LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Guy Maddin: Movies
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Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) was to be Maddin's triumphant return to feature filmmaking. The script was ready, he had a cast of actors more well-known than any actors he had worked with before (Shelley Duvall, of Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and Altman's Popeye (1980), as well as Frank Gorshin, of camp fame from playing The Riddler on the 1960s Batman television series), and all with a larger budget than he had ever known before. The plot revolves again around a love story, and a man returning home to a land where the sun never stops shining, and yet, while the film contains several elements that are pure Maddin, it just cannot sustain itself for its 90 minute length. In many ways, the film feels compromised, an indication that Maddin's fervent imagination and creative independence were not a match made in heaven to distributors handing over a great deal of money to him, with the expectation that at least a semi-marketable movie would result. Through compromise, neither party ended up being satisfied, and the resulting work was Maddin's least satisfying feature film to date.
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Born on February 28 1956 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Guy was named for 1950s Western B-movie star Guy Madison. His father was a prominent hockey coach and national team manager, and his mother worked as the proprietor of a local beauty shop. As a child, Maddin spent time at both his parent’s workplaces, viewing the everyday eccentricities of the players and the fans involved in Canada’s unofficial national sport, and of the women who frequented his mother’s beauty salon. He was an abnormally imaginative child, but became even more so when a common cold developed into an intense neurological condition that resulted in strange physical sensations that made him feel as though he was constantly being touched by ghostly fingers. Add to this his father’s Willy Loman-esque life and early death, and his brother’s suicide, and you have the building blocks of either a repressed, angry introvert or a budding artistic mind.
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All of Maddin's movies, with the exception of Twilight,imitate silent movies, even if there's actual dialogue. Perhaps it would be better to say that he often points to early sound movies, or what they would have been like if silent-movie montage had been maintained. If there is dialogue, it is usually stilted and either postproduction or, if synchronized, sounds as if it's dubbed. The actors deliver their lines as if they are, as one says, phoning them in. An exception, along with the ever-game Rossellini as a Canadian beer baroness, is the ever-charming Shelley Duvall. Her role as the host of television's once-popular Faerie Tale Theater helps create the atmosphere of the lush and lugubrious Twilight.
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Footage from old home movies leads into a section in which Maddin hires actors to play his siblings, circa 1963. He then directs deadpan re-enactments of key emotional episodes. The narrator pretends that his looming mother stands in for herself, but she’s actually played by the 86-year-old Ann Savage, a 1940s B-movie bad girl and cult fave.
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To get that childhood-memory feel, Maddin reverted to that most basic back-yard mnemonic tool: the Super 8 movie camera. It’s ... a film that relies heavily on iris shots (particularly when the omnipresent mother is spying on her pubescent son through a telescope), flashes of faux Technicolor (most of the film is shot in black and white), and lap dissolves for dramatic, as well as archaic, effect.
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Maddin: Maybe that one doesn't get used often enough in the industry. The Foley artists are real boredom insurance, because you get to look back and forth between the movie screen and the Foley artist and you see this Grand Guignol thing happening on the screen and then you look down and see the Foley Captain chewing on celery and twisting it around. It's kind of fun.
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