Interviews

Jesus Christ Saviour: Interview with Peter Geyer

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Klaus Kinski
Jesus Christ Saviour

Format: Cinema

Seen at Edinburgh Film Festival 2008

Director: Peter Geyer

Cast: Klaus Kinski

Original title: Jesus Christus Erlöser

Germany 2008

84 mins

At the height of his career, Klaus Kinski was Germany’s favourite fiend. On November 20, 1971, the iconic actor took to the stage of Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle to perform a very personal reinterpretation of the New Testament, a theatrical monologue about ‘a man who would rather be massacred than continue to live and fester’. Only moments after Kinski entered the spotlight to begin his recitation hecklers in the sold-out auditorium started hurling insults, deliberately provoking Kinski into a rage until he stormed off. However, he returned to the stage time and again and eventually what was meant as the prelude to a planned world tour turned into spectacular tumult and chaos.

Scenes from this evening were very briefly featured in Werner Herzog’s Kinski film My Best Fiend. But now his biographer and estate administrator Peter Geyer has made a full-length documentary out of the previously unseen 16mm footage. Jesus Christ Saviour offers a scrupulously precise reconstruction of Kinski’s legendary defiant stage performance, and the hostile audience’s reaction.

Pamela Jahn talked to director Peter Geyer at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival where the film had its UK premiere.

Pamela Jahn: Your film documents Kinski’s attempt to engage an audience of thousands with a recitation of over 30 typewritten pages reclaiming the story of Jesus. What made Kinski do that?

Peter Geyer: Back in 1961, Kinski announced in an interview in Der Spiegel (the largest German weekly magazine at that time), that he would put the New Testament on stage. Most people probably don’t know that Kinski started as an actor by doing recitations on stage in the late 1950s with verses and ballads by Villon, Rimbaud etc – So, basically, Kinski spoke himself to fame. During 1959-62 he performed and released 32 audio-books. The event was long planned, but soon after he had achieved the cover story in Der Spiegel he moved on to film where financial prospects were better.

But he obviously cherished the idea. Was he to a certain degree obsessed with Jesus?

I am not sure if the obsession increased with the years, but whatever he did, he was always totally passionate and fanatical about it. For example, if you watch Aguirre you get the feeling that he was exceptionally obsessed with that role, but the truth is that he actually didn’t want to shoot Aguirre in the first place. Initially, he came back to Germany to go on tour with Jesus Christ. But after what happened in Berlin, the tour got cancelled, and Kinski needed a new job. He was more obsessed with money than with anything else.

So, it was all about money…

Of course. Kinski sold his soul for money, which explains why his film career is so lousy. By the end of the 1960s, the Italian film industry was in deep financial crisis, and Kinski – who starred in a vast number of those low-budget Spaghetti Westerns – got in trouble because of that, too. His very clever strategy to receive incredibly high fees for only very few days of actual shooting wouldn’t work any longer. Plus, the producers had had enough of Kinski’s extravagances. Right then he got this very attractive offer from a famous German concert impresario: For the enormous fee of one million Deutschmarks, Kinski would perform in 100 venues all over the world, reciting his version of the New Testament live on stage. The initial plan was to start the tour in Germany and then take it to Europe and America. So, Berlin was meant to be only the beginning of a word tour that never happened.

Kinski didn’t even get a chance to start his monologue properly, almost immediately people start interrupting him, and it seems that the audience was out for blood from the beginning… Why would they pay for someone they didn’t want to see?

It’s true that the atmosphere was very tense from the beginning. Many people came to provoke Kinski, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that all of them were just thirsting for confrontation. I think it was only a small number of real hecklers, which makes it even worse, because the rest of the audience didn’t manage to kick out the few assholes and get to see the show. None of them dared raise their voice against the few Kinski opponents in the auditorium and after a while the aggressive tone took over the entire hall. Of course, Kinski misbehaved too, and so it all ended in great chaos.

Didn’t he enjoy provoking people?

If you look closely at his performance in the film, you see that Kinski never deliberately provoked an argument. He didn’t seek confrontation, but he also couldn’t take any form of criticism. He was too insecure for that. So in order to be able to cope with it and avoid getting hurt, he trained himself to be quick at repartee. But all the shouting and screaming on top of that just scared people, they didn’t know how to deal with him.

What sort of reputation preceded Kinski in Germany at that time?

It was something of an open secret that Kinski lived in luxury in his villa in Italy. He was a rich international film star. But I don’t think that his flamboyant life style or his eccentric, egomaniac persona was the problem. In many ways, Kinski often was ahead of his time, in his work but also because he was the first person who used tabloids for his own purposes. In 1971, however, he simply looked like a self-proclaimed believer, an epigone.

Your film is simply a raw and meticulous reconstruction of the infamous event. Why did you decide to offer no further comments or explanation?

My intention was to make his work accessible, and to be truthful about Kinski. The most interesting thing is to just see him performing life on stage, there’s no need for further explanation or attempted whitewashing. I am used to facing the aggression of Kinski fans because they hate me for clarifying lies that he made up in his book (All I Need Is Love). But it’s not my intention to turn Kinski into a super-human or create a new legend.

Did you ever search for any of the people who attended that evening?

No, never. Having said that, I actually never had to look for them, they came to me. I’ve met a lot of people who said that they were in the audience that night. But whenever it comes to Kinski, it seems that people’s memories become very vague. I call this the Werner Herzog syndrome, which is that, whenever it is about Kinski, you have to come up with a great story simply to make Kinski larger than life. People who say they encountered Kinksi but who were actually not really close to him, always try to turn his pretty boring private life into something bigger, more exciting. I’ve got the recorded material anyway, material that is not manipulated, so why should I ask someone else?

How do you think people look at the material today?

It depends on the generation. When I took over Kinski’s estate, Kinski was ‘dead’; the time for people like him is over. Today, the younger generation understands that he was actually the last non-conformist figure in the German entertainment industry. Someone who really said, ‘No – I am against your system’, but who didn’t hurt anyone. Which makes him an ideal badge to wear for people trying to be different – it’s the same with Kinski as it is with Che Guevara.

Did Kinski ever think about making a film out of the footage himself?

No. His third wife, Monhoi, told me that she had asked him once about the footage and why he didn’t want to edit it and show it again. Kinski answered, ‘They would only nail me to the cross again. You can do that when I am dead, but as long as I am alive, they would think that I am a bad loser.’

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Features

DUSK ‘TIL DAWN MADNESS! HOMMAGE TO 75 YEARS OF THE DRIVE-IN

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The cinema has always been both valorised and demonised as a major player in the movement towards sexual liberation in the twentieth century. The intersection of socio-cultural realities and the cinematic imaginary are fairly well charted waters, as are the names of the major figures involved. But among the unsung movers and shakers of cinematic history towards this sexual reordering, I propose a lesser known name be added to the roll call: that of Richard Hollingshead Jr, who 75 years ago this year opened the first ever drive-in movie theatre.

It was on June 6, 1933, that his legendary US Patent No. 1,909,537 for ‘The Park-In Theatre’ was actualised in Camden, New Jersey, where the preferable final appellation ‘Drive-In Theatre’ was adopted. The first ever drive-in movie to be screened was, appropriately enough, Wives Beware (Fred Diblo, 1932), a British film aka Two White Arms which is reputably about trying to, in Tom Waits’s words, ‘getcha little somethin’ that you can’t get at home’ – one of a number of staple slogans which would come to sustain drive-in business for the next 50 years.

A second drive-in appeared in California in 1934 and soon Hollingshead was franchising his invention across America, suing anyone else who dared to build an independent one. But in 1945, a time when there were only 100 drive-ins in the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Hollingshead’s drive-in patent was null and void and consequently that anyone had the right to open one. As it was, this legal decision happened to coincide with the end of World War Two, the end of rationing and the end of the American economic depression. It also came at the start of the post-war baby boom, the start of the migration of young families from town centres to the newly emerging suburbs and with the rise of a new prosperity that now meant almost everyone could own an automobile. In brief, the conditions were ripe for an explosion in drive-in construction. Anyone with a little land – land outside towns was, like gasoline, cheap then – could build their own drive-in. The audience could watch a movie with the whole family – saving on babysitters, parking and the more expensive indoor town cinema ticket prices, all the while enjoying the comfortable environment of their steel household pet – the family car.

