. Restoration is supposed to return a film to its original appearance. Yet Maddin's films seem to emerge from the lab looking exactly as if they had just arrived from that midnight cinema in Lisbon. 4K, 6K or even 8K cannot improve them very much. Perhaps the only thing capable of restoring a Guy Maddin film is time itself. The perpetually unrestored and unrestorable filmmaker: Guy Maddin.
No comments:
Post a Comment