Now Playing: belle & sebastian - if you're feeling sinister
Topic: film
Back in 1998 I fell in love with the work of Guy Maddin when I saw Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and immediately preceding it, the documentary "Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight". It wasn't just Tom Waits husky voice narrating the documentary that washed over me and lulled me into a dazed wonder: watching the extent to which Maddin goes to create his cinematic worlds and then seeing the final, dreamy, glowing product had me utterly enthralled and enamoured.
His work has elements of what I love in the work of Tod Browning's Freaks and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, and generally has me in a similar state of wonder.
As Maddin mentions in the documentary, his films generally just get packed up on completion and sent around the world on the film festival circuit as most of his films don't attract a large enough audience to warrant general release, though The Saddest Music In The World did manage to break that pattern for a moment.
So every year I look forward to the prospect of another Maddin fix, this year being "My Winnipeg", a mixture of fact and fiction about his hometown. That, Peter Greenaway's "Nightwatching" and Miike Takashi's "Sukiyaki Western Django" (spot the odd one out :P) are my most anticipated MIFF bookings.
And amongst my various long-intended photographic projects is the intention to create a series of narrative, cinematic images in the style of Guy Maddin and Tod Browning's films. Maybe one day soon... but for now I just have this one image that's a sort of trial run experiment.