The latter part of the 1940s saw the evolution of sound systems, which went from loudspeakers booming out the soundtrack (and outraging homeowners nearby) to the small in-car speaker on a pole, ‘Don’t forget not to drive away with it!’ Minute revisions were made to the angle of the vertical pile of earth which optimised parked viewing when 500-2000 cars were positioned in semi-circular rows. No car? No problem! There was even a ‘fly-in drive-in’ built, which accommodated a couple of dozen small aircrafts. Then came the introduction of family-friendly niceties like barbeque pits, picnic tables, swings and playgrounds, clowns and circus acts, uniformed attendants, huge neon signs and the single most profitable innovation of all: the legendary concession stand and the ubiquitous intermission film trailers inducing the audience to scarf down loads of buttered popcorn, ice-cream, hot dogs, candy bars and soft drinks – sometimes beer. By 1949 there were 155 drive-ins, but the golden age was just around the corner; by 1951 there were 820 drive-ins and in 1958 close to 5000, though this development came at a cost: in that same year a similar number of indoor cinemas closed their doors.

The growing number of young children and families in 1950s America who were living in suburbia and filling these drive-ins were catered to in every way possible. Drive-ins were known as nice family places – for a mainly white, aspirant middle class, it has to be said. There was some concern about stories and rumours of various amorous activities taking place in the back seats of cars – made evident by the steaming up of windows – but it was not until these baby-boomers emerged from their cocoons and became that culturally and economically distinct market group, the teenager, that things really hotted up – both on and off-screen. It was also at this time that a number of new factors entered into the cinematic equation. The major studios had always resisted distributing first run films to drive-ins and reserved them for the ‘classier’ cinemas in town centres. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s seismic cultural shifts were occurring which changed the face of the industry, among which may be noted the challenges hurled at Hollywood from television, the more liberal sexual content of European (often dubious) ‘art-house’ films, publications like Playboy magazine, challenges to censorship laws, more relaxed attitudes to sexuality, and of especial significance for drive-in owners: the raging hormones of 16-18-year-olds. Affluent enough to drive their own jalopies around and to control their own social lives, they had one big problem – where to go out on a date that was (superficially) acceptable to parents yet provided good cover for the more frisky pursuits of adolescent affection (lust). Thus did the ‘sin pit’ designation of back-row indoor cinemas morph into the ‘passion pit’ designation for drive-ins. And most crucially and importantly to all of these factors was the development of a market niche which the big studios were slow to react to: the low-budget teen’sploitation film, into whose eventual canon masters such as Roger Corman, Samuel Arkoff, and Herschell Gordon Lewis were operating. As the 60s moved on, drive-in film cycles and sub-genres popped up in these shady venues like transgressive mushrooms: biker flicks, rebel flicks, bad girl flicks, JD flicks, beach party flicks, nudie flicks, rock ‘n’ roll flicks, women in prison/caged women flicks, and later the counter-culture flicks featuring anti-heroes and student activists (always an obligatory reefer rolling scene), psychedelic flicks, and gore fest flicks – all this and they were often screened in dawn till dusk marathons; which is how, dear reader, the present writer of this piece came to know all about the de Sades, the Phibes, the Captain Americas, the Ilsas, the Emmanuelles, the Gidgets and the Shafts of this world, alongside gaining – after many futile and frankly fumbled attempts – some modest mastery of the complex ergonomics of the bra strap clasp, a skill which seemed then to rank alongside any kinaesthetic feat of Houdini’s.

This period (60s to mid-70s) was in fact the high cultural and historic cinematic watershed of the drive-in theatre, in spite of the fact that profits weren’t quite as good as in the 1950s, in spite of the fact that the incorporation of daylight saving time was forcing back starting times, in spite of the fact that the rival indoor cinemas (soon to be multiplexes) were improving their facilities and offerings. And it was likewise the golden age of the drive-in film. Roger Corman himself was involved with the production of some 200 movies, and a quick glance at books like Cult Flicks & Trash Pics or Slimetime: a Gudie to Sleazy Mindless Movies will provide plenty of other choice examples.

But then came the crash: with ever-diminishing returns, desperate drive-in managers moved from exploitation films to screening XXX and porno films thus alienating many audiences and outraging neighbourhoods – it was said that car accidents were caused by drivers gawping at the giant roadside screens and that people were subject to 40-foot-high fornication scenes from their home windows. Added to this, fuel crises, the baby-boomers distaste for suburban life and the consequent return to inner city dwelling, and the dampened enthusiasm for the novelty of alfresco movies all contributed to the fall of the drive-in. The hearty drive-in owner soldiered on, but from a peak of 5000 screens in 1958, there were only 1500 in 1988 and less than 500 in 2000 (Sources of all figures from The Drive-In Theatre History Page). But the final nails in the coffin came with VCRs, cable channels and the massive sell-offs of drive-in properties, whose value had sky-rocketed as suburban malls, retail superstores and drive-in eateries swallowed up the out-of-town areas.

A few drive-in theatres still operate but the rest are cultural dinosaurs; rotting brick-and-wood behemoths hidden behind overgrown greenery and trees, unlisted architectural monuments to a period in American cultural and social history where cars, movies and making out were a kind of youthful holy trinity. But as Joe Bob Briggs writes, ‘They can burn us up. They can knock us down. But they can’t close the drive-in in our heart.’

So let’s all raise a CHILLING! BLOODY! BEASTLY! TERRIFYING!, NAKED! 75th ANNIVERSARY drink to that great genius of cinematic innovation, Richard Hollingshead, Jr.

James B Evans

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH PETER WHITEHEAD

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Peter Whitehead

The retrospective at the Paris Cinemathí¨que in January 2007 followed by this summer’s Italian festivals of Bologna and Bellaria have witnessed the re(in)surrection of Peter Whitehead’s subversive counter-cinema. There is also a book being published, the first on the British director, Peter Whitehead: Cinema, musica, rivoluzione (Cinema, music, revolution), unfortunately only in Italian. After having spent a long time in Saudi Arabia breeding falcons (see The Falconer by Chris Petit, a good documentary on the director) Whitehead has recently come back to cinema and started working on an adaptation of one of his novels (he’s also a famous cyber-novelist), Terrorism as one of the Fine Arts… a long overdue film on Western fundamentalism and its ‘democratic’ CCTV-controlled identity.

Best known for his records of 60s music and youth culture, Peter Whitehead placed his own desiring subjectivity at the heart of his films and sculpted with light (he was a cinematographer as well as an editor) an alternate vision of the swinging sixties (a term which, according to the director, was coined by the CIA in order to downplay the revolutionary nature of that period). Superimposing warped and unfocused images on the dominant standard of clean and fake commercial aesthetics, his style sought to fight the capitalistic forces specialised in the commodification of the youth’s rebellious urges.

When Whitehead’s camera scratches away the glossy pretence of what he described as ‘that old monotheistic, patriarchal, elitist, conservative crap that through institutionalised imperialism is devastating the Third World and those who oppose this manslaughter’, I cannot help but thinking about his first, seemingly irrelevant, film, The Perception of Life. I watched the film in a quasi-deserted cinema during the Biografilm festival in Bologna where, exception made for this one feature, Whitehead’s retrospective was hugely successful. The film was commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation (Unit for the History of Ideas) and is about the evolution of biologic sciences in relation to the development of microscopic techniques. It was shot through lenses used by scientists from the 17th to the 20th century and it somehow embodies Whitehead’s cinematic action to come: going beyond the appearance of things, trying to analyse them from within after having perforated their surface, just like the eye-slitting in Un Chien Andalou. This curious film is closed by a voice-over asking the audience: ‘Have we arrived to the point where our eyes are meeting our imagination?’… An involuntary poetic declaration?

The Celluloid Liberation Front met Peter Whitehead in Bologna, where 31 years ago the tanks sent by the government entered the city to repress the creative autonomy movement, killing an innocent man and thousands of dreams.

CLF: What can you tell us about the film you’re now working on, Terrorism Considered as one of the Fine Arts?

