Bibliographic record
Abstract
William Beard, Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 504 pp. Cased. $85. ISBN 978-1-4426-4139-6. Paper. £23. ISBN 978-1-4426- 1066-8. Darren Wershler, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 144 pp. Cased. $45. ISBN 978-1-4426-4246-1. Paper. £11.75. ISBN 978-1-4426-1134-4. These two excellent and rewarding volumes constitute a very valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on Guy Maddin, and also complement each other in useful and productive ways. William Beard's comprehensive Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin ranges over the entirety of the director's output, while Darren Wershler's study, the sixth volume in the University of Toronto Press's admirable Canadian Cinema series, is dedicated to a close analysis of Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007), which Wershler also situates within the wider context of Maddin's body of work and its richly varied influences and intertexts. Both books offer compelling insights into the idiosyncratic output of a director memorably described by Jonathan Hoberman as either the 'most eccentric of mainstream filmmakers or the most accessible of avant-gardists'. Into the Past takes a chronological approach to Maddin's production, dedicating a chapter to each of the director's feature films in order of release, while a concluding section turns its attention to Maddin's short films. (Some brief comment is also offered on the director's plans for Keyhole, his most recent work, which premiered at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, and which was in its early stages of development at the time of Beard's writing of the book.) The structure allows for an extremely lucid and cogent analysis of continuities and changes within Maddin's films over the years, highlighting what Beard terms 'a slow growth and transformation in the filmmaker's range and treatment of subject matter and a slow development and then a sudden alteration in his visual language' (p. 13). A highly engaging introduction identifies various influences on and contexts for Maddin's cinema: silent film, surrealism and melodrama amongst them. These 'Elements of Maddin', as Beard styles them, then become touchstones for his analyses throughout. The chapters on Archangel (1990), Careful (1992) and Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) are especially insightful, while a wonderfully astute and detailed reading of The Saddest Music in the World (2004) brilliantly addresses the vexed issue of the 'Canadianness' of Maddin's output; Beard interprets the film's central contest in allegorical terms in which 'Camp and kitsch dissolve into a psychic landscape of melancholy, and the greater truth and power of Canadian cinema is, in [a] twisted and baroque fashion, asserted over its gigantic glittering rival to the south' (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".