The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

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Guy Maddin
L’âge d’or
Guy Maddin thinks surrealism is the perfect mode in which to tell a love story.
“It has the shape of boy meets girl, gets girl, and loses girl, and then gets
to go magma-headedly, mad love crazy,” he says. “The real connection for
me comes from the climax of the movie, when Gaston Modot has lost Lya to
another, even older man. He’s just completely molten-headed with jealousy
and despair, and he starts throwing flaming pine trees out the window. He
starts ripping apart pillows and walking around with handfuls of feathers.
He’s doing all the things that I felt I had just done just earlier that year when
I had been dumped and walked around with a plow in my living room.”
Here, Maddin describes his and his friends’ first encounter with the film:
“We had an analogous little gang, and just the excitement of a primitive
movie made by people who weren’t slick and didn’t have any experience
or training and yet still told this great mad love story with so much froth
excited me because it made me realize I didn’t need to go to film school.”
Guy Maddin selected filmography:
Careful (1992)
The Heart of the World (2000)
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002)
Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands (2003)
The Saddest Music in the World (2003)
Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)
My Winnipeg (2007)
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