Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin (review)

Until the publication of William Beard’s thorough study of Guy Maddin, commentary on the Canadian film-maker was like his films themselves – scattered among sources that were often hard to find, in formats long and short, mainstream and ephemeral. Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin draws together the main currents of writing on Maddin and should now occupy centre stage as the major academic study of his first quarter-century as a film-maker. While one hopes that a great many Maddin films are still to come, Beard’s book takes us up to the release of the director’s 2007 ‘hit’ My Winnipeg, a film he sees as the culmination of Maddin’s ‘most powerful and productive’ phase. Each of Maddin’s feature films is the focus of a lengthy chapter in Beard’s book, while a forty-page appendix offers a richly annotated list of all of the director’s known short films.

The real substance of Into the Past lies in its close readings of each of Maddin’s major works. These readings are supplemented by bits of background on each film’s production and by interviews with Maddin and his long-time screenwriter George Toles, but this is a book that hews tightly to the films themselves. Maddin’s films have always been celebrated for the complex references and influences mobilized within them, from French symbolism through the Hollywood studio horror film of the 1930s. They have also, and just as commonly, been seen as autobiographical, albeit in oblique and often perverse ways. The challenge for anyone writing about Maddin is that of finding an analytic line through the films that avoids both the obsessive source-spotting of some critics and naively psychologizing auteurism of others.

Beard has found this line and sticks to it across his ten chapters. Amidst the recurrent features of Maddin’s work – fixations on childhood, mutilation, repression, and so on – Beard identifies clear shifts between early and later works. One of these shifts is from a preoccupation with forgetting to the busy, even jubilant activity of remembering. In early Maddin films, such as Archangel or Careful, characters act with a lugubrious slowness, weighed down by repressed memories or paralyzed by amnesia. With Brand on the Brain (2006), Beard argues, the fixation on childhood now allows a ‘sweet immersion in the font of meaning’ rather than forcing a confrontation with the blockages of repressed memory. In this and subsequent films, we find a shift of tone; the later ones, Beard suggests, are warm where their predecessors were cold. Ponderous editing styles borrowed from silent melodrama give way to the quicker, more dynamic pacing of sound-era musicals or 1920s Soviet montage. This transition involved a slight reshuffling of the influences acting most forcefully upon Maddin. We may see it, as well, as one way out of the impasse (and famously public depression) he experienced following the widely diagnosed failure of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), the film meant to establish his commercial viability.

By identifying My Winnipeg (2007) as the culmination of a confident, productive phase in Maddin’s career, Beard acknowledges that film’s success – a success confirmed by My Winnipeg’s laudatory reviews, Air Canada screenings, and cross-generational appeal. More usefully, though, Beard is able to trace growth and transition in a body of work sometimes seen to be weighed down by unchanging obsessions.