Who Is Guy Maddin? Meet the Auteur Cinephiles Love to Name-Drop
Guy Maddin is the type of director who prompts the “if you know, you know” nod. Cinephiles invoke his name to test each other, winking over shared knowledge of his work like some secret society of experimental film enthusiasts. That’s because his filmography is truly like no other. Known for recreating early 20th-century film styles, surrealist imagery, and dreamlike, nonlinear, and melodramatic storytelling, the Canadian director is unapologetically avant-garde and incomparable as an auteur.
Kino Film Collection is proud to be home to three standout Maddin works—Tales From the Gimli Hospital Redux (1988), The Forbidden Room (2015), and, new this week, Careful (1992). Spanning the course of his nearly 40-year career, each film is the perfect gateway into his filmography. If you’re uninitiated but would like to be in on the secret, nod to other cinephiles, and say “IYKYK,” our playlist is the perfect place to start.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Maddin’s career could be traced to the University of Manitoba, where he met filmmaker and heavy influence John Paiz and cinema professor and longtime collaborator George Toles. From there Maddin joined the Winnipeg Film Group and began acting in the cable access show Survival. In 1985, Maddin made his directorial debut with the short film The Dead Father, a black-and-white 16mm surrealist work inspired by Luis Buñuel and Man Ray. And thus the Guy Maddin style of filmmaking was born.
Three years after The Dead Father, Maddin made his first feature, Tales From the Gimli Hospital. Also shot in black and white on 16mm film, the film further cemented the dreamlike, surreal, silent-film-inspired works that would define his oeuvre. Set during a smallpox epidemic at the turn of the century, the story follows two men at a hospital in Gimli, Manitoba, who compete for the attention of the nurses. Steeped in German Expressionism-inspired shadows, imbued with equal parts humor, drama, and weirdness, and paying homage to his local Canadian roots, Tales From the Gimli Hospital paved the way for the rest of Maddin’s filmography.
In 1992, Maddin released his third feature and the first film he shot in color, Careful, about a fictional Alpine mountain village that forces its residents to live in near silence to prevent triggering deadly avalanches. In the fictional town of Tolzbad, even the slightest shriek of emotion can trigger a devastating avalanche and wipe out much of the population. So residents are taught to whisper and practice strict self-control, creating a pressure cooker of bubbling emotion, secret desires, and pent-up rage.
The story follows brothers Johann and Grigorss and their family, who are entangled in a messy web of rivalry, incest, and vengeance that would make Douglas Sirk blush. Oedipus complex, Electra complex, the Cinderella Phenomenon—the film is an entire semester of family psychology. But in true Maddin form, these heightened emotional issues are refracted through a grainy, soft-focus, uber-saturated lens and hyper-stylized tableaux, à la German Expressionism.
But Maddin takes his signature surrealism to new heights with the phantasmagoric, kaleidoscopic all-out assault on the senses that is 2015’s The Forbidden Room. The story-within-a-story conceit, which includes a submarine crew forced to eat jelly donuts to stay alive and a man (played by an unforgettable Udo Kier) plagued by an intense obsession with “derrieres” (butts), turns the film into more of a visceral, stream-of-consciousness experience rather than anything in the traditional cinematic sense. It’s almost like an evolution of film language as we know it. “It's something that is just totally eye-filling and wondrous,” Richard Lorber has said of the film. “And you just have to let your mind roam freely over his images and not try to make any sense out of it.”
If you’re already a Guy Maddin fan, we invite you to relive the exhilaration of discovering his work for the first time. And if you’re just learning his name now, prepare to have your mind blown by Maddin’s unparalleled brand of surrealism. Everything you thought you knew about film is about to change forever. If you know, you know.
You can now stream a 4K remaster of Tales From the Gimli Hospital—Tales From the Gimli Hospital Redux—along with Careful and The Forbidden Room on Kino Film Collection. Physical media collectors, check out our online shop for even more Guy Maddin titles.
Tales From the Gimli Hospital Redux (1988)
Guy Maddin’s highly acclaimed first feature is regarded as one of the true cult hits on the midnight movie circuit. Set during a smallpox epidemic in the village of Gimli, Manitoba near the turn of the century, Tales From The Gimli Hospital is a dreamlike, elliptical film which explores the jealousy and madness instilled in two men who share a hospital room “in a Gimli we no longer know.”
Careful (1992)
Guy Maddin’s early masterpiece takes place in an Alpine village where the wary residents —adult, child and animal!—must speak softly and tread lightly lest they cause an avalanche. But sexual frenzies teem in this world of repression, setting off love triangles and quadrangles with deadly consequences. Bathed in lurid, luminescent tints, Careful resembles a vintage melodrama from another planet.
The Forbidden Room (2015)
Selected for the Berlin and Sundance Film Festivals, The Forbidden Room is Guy Maddin's ultimate epic phantasmagoria. Honoring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this this film is Maddin's grand ode to lost cinema featuring Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling and more as a cavalcade of misfits all joined in the joyful delirium of the kaleidoscopic viewing experience.