PW: My new film can be considered The Fall‘s sequel since it enacts the end of representation. The protagonist is Michael Schlieman, a MI6 spy working in the terrorism section of the British intelligence. He disappeared and will publish his ‘confessions’ on the internet, revealing the truth about secret operations carried out by various governments. There is a parallel between the sinking of the French Greenpeace boat, the Rainbow Warrior, and the terrorist state murder of a Greenpeace photographer. Schlieman is now part of an eco-terrorist group… the central element of the film is the killing of an ideal victim. I want to investigate the CIA’s influence on English culture, which is based on misinformation. This new film is influenced by Thomas De Quincey’s novels, Confessions of an Opium Eater and Murder Considered as a Fine Art, and I’d say that it is about fear and control, or better still, about the fear that the state spreads in order to control. After having destroyed the Third World now we are also destroying this planet; Gaia is now, rightly so, revolting.

CLF: Can cinema participate in social struggles, or does it merely register/document?

PW: Yes, partly it can but it’s just a little part. I think that avant-garde art always has to be directly and belligerently dangerous, destructive, but not towards itself, rather, towards the collective inertia. The true aim of art should be to cultivate acts of war… it’s not enough to paint words on walls, these walls need to be torn down.

CLF: Can you tell us more about the magazine you co-founded, Afterimage?

PW: I founded that magazine with Field and Sainsbury in 1970, we were mainly influenced by Cahiers and its political commitment and wanted to bring across the channel some avant-garde cinema such as Godard’s British Sounds (Peter Whitehead was the first one to translate Godard’s films into English) which remains little seen to these days. We were the first to publish the Manifesto of Third Cinema by Solanas and Getino in Europe besides reviewing Guney, Fassbinder and Herzog among others.

CLF: While watching the early Rolling Stones performances in Charlie is My Darling I felt that back then they were using a language that many found dangerous and hyper-kinetic. What attracted you most to that band?

PW: You got the point, the media back then was focusing on the style of the band while for me it was a matter of form or language, as you said. They were adopting the musical culture of the Afro-Americans, an oppressed minority, therefore that music was carrying a strong political message in itself. Jagger himself said, ‘music is one of the things that can change society, don’t let white kids listen to black music if you want them to remain how they are’.

CLF: I’ve just watched your first film The Perception of Life, and in spite of being poles apart from the rest of your production I thought that it somehow represented your cinema quite well. What do you think of that film?

PW: I have to admit that back then I didn’t like the film but, later on I got interested by the fact that it was all shot through a microscope, in other words I was not using the camera, I was using a microscope, and many sequences are shot through the oldest machines used by scientists. We were looking for what these scientists were seeing through those lenses. Perception shows how theories are determined by what is visible. You’re right, in a sense all my films are linked to the idea of using the camera as a microscope. I think that in all my films I enter a situation and I try to analyse it from the inside.

Interview by Celluloid Liberation Front

Short Cuts

SHORT CUTS: UNCUT

Monsters of Miami

Still from Monsters of Miami

Uncut is a film forum that runs monthly at the ICA (London).

For more details visit the ICA website.

The ICA’s monthly Uncut Film Forum is an all too rare opportunity for members of the public to see short films by up-and-coming directors and film school graduates, with the chance to get the inside scoop from the filmmakers themselves. Programmed and presented by Joel Karamath, the Forum was founded fifteen years ago in response to the demise of repertory cinema: ‘A lot of the art-house cinemas were closing down when I was at college, so there were fewer places to see films by new directors. I wanted somewhere to show films and have them discussed, so when the ICA offered me the opportunity to set up a film forum, I ran round the student shows to pick the best films and the monthly event grew from that’.

June’s Uncut featured eleven incredibly eclectic short films covering a broad range of subject matter and styles, from challenging documentaries, to touching dramas, fantasy with live action mixed with animation to more abstract takes on filmmaking. ‘There’s no point programming two hours of avant-garde cinema’, says Karamath, ‘you want the audience to be drawn in. So by showing a variety of films, including a couple of more abstract pieces, you really hold their attention’.

Many of the filmmakers tackled tough subject matter, providing balanced arguments. Hamish Mek Chohan’s Boots and Braces – The Night Southall Burned is the story of the clash between skinheads and Indians in Southall in 1981, with interviews from both sides providing a compelling investigation into a forgotten issue. In Monsters of Miami, Nick Ahlmark talks to paedophiles forced to live under a bridge with no running water or electricity, due to a law that means they can’t be less than 2,500 ft from anywhere children gather. Their story is sympathetically told, and the viewer feels sorry for these men while simultaneously horrified by what they’ve done.

Death was a dominant theme in June’s event, as demonstrated in the poignantly funny drama Roaring Heaven, which is set in an old people’s home and tackles the way British people are able to handle and talk about death. In stark contrast to the film’s sad subject matter, the colours are Technicolor bright, representing the heightening of the senses due to grief.

Death receives a more abstract treatment in Niall Thompson’s Six Million Ways To Die where an actor is filmed straight to camera, reciting stream-of-consciousness monologue in one take, listing every conceivable way to die. The monologue features everything from ‘heart attack’ and ‘stabbing’ to ‘ill-prepared fugu‘ and ‘eaten alive by a whale’.

To put together the programme of the Film Forum, Karamath (a college lecturer) searches for the most outstanding work from an international assortment of student filmmakers. Yet, he also looks beyond the confines of film school: ‘I’m most interested in the first film out of college, where the filmmaker is no longer restricted by college but they haven’t yet been disillusioned by the industry’. If the standard of shorts demonstrated is as high every month then the future is certainly bright for the British Film Industry. Uncut resumes in the autumn after a short summer break.

Lucy Hurst

Film Jukebox

CRAZY GIRL’S JUKEBOX

Crazy Girl

Is there anything Crazy Girl can’t do? She is a musician, she has her own radio show, she animates her own videos and stories plus she designs teen-freaking computer games. All the latest info about the ultimate 21st-century Renaissance woman is on her website, including the details of the new, luxurious 12′ box set due out on the Tummy Touch label in August. This is her film jukebox.

1- Tommy (1975)
We got cable TV when I was a kid. There was only 1 channel, HBO, and it showed the same 3 movies over and over. Tommy was on constant rotation in 1978 and I watched it every day after school. At first it scared me, but then I became obsessed with it and to this day, I can recite the dialogue from beginning to end. The Who’s music plus Ken Russell’s keen direction equals a beautifully styled, psychedelic wonderland. It’s beautiful, twisted, has killer music and outfits, lots of star cameos and the hero is a pinball champion. What more could you want? When I was little it really captured me, I knew one day when I grew up I wanted to be a gypsy acid queen, just like Tina Turner. Recently I was home visiting my mom, and Tommy was on, she had never watched it, after a while, she started crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, ‘I was a bad mother to let you watch this film when you were so young, I can’t believe this is what you were watching!’ I had to reassure her; ‘Don’t be upset Mamma, this film really influenced me on so many levels, if I hadn’t of seen it so young, I wouldn’t be doing what I am today!’

2- Always for Pleasure (1978)
Growing up in the deep south of Columbus, Georgia, USA, there was one thing I looked forward to with a vengeance; spending my vacations in New Orleans with my grandpa Stuart and my uncle Diggie. Leaving the drab beige Bible belt town for this rainbow city of exploding fabulousness! My family had an intense pride for their city. Grandpa was a jazz trumpeter. He’d played with the old jazz legends but when I was a kid he was the bandleader for the circus, which was pretty cool! My uncle was a musical playwright who wrote shows based on New Orleans culture and he was also an amazing costume designer. Going to visit them was like being on another planet where you dressed in sequins and feathers, ate yummy creole cuisine, and danced to the blaring sounds of trumpets and banging drums. This beautiful film by Les Blanks is the only film I have ever seen that truly captures the magic essence of New Orleans and what it once was. It’s set in 1978 at Mardi Gras. Witness the Mardi Gras Indians – Wild Tchoupitoulas chiefs doing their patois battle (kind of a folk rap), learn how to boil crawfish, Irma Thomas talks about how to make perfect red beans, see a rare performance by Professor Longhair, and much more. This is the New Orleans I remember – the beauty, the carefree way of life, the fun, the golden days.

3- Waiting For Guffman (1997)
In 1976 I played a young Scarlett O’Hara in my hometown’s sesquicentennial (150 year) celebration. That was my introduction to my local community theatre company. That’s why I love this film so much, it mirrors my small town upbringing. From the guys that brought out classics like Spinal Tap and Best in Show, this particular film is my favourite of theirs. Set in the fictitious town of Blaine, Missouri, the local theatre company writes a musical to celebrate Blaine’s 150th birthday. As the story goes, in the early 1900s, a presidential candidate was campaigning on a train that stopped in Blaine, a local boy gave him one of his father’s hand-crafted foot stools, that created the stool boom, and Blaine became known as the stool capital of the world. The theatre group does a song and dance number all about stools, it is the funniest thing I have ever seen.

