Guy Maddin
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Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015 -
Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke on Shooting Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room
Ben Kasulke has literally dozens of credits on his iMDb page, but running throughout his career are collaborations with two directors: Lynn Shelton and, more recently, Guy Maddin. And what’s remarkable is how different those collaborations are. With Shelton, Kasulke affects a seemingly casual, on-the-fly naturalism, never allowing his cinematography to deflect from the actors’ moments. With Maddin, however, Kasulke is working in service to an entirely different aesthetic, one in which a film’s look is part and parcel of its meanings. In Maddin’s work, Kasulke’s lensing takes us far away from the present, back to times when film both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015 -
Wanting to Like Everything: The Telluride Film Festival
The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival kicked off with a packed screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featuring Coppola, screenwriter John Milius (still recovering from his debilitating stroke but in great spirits), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer Fred Roos, and editor and sound designer Walter Murch in attendance for a post-film Q&A. It was the kind of event that represents what Telluride does best as a kind of summer camp for movie lovers: presenting a great film impeccably projected before an appreciative crowd in a casual, conversational atmosphere. There’s something about the environment of Telluride — both the gorgeous Colorado […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 5, 2014 -
TORONTO 2011 PREVIEW: CANUCK ATTACK
Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 8, 2011 -
ANNA CALVI AND… GUY MADDIN?
Anna Calvi’s self-titled album, recently shortlisted for the U.K. Mercury Prize, has been a grower with me in the last few weeks. Now, an interview with Calvi in The Guardian has bumped it up even further. A lot of reviewers have referenced the cinematic quality of Calvi’s songs and, indeed, singles like “Blackout” make one think that she’d be a natural for the next James Bond soundtrack. So, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Calvi’s inspirations are a lot less obvious. Indeed, the only movie that has inspired one of her songs is one of the past decade’s best […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 24, 2011 -
GUY MADDIN’S “NIGHT MAYOR”
Guy Maddin’s hometown fantasia, My Winnipeg, is one of my favorite films of the last few years. Night Mayor is a recent short film that explores similar territory. It won a Short Film Jury Award for Experimental Short at this year’s SXSW, and is now available online at the National Film Board of Canada site (and embedded here). From the press release: Night Mayor tells the tale of Nihad Ademi, a Bosnian immigrant who serves as Winnipeg’s “night mayor.” Ademi somehow harnesses the multi-coloured waves of the Aurora Borealis and uses its power to broadcast images of his beloved adoptive […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 16, 2010 -
JENNIFER KROOT, “IT CAME FROM KUCHAR”
George and Mike Kuchar are two of the great camp experimental filmmakers of all time. They represented a pastiche heavy, less self-serious strand of the New American Cinema’s downtown explosion in the early 1960s. Evangelized by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice, their work spans over 700 short and feature films, almost all of the executed on the flimsiest of budgets, many of them made in an almost artisanal, fiercely individualistic mode. In a Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 7, 2010
