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Cowards Bend the Knee
- GenresFilm
160 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2003
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About the author
Guy Maddin
9 books11 followers"Guy Maddin (born February 28, 1956) is a Canadian screenwriter and director of both features and short films from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His most distinctive quality is his dogged persistence in recreating the look and style of silent or early sound era films which has solidified his popularity in niche-cinema and academic circles.
While Maddin strives to recreate the styles and moods of early film melodramas, Weimar Republic German silent films, and 1920s Soviet agit-prop, his own personal style lies in his use of clichés, psychosexual situations, bizarre stories and humor. Reminiscent of the early work of American director David Lynch, it is this self-conscious and surreal merging of early film-making techniques with a post-modern sensibility that give Maddin's films a style referred to as "Ultra-Conformist" or "Anti-Progressive", which sometimes occurs in culturally and geographically isolated Canadian cities. Luckily, continuing assistance from provincial and national Arts Councils as well as the Winnipeg Film Group aid in Maddin's pursuit in the making of art-house history.
His film education came not with any formal training at a trade school, or his experiences at the University of Winnipeg, but with endless weekends of watching films with close friends John Paizs and Steve Snyder. Soon realizing that Paizs was making and performing in his own post-modern films and Snyder was teaching production at the University of Manitoba, Maddin eventually gave up an unsatisfying day-job as a bank-teller and decided that he needed to put his own knowledge to work and step behind the camera, in his case the popular Bolex hand-wound camera.
Maddin's first film was the Winnipeg Film Group assisted 1986 16mm short film The Dead Father. His first 16mm feature film was Tales from the Gimli Hospital.
In 2007, Maddin became the first artist-curator of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. In this position, he performs the programming for their new "Curated by..." series.
As of fall 2007, Maddin will be teaching film at the University of Manitoba. Also in 2007, Maddin's film My Winnipeg won the Best Canadian Feature award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Maddin's films are often set in his home town of Winnipeg and are usually set in abstract 20th century historical periods. Themes in strained family relationships,Maddin's films frequently include unrequited love, murder, Soviet Russia, homoeroticism, incest, dismemberment and the workings of human impulse and subconscious."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Maddin
While Maddin strives to recreate the styles and moods of early film melodramas, Weimar Republic German silent films, and 1920s Soviet agit-prop, his own personal style lies in his use of clichés, psychosexual situations, bizarre stories and humor. Reminiscent of the early work of American director David Lynch, it is this self-conscious and surreal merging of early film-making techniques with a post-modern sensibility that give Maddin's films a style referred to as "Ultra-Conformist" or "Anti-Progressive", which sometimes occurs in culturally and geographically isolated Canadian cities. Luckily, continuing assistance from provincial and national Arts Councils as well as the Winnipeg Film Group aid in Maddin's pursuit in the making of art-house history.
His film education came not with any formal training at a trade school, or his experiences at the University of Winnipeg, but with endless weekends of watching films with close friends John Paizs and Steve Snyder. Soon realizing that Paizs was making and performing in his own post-modern films and Snyder was teaching production at the University of Manitoba, Maddin eventually gave up an unsatisfying day-job as a bank-teller and decided that he needed to put his own knowledge to work and step behind the camera, in his case the popular Bolex hand-wound camera.
Maddin's first film was the Winnipeg Film Group assisted 1986 16mm short film The Dead Father. His first 16mm feature film was Tales from the Gimli Hospital.
In 2007, Maddin became the first artist-curator of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. In this position, he performs the programming for their new "Curated by..." series.
As of fall 2007, Maddin will be teaching film at the University of Manitoba. Also in 2007, Maddin's film My Winnipeg won the Best Canadian Feature award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Maddin's films are often set in his home town of Winnipeg and are usually set in abstract 20th century historical periods. Themes in strained family relationships,Maddin's films frequently include unrequited love, murder, Soviet Russia, homoeroticism, incest, dismemberment and the workings of human impulse and subconscious."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Maddin
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June 22, 2009Read the STOP SMILING interview excerpt with writer and filmmaker Guy Maddin
Q&A Excerpt: Director Guy Maddin
By José Teodoro
(This interview originally appeared in STOP SMILING The Photography Issue)
For as long as he can remember, Guy Maddin wanted to make movies that look like movies from 80 years ago. He’s a lifelong inhabitant of Winnipeg, an ice-encrusted, gloriously decrepit city on the terrifyingly vast Canadian prairie — an area that just happens to be the nation’s secret cultural wellspring. As evidenced in his comparatively luxuriously budgeted The Saddest Music in the World (2003), which starred Isabella Rossellini as an amputee beer baroness, Maddin favors primitivism, melodrama and the haunting artifice of early cinema, while complicating cosy nostalgia with frenzied editing, anachronisms and bizarre, highly neurotic subject matter. His personal life is often an inspiration, but distorted and absurdly mythologized through the morbid imaginations of Maddin himself and longtime writing partner George Toles.