4- Fantastic Planet (La Planí¨te Sauvage, 1973)
Back in my early 20s, myself and 3 friends took acid and tripped at this folk artist compound in South Georgia called Pasaquan. It was built from the 1950s to the 80s by this wacky man who went by the moniker St EOM. He believed he was a Pasaquoan and he was to teach the world of Pasaquanism. Pasa from Spanish meaning the past and Quan from Chinese meaning the future – bringing the past to the future was his philosophy. All throughout the grounds were these giant space creatures with pressure point suits with their hair standing up in the air – that was another part of his mantra, that the hair must stand up to receive cosmic messages from the galaxies. Supposedly they could levitate as well. It was an intense, magical 3 days. We dressed in his outfits and tried to contact his spirit. Afterwards, one of my friends handed me a videocassette and said, ‘All will become clear’. Boy, was he right, it was like all the mysteries of the world were revealed, right there and then. Fantastic Planet was almost a reflection of St EOM’s vision. I believe the 1970s were the last renaissance on earth, just look at the outfits and music that was made then. Particularly 1973. The film was made by French artists in Czechoslovakia. It’s a story about the Oms and the Draags. The Oms are humanoid creatures broken into 2 groups, savage Oms that live in the forest and domesticated Oms who are pets of the Draags – the overseers of the planet. The Draags are giant space creatures in pressure point suits that levitate – see the similarities? The story is about the Oms trying to break free from the Draags’ tight reign. On top of a brilliant story, and wonderfully weird animation, the soundtrack is utterly superb!!! Composed by Alain Gorguer, the top track for me is ‘Ten Et Medor’, it’s also my favourite scene from the film.

5- Bottles (1936)
When I was little I really wanted to go to Disney World, just like all the other kids, but my parents were totally against the blatant consumerism, so instead we did Swiss Family Robinson type adventures, mining for amethyst, sapphire, ruby, rose quartz and even panning for gold in the Appalachian Mountains. I thought it was totally unfair and if I could have charged my parents with abuse I would have. Oddly enough, I was never ever a Disney cartoon fan, not even Fantasia (gasp!), I just wanted to fit in, I guess, and be normal. Every day there would be old cartoon shorts on the TV. This one in particular really grabbed me, made by one of Disney’s rivals – Harman & Ising. It’s set in a chemist’s shop, the chemist is making a drug and the fumes make him pass out. When he awakes everything is upside down and topsy-turvy. The entire chemist shop comes to life, the Alka Seltzer sings to the lipstick, the hair brushes dance with the perfume bottles, it’s all so mad. I think this made me want to try psychedelic drugs. I mean if it makes you see dancing lipsticks, it can’t be that bad, can it?

6- The Cockettes (2002)
I was born in the wrong time. If only I had been born in the late 40s, I would be in my late teens or early 20s living in a San Francisco commune. I am a total idealist and wish for a perfect utopia, it seems for a brief time in history, there was one in San Francisco. There was a printing commune, a food commune, art commune, music commune, and they all came together to work as one; but the best most fun commune that I would have joined had to be the drag commune. They had a drag box you could pick outfits from, they danced and took acid and covered their faces in glitter. They soon called themselves the Cockettes and formed a musical performing troupe, who counted Divine and Sylvester as members. It wasn’t long before famous people like Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger were lining up to catch their performances; but sadly it all crashed when they tried to recreate the San Francisco magic in New York City. This documentary has amazing vintage footage of their shows, with cameos by John Waters and Allen Ginsberg. A brilliant look into the wacky world of the acid-taking, beard-wearing, glitter-covered queens. Let’s hope that style makes a comeback soon.

7- Auntie Mame (1958)
Like I mentioned previously, going to New Orleans when I was a child was my favourite thing to do. One reason was because of my uncle, he could make a funeral fun, and he did when my grandpa died on my 13th birthday! I was devastated. But, Instead of staying home crying, he dressed me in sequins and feathers and took me to a play he was in at the time, that happened to star Dr Tony Jones from General Hospital (a popular soap opera from the 1980s). I forgot all about gramps and stayed up all night with Dr Tony Jones drinking virgin strawberry daiquiris. My uncle was a true bohemian, who travelled the world in the 60s with this theatre company called La Mamma. Their claim to fame was this series of ancient Greek tragedies performed in ancient Greek, at old theatres in the rounds in the Middle East. It was pretty ground-breaking stuff at the time, and original members included Sam Shepard, Susan Sarandon and Merryl Streep. Going to visit him was a real learning experience. He was a true artist and non-conformist, who on top of showering me with love, affection and lots of gifts, always taught me to be myself, not to judge others and to see life in a different light. Auntie Mame always reminded me of him. The story is about an orphaned boy forced through boarding school, who spends his vacations with his wild, wacky, bohemian aunt who shows him life through a different perspective. The outfits and sets are truly glorious, and again there is a moral message – be yourself and do not judge others. This classic film is a true old Hollywood gem.

8- Dancing Outlaw (1991)
When I first saw this film I thought it must be a hoax. Is it possible that a paranoid, schizophrenic, glue-sniffing, clog-dancing Elvis impersonator could exist? But the answer is ‘YES!’ Oh, I love this film. It is the story of Jessie White. Jessie has 3 personalities – Jessie – the sweet clog-dancing man, Jesco – the angry, glue-sniffing, devil-worshipping criminal, and Elvis – duh – the king of Rock and Roll. This fly-on-the-wall doc follows him around his home town of Boone County, West Virginia. A poor, coal-mining community nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. The film starts off with Jesco, in an Iron Maiden T-shirt with a boom box blaring ZZ Top, clog-dancing across a wood-slatted bridge over a ravine. Jessie’s deceased father had been a clog-dancing champion of Boone County and he desperately wants to follow in his father’s clogsteps. It’s quite evident when his personalities change. Jessie is sweet, Jesco is mean, and Elvis can be mean too. At one point his wife asks, ‘ Jessie, when will you make love to me?’ He replies, ‘Bitch, you call me by my right name or I’ll cut your fuckin’ head off’. So she asks, ‘ Elvis, when will you make love to Priscilla?’ A funny, poignant peek into a true character’s life. Apparently, there is a Jessie White music festival, one day Lord, please let me play there.

9- Mule Skinner Blues (2001)
My other grandparents lived in Florida and every year we would make the journey down to visit them. Along the way my dad would drive us through a trailer park and say, ‘This is where the carnies live’ and we would all peer out the windows hoping to catch a glimpse of the lobster man, bearded lady or obligatory midget. Sadly, all we saw were trailers, but I’m fascinated by trailer parks. This sweet little documentary is set in a trailer park in Florida inhabited by a group of misfits. Beanie – an alcoholic, drifter, and also king of the misfits, has one dream – to make a horror film. And together with his merry neighbours, and the documentary film crew, his dream comes to fruition. One lady sews the outfits, others provide the soundtrack, and with the magic of a gorilla costume – a monster is born. It’s a great feel-good film and nice to see a quirky community pulling together for art’s sake.

10- Belleville Rendez-vous (2003)
This animation is about a grandmother’s undying love for her grandson and the lengths she will go to protect him. Set in France in the ‘olden days’, the thing I love about this film is there is no dialogue, except when Les Triplettes de Belleville, a band of jazz-singing old ladies, do their occasional performance. That’s what is so great though, this film transcends words, it’s just a beautiful, moving story about love, protection and lots of bikes. My favourite is the dog, he’s so life-like. He has these funny doggy dreams which remind me of my dog Boo Boo Bee Bee, he has doggie dreams all the time.

Interview by Nick Dutfield

Interviews

INTERVIEW WITH GUY MADDIN

Guy Maddin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 July 2008

Venues: BFI Southbank, Renoir, The Gate (London) and key cities; Scotland July 18

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin

Canada 2006

90 mins

Guy Maddin season at the BFI Southbank

July 4-23

Programme

In the week before the British theatrical release of his new documentary My Winnipeg and the BFI retrospective of his films, Guy Maddin came to London to introduce some preview screenings of his work. Alex Fitch caught up with the director and they chatted about My Winnipeg, Guy’s interests and influences as a filmmaker and his career on screen so far.

