Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (review)

Guy Maddin is one of the most loquacious of Canadian film-makers. His conversation is garrulous, effusively personal and autobiographical, and deliriously confessional. He responds enthusiastically and ingenuously to questions about anything anyone dares to ask, spontaneously and richly connecting the characters and narratives of his films to his own experience and family history. As an illustration of this continuing engagement with self-revelation, take the self-generated title of his series of lectures and performances at Innis College, University of Toronto, in 2010: ‘I’m Going to Pull Down My Pants: Confession & the Cinema of Uninhibition.’ Already two books of interviews are in print, as well as countless one-off interviews in cinema journals and film magazines.

Maddin is also wonderfully generous with the dissemination of his own work, including scripts and documentation of his films, as well as publication of his private journals. As a result, the critical discourse surrounding his work is deeply larded with quotations from Maddin, as well as from his former mentor and close collaborator, screenwriter George Toles. It is no wonder that Maddin’s witty reflections on film history, the future of the forgotten and the unknown, the allegorical complexion of autobiography, the welcome anaesthetic of amnesia, and the truth of melodrama (among many other poetic and often haunting statements) productively activate a critical context for his work. In addition, perhaps not so productively, his statements of his own intentions are routinely ladled into analyses of the films.

From my training in film theory, I approach with cynicism a book that takes as its subtitle ‘Essays on Guy Maddin,’ for I see this as indication of a determining biographical paradigm centering on the person of the film-maker rather than his work. The introduction to Playing with Memories, by editor David Church, sets out the biographical details accordingly.

Yet the welcome surprise of these essays is that, while almost all of them include citations of Maddin in their footnotes, they come at the films from divergent angles. There are a few commonalities of course, consistent with the current trends of contemporary film scholarship. A common thread is the reinvigoration of thinkers from the past. Walter Benjamin is a perennial, a master of many moves; Freud in the context of Maddin is a must (while Lacan is outré these days); E.H. Gombrich is a breath of fresh air, not seen in a long time; Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ seems a bit tired, too familiar to be productive; and then along comes Nietzsche dancing with Freud’s ‘uncanny’ and we are back on Broadway.

In addition to the differences among their theoretical references, the essays take effectively opposing positions on key critical issues. Are the films postmodern or nostalgic? Are they camp or kitsch, melodramas or fairy tales? Do they evoke the bergfilme (German mountain film) or the baroque Trauerspiel (‘sorrow play’)? Should they be read as deixis (the orientational features of language)? Are they avant-garde or mainstream? Do their tattered surfaces revivify the lost past of cinema, or do they suggest the impossibility of retrieving the past? Do they trace the 1970s model of Canadian cinema as featuring ineffectual and repressed characters, or do they carve out a post-national space that queers the connections between nation, family, sexuality, and gender? While contrarian views abound in this collection, most of the essays include close analysis of the films and argue their points pretty convincingly.

About half the essays have been published elsewhere in the past – for example, those by Geoff Pevere, Steven Shapiro, William Beard, and Will Straw – but their inclusion in the anthology is worthwhile as they are often cited in later articles. In sum, this book will be an effective teaching aide, and it is a pretty enjoyable read for those of us who love Guy Maddin. And really, who doesn’t?