Maddin’s silent feature Brand Upon the Brain! had its premiere at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival with full orchestra, live Foley artists and live narration. Like Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) — a love triangle involving abortion and obsession, hockey and hand transplants — it features a protagonist named Guy Maddin and is riddled with guilt, fearful slips into shadowy memories and unresolved confusion over desire and identity, all played out on an island of orphans driven to emancipation by a hot teenage detective. The morning after the film’s triumphant debut, Maddin’s obvious glee was pushed to greater heights when he sweet-talked the armed officer rather ominously monitoring our talk into letting us fondle his machine gun and examine his hollow-tipped bullets.
Stop Smiling: An unusual and complicated strain of autobiography runs through your work. Why so many characters named Guy?
Guy Maddin: If you’re being as transparently dishonest as most filmmakers — you know, Martin Scorsese having a taller alter ego in Robert De Niro — you might as well just come out and say who it is. Besides, you have to be pretty sure that your alter ego, if he isn’t named after you, is doing pretty interesting, compelling things, whereas I feel like you’re buying a little extra goodwill from the audience by naming the character after yourself. It’s tricky, of course. You’re all of a sudden engaging yourself in an act of masochism if you’re making yourself look bad. You’re really indulging yourself in self-pity if you’re depicting your horrible childhood, and that can only be withstood by an audience for a few minutes before they hurl. So it’s strangely liberating just being up-front about it, saying, “This is me,” because every character in the movie is me anyway. All I can go by is what I myself would do in a certain situation.
Read the complete interview excerpt...
Q&A Excerpt: Director Guy Maddin
By José Teodoro
(This interview originally appeared in STOP SMILING The Photography Issue)
For as long as he can remember, Guy Maddin wanted to make movies that look like movies from 80 years ago. He’s a lifelong inhabitant of Winnipeg, an ice-encrusted, gloriously decrepit city on the terrifyingly vast Canadian prairie — an area that just happens to be the nation’s secret cultural wellspring. As evidenced in his comparatively luxuriously budgeted The Saddest Music in the World (2003), which starred Isabella Rossellini as an amputee beer baroness, Maddin favors primitivism, melodrama and the haunting artifice of early cinema, while complicating cosy nostalgia with frenzied editing, anachronisms and bizarre, highly neurotic subject matter. His personal life is often an inspiration, but distorted and absurdly mythologized through the morbid imaginations of Maddin himself and longtime writing partner George Toles.
Maddin’s silent feature Brand Upon the Brain! had its premiere at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival with full orchestra, live Foley artists and live narration. Like Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) — a love triangle involving abortion and obsession, hockey and hand transplants — it features a protagonist named Guy Maddin and is riddled with guilt, fearful slips into shadowy memories and unresolved confusion over desire and identity, all played out on an island of orphans driven to emancipation by a hot teenage detective. The morning after the film’s triumphant debut, Maddin’s obvious glee was pushed to greater heights when he sweet-talked the armed officer rather ominously monitoring our talk into letting us fondle his machine gun and examine his hollow-tipped bullets.
Stop Smiling: An unusual and complicated strain of autobiography runs through your work. Why so many characters named Guy?
Guy Maddin: If you’re being as transparently dishonest as most filmmakers — you know, Martin Scorsese having a taller alter ego in Robert De Niro — you might as well just come out and say who it is. Besides, you have to be pretty sure that your alter ego, if he isn’t named after you, is doing pretty interesting, compelling things, whereas I feel like you’re buying a little extra goodwill from the audience by naming the character after yourself. It’s tricky, of course. You’re all of a sudden engaging yourself in an act of masochism if you’re making yourself look bad. You’re really indulging yourself in self-pity if you’re depicting your horrible childhood, and that can only be withstood by an audience for a few minutes before they hurl. So it’s strangely liberating just being up-front about it, saying, “This is me,” because every character in the movie is me anyway. All I can go by is what I myself would do in a certain situation.
Read the complete interview excerpt...
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