Guy Maddin (1956 - )
Related: American cinema - director
Biography
Guy Maddin (born February 28, 1956) is a Winnipeg writer and director of both features and short films. His most distinctive quality is his fondness for recreating the look and style of silent or early sound era films.
While Maddin strives to recreate the styles and moods of early film melodramas, Weimar Republic German silent films, and 1920s Soviet agit-prop, his own distinct personal style lies in his use of clichés, psychosexual situations, bizarre stories and humor. It is this self-conscious and surreal merging of early film-making techniques with a post-modern sensibility that give Maddin's films their distinct style.
Maddin's first film was the 1986 short The Dead Father. His first feature film was Tales From the Gimli Hospital. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Maddin [Dec 2005]
Careful (1992) - Guy Maddin
Watching Guy Maddin's Careful is like stepping into a mutating time warp of cinema history, where German alpine dramas of the 1920s are gene-spliced with Daliesque surrealism, Murnau's silent melodrama, and--in an uncannily precise act of stylistic homage--the hypnotically skewed universe of German Expressionism. Filmed in gloriously filtered colors that cross Maxfield Parrish with Peter Max, this stylistic hybrid virtually defies description and must be seen to be truly appreciated. Suffice it to say, the fictional mountain village of Tolzbad--where silence is golden, and extreme measures are taken to avoid a sound-induced avalanche--is one of the strangest and most outrageously amusing locations in the history of film. You think that's an exaggeration? If anything, it's an understatement. --Jeff Shannon for amazon.com
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