More — More! — Maddin-Mania!

Dearest reader:

You're still thinking about Guy Maddin, aren't you? I thought so! So I'll feed your hunger for more with links to some shorts, filled to overflowing with hypnogogic montage, subliminal edits, and subject matter both lurid and risque!

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"Zookeeper Workbook"

Maldoror, or is it? Some things are put in the mouth for safekeeping: lightning rods and tiny crabs, finger-rings for fingers. A tyger is made in the space where light is not. Q: What does a eunuch eat? A: Anything he wants! // [This film is obviously related to Maddin's "Maldoror: Tygers," which I've never seen. The treatment for that film, published in From the Atelier Tovar, entangles Comte de Lautréamont's character within Shakespearean webs of enchanted and misdirected desire.]

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"Fuseboy"

"Boiler room boys" put their fingers places they should never go, enduring dares and daring danger! Nightmares turn to passions, as metaphors turn literal! And are those Cocteau's rubber gloves, attempting a pass through the camera lens? // But oh! those "sockets of fire!" // ["Fuseboy"'s soul-mate is "Sissy Boy Slap Party," the title of which is so utterly self-explanatory as to render further exposition of its humid harem themes not only redundant, but reductive. Watch an extended cut — the third of three versions — of the latter here.]

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"Rooster Workbook"

"This little montage sequence was meant to be part of a longer film called Love Chaunt of the Chimney, but this latter film — an adaptation of Herman Melville's short story "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo," shot in 1997 — was completely lost, except for a few excerpts, when vandals torched my editing studio. When my editor John Gurdebeke and I decided to edit the few minutes that survived, we found that the spirit of the original feature-length film survived in the shorter piece — lots of ennervating sexual submission to the cock's crows, lots of filthy ash writhing — and that we just saved viewers a lot of time by submitting to fate and grieving no more over the loss of the feature" — Guy Maddin





[NOTE: All links are to YouTube, which means that these films might only be available for a moment or two.]