Directors in Focus: Guy Maddin

Wed.-Sat., Sept. 23-26, various times, $8, Ibrahim Theater, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.

by Shaun Brady

movies

In his most recent films, Guy Maddin has trained his eccentric camera obliquely inward, creating a series of psychosexual autobiographies, documenting not his actual self but an inner imp of the perverse. I-House's retrospective ends just as that turn begins, with 2003's Cowards Bend the Knee, a fever-dream self-flagellation via Freud and Fritz Lang. In his mythologized self, Maddin has found perhaps the only subject that can sustain his fetishization of cinema history. The Winnipeg filmmaker's oeuvre posits a timeline where Murnau begat Anger; silent film and underground cinema communicate across the generations, while the scratches and faded images and missing frames seem less the project of age than of being dredged from the psychic depths. The series reaches back to Maddin's 1988 debut, Tales From the Gimli Hospital, and includes the WWI Kino-noir Archangel, full of Hitchcockian obsession and H.G. Lewis gore; the grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tale Careful, where Ptushko-like handmade fantasies are painted in lurid Kenneth Anger colors on a Riefenstahl mountain; the curdled enchantment of Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, a midsummer night's mash-up of Max Reinhardt and Peter Max; the ballet film Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, far less interested in the vampire than his bite's sexualizing effect on his Victorian victims; and The Heart of the World, a frenzied parody of silent Soviet propaganda films.