Alex Fitch: My Winnipeg seems to be a mixture of the various styles you’ve developed in other movies. Parts of it – for example the ballet section – remind the viewer of Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary and other parts are autobiographical. Do you see it as a sort of culmination of your career so far?

Guy Maddin: Yeah, I just decided to kind of throw the kitchen sink at the viewers! I was commissioned to make this film and I’ve never made a long documentary before. I’d made a short one with Isabella Rossellini which I’d always called a docu-fantasia, because Isabella was talking about her father on his centennial, but I don’t think she was really worried about getting the facts right. What really mattered was that this was a documentary about her feelings about her father, so she conducted all the research she needed in her heart. So when I was commissioned to make a film about Winnipeg I realised I could do the same thing! But I was still worried about ‘the documentary’ and all the ridiculous disciplines it tends to require, all the apparent objectivity and higher shooting ratios and longer editing periods and discovering your true subject in the editing… All these are clichés about the process of making a documentary, and I was pretty terrified! So I thought, I’m just going to load up the arsenal with as many tricks as I have… But something prevented me from allowing them to be tricks; since I was talking about my Winnipeg, they had to ring true in my heart. So I ended up making – I think very intuitively – a movie about Winnipeg that really kept grabbing at the oddest, almost forgotten corners of my memory and finding things that mattered to me. Finally, I found myself not making a movie about Winnipeg after all but about home – everyone’s home – about home towns, family, nostalgia, memory or something! I think that’s why the movie’s been travelling way better than I ever thought it would. People in Sydney or London or Berlin are seeing the same things in it that Winnipeggers see in it. It’s strange…

AF:Someone famous once said it’s not so much that ‘History is written by the winners’ but rather ‘History is written by the writers’ and so you can take any kind of fact and weave it into your own personal narrative.

GM: That was a bit of a challenge. There are so many disparate and seemingly unrelated items of interest to me that I had to find a way of weaving them together. The editing process did take a long time, but sometimes I would just fluke upon a connection between two things during my improvised narrations. I would go to the recording studio for five or ten minutes each day and just talk for a while. Sometimes in the spirit of just keeping the talk going I would have to repeat things before thinking of the next thing to say and so things started taking on poetic symptoms. Every now and then when I was trying to force out an idea, I’d come up (to the studio) – and in desperation, to keep the ball rolling – I would make a throw that accidentally perfectly connected two scenes. Ultimately, after months of doing these improvised narrations, almost every scene in the movie spoons against the previous and the next or rhymes somehow with a scene elsewhere in the movie and they all kind of fit together. I’d like to feel that if there were such a thing as poetry or psychology accountants, they’d come in and do an audit and everything would add up horizontally, vertically, diagonally and we’d be congratulated for keeping such good books!

AF: A lot of themes in the movie seem to be about movement and rhythms. The confluence of the rivers, the way they flow into the town and the immigrants, the way they flow into the town and the way the railroad flows into the town… Nature and man’s imposition on nature is something that might dictate a more poetic narrative rather than straight storytelling.

GM: Yeah, and Winnipeg especially, being at the geographical centre of North America and the site of so many strange intersections including all sorts of mystical beliefs whether European or Aboriginal… I’m not much of a mystic when I’m not holding a camera but you’re always looking for something to haunt your screen when you’re a filmmaker and I found it in abundance in Winnipeg. The stories really had me half-believing in all the great mystics and the legends. I mention them because they actually create a really strong and eerie milieu for the stuff that happens within my family. I could never successfully disentangle a study of my home town from a study of my own home and family. I was pleased that the staining mystical powers bled right into my family and that all the occult ectoplasms prescribed to the city by Aboriginals and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also seemed to be in operation whenever my siblings and my mum sat down to eat dinner!

AF: How autobiographical are the recreations?

GM: They’re spot on!

AF: You show a younger version of yourself making films of your mother and family. So that actually happened?

GM: Yeah.

AF: So you might have, for example, those actual home movies as an extra on the DVD if you felt like exposing yourself that much to the world!

GM: I have hours of 8mm footage – it’s not even Super 8 yet – from when I was very young. I shot some of it; my older brother, Ross – who’s still alive – shot a bunch as well. He’s twelve years older than I am. My dead brother was an audiophile and created tonnes of sound sculptures which we were able to incorporate into the movie, so he has a posthumous credit of sound design or some sort of sound department credit anyway. I didn’t want to give him too good a credit – you don’t want to cheat the living out of their proper credits! The recreated family and conversations were spot on, as well as I could remember anyway – memory’s pretty unreliable.

AF: The new scenes, were they shot on film or digital? The reason I ask is because you mentioned alchemical processes earlier and film itself is obviously a very alchemical process – you open a shutter, expose some plastic to light and bathe it in chemicals in order to reveal the hidden image…

GM: …and you’d think I’d know that more than anyone! But I really thought that making a documentary was an opportunity for me to break free of my enslavement to film emulsion and work in HD. So I did buy an HD camera and I shot most of the movie with it and then I realised that these stories would sit a lot better in emulsions rather than pixels. They’re just made for emulsions… So I projected the finished edited film onto my fridge and shot it with a film camera and there the stories sit properly!

AF: The history of filmmaking is something that’s very important in your work. There’re all sorts of references to silent movie techniques… Were European silents something you were fond of when you were growing up?

GM: Not when I was growing up, but when I was a 20-something hipster I loved the look of those things. When I was daydreaming of becoming a filmmaker and for the life of me couldn’t light the basic three-light set-up. I had three shadows every time I’d light them, so I started unplugging them until I got down to one shadow. And it was an expressionist shadow and I realised the shadows were not only very evocative and loaded with atmosphere and dread but also the most inexpensive form of set decoration. Absence of light seemed to suggest far more than building a set could ever do! It was kind of a chicken / egg thing… I think my penchant for expressionist stuff came about from sheer inability to do classic filmmaking, and then of course that forced me to watch more silent film and I found more affinities with it. The approach of silent film is a little closer to fairy tale than naturalism. I like treating everything as more or less fairy tale anyway. That’s my way of finding myself inside of a book, I always pretend it is a fairy tale at first – whether it is or not – and then make adjustments later.

AF: In your first three films, you seemed to be touring Europe both in terms of style and narrative – Tales from the Gimli Hospital is about an Icelandic community, Careful is about a Swiss town, Archangel is about a group of Russians. Also, Archangel and Careful have very strong expressionist and constructivist influences, which culminate in my favourite of your shorts, The Heart of the World, which feels like a lost Russian silent movie!

GM: Yeah and that’s the only movie I’ve made that turned out exactly the way I planned it! It’s pretty lucky – that won’t happen again! I feel it’s because film, more than any other art form – it can be argued that Renaissance painting was like this too – is an industry as well as an art form. In its industrial haste, so many beautiful unexploited potentials were just left behind and it seems like such a shame not to go back and exploit them a bit more, even as ineptly as I do!

AF: I wouldn’t say that at all! Certainly the fact that your films use the language of the silents gives them a great visual aesthetic that stands out amongst all the CGI and the slickness that are crowding the movie theatres. It seems a shame that so few directors have a visual style any more, as if they have to fit in with everything else that’s out there.

GM: I’m so lucky… Like I said, whatever visual style I have – and I do have one – came about just from dumb tenacity to shoot in spite of the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing and I’ll credit myself with recognising that that was producing something – something worth clinging onto with a lot of desperation! It’s evolving slowly but I’m not in any hurry; there’re still a million and one great stories to be told by this enchanting method, so why toss it out, the way the industry did the first time around?

AF: In the films you made from the late 90s onwards like The Saddest Music in the World and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and now the hidden history of Winnipeg you seem to be inventing a Canadian mythology.

GM: Yeah, definitely.

AF: Modern Canadian cinema seems to be somewhat ‘new’; it seems to be inventing its own history as if the hundred years that preceded it haven’t been documented enough so they need to cram it all in.

GM:They haven’t! I guess because we’re smack dab up against the greatest self-mythologising culture ever, America – we’re loathe to self-mythologise. When Canadians are asked to define their identity, they say, ‘Well, we’re not American!’ And pressed to define what that means, they say, ‘Well, we don’t exaggerate, we don’t boast…’. But there’s no more sure-fire way to consign a historical figure or event to complete amnesiac oblivion than to present them in life-sized terms. So it’s nice to see other filmmakers’ work, but it was something I was prepared to do if no one else was going to do it – start self-mythologising… That doesn’t mean lying! If you asked the average American which one of the following really existed, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Daniel Boone, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Joe Montana, they couldn’t tell you half the time! So apocryphal people are just as important as ones that really lived. They get boiled down to an essence that gets tasted in one’s lifetime and goes into the recipe of a national identity. I just want to do my bit for Canadians so they don’t have to say, ‘Well, we’re not American’.

