The Playlist has admittedly drifted off in the wrong direction of late. Let’s try and reign it in and get back to the good stuff. Canadian filmmaker of the wintry and melodramatically delirious mien Guy Maddin (“Brand Upon The Brain,” “The Saddest Music On Earth”) has a new film on the way.
Much like his incredible, drunken-dreamy docu-fantasia, “My Winnipeg” (one of 2008’s best), this one is also commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). But it’s not a feature length film at all and the nine-minute short will be called, “Night Mayor.” Production is slated to begin today, March 9 and Maddin calls it “an imaginative cinematic riff on the significance of a public film producer.”
And he’s evidently putting a feature-film on the backburner to make way for the short. His next film, entitled “Keyhole,” won’t shoot until next winter and he describes it as, a “film noir battle of the sexes.” Those who know Maddin’s obscure, but hilariously weird work know he’s one of Canada’s hidden cinematic treasures. He does absurdist psychodramas, strange oedipal bents like no one else (sort of like Douglas Sirk dialed up to 11 shot inside a snowglobe on pixelvision cameras). But uh Victoria Secret’s is his primary backer? Weird, apparently they’re cool with the delay. “There’s so many things with Keyhole that I want to pull off and I just need a little more time to try.”
Back to “Night Mayor.” Maddin says he gained a huge new respect for old NFB films while digging around in the archives. “I thought I was doing research, but I just ended up being delighted by a lot of the old archival NFB films. I was shocked when I looked at these things three years ago to find out how beautifully made they were. They really were un-Hollywood, which is why I didn’t like them as a kid, but they really have a strong feeling of their own. I realized some of our best films were made 50, 60 or 70 years ago.”
“I want to make a… tribute using the vocabulary of old NFB films, to construct a parable about the task the NFB faced when trying to get the word out to a gigantic country with a very thinly spread-out, small population.” Always very provincial, but yet so very unique. He’s a gem (and appreciated by cinephiles, the wonderful “Brand Upon The Brain” was released by the Criterion Collection last year). [Vancouver Sun/ existence of said short via Cinematical]
