From The Atelier Tovar

Guy Maddin is one of Canada's most celebrated and original filmmakers, the director of such delirious films as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg. Few know, however, that he is just as gifted a writer, and his resolutely purple prose, as eccentric and enchanting as his film work, is a true delight. From the Atelier Tovar gathers, in one volume, the best of Maddin's writing: his journalism (originally published in the Village Voice, Cinema Scope, Film Comment and points beyond), unpublished short stories and film treatments (including the riotous Child Without Qualities), and selections, both lurid and illuminating, from the filmmaker's personal journals. Here are Maddin's feverish musings on hockey, the Osmonds, divas of the Italian silent cinema, Bollywood, his own twisted biography, and much, much more. What emerges finally is both a fragrant potpourri and a treasure trove, a singular portrait of this very unique artist.

Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between. Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.

Most Canadians are city dwellers, a fact often unacknowledged by twentieth-century Canadian films, with their preference for themes of wilderness survival or rural life. Modernist Canadian films tend to support what film scholar Jim Leach calls “the nationalist-realist project,” a documentary style that emphasizes the exoticism and mythos of the land. Over the past several decades, however, the hegemony of Anglo-centrism has been challenged by francophone and First Nations perspectives and the character of cities altered by a continued influx of immigrants and the development of cities as economic and technological centers. No longer primarily defined through the lens of rural nostalgia, Canadian urban identity is instead polyphonic, diverse, constructed through multiple discourses and mediums, an exchange rather than a strict orientation. Taking on the urban as setting and subject, filmmakers are ideally poised to create and reflect multiple versions of a single city. Examining fourteen Canadian films produced from 1989 to 2007, including Denys Arcand’s Jésus de Montréal (1989), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo (1992), Mina Shum’s Double Happiness (1994), Clément Virgo’s Rude (1995), and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007), Film and the City is the first comprehensive study of Canadian film and “urbanity”—the totality of urban culture and life. Drawing on film and urban studies and building upon issues of identity formation in Canadian studies, Melnyk considers how filmmakers, films, and urban audiences experience, represent, and interpret urban spatiality, visuality, and orality. In this way, Film and the City argues that Canadian narrative film of the postmodern period has aided in articulating a new national identity.

Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg (2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin’s work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.

Over the past forty years, Canadian literature has found its way to the silver screen with increasing regularity. Beginning with the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God to the Hollywood film Rachel, Rachel in 1966, Canadian writing would appear to have found a doubly successful life for itself at the movies: from the critically acclaimed Kamouraska and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in the 1970s through to the award-winning Love and Human Remains and The English Patient in the 1990s. With the more recent notoriety surrounding the Oscar-nominated Away from Her, and the screen appearances of The Stone Angel and Fugitive Pieces, this seems like an appropriate time for a collection of essays to reflect on the intersection between literary publication in Canada, and its various screen transformations. This volume discusses and debates several double-edged issues: the extent to which the literary artefact extends its artfulness to the film artefact, the degree to which literary communities stand to gain (or lose) in contact with film communities, and perhaps most of all, the measure by which a viable relation between fiction and film can be said to exist in Canada, and where that double-life precisely manifests itself, if at all. - This book is published in English.

Guy Maddin started making films in his back yard and on his kitchen table. Now his unique work, which relies heavily on such archaic means as black and white small-format cinematography and silent-film storytelling, premieres at major film festivals around the world and is avidly discussed in the critical press. Into the Past provides a complete and systematic critical commentary on each of Maddin's feature films and shorts, from his 1986 debut film The Dead Father through to his highly successful 2008 full-length 'docu-fantasia' My Winnipeg. William Beard's extensive analysis of Maddin's narrative and aesthetic strategies, themes, influences, and underlying issues also examines the origins and production history of each film. Each of Maddin's projects and collaborations showcase his gradual evolution as a filmmaker and his singular development of narrative forms. Beard's close readings of these films illuminate, among other things, the profound ways in which Maddin's art is founded in the past - both in the cultural past, and in his personal memory.

This is a provocative collection of essays that provide cutting edge, original research in film studies, discussing a number of 'transgressive' films that have never before had such in-depth analysis and treatment. From '70s Italian horror films and extreme European cinema to Nazi propaganda films and fundamentalist Christian 'scare' movies, these essays explore many different genres and themes.

The Young, the Restless, and the Dead captures the spirit of Canadian filmmakers through interviews with the most accomplished and dynamic of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s film greats. Funny, provocative, and enlightening, the filmmakers reflect on their careers and explore with the interviewers the issues that challenge them. This book features an interview with a late director (Jean-Claude Lauzon) whose work is recognized in the canon as outstanding; interviews with filmmakers who are accomplished in their fields and have to their credit a sizeable body of work (Blake Corbet, Andrew Currie, Brent Carlson, Guy Maddin, Lynne Stopkewich, Anne Wheeler, Gary Burns, and Mina Shum); and an interview with a young director new to the field (Michael Dowse). Together these players in the Canadian film scene capture the energy, success, and tribulations of a fascinating cultural industry. The Young, the Restless, and the Dead is the first volume in a series of interviews with key cultural creators in the field of cinema. It seeks to bring to a wide audience the insights and emotions, the trials and achievements of significant figures in Canadian film. George Melnyk talks about The Young, the Restless, and the Dead with Eric Volmers of the Calgary Herald. Read the interview online.