AF:Also, because you’re nestling against a ‘sleeping elephant’, as someone once called America, Canadian cinema seems to be able to explore themes that American cinema seems to be terrified of, such as sexuality, for example. Your films, the films of Robert LePage, the films of David Cronenberg, seem to explore male sexuality in a way that American cinema won’t touch with a barge pole!

GM:Us Canadian mice can go right up the rear end of that elephant without them even noticing! It’s an advantage.

AF:In My Winnipeg for example, the scenes in the changing rooms… Is it something you feel just isn’t explored in cinema?

GM:Children are sexual beings, just think of your own childhood. In my case, I was far more sexual as a child than I am now; far more preoccupied from a very early age… I haven’t conducted an elaborate survey, but I just like movies that acknowledge that. There’s a great Canadian film called Léolo that gets right into that. I’m just trying to be honest. Nothing bothers me more than a movie about the innocence of children! What are they innocent of? They might be innocent of murder, but that’s about it! Children haven’t learned to repress yet or anything like that. They’re just teeming with wonderful luridity, from very early on! I was six, maybe, when for some reason I locked the bathroom door and urinated into a badminton birdie! It was very important that I do this! I’m not going to say how many times I did this, but…

AF:You marked that territory well!

GM:…it seemed to make sense to me somehow. While it was a rough draft or an incorrect model of the world, there was something telling me to do that…

AF:Another theme in your work is matriarchal figures. Obviously there’s Ann Savage playing a semi-fictionalised version of your mother in My Winnipeg, in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs there’s Shelley Duvall, in The Saddest Music there’s Isabella Rossellini… These strong female presences, is that something you’re trying to work out – some sort of childhood trauma – or just something you feel isn’t explored enough in cinema?

GM:Yeah, especially in indie film, which is still very male-dominated. I’m not going to start making feminist statements on behalf of women filmmakers, but it just feels good to see everybody represented fairly in movies. Bergman’s trick was to write autobiography and then ascribe his own autobiographical traits to one or two female characters; but I’ve been lucky enough, I’ve had one or two very strong female characters in my life and they seem to be bottomless sources of narrative material! My first few movies were very male-centred with very simple objects of desire wearing the skirts but in these recent pictures I’ve decided to zero in on what women really meant to me. They feel more fleshed out, it’s very satisfying.

AF:I suppose that in films like Cowards Bend the Knee and Sissy Boy Slap Party it’s the absence of a female presence that causes the guys to go crazy?

GM:Well, yeah! If you’re just lounging around the dock with your shirt off and a gob hat aslant over a sun-sleepy face, you’ll get yourself into some trouble! I found myself reading Euripides of all things… I never wanted to read Greek tragedy, I thought that would be like unrolling parchments and be a very arid activity, but gobbling up Euripides is like flipping through the pages of Mexican romance comics – really fun, fast-paced, crazy, violent stuff! Everything Quentin Tarantino should be is in Euripides! Not only that, it’s written 2,500 years ago but it’s about the relationship you just got out of – it’s incredible! There’re some great women characters in there and I’m in there! The male characters always seem to be me! In Medea, I’m Jason. I’ve gone out with Medea, I’ve gone out with Electra… It’s amazing how easily you can find yourself in these things.

AF:It’s interesting you should mention Medea, as Lars von Trier made a film version of the story for TV and I was wondering if you were a particular fan of his work, because the central leit-motif in My Winnipeg, having the train with back-projected images behind it, reminded me very much of Europa.

GM:Yeah, I had that in mind and then I realised that when I was trying to hypnotize people at the beginning of my movie some people might be reminded of Max von Sydow’s very hypnotic narration in Europa, but I’d already decided to do it anyway. It ended up being different. Von Trier really took the rear-screen projection a lot further, by incorporating characters in real world and ‘flat world’ and having them trade places and things like that. I do like rear-screen projection. It’s a simple way of opening up space – of acquiring cheap cinematic space.

Interview by Alex Fitch

For more on this see Guy Maddin and the mythologising of Winnipeg and the interview with Cecilia Araneda, director of the Winnipeg Film Group.

Features

GUY MADDIN AND THE MYTHOLOGISING OF WINNIPEG

My Winnipeg

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 July 2008

Venues: BFI Southbank, Renoir, The Gate (London) and key cities; Scotland July 18

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin

Canada 2006

90 mins

Guy Maddin season at the BFI Southbank

July 4-23

Programme

Close to the geographical centre of the North American continent is the seventh largest Canadian city – although the locals consider it relatively small – Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba. Native Americans first arrived in the area 6000 years ago, Europeans in 1738 and it was incorporated as a city in 1873.

Although Guy Maddin’s new film My Winnipeg may provide their first introduction to the place to most British viewers (beyond Homer Simpson using it as his base in the episode where he becomes a prescription drug mule and A.A. Milne’s confusion over the origin of Winnie-the-Pooh), film has been used as a promotional tool for the location for almost as long as cinema has been in existence. In 1888, James Freer, a reporter from Bristol, emigrated to the city and became Canada’s first filmmaker plus a keen proponent of his new home to boot, shipping the pro-emigration film Ten years in Manitoba back to his country of birth in 1898. 120 years later, Manitoba’s most illustrious filmmaker (if that isn’t damning him with faint praise) is still using the techniques of silent cinema and has made, if not a love letter to his home, at least a salacious biography that might equally be called Fifty-two years in Manitoba and everything that intrigues me about the half-century before…

Guy Maddin has always been a curious filmmaker, in all the connotations of the word, creating films that take an oblique look at their subject matter and often seem impenetrable to the casual observer. What makes Maddin’s directorial style most recognisable is his appropriation of the language of silent movies; even though many of his films contain some synch sound and dialogue, the use of inter-titles, lower frame rates (than the modern minimum of 24 fps), monochrome / tinted cinematography and degraded film stock make them look more cognate to the cinema of a hundred years ago than to modern filmmaking. In a climate of slick CGI, $100-million-budgets and a fixation on verisimilitude, Maddin’s faux retro style makes his films stand out as some of the most intriguing, exciting and unique in today’s cinema.

Two recent films brought his work to the attention of British audiences, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary and The Saddest Music in the World, both of which had an angle that made them more approachable to audiences unaccustomed to seeing silent-style movies. Dracula is a filmed version of the Royal Winnipeg ballet; it premiered first on the BBC before transferring to cinemas (perhaps to gauge the audience) and arrived on the big screen not long after a similar production at Sadler’s Wells. The Saddest Music in the World is a musical (which the British seem to love) and has a bankable star in the form of Isabella Rossellini. In contrast, Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand upon the Brain! which Maddin made either side of The Saddest Music, only received festival screenings in this country; perhaps the subject matter – the sexuality of ice hockey players and incest in a remote lighthouse respectively – was considered too outré, especially when combined with his idiosyncratic style.

The director’s latest film arrives towards the end of a decade marked by a fascination with documentaries, whether it’s big-screen hits such as Touching the Void and Bowling for Columbine or the more recent TV success of Who do you think you are? My Winnipeg combines these two styles, as a very cinematic documentary (which is ironic as it was bankrolled by the Canadian Documentary Channel) and one that touches on issues of a person’s origin, albeit from a geographical and cultural point of view rather than a genetic perspective.

My Winnipeg is a tour de force and possibly the director’s finest film so far, combining found footage, absurd re-enactments, tragedy, comedy and the (un)usual florid sexuality of Maddin’s characters. Interestingly for a director whose work is so unique, the main storytelling device is similar to Lars von Trier’s Europa – a character has a dreamlike experience on a train surrounded by rear projection. As there are similar themes in both films – geography, upbringing, racial heritage and unreliable narrators – it may go some way towards explaining why Maddin chose to use the same technique. Both von Trier and Maddin are directors who mythologise locations, both real and fictional, revealing hidden stories and meta-narratives behind them. Von Trier and Maddin’s choice of locations has been driven by necessity and they have usually remained within spitting distance of Denmark or Winnipeg respectively, resorting to obvious stage sets to represent far-flung locations (as in von Trier’s Dogville and Manderlay or Maddin’s Careful and Archangel). Maddin’s first film Tales of the Gimli Hospital saw the director travelling an hour north of Winnipeg to take advantage of that town’s desire to have a cinematic identity and promote its status as the largest Icelandic community outside of Europe – the film premiered at the first Gimli film festival. But at that point, the director’s style was not yet fully formed, and it is only after the European detours of Careful and Archangel that Maddin started to construct Winnipeggian fairy tales using the style of European silents while creating a local folklore based on myth, absurdity and twisted sexuality.

