Kino Kino Kino Kino Kino: Guy Maddin’s Cinema of Artifice

Abstract

Guy Maddin’s films are at once immediately engaging and exhaustingly complex. They leave the enduring impression of a distanced, fleeting world, strangely close to our own — like a deep shadow of it. My purpose in this essay is to briefly reflect on this impression, giving an account of how the work of this Canadian filmmaker achieves this effect. His art may be understood as anti-mimetic, since it does not represent our everyday life by simple imitation. Yet these are films in which the representation of the world (and its creatures) and the construction based on images of the past (and its artifice) are not opposites. Both of these features become meaningful because they rely on the imagination and the sedimentation of memory in order to trigger recognition. In recent years, Guy Maddin has developed a more personal engagement with his own memories in what he calls the Me Trilogy and this is also an aspect that is worth analysing.