WHO is he?
Canadian artist, filmmaker, writer, scenarist, cinematographer and film editor who has directed 10 feature films and close to 50 short-length films since the mid-eighties. Maddin is among the most celebrated Canadian filmmakers of today alongside David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan. His recent cinema straddles the realms of installation art and conventional film production.
What are his films about?
Themes
Style
WHYis he of interest?
Maddin’s films are some of the earliest examples of a truly post-modern cinema, not only in the way they rework traditional forms to comment on them, but also forge a new vision out of such cinematic cross-referencing. While purists may object to Maddin’s ironic appropriation of silent cinema aesthetic as being too clever for its own good, the anachronistic elements within these films are a sort of evidence that Maddin intends to mould these appropriated elements into an idiosyncratic novelty.
WHEREto discover him?
Just six minutes in length, the explosive The Heart of the World (2005) comes across as a perfect distillation of the key themes and style of Maddin’s cinema. Cut to a pulsating score, the film follows a scientist, Anna, who saves the world from a certain ‘heart attack’. The Heart of the World is made in the vein of early Soviet propaganda films, with their intense formalism and ideological rigidity intact, while at the same time commenting upon the psycho-sexual bases of those films. Maddin’s film, as it were, is a post-modern commentary on modernism.
