The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

134 Guy Maddin
a movie myself. My methods were sort of initially found by looking in the
direction that Buñuel pointed me in with this picture.
How did you see the film?
Maddin: I stumbled across it up here in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, the French network, used to run silent movies on Sunday
night. For some reason, I was in the habit of tuning into the French channel
because they also ran a lot of nudity. It was something you kept trying to dial
on your TV like a slot machine, just to see what kind of jackpot you could
hit on the French channel. Every now and then, it was remarkable what you
could come across. This is what I came across one night.
Atom Egoyan, who is also in this book, discovered Persona in exactly
the same way, expressly because he was looking for nudity.
Maddin: Yeah, it literally is like a slot machine sitting in the corner of your
living room, and when you were alone, you would just go over there and
spin the channel selector and hope it comes up cherries or whatever. It was
a tradition that I’d forgotten about until just now. So I did stumble across
it, and then my muses and I played it over and over again. We wore out
the tape. It was one of the first movies that I ever videotaped, actually, in a
beautiful sepia-toned unsubtitled version. So when I became obsessed with
the movie later, I bought one of the scripts. They’re really necessary in the
prevideotape days. They help you remember it. I was able to get the English
translation and realized it made no more sense than the untranslated version.
That was pretty delightful to me, too, and I bought into the Surrealist
Manifesto that everyone else had been sick of for years. It was like 1930 all
over again for me. It just hit me with the full force of its year.
What part of the Surrealist Manifesto particularly appealed to you?
Maddin: It seems so old a hat now, but the idea of using completely disparate
or unconnected objects and combining them to create a subconscious
product and to create an indecipherable effect. It worked every now and
then. A lot of times it didn’t, but you were willing to, like your favorite
baseball player, settle for a .300 average, and then when it did work, it was
really nifty.