For two decades the Images Festival has celebrated artists and audiences who prefer their a&e come from beyond the beaten path. This year the celebration continues, April 5th through 14th, at a number of Toronto venues.
Guy Maddin is perhaps one of the more widely recognizable names on this year's roster. I had a chance to speak with the Winnipeg filmmaker recently, and quickly learned that the Images Festival is nothing new to him.
“I really like the spirit of the Images Festival,” he says, after listing a number of things he's especially looking forward to this year, including Babette Mangolte's Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic, and German artists Jürgen Reble and Thomas Köner's projected performance, Quasar. “It's just the right size, and makes you feel really welcome, as a viewer or a filmmaker, and I've gone as both.”
Those interested—with faces, hands, pressed against the window looking in—but hesitant about the stereotypically stuffy and elitist world of art, take heart; Maddin says, “the intimidation factor is zero.” In fact, his enthusiasm about the festival is, I would imagine, as contagious as Guy Maddin's enthusiasm could get. “You really feel like you're drinking up new stuff [at the Images Festival]. You leave always with that invigorating sensation of having both double garage doors opened up in your brain, and you just feel a lot smarter, and more ennobled, and excited. You feel like running down the street and kissing or punching someone. It's pretty good stuff.”
If you're wondering what Maddin has been up to lately, the answer could be divided into three categories: film, writing, and other. And if we were to pull this up in pie chart format, I'm guessing “other” would constitute a little more than half. As we speak, the deadlines for six separate writing projects stare him in the face—though, he admits, no work is really getting done. “The self-loathing meter's buried right now,” he says. When I ask if he works well under pressure, he replies, “I think the secret that I should reveal to all my editors is that if they start yelling at me, or appealing to my sense of duty by telling me that I'm letting everyone down, if the pressure's applied properly, that's probably when I work best. But if it's not applied at all, I guess I just wait until there is pressure.” The projects, Maddin says, are all long pieces, and include: a piece on underground avant-garde filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger for Film Comment Magazine; DVD liner notes for a Billy Wilder picture, Ace in the Hole, for Criterion DVDs; a book foreword on Italian silent movie divas; an article for Winnipeg-based arts magazine BorderCrossings; and a treatment with Kazuo Ishiguro (screenwriter, The Saddest Music in the World), to be pitched in the next few days.
Maddin has never tried to keep his love of lazy under wraps. In fact, in one interview he confesses to pretty much sleeping through his twenties. (See dad, there's hope for me yet.) Clearly these periods of, let's call it relaxation, are thoroughly necessary—not to mention well-deserved, considering the work that goes into the other half of the pie. Or is it cake?
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“Yesterday I bought myself a birthday cake, which is something I've always wanted to do,” Maddin tells me while we're on the topic of laziness and procrastination. “For decades I've wanted to do it, and now, when I can least afford to do it, health and weight wise, I just went out and bought a birthday cake for myself from a Winnipeg institution, Jeanne's Bakery; I just bought myself an entire birthday cake and sat down and ate it instead of writing.” Maddin's birthday is the last day of February. “I didn't put candles on it and blow them out or anything, I just went and bought it and ate it when no one was looking. Then a friend called and said he was coming over so I wolfed it down as fast as I could so he wouldn't catch me.”
I asked if he cut slices, or just ate from the cake. “The first piece I cut a very large slice, one quarter of the cake, and then I just ate off the cake. . .until it was gone.” I was imaging a white cake, and wanted to make sure. “It was white. I don't even want to think about what it's doing inside of me right now. [It's] probably reconstituting itself back into its original elements. A couple of sugar beets sitting in my gut right now. Some eggs, and a bottle of Mazola oil. In the bottle, probably. That's what it feels like.” Say you don't know what he's talking about and you know you're lying.
“I'm bottoming out, it's part of my process,” he says, half-mockingly (the mockingly half being the part about process—he'd be the first to admit to bottoming out, surely.) “I hate talking about process, I hate process people. But evidently part of my process is to bottom out entirely, until I'm so disgusted with myself that I'm actually galvanized into action. And then I'll work really hard for about three days, and then strut around as if I've been working really hard for a year.” I'd heard he's self-deprecating, but this was starting to make me feel “normal”.
