The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

136 Guy Maddin
It has a great shape, and it’s a great romance, as well, but for some reason
all of us seemed to understand Gaston Modot. He seemed to be leading the
way, with his flared nostrils and his agonized face and his wax toupee. He
was all the male humiliation we’d been feeling for a number of years. He was
lust incarnate. Lya Lys is so sexy, and I knew a woman that kind of looked
like her. It just grabbed me by the balls.
The surrealist way about it really worked for me. Plus, it’s a great feeling
watching humiliation set pieces, and when Gaston agonizes, he agonizes.
The completely uninhibited nature of feelings in surrealist pictures is really
fun. Also, he is a real charismatic actor, but the fact that nifty-looking people
were clearly not acting well, but were still producing a powerful effect,
was really exhilarating to me. It was like discovering a few years earlier how
much I loved punk bands that couldn’t play. The real excitement lay in their
fresh acquaintance with the instruments they were holding in their hands,
and their inability to really do anything sophisticated with them. They still
manage to unleash a power that astonished them and mesmerized their
fans. I saw a quick analogy there with basement bands and L’ âge d’or.
I watched your films Cowards Bend the Knee and The Saddest Music in
the World again last night. The filmmaking styles of the 1930s are particularly
pronounced in your own work. To what do you attribute that
affection, stylistically, in your canon?
Maddin: I don’t know what it is. I remember making an analogy in my
head: I loved the basement band music, the second British invasion, so it had
already been sort of swelling my bosom with rock music thrills for five years.
When I saw that film could do the same thing if it went underground at that
moment, I just felt that maybe I could do the same thing. I knew I could never
be a rock musician, but I thought I could be a filmmaker, and it just felt like
only a matter of months, or minutes even, before everyone would be naturally
watching and pogo-ing away to my films of this nature, as well. I couldn’t
believe that it seems to have taken the world almost two decades to start.
How might L’ âge d’or play to a modern audience?
Maddin: It’s really harsh. It’s strange, the way in pop culture film always
seems so much slower than music. I guess music can turn around more