Amnesia: the process by which certain memories prior to a defining trauma become compromised or, in some cases, irretrievable. Has there ever been a filmmaker who more completely invokes this peculiar malady cinematically than Guy Maddin? It is hard to think of a Maddin film that doesn’t feature at least one amnesiac amongst its colorful ensemble, or at least one character with an undiagnosed pattern of forgetfulness. As a viewer, it is hard not to feel like an amnesiac just days or even hours after encountering one of his films, so convoluted and dreamlike are the sequences of events that comprise their unstable plots. And as a body of work, Maddin’s films comprise an attempt to formalize what amnesia might mean in a film-historical sense: the cinematic medium as a fluid form offering peculiar eccentricities from decade to decade, but one whose time-stamped specificities cannot be adequately appropriated by subsequent generations of practitioners without some fundamental shift in the DNA of the work. Once-fashionable stylistic approaches may prevail, and stories might be recycled in clumsy fashion, but deterioration—of materials, of styles and of collective memory of those approaches—nonetheless lies at the heart of this young art form.

By affectionately breathing life back into old mannerisms of the medium, Maddin’s eleven features to date attempt to work against this truth. At the same time, they affirm it by proving that, through cinema, memories thought lost to amnesia can be retrievable, but only in warped, degraded form. At one point in his 2002 film Cowards Bend the Knee, there’s a silent-film intertitle with the words “What sharp amnesias!”—a paradox, of course, but one that gets right to the heart of the impulse behind Maddin’s work. His films are sharp amnesias: fetishistically detailed, meticulously pantomimed recreations of forgotten films, films that never existed, films that existed only in Maddin’s mind, in his dreams, or perhaps in the dreams of motion picture audiences. These hypothetical films are modeled after real films, but they’ve emerged from the vagaries of time, memory and trauma as something else, their components tweaked, twisted, stretched and bruised beyond recognition, though still bound closely in spirit to the original creations.

Born in 1956, Maddin grew up in the harsh, wintry environs of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and many of his artistic fixations, which can’t be reduced to just cinema, can be traced back to this upbringing. Per an interview with The Dissolve critic Scott Tobias, Maddin “can’t even remember the source of half of the stuff” that wound up in My Winnipeg, his “ecstatic truth” ode to his city of birth, but the many explicitly autobiographical details in his films suggest otherwise. Despite playing like a mind-numbing parody of a bad zombie film, Maddin’s debut short, The Dead Father (1985), is clearly a reflection on the loss of his dad at age twenty-one, a void that partially explains the many absent or ineffectual patriarchs in his body of work. Similarly, the commissioned installation short Only Dream Things (2012) explores another family death: the suicide of his older brother in 1963. Meanwhile, Maddin’s three most blatantly self-referential features—Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand Upon the Brain! and My Winnipeg—all portray characters named “Guy Maddin” as timid geeks with severe angst amidst the opposite sex, nagging Oedipal complexes, and a tendency to displace these issues with peripheral fixations: hockey, work, or, most significantly, prolonged exposure to the flickering glow of a television set at odd hours of the night. As the operatic expressiveness of his filmmaking suggests, these representations are clearly the products of self-mythology, but they are not fabrications. To the extent that the childhood Maddin represents in his films is based in fact, it is one marked by inertia, loneliness, grief and escapist fantasies—the kind of emotional spectrum that might induce something like trauma.

Maddin’s movies, then—from the rickety folk-tale creepiness of Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 1988 to his latest and most ambitious regurgitation of bygone melodrama, The Forbidden Room (a world premiere at Sundance 2015)—offer records of his will as an artist to exorcise and glorify the memories of his fractious youth, spun through the hodgepodge of televisual, phonographic and cinematic styles he witnessed as respite from those uncertain times: stiff sitcoms from the 40s and 50s, sensational radio programs, hardboiled but technically crude B movies, lavish Technicolor spectacles and many other, older oddities that might have happened across his TV screen in the far reaches of cable access. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs cannibalizes Kenneth Anger and William Shakespeare, Careful riffs on the nebulous strain of “the mountain film,” Brand Upon the Brain! sporadically evokes French experimental and impressionist cinema of the 10s and 20s, Archangel echoes Soviet war propaganda films, Keyhole touches on detective fiction and pulp noir à la Raymond Chandler, and so on and so forth.

What ties these waywardly cinephilic visions together is a constant return to the same narrative and thematic logic (part of this consistency must surely be indebted to George Toles, Maddin’s co-writer since Archangel), as well as a contradictory predilection to interrupt this logic with bizarre detours and non sequiturs. Many of Maddin’s films take off from preposterous speculations—What if a part of Russia was not informed that the Great War ended? What if the sun never set over a village? What if Dracula seduced his female victims with elegant ballet chops?—before finding ways, however tenuous, of circling back to his pet themes: memory loss, sexual awakening, heartache, nature vs. nurture. Structurally, Maddin’s narratives often invoke P. Adams Sitney’s notion, as outlined in his volume Visionary Film: The American Avant Garde, of “trance films”—that is, films loosely following a single protagonist/audience surrogate “undertak[ing] an interior quest” wherein he or she encounters “erotic and irrational imagery” that “evokes the raw quality of [a] dream itself.” But unlike the characters in the works of the trance film’s most cited specialists—avant-garde narrative filmmakers like Maya Deren, Gregory Markopoulos and Kenneth Anger—Maddin’s somnambulist heroes restlessly intervene in their own mystifying dreamscapes, all this despite so often being beset by injuries, diseases, or just chronic forgetfulness and psychological confusion.

Maddin’s body of work might best be digested in one marathon-like jumble—an opportunity this retrospective doubtless affords the adventurous viewer—because, on their own, his films can be deliriously nonsensical. Taken together, their obsessive repetitions and parallels become unmistakable, and the collision of all their film-historical touch points starts to usher the viewer closer to what Maddin’s own mind must be like: a inexorable mental factory with an impossibly vivid sense of visual and sonic memory but precious little regard for psychological and narrative continuity or neatness. That this seemingly disorderly brain also belongs to a truly prolific high-concept showman—Maddin’s eclectic working life has constituted everything from ballet choreography and live performance orchestration to peep show installation and film journalism—is one of the great delights to follow in modern cinema. Assuming the forces of amnesia have whipped his oeuvre into a muddle of amorphous hallucinations for even the most enthusiastic of Maddin acolytes, the release of the sprawling and entrancing The Forgotten Room gives audiences a chance to acquaint themselves anew with this most idiosyncratic auteur. – Carson Lund

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to welcome Guy Maddin to both the cinematheque for a few evenings of screenings and conversation and to Harvard’s VES Department; he will be gracing the halls and classrooms of the Carpenter Center this year as a Visiting Lecturer.