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Record W799802147

Forget Your Desire: The Cinema of Guy Maddin

2006· article· en· W799802147 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Kenneth White

Bibliographic record

VenueMillennium film journal · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicCinema and Media Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMovie theaterNarrativeArtLiteraturePostmodernismAestheticsIronyVisual artsHistory
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Out-of-synch audio, incongruous lines of sight and awkward match-on-action editing undermine the structuring melodramatic narrative of Guy Maddin's cinema. Dialogue is rerecorded in every picture, Vaseline is smeared on the camera lens for distortion, and Maddin regularly utilizes-or replicates the effect of-Super 8 and two-strip Technicolor film stock. At once imbuing a singular emotional sincerity and narrative propulsion in his films, Maddin freely appropriates iconic images and plot devices of classic cinema, parading their dated sexual politics and social mores. Maddin constructs a film history canon uniquely his own, cut and pasted from the exemplar films of German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, early American melodrama, and the avant-garde. In his 1992 picture Careful1 the result is a self-conscious amalgamation of incomplete early cinema references, self-conscious Freudian symbolism, and postmodern irony that implicates our cognitive experience of cinematic illusion in its revisionist critique. Maddin began making films in the late 1980s, but none of his narratives take place after 1930. While utilizing actual events as points of departure, such as the smallpox epidemic of 1900 in the Icelandic community of Gimli, Manitoba (Tales from the Gimli Hospital),2 or the post-World War One collective amnesia of Archangel, Russia (Archangel)? Maddin manipulates the conventions of naturalist-realist narrative development and abandons accurate documentation of the historical event for a playful dissection of audiences' suspension of belief. In recent works, Maddin's application of digital technology heightens the immersive qualities of his worlds while continually reminding the viewer of its artificiality, of his directorial hand. Maddin states, I want [the audience] to be aware they're watching a movie, I'm not trying to hide that fact ... Everything is artificial in the world of ... film and melodrama.4 He does not simply acknowledge but fully celebrates their artifice, disrupting nearly every established tool used to garner investment in the naturalist-realist, melodramatic, and romantic structures of his inspirations. Maddin fills in the gaps of his incomplete recollection with referents outside of history, creating a nostalgia for a past that does not exist. Using contemporary tinting processes, digital video, and nonlinear editing in combination with 35mm, 16mm, and Super 8 film formats, he remakes a past borne by the future. Maddin simultaneously builds a baroque diegesis and dismantles it through incomplete revisionist homage, infusing a Freudian narrative vocabulary with contrived historical hyperreality. He effectively occupies multiple levels of what Jean Baudrillard calls the precession of simulacra, mirroring a subjective and fractional film canon, while conflating the illusion inherent of all cinema. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes, Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible ... All ... energy of representation [has] vanished in a hallucinatory resemblance ... of the real to itself.5 History and illusion implode. Reality is signified only by perverse simulation. Maddin extrapolates the hyperreal echo chamber into an allinclusive project in which every vestige of its signification points to its unraveling, on every level of representation. Careful was Maddin's first color film. In it we are introduced to Tolzbad, a fictitious 19th-century Alpine town where oedipal drives and sibling rivalry plague the inhabitants, compounded by perpetual fear of impending avalanches. seemingly dazed by the over-saturation of their own images, they stumble through a world of both baroque artifice and the strictest code of whispered repression and self-restraint. At home in their fabricated surroundings and utterly out of time and place, they are lost in mismatched thoughts and desires. The deadpan reading by the actors, Maddin's wooden script, the contrived sets, and dustaccented soundtrack, create an ironic distance between the viewer and the film. …

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How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.277
Threshold uncertainty score0.420

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.217
Teacher spread0.184 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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