The Ecstasy of Fetishization: An Interview with Guy Maddin

If you listened carefully while the Academy Award for Best Picture went to The Artist, you could hear thousands of film geeks across the world whisper, "Bullshit." Making a silent movie? Pssh. Guy Maddin’s been doing that kind of thing for years. And he’s been doing it way weirder.

The 56-year-old Canadian auteur is famed for using antiquated film technology to create darkly surreal visions of eras that never quite existed. He’s won acclaim for bizarre, black-and-white quasi-comedies like My Winnipeg and The Saddest Music in the World, as well as silent features like Brand Upon the Brain! and Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. He’s fixated on perverse sexuality and the low-budget sci-fi of early cinema. And he’s nothing if not prolific — he’s cranked out nearly 40 films in the past 25 years.

Maddin’s latest, Keyhole, follows a gangster (Jason Patric) as he navigates a house haunted by his dead wife (Isabella Rossellini) and others. It’s been hopping through art houses across the U.S. — and Maddin has been hopping across the Atlantic, appearing at Paris’s Centre Pompidou for an exhibition devoted to his work. I caught up with him to talk about resurrecting dead tech, building DIY electric chairs, and why “fetish” shouldn’t be a dirty word.

What do you think of The Artist?

I haven’t seen it yet. I want to hate it. I’m scared I’ll love it. I’ve managed to see a few clips and I have to say it looks depressingly likeable.

Is there anything frustrating about the fact that its director, Michel Hazanavicius, depicted the silent era as somewhat anodyne?

Not at all. I don’t think Hazanavicius is under any obligation to make the movie any darker, more sinister or cynical than it is. He clearly has his own charming touch — it’s his voice and it works for him. [Fritz] Lang had his own voice; sometimes it’s too cynical. I have mine, all lugubrious self-pity interlarded with a weird species of self-loathing narcissism. I’d be annoyed if Hazanavicius had my exact voice, but if he did, then there’d be no Academy Award to discuss right now.

What is it about the technology of the silent era that makes for a unique filmgoing experience?

Well, with silent film, right away you’re getting a world removed from reality. It’s not even pretending to be real life. It’s in black and white, its performances are mimed, and there is no audible dialogue. In other words, the films are a few giant strides closer to opera, theater or fairy tale. Often, silent film stories are framed accordingly. Everything seems to aspire to the universal, capable of a certain kind of poetry — or at least a kind of melody — that talking pictures rarely achieve. How much do technical aspects of a film — use of black and white, use of sound vs. silence, and so on — determine its meaning?

I always thought — but I’m kind of weird — that a film should be shot in black and white unless it had a good reason to be shot in color. It’s a nutty position, mine. Maybe it’s smarter to say that if a filmmaker is going to use color, he or she should use it in a way that justifies its use. I think that in most cases it’s used simply because audiences will buy almost any kind of color as a facsimile of reality. Ugh, reality: what an undefined term.

What a whiner I’ve become. I love the fact that the movies are both an art form and an industry. I love the showbiz of it all, the industrial rush past all the sensitive options a director might consider. I really do love things that go boom, oomph, or awooogah! After The Turin Horse, my fave film of last year was Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol. And the best double bill I’ve ever seen? Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation and Jerry Lewis’s The Patsy. Keyhole features a lot of quick cuts and unstable hand-held shots — wasn’t that unusual in films of the era you’re emulating?

I’ve been using a lot of quick cutting in my films the last decade or so. I’ve never tried to imitate old films, you might be surprised to hear. I just borrow underused gestures, ones that are still loaded up with great gobs of flavor, as far as I’m concerned, and mix them up with more modern tropes. Or plagiarisms.

One of the most fascinating motifs in Keyhole is the characters’ home-made machinery — things like a DIY electric chair and a pneumatic in-home message system. How did you decide what those machines should look like?

My production designer, Richardo Alms, made them. He really got into the teen spirit. The script called for homemade inventions — a homemade electric chair, a family desktop organizer and pneumatic messaging system, etc.

When I was a young kid my older, teenage brother was a precocious inventor of the sort shown in the movie — intercoms, radios, and stereos, he fashioned them all out of mere household items. When he was sixteen he was arrested for turning my aluminum flying saucer toboggan into the broadcasting dish for a pirate radio station he operated out of his bedroom. I was so proud of him, watching the police come into our house to shut him down. I was even thrilled to see my toboggan confiscated. How do you draw the line between celebration of outdated technology and fetishization of it?

I don’t even think about such a line. Fetishization seems like a good idea. My whole career has been fuelled by obsessions. But I’m only so good a filmmaker, and I think I forget to fetishize, or somehow fall short in that department.

Growing up, what enchanted you about the past?

I’m not sure. I’ve always been interested in my place inside the great flow of time and history. I like to know how old my parents were when their parents died, and compare that to how old I was when other sad or happy things happened, then cross reference that to what happened in pop culture on those occasions, including the death ages of various favorite movie stars, my own age now, my own age when my parents were that age, and what my age will be when my daughter is that age.

Everything is a matrix of cross-referenced dates and ages — a massive flowchart. I can’t believe other people don’t think that way, but evidently they don’t, or at least not everyone does. Some people just don’t think of the past at all. I’m an atheist, but I like to pay tribute to the past, almost memorialize it. I suppose that’s my facsimile of immortality, the best I can come up with.

Do you fear the future?

I should. I don’t really have any savings, nor a retirement plan. I gotta keep working, and my secret fear — so intense it’s almost a wish — is that I go blind. There are four generations of blindness in my family! Of course, I could probably just fall back into what so many people think of as Guy Maddin shtick if that came to pass. I could do all my old tricks with my eyes shut.

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