Following in Freer’s footsteps, immigration and emigration are common themes in Maddin’s work. Gimli Hospital adds a surrealist Icelandic history of bizarre rituals to the tale of third-generation Manitobans. Archangel is about a Russian settlement in the Arctic that is still fighting The Great War after it has ended (as no one bothered to tell the inhabitants). Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary brings the novel’s subtext of feral foreigners from the East to the fore, not least with the casting of Zhang Wei-Qiang in the lead and sensational inter-titles that add a note of xenophobia to Van Helsing’s mission to kill the vampire. Being at the crossroads of rivers and railroads, and labelled ‘The Gateway to the West’, Winnipeg is inevitably a city of travellers in a country of immigrants.

My Winnipeg tells two narratives: the story of the city itself through archive footage and re-enactments of local incidents / folklore, and Maddin’s own story as a local and a filmmaker who feels harried by geography, family and wanderlust. My Winnipeg also seems to be a summary of Maddin’s entire work – one section is a silent ballet recalling Dracula, another tells a lurid tale of young sexuality in a public swimming pool that is remindful of Cowards Bend the Knee and yet another enacts a German invasion of Winnipeg, which echoes Archangel and so on. As befits his style, the director has chosen incidents from the city’s past that benefit from Byzantine retelling – the horrific tale of a herd of race horses trapped in a frozen river, a local bridge that was destined for Egypt and dreams of foreign climes, the buffalo stampede that destroyed Happyland, an amusement park reclaimed by the homeless and re-erected on the city’s rooftops. Elsewhere, Maddin casts a film noir actress – Ann Savage – as his own mother and links the role with the history of both his own cinema and the medium in general by telling the story of her involvement in home movies shot in their front room. This is a tale of both parental influence and urban parenting as the director sees the city itself as nurturing him, naming the Winnipeg (Ice Hockey) Arena as his male parent and the frozen horses in the river as midwives in the baby boom of a previous generation. This is the story of how a city and its culture and geography shape a person and their private history. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg may be a unique take on a city that is as individual as the man behind the movie camera, but this is a personal tale that will delight and intrigue audiences and I hope will prove as good an advert for the city as James Freer’s nineteenth-century tract was for Manitoba. I also hope My Winnipeg helps publicise Maddin’s astonishing work as a whole.

Alex Fitch

The Guy Maddin season at the BFI Southbank runs from July 4-23. More information on the programme on the BFI website.

Related articles: interview with Guy Maddin; interview with Cecilia Araneda, executive director of the Winnipeg Film Group.

Inspired by the release of My Winnipeg, Soda Pictures in conjunction with Four Docs, 3
Minute Wonder & The Branchage Film Festival will be launching a filmmaking competition ‘Your Winnipeg’. Filmmakers are invited to submit a 3-minute documentary about their hometown being as experimental and creatively adventurous as you dare! Guy Maddin will join a jury of industry professionals to select the winning entry, which will be screened on Channel 4 and feature on the UK DVD release of My Winnipeg. The winner will be rewarded with £1500 and a holiday to Maddin’s Winnipeg. Three runner-up films will also be screened on Channel 4 and the winners will each receive £1500. For full details and to enter please follow the link below to the competition website.

Interviews

THE WINNIPEG FILM GROUP: INTERVIEW WITH CECILIA ARANEDA

Cecilia Araneda

Guy Maddin learned his craft as part of a local filmmaking initiative, the Winnipeg Film Group, which exists both as an art-house cinema and as a resource for local filmmakers. Alex Fitch talked to Cecilia Araneda, executive director of the WFG, about the work of the organisation and Guy Maddin’s involvement with it.

Cecilia Araneda: There are proportionally a lot of independent filmmakers working in Winnipeg, and I do mean independent in the sense of artist-driven work. Winnipeg is a bit of a rarity in Canada in terms of its filmmaking context. Indeed, in English-language Canada, we believe that Winnipeg has the most distinct filmmaking community. Because Winnipeg does not have a film school, and for some other reasons likely related to the size of our city (big, but not too big) and its isolation from any other major metropolitan centre in Canada, the Winnipeg Film Group developed as different from other independent film co-ops in Canada and became a full centre supporting the entire cycle of film.

Alex Fitch: Why do you think Winnipeggian film has a distinct voice within Canadian cinema?

CA: Without access to a film school, filmmakers in Winnipeg just did what they thought was best and perhaps didn’t realise – or maybe they did and didn’t care – that they were breaking all standard conventions. Locally, film critics were brutal when they reviewed the works of our members produced in the 80s (we opened our Cinematheque in 1982, and of course prominently featured our members’ films) and the early 90s, because they weren’t following the standard conventions that are normally taught to filmmakers in film school. Before the ‘film industry’ reached Winnipeg, with corps of experienced film crafts people and technicians training students in making films ‘the right way’, the Film Group evolved an aesthetic approach that essentially affirmed that there is no one right way to make a film, and certainly no wrong way. The skill of filmmaking in Winnipeg was something that was handed down personally from filmmaker to filmmaker (John Paizs to Guy Maddin, Guy Maddin to Deco Dawson, for example). It often stuns people across the country to see just how influential and significant Winnipeg filmmakers remain, and how proportionally deep the talent pool is in relation to artistic cinema over the years, in spite of how small Winnipeg is and in spite of the absence of the many financial resources that are available in other centres.

AF:Is Guy’s output indicative of a local style?

CA: He is certainly among one of the most recognised independent filmmakers from Winnipeg, and his output could be said to be parallel in a way to that of Norma Bailey (Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1980). But Norma works in a completely different aesthetic school, focusing on narrative and documentary, and her movies are a staple of television programming. Guy and Norma are the only filmmakers that I can think of that have consistently worked for decades here in Manitoba at a high level. In the early days, if you wanted to make a film and if you wanted it screened at our film theatre (likely the only screening local filmmakers would have had here in the city), you would have hung out here at the Winnipeg Film Group. In an interview I did with Guy Maddin last year, he noted that he learned filmmaking by hanging out at the Film Group – as non-specific as that might sound (Guy studied Economics in University). Guy’s insistence on doing things his way – even a documentary commissioned by the Documentary Channel (My Winnipeg) – often in spite of compelling financial reasons, is, of course, what clearly stands out in my mind about him as a filmmaker. That, plus you always feel you know him a little more as a person with every film you watch, which is not necessarily true of other filmmakers in his category.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Related articles: Guy Maddin and the mythologising of Winnipeg, interview with Guy Maddin.

Festivals

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2008: Under the Radar

Blood Car

Edinburgh International Film Festival

18-29 June 2008

EIFF website

2008 was a year of innovations for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Not only did it move from its usual August date to an earlier June slot, but it also unveiled a brand new section entitled ‘Under the Radar’, described by the festival organisers as ‘celebrating the true spirit of “cult” film’. Oddly, ‘cult’ seems to have become the buzz word of the moment in the film world and everyone wants a piece of it. Equally bizarrely, cult seems to have become a genre in itself. But if it means getting more oddball, unconventional and challenging films on the screen, all this excitable bandying about of the word might be worthwhile.

One of the most pleasurable entries in the Under the Radar selection was Blood Car, a black comedy satirising America’s insatiable need for oil and its readiness to do whatever it takes to carry on running its gas-guzzlers. With fuel prices having shot through the roof, a mild-mannered green-minded vegan primary school teacher (complete with elbow patches on his cord jacket) accidentally invents an engine that runs on human blood. Although initially appalled by his discovery, he abandons his principles to keep his car running so he can obtain sexual favours from naughty carnivorous sexpot Denise, all the time while being watched by the FBI.

