LUCIDMEDIA

An Audience with Night Mayor: Guy Maddin Celebrates 70 Years of NFB at TIFF

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Friday, 11 September 2009 10:13

Along with the Hollywood stars and the dealmakers in town for the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada’s place in the wide, far-reaching world of cinema will also be celebrated during the ten-day-long celebration. Included in the Festival will be Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin and the premiere of his latest work, Night Mayor, a short film commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada. The ten-minute work examines the importance of film as a means of mythologizing Canadian history and exploring cultural identity, past and present. It takes place in 1939, which is fitting, since that’s the same year the NFB was founded. Indeed, Night Mayor is a tribute to the organization’s 70th anniversary being celebrated during throughout this year, as well as during TIFF.

Maddin’s latest work skirts the realms of what’s real and imagined, and straddles the line between fictional and documentary styles. His work has a retro, old-world feel to it that recalls many of the NFB films now available in their online archive.

Night Mayor is the story of a Bosnian immigrant, Nihad Ademi who comes to Winnipeg (Maddin’s hometown, and the subject and shooting locale of much of his work) and invents a machine that harvests local images via the natural phenomenon known as the Aurora Borealis. The images that are culled are then broadcast across the country, where thousands watch them with wonder, and contemplate their own place within the Canadian Diaspora.

Eventually, the invention starts to go past its original mandate, and begins broadcasting images from Ademi’s unconscious mind, and more widely, to include further projections of national consciousness –literal and figurative –from various locations across the country. This, in turn, results in a government raid on the immigrant’s laboratory. Ademi’s broadcast of unregulated, unapproved patriotic imagery of –and for –its citizenry is a rich metaphor on the Canadian government’s relationship with its artists.

Stylistically, the film’s combination of fast edits, unusual angles, high-contrast cinematography and lighting effects is a nice complement to the elegant black and white the short was filmed in. Ademi’s careful voiceover produces a vintage-film effect that, while jarring, is also deeply reminiscent of the early documentaries produced by the National Film Board. That connection between old and new, says Maddin, is entirely intentional.

“It’s the idea of a typical NFB film subject from the early days,” he says with palpable excitement, “the typical early Canadian citizen coming here, and attempting in his own way, to patch together a Canadian identity or to understand what that means. The NFB tries to sort it out for us. It occurred to me that in trying to think of what made Canada different than America –and often it’s not enough for our liking –we do have the Northern Lights more than they do. Our population is so much more spread out, so if there was some way of uniting us by using the Aurora Borealis, then having the government try to shut it down, that would define Canada.”

Maddin’s own works are deeply influenced by German expressionism and European surrealism of the 1920s. Critics have conjured the names of Bunuel, Eisenstein, and even American auteur David Lynch in trying to describe the unique style and content his elegant, if equally offbeat, work.

His first short, The Death Father, was a black and white work shot on 16mm that was deeply influenced by silent film. His first full-length feature, the hallucinatory Tales From The Gimli Hospital, revolves around the happenings in a sick ward, and again, harkens back to an older era of filmmaking.

Maddin’s other works include 2002’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, for which Maddin won a Gemini for Best Director. He worked with Isabella Rossellini for 2003’s The Saddest Music in The World, which went on to win three Genies and collect a litany of other film and comedy awards worldwide. Brand Upon The Brain! (2006) is a semi-autobiographical tale shot in grainy black-and-white in which Maddin re-visits his past. My Winnipeg, from 2007, is equally personal in its autobiographical content, with Maddin’s perceptions of his beloved prairie hometown nicely mingling with his mesmerizing narration. The film won a number of awards, including Best Canadian Film at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, and the Toronto Critics Award for Best Canadian Feature in 2008.

Inspiration, Maddin admits, comes in fits and starts. But once an idea has taken hold, it has to be manifest –and quickly, at that. “It’s funny,” he says on the line from his beloved hometown, “I’ve gotten a number of short film commissions, and in every case, I’ve learned that I can’t get that initial idea out of my head.” Maddin says that shooting Night Mayor was part-history lesson, part-improvisation.“ I didn’t have a script for it,” he admits. “I decided to shoot it as a documentary, just the way the NFB would’ve done.”

The pseudo-documentary style is a fitting ode to what is ostensibly Canada’s most recognizable film organization. The NFB’s roster of works may run the gamut in terms of style and content, but they are all documents that trace the history and identity of a country.

What Night Mayor combines is Maddin’s penchant for bleeding the real and imagined, and the NFB’s agenda of defining and developing a national identity via film. These are especially apparent in documentaries like The World Of Three, Women On The March, 1867 and After. Films that helped to define the national mood and character at the time they were made, even as they covered a wide disparity of topics, both epic and intimate. The documentary format, with all its challenges, still seems to hold a certain appeal to the filmmaker.

