Archangel, 1990
Archangel (Guy Maddin, 1990)
David Cronenberg once quipped, “You haven’t seen a truly foreign film until you’ve seen a Guy Maddin film.” A weird, wild and extraordinary work, Maddin’s Archangel is both melodrama and deadpan parody. With striking cinematography and stylized set design, Maddin tells a tragic tale of obsessive love during the Great War in the arctic Russian town of Archangel, a crystalline city of spires and onion domes. Here a Canadian soldier, a Belgian aviator and a Russian nurse, their minds clouded by mustard gas and the horrors of war, forget who they are really in love with.
Tom McSorley, Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute, writes, “Shot in sumptuous black and white worthy of Josef von Sternberg and filled with slices of the surreal and the cruel, Winnipeg visionary Guy Maddin’s second feature is a masterpeice: a wistful, luminous conflation of absurdity, high romance, heroic delusion and the Canadian colonial. Buster Keaton would approve. Bunuel, too.” This true Canadian gem won the U.S. National Society of Film Critics’ prize for Best Experimental Film of the Year in 1991.
Cinematheque Waterloo is delighted to present, courtesy of the Winnipeg Film Group, the original film on a glorious new 35mm print. -Katherine Spring
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Runtime: 90
Director: Guy Maddin Cast: Michael Gottli, David Falkenburg, Michael O'Sullivan |
Archangel , 1990
|
Archangel (Guy Maddin, 1990)
David Cronenberg once quipped, “You haven’t seen a truly foreign film until you’ve seen a Guy Maddin film.” A weird, wild and extraordinary work, Maddin’s Archangel is both melodrama and deadpan parody. With striking cinematography and stylized set design, Maddin tells a tragic tale of obsessive love during the Great War in the arctic Russian town of Archangel, a crystalline city of spires and onion domes. Here a Canadian soldier, a Belgian aviator and a Russian nurse, their minds clouded by mustard gas and the horrors of war, forget who they are really in love with.
Tom McSorley, Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute, writes, “Shot in sumptuous black and white worthy of Josef von Sternberg and filled with slices of the surreal and the cruel, Winnipeg visionary Guy Maddin’s second feature is a masterpeice: a wistful, luminous conflation of absurdity, high romance, heroic delusion and the Canadian colonial. Buster Keaton would approve. Bunuel, too.” This true Canadian gem won the U.S. National Society of Film Critics’ prize for Best Experimental Film of the Year in 1991.
Cinematheque Waterloo is delighted to present, courtesy of the Winnipeg Film Group, the original film on a glorious new 35mm print. -Katherine Spring