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“Another trick is to get up really early, 5 am., and work for three hours. Finish the work day at 8. But since I got up earlier than everyone else in the world, congratulate myself for that. And then, another one is to work on a holiday, like Passover or Christmas morning, or Good Friday, when everyone else is resting. And I can feel superior to the rest of the world then—even if they're the only three days I work that year.”
“I'm dying to just read a book,” he tells me. “Or go for a drive in the country, or something. And the amount of time I just spend moaning around the apartment, I could be reading a book or driving in the country for weeks on end, but. . .I need to go to a hypnotist I think.”
That said, those pieces of writing will get done. And though film making seems to be his calling card, Maddin does equally wicked things with the written word. He's admitted to turning to freelance out of desperation, but fans of his writing will be happy to know that, despite his tendency to put things off, he does plan to get things on paper. His published collection, From the Atelier Tovar, includes a selection of journalistic pieces, film treatments, and personal journal entries. And it seems he might be warming to the idea of writing in general; “I think I might have one or two short stories in me before I die. I don't kid myself that I'll ever be a novelist.”
I wanted to ask about music. In his films he deals mostly with classical, instrumental sounds, but he's made a name for himself with more mainstream artists. In 2001, Maddin directed his first and only music video to date for Sparklehorse's “It's a Beautiful Life”. When Metric's Emily Haines decided to pursue a solo project, she asked Maddin if she could use his imagery as her backdrop. Of these connections, the filmmaker said he was “flattered, honoured, all of that.” In fact, he was already a fan to begin with. He's talked about the connection between music and memory, but does he think music affects mood, or vice versa? “For me, when music's really sad or really depressing in a beautiful way, I find it far more mood-altering in a great way, than trying to force a bad mood into a good one by listening to the Beach Boys.”
Perhaps best known for his 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin has taught for nearly ten years—“just one or two courses a year”, he says—and will be returning to his post at the University of Manitoba this fall, after taking several years off to focus on film making, including his most recent feature, Brand Upon the Brain!. As anyone familiar with his work will tell you, his childhood has played an especially large role in his work to date. “I tend to use up the subject of my films and lose interest in them,” he says. “I put a lot of autobiography in [Brand Upon the Brain!], so much so that, in the inevitable process of making the film you just turn it into so much footage and product and stuff to be cut up and rearranged, you just turn it into stuff, that you actually get sick of it.”
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“A long series of recurring dreams that I had about my childhood and dead relatives have all ended since I completed that movie. I'd been having them for decades, and I no longer even think about the past [that way], now that I've done two overtly autobiographical films—one about an adult romance gone bad, and one about my childhood. I've been able to put all that stuff behind me. I don't know if it's therapeutic so much as it just makes you sick of working with it. It just takes so long to make a movie that you really are done with it, you don't want to think about it anymore.” He laughs, “If you want to put something away forever, make a movie about it.”
So what does Maddin have in store for this year's Images Festival? He tells me we can expect a show-and-tell tennis match of sorts. He'll present on the last night of the festival with fellow filmmaker Bill Morrison, in a screening/talk that will consist of, “opening each others' eyes, and therefore the audiences', to some odd clips that exist out there. It's kind of like telling a personal favourites list from the world of YouTube, or something like that, just little things, but things that aren't on YouTube, odd things that aren't in the public domain.”
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What will he bring? “I have a little secret list of things that I guarantee aren't on, in most cases—there's one that is on YouTube—but things from my own personal video collection, that I love, and that sort of territorially stick together somehow. I have no idea what Bill's going to counter with, but it'll be like a tennis match, we'll just bat our films back and forth, take turns, and at the end. . .I guess we're not going to keep score or anything, but it'd be nice to beat him.”
MOMENTUM 10/CLOSING NIGHT GALA Saturday April 14: 9-10:30pm $15/general admission, $12/student/senior/member |
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And check out www.imagesfestival.com for lots more that you'll kick yourself for missing.
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