The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

144 Guy Maddin
see that the spicy, spice-induced temperatures must be running a lot higher
in that Wuthering Heights, and it is pretty crazy. I guess, just by sticking to
similar subject matter from picture to picture, he was able to work in the
areas where a dreamlike rendering works best and the kind of delirium with
which the bourgeois would operate, and certainly lovers. There are other
types of delirium that he didn’t touch on much, childhood recollection and
things like that, but maybe he just would have been too cruel for that. Of
course, he had Los olvidados. I watched that on Christmas Eve. It ends with
Pedro being dumped in a garbage heap. Just before I opened my presents,
that was un-fucking-believable. We had to watch Los olvidados first, before
anyone could open presents.
How do you think your life or your work might have been different if
you hadn’t seen L’ âge d’or at the age and the time that you did?
Maddin: I don’t even know if I would have even known how to begin making
movies. He made moviemaking seem necessary to me. I guess a number
of other directors could have told me the same thing, Joseph Cornell or
George Cukor. People I loved just as much almost at the time could have
told me the same thing. It was the urgency of what Buñuel’s L’ âge d’or was
about, this passionate affair ending in disaster. That was all I could relate to
at that point in my life.
It was all I really had, short-lived splendors crashing and burning just at
the most ecstatic point. Seeing these precise feelings reproduced by rather
primitively performed roles and clunkily sliced-together shots really galvanized
me and made me realize I could start putting my own lurid confessions
up for anyone who wanted to see on film. I stood a chance of having a
style and speaking to people as powerfully as the basement bands did with
their crudely put-together little outbursts and things. I don’t even want to
think about what would have happened if I hadn’t encountered L’ âge d’or,
because I don’t even think I ever would have picked up a camera.