LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Guy Maddin: Films
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On July 1, 2007, Guy Maddin became University of Manitoba’s distinguished film maker in residence. A Faculty of Arts’ joint position with Film Studies and the Department of Icelandic, Maddin’s hiring is in harmony with the hiring of artists in universities world wide in that it expresses recognition of and respect for an exceptionally gifted artist. The belief in the artist’s ability to enrich and stimulate the academic community at large runs as deep.
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Guy Maddin lives in the twenty-first century near the windswept Icelandic shores of Manitoba's Lake Winnipeg. Maddin's films... live in the first few decades of the twentieth century in a mountainous land outside of Prussia.
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Guy Maddin just might have Joseph Stalin to thank for jump-starting his career. In 2000 the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Maddin to pay tribute to the festival's 25th anniversary. Reminded of the Soviet dictator's habit of inviting artists to write symphonies for him, Maddin's tribute was a frenzied bit of Soviet-style propaganda. The Heart of the World has succeeded "beyond my most hubristic daydreams," Maddin tells the CBC's Michael Enright.
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Guy Maddin borns in 1956 in Winnipeg (Canada) where he studied Economics at the university and where he still lives. He worked in a bank and as a house painter before he mades his first film in 1986 (The Dead Father). He had the chance to be produced by Greg Klymkiw.
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Two years later, Maddin had finished his first feature film. Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) takes place in turn-of-the-century Gimli, Manitoba, as it recovers from the effects of a smallpox epidemic. In a surreal, expressionistic world, a melodramatic competition between two patients at the hospital becomes a life-and-death struggle. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shown at film festivals and critics drew comparisons between it the work of surrealist masters David Lynch, Luis Bunel, and F.W. Murnau. Tales from the Gimli Hospital struck a chord within audiences, and the film continues to be shown as a midnight feature in New York theatres.
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The other important film history touchstone in Careful is the horror genre, a genre which Maddin has continually flirted with. The external, nocturnal sets are patterned after the Universal Frankenstein films; the use of shadows in certain early scenes is reminiscent of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932); and there are scenes of exceedingly graphic violence: the coroner drives a large nail through the heart of each dead citizen as punishment for his Oedipal desires, and Johann (Brent Neale) mutilates his mouth with a hot poker and then cuts off four of his fingers with garden shears. This level of violence may be common in the modern horror film, but was not even a remote possibility in the period referenced by Maddin (Universal studios, German Expressionism, Carl Dreyer). This ‘aesthetic anachronism’ occurs in many Maddin films, beginning with his formative first short film The Dead Father. In this autobiographical short Maddin tries to exorcise the pain of having lost his father at an early age, with the story of a dead father (Dan P. Snidal) who routinely returns from the grave as a walking undead to haunt the “domain of memory.” In the penultimate scene the son (John Harvie) takes a spoon to his dead father’s stomach and begins to eat his insides. Even dead and half-eaten, the father wakes up and freezes his son with a stern glance.
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