LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Guy Maddin
built 123 days ago
When the DVD of The Saddest Music in the World was released in 2004, it included Sissy Boy Slap Party, and two new Guy Maddin shorts – A Trip to the Orphanage and Sombra Dolorosa. All three were intended to be viewed as spin-offs of The Saddest Music of the World, despite Sissy Boy Slap Party having been made almost a decade before. Both of the new shorts ran about four minutes in length and featured a combination of music and Maddin’s bizarrely beautiful imagery. A Trip to the Orphanage features one of Saddest Music’s stars, Maria de Medieros, opera music, haunting imagery and an overwhelming sense of sadness. Sombra Delorosa has been described as “a demented take on demented Mexican melodramas” that tells the tale of the Widow Paramo who must battle El Muerto (the eater of souls) in order to save her suicidal daughter. The battle, naturally, takes place in a Mexican boxing ring. Also in 2004, the Sao Paulo International Film Festival featured a retrospective of Maddin’s work.
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GUY MADDIN'S NAME earns a grin from film buffs because the very idea of Guy Maddin is funny. Over the past decade or more, as much of English-language commercial cinema has been subsumed by pre-fab blockbusters, leaden Oscar-baiting studio pictures and art house Controversies-of-the-Week, the Winnepeg-based Maddin has carved out his own unique niche directing the modern equivalent of silent and early-sound films. His filmography—which started with 1988's Tales from the Gimli Hospital and continued through 2002's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and last year's weird musical talkie The Saddest Music in the World—consists of kooky yet feverish melodramas, stylistically rooted between 1916 and 1932. In other words, his career is the opposite of commercial. That he's sustained it for going on 20 years—as similar efforts, including Charles Lane's sweet Sidewalk Stories were dismissed as one-shot stunts—seems almost heroic.
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F[I]lmmaker Guy Maddin has been described as “the Canadian David Lynch” for his surreal, visceral films. His unique vision has gained both critical admiration and an impressive cult following for his many shorts and feature-length films such as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, The Saddest Music in the World and Dracula: Tales from A Virgin’s Diary.
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Maddin draws voraciously from the cinematic past, especially the 1920’s, his favorite cinematic period. One of the seminal figures of Maddin’s philosophical world view is Lon Chaney, famous for his numerous realistic performances of physically tortured characters (legless, torsoless) which earned him the nickname “man of a thousand faces.” In a review essay of a Lon Chaney DVD box-office set Maddin refers to Chaney’s extreme physical performances as “disfigurement allegories.” This same allegorical use of physical disfigurement as an expression of emotional pain or psychological trauma is common across all of Maddin’s work. For example, the one-legged soldier Lt. Boles (Kyle McCulloch) in
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Maddin: Well, there are so many Canadians who come down to American and are very successful. There are the secret tribe of Canadians who lived in Hollywood; Mary Pickford, for example. It’s a certain kind of Canadian, the Canadian who turns his back on Canada. And then there’s the kind of Canadian who embraces his heritage or ethnicity. There aren’t many patriotic Canadians, but in Winnipeg there’s a huge Ukrainian population . So someone named Danielle might adapt her Ukrainian name— Danishka. She might then start wearing traditional Ukrainian garb.
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Maddin has ... made many short films, few of which have been seen. These include: Mauve Decade (1989), Indigo High-Hatters (1991), The Pomps of Satan (1993), Sea Beggars (1994), Sissy Boy Slap Party(1995), Maldoror: Tygers (1999), and The Cock Crew (1999).
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Guy Maddin