Guy Maddin, Template:Post-nominals (born February 28, 1956) is a Canadian screen-writer, director, author, cinematographer and film editor of both features and short films, as well as an installation artist, from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His most distinctive quality is his penchant for recreating the look and style of silent or early-sound-era films. Since completing his first film in 1985, Maddin has become one of Canada's most well-known and celebrated film-makers.Maddin has directed ten feature films and numerous short films, in addition to publishing three books and creating a host of installation art projects. A number of Maddin's recent films began as or developed from installation art projects, and his books also relate to his film work. Maddin has been the subject of much critical praise and academic attention, including two books of interviews with Maddin and two book-length academic studies of his work. Maddin was appointed to the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honour, in 2012.
Many of his films are set in a mythologized version of his hometown of Winnipeg.
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Characters frequently suffer from amnesia, forgetting even their own marriages and loves
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Often uses motifs of sexual repression and errant perversity
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Plots usually involve a series of complicated, entangled, unsuccessful love stories
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Films often imitate the visual look and special effects of the silent film era
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Quote
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I always thought that it was great when people told me that my films are impossible to put in a drawer. So I'd say: 'Oh, thank you', and they'd respond: 'No, that's terrible. You would be doing yourself a big favour if you worked in a genre.' And then they'd tell me I should work in science fiction, a genre I don't find much of a connection with for some reason, even though it has so much potential. To some extent, science fiction and horror seem so close together as an element of fantasy. But I still like my horror films scary yet slightly allegorical to a degree where I'm not sure whether I can figure out the allegory. If I can't figure it out, that's even better. But it has to be rooted in something that we all feel, whether we believe in saucers or vampires or not. We all feel those things but they are dressed up in the horror genre garb. I like that.
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I've never bought that cliché that you should never take people out of the narrative, take people out of that dramatic illusion. I'm more of a person who loves his grandmother. I'm thinking when a grandmother sits at the foot of your bed and tells you a bedtime story, you get absorbed into the story, you notice her style of telling a story. Some parts you should tell badly, other parts charmingly. You're totally sucked into the story. You've been scared, moved, engaged, and then every now and then you notice your grandmother has a dental whistle or a nose hair or that she's getting pretty wrinkly and that she's sitting on your foot, and then you go back into the story. I'm one of those filmmakers that likes to show the grandmother.
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Fact
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Retrospective at the 9th New Horizons Film Festival (2009).
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Maddin is the subject of four books, two interview books (Guy Maddin: Interviews, edited by D.K. Holm, and Caelum Vatnsdal's Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin) and two academic studies (Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg by Darren Wershler, and Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin by William Beard).
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Maddin's films often feature autobiographical elements, especially his "Me Trilogy" (of Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand Upon the Brain!, and My Winnipeg) of three films that feature a protagonist named "Guy Maddin".
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Maddin's films since 2003 have often begun as or developed from installation art projects (particularly Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain!), and in 2012 Maddin began shooting a series of 100 short films, with each production being at the same time a gallery performance.
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In 2012, was among 70 new appointees to receive the Order of Canada, one of the country's highest civilian honours.
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Maddin's father Chas was blinded in one eye when his mother held him close to her as an infant and an open brooch pierced his eyelid. A similar event occurs in Maddin's third feature film, Careful.
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The youngest of four children. He has a sister named Janet and two brothers named Cameron (deceased) and Ross.
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