“In my last feature, My Winnipeg, I was trying to fool people into believing it was [a real documentary],” he notes. “In this one, we shot it as if it was a real documentary –so you got fooled –but it’s kind of fun. We keep fooling somebody.”

The bleed-over between reality and fiction is further highlighted by the fact that the name of the actor and the character are one in the same. Nihan Ademi is, in fact from Bosnia. Maddin gave Ademi, and all the actors in Night Mayor, complete freedom in terms of fleshing out their roles. Since the project was in the style of a documentary, he wanted performers to be as natural and unmannered as possible.

“I refused to direct any of the actors,” he states. “I just told Nihad to work with his onscreen children, to go about his day in the workroom, then I shot it like a documentary, and I had the editor cut it together like a documentary. They say documentaries are made in the editing room, so it was a matter of getting Nihad to say some thoughts on the Aurora Borealis, on music and on the country as he’d heard me musing out loud. We recorded those things, and it’s kind of interesting making a documentary –or rather, something like a documentary, but fooling yourself into believing it really was one.”

The Aurora Borealis, which Maddin calls “a beautiful thing,” has its own technological effects, which, prior to Night Mayor, the filmmaker was not aware of. This technology was part of the inspiration behind the machine that’s featured in the film.

“My production designer and I were talking about this gadget converting music into imagery, and he suggested the Aurora Borealis,” he recalls. “He had been doing research and noted that people had been collecting music that the Aurora Borealis produces. They chanced upon it by hooking up radios to four miles of barbed wire fence, which served as an antenna that then collected radio signals produced by the Aurora Borealis. It makes music.”

Maddin’s knowledge of old film technology allowed him to research the historical experiment further, and in that process, it occurred to him that the marriage of technology and natural phenomenon would make for an ideal thematic subtext. “I thought it would be a nice way of combining the cinema of the NFB, Canada, and visuals and music,” he says, “music being of all artforms, the shortest route to the heart. There are a lot of emotions that music represents, so I thought some sort of occasion, like a birthday, allowed us to be emotional.”

Celebrating the NFB’s 70th birthday is, after all, a national affair; it seemed only fitting to capture the emotion of the moment through filmic technique. “I thought we should try to come up some emotion while blowing out candles,” says Maddin.

Night Mayor achieves a nice balance between the cold, hard machinery portrayed in Ademi’s laboratory, and the haunting, beautiful, non-tangible poetry in the flicker of images it produces. This mix is reflected in Night Mayor’s score and sound design –the effect is a dreamy mix of sweeping orchestral sounds and the grinds and clicks of technology. “I know machines can be really chilling and distancing –as Atom Egoyan has so beautifully portrayed, they’re alienating –but I’d like to think there’s still a way of anthropomorphizing these things. They’re made by people and for people, and it’s something you have to keep under wraps, and struggle with.”

Along with man-made sounds, there’s another sound effect in the film that viewers may not be aware of. The score, says Maddin, “is overcome by the natural sound effects of the Aurora Borealis. There are some sounds of actual sounds in it, from the barbed wire fence radio.”

Seeking to define and cultivate a Canadian identity via film isn’t a new idea, but it is one Maddin has developed throughout his career. He frequently speaks of mythologizing Canada for Canadians, and has utilized a specific filmic language to try to express and expand this idea. His tribute to the National Film Board’s 70th anniversary is proof positive of his commitment to fostering this vision, and indeed, the NFB themselves have been crucial in presenting scenes from the country, to the country, within a context of cultural nation-building.

However, with the advent of online technology, one wonders if such stringent efforts at visually defining a people actually matter anymore. Doesn’t the web render national identities a rather quaint –if not outmoded –idea?

“In some ways, (the internet) might remove the need to identify ourselves with our country,” he muses. “We are online citizens of the world.”

Still, his love for being a native of Winnipeg is something that will never fade. “It makes me kind of proud,” he says, referring to the success Winnipeg artists such as painter Marcel Dzama have found. “It’s made the place cooler. Well, it already is a pretty cool place, even though it’s got real live modern urban issues, and all sorts of scary things.”

Scary things aside, perhaps Maddin is one of the many forces that has put Winnipeg on the cultural map. It’s been designated as one of three Cultural Capitals of Canada for 2010, and the city will receive roughly $2 million of federal money for arts and cultural projects.

But until 2010, the rest of Canada –indeed the world –will have to content itself with small peeks at the city’s cultural life. TIFF provides but one peek; Night Mayor may be brief, but it’s tantalizing on many levels.