Bigga Than Ben: A Russians’ Guide to Ripping Off London was another satire, this time of the various absurdities and Catch-22 situations that await immigrants trying to get a job, open a bank account and find a place to live in the British capital. Gleefully rude and offensive to all, it follows the tribulations of two naive, albeit unscrupulous, Russian thugs, Cobakka and Spiker, recently arrived in the UK. Key to the success of the film is Cobakka’s strongly-accented, authentic-sounding narration, which fully immerses the audience in their skewed worldview and makes us see London from a new perspective.

Strange Girls was quite a nice little oddity that centred on two disturbing-looking red-haired twins, Giorgia and Virginia, who refuse to communicate with the outside world and have spent most of their lives in a psychiatric hospital. In private, however, they reveal literary ambitions, wit and a natural penchant for cruelty and murder. When Virginia falls for Oyo, a boy from the neighbourhood they have just moved into after their – clearly misguided – release from hospital, the sisters’ dysfunctional relationship is stretched to breaking point and the hate and jealousy underlying their exclusive relationship is revealed. Although none of this is exactly original, the film was enjoyably bizarre and created a convincingly strange world.

We weren’t able to see the sixth film in the section, Crack Willow, but the remaining two were serious let-downs. With its Beauty and the Beast storyline and laboured literary tone, not to mention the seriously limited plot, Spike was nothing more than a high school kid’s clichéd Goth fantasy. The Third Pint, from Argentina, revolved around a man who becomes invisible after drinking three pints. This was the pretext for a lengthy, self-indulgent disquisition on anything and everything as the narrator travels around the world. Moving at a lethargic pace, the film had very little to say and its trite ‘insights’ into modern life certainly don’t justify its existence.

All in all, while some of the Under the Radar films were enjoyable, none of them were as audacious, original or subversive as could have been hoped for and the whole exercise felt quite safe and tame. We also checked out the Night Moves section of the festival for more late-night type thrills (the distinction between Night Moves and Under the Radar is not entirely clear to us). But that section contained some even poorer works, which seemed to have been included solely on the basis of their ability to deliver some very cheap shocks, whether it was the nasty, pointless torture of Mum and Dad, set among a sort of psychotic Royle Family, or the autopsy horror of the predictable, generic Cadaver from South Korea. The Spanish thriller Shiver was another major disappointment; marred by an incoherent, muddled script that felt like a first draft, that film had no place at an international festival. It wasn’t all bad though and the section was rescued by two remarkable films. Time Crimes was a labyrinthine Spanish thriller revolving around brilliantly confusing temporal paradoxes while Just Another Love Story was a sleek, modern noir thriller from Denmark that combined an intense, brutal character study with a brilliantly vicious diagnosis of the country’s moral state.

While it is great to see more unconventional, low-budget types of filmmaking given some space at a major festival, it is a real shame that some of the works seemed to have been selected simply because they superficially ticked the boxes of what has become associated with midnight movies/cult films – rude humour, grossly funny gore, bizarre-looking actors, pointy-headed aliens, body horror and/or monsters. The real night-time thrills were to be found elsewhere this year, with the speculative futuristic thriller Sleep Dealer from Mexico and a superb, moving take on the vampire from Sweden in Let the Right One In. Both films used fantastical elements intelligently to explore, respectively, Mexico’s exploitation by US corporations, and tender and dangerous love between two outsider children. For lovers of the dark stuff (and for the general critics too), Let the Right One In was the true star of the festival.

Virginie Sélavy

For more Edinburgh Festival coverage see: EIFF 08: Best of the Fest, Standard Operating Procedureand Interview with Olly Blackburn, Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter (Donkey Punch).

Festivals

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2008

Let the Right One In

Still from Let the Right One In

Edinburgh International Film Festival

18-29 June 2008

EIFF website

Separated from the major annual Edinburgh Festival pandemonium for the first time ever, this year’s 62nd film festival wished to establish a fresher, stronger, edgier identity, exploring the nooks and crannies of new movie-making and bringing unusual treasures to its enthusiastic local and international audience. Unfortunately though, this was not a year of major cinematic breakthroughs and in spite of the promising programme notes, too many of the films turned out to be mediocre.

Without doubt, the pick of the festival was Swedish director Tomas Alfredsson’s excellent Let the Right One In (L Ã¥t den rätte komma in), an intelligent, well-paced vampire movie, which deservedly won the top award for best narrative feature at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Impressively handling familiar material and giving it a fresh spin, it has the gruesome feel and bizarre beauty of an eccentric horror fantasy, but also delivers plenty of emotionally charged drama and wry humour. Andersson slowly charts the blossoming friendship between troubled 12-year-old Oskar and vampire girl Eli through a series of poignant and near-surreal attempts at bonding that are in turn gentle and disturbing. Superb cinematography and mesmerising performances by the two adolescent lead actors (K Ã¥re Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson) make it a film to treasure.

Another Nordic find was Ole Bornedal’s Just Another Love Story, a grippingly complex and stylish contemporary noir thriller from Denmark, in which a police photographer finds himself emotionally entangled with a comatose young woman injured in a car accident that also involved himself and his family. Developing into an obscene, twisted romance, the story remains powerful and well-calibrated throughout, turning into a shocking, nerve-racking riddle played out with a brutal relish for the grotesque in the final part.

One of the festival’s most enjoyable films was the truly unsettling sci-fi narrative Sleep Dealer by young Mexican director Alex Rivera. Following in the giant steps of The Matrix or Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, this striking and hugely inventive debut feature playfully addresses the idea of humans retreating from objective reality by means of computer software that connects to their conscious minds through metallic ports inserted into their bodies. In Rivera’s futuristic fantasy, however, people use the new technology not so much to experience virtual thrills as to earn their living by controlling robots performing manual work in the US. The riveting story is served well by consistently excellent performances and is visually remarkably polished. Rivera makes a virtue of his low budget by transforming financial restraint into an aesthetic choice and this assured debut feature reveals that he is a talent to watch.

This year’s programme was dominated by realism, psychology and low-budget intelligence, which was particularly noticeable in the selection of British films. However, the excitement about new British cinema was dampened down by the bleakness and austerity that characterised most of the films. Duane Hopkins’s eagerly awaited debut feature Better Things was a lyrical yet painfully grim tale of drug abuse, sexual confusion and the cruel realities of growing up in the Cotswolds. Other critics were seduced by Helen, Christine Molloy’s slow-burning drama in which a missing girl’s persona starts to influence the girl who agrees to take part in a police investigation to help find her. Despite an astonishing performance by young Annie Townsend in the lead, the film is maybe too deliberately cryptic for its own good and not quite the revelation so many were hoping for. After all this misery, Shane Meadows’s Somers Town proved to be the most enjoyable and compelling British feature, managing to be gently melancholic, toughly funny and irresistibly charming in equal parts.

In terms of quality and innovation, the foreign-language films clearly dominated the programme and The Wave proved that German cinema is still going strong. Dennis Gansel’s smart, slick and powerful film is an adaptation of the real-life teaching experiment that originally took place in a Californian High School in 1967. What begins as a clever educational game that aims at probing the social order and reveal the roots of fascism escalates into tragedy, culminating in painful disillusionment and frightening violence in the grim last act.

The festival proved most convincing in its section of distinctive and often small-scale documentaries, the more personal films often proving to be the most accomplished and satisfying ones. The best British documentary, though not officially included in the section, was James Marsh’s Man on Wire, which recounts Philippe Petit’s staggering attempt to walk a tightrope between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. There were also fascinating portraits of unique, eccentric men, such as Matt Wolf’s affectionate tribute Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, and Erik Nelson’s Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which offers a glimpse into the incredible mind of American cult writer Harlan Ellison. Other treasures to be found in this section included Jesus Christ Saviour, which already stood out at this year’s Berlinale in February.

Significantly, it was the excellent Shirley Clarke retrospective that ensured there was always something worth seeing. It provided the rare opportunity to watch Clarke’s magnificently stark The Cool World on a cinema screen, while also presenting the memorable and rarely-screened documentary Rome Burns (Rome Brûle – Portrait de Shirley Clarke), a collection of delightfully unpretentious interviews with Clarke shot in January 1968. Seeing the fascinating filmmaker nonchalantly talking about her work to date while Jacques Rivette and Yoko Ono hang out on a futon in the corner might have been the closest Edinburgh came to an event.

Pamela Jahn

For more Edinburgh Festival coverage see: See also EIFF 08: Under the Radar, Interview with Olly Blackburn, Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter (Donkey Punch) and Standard Operating Procedure.