Maddin homage to NFB packs subversive punch

TORONTO -- When filmmaker Guy Maddin accepted a commission from the National Film Board to make a short film observing the 70th anniversary of the institution, they had to know Maddin wouldn't end up making something remotely conventional.Very much a Guy Maddin film in the vein of My Winnipeg, Night Mayor (screening this week at the Toronto International Film Festival) only vaguely echoes the NFB's real history. It is set in the year 1939, when Scotsman and proto-documentarian John Grierson founded the NFB. But in Maddin's vision, that event is refracted into a fantasy about a Bosnian immigrant who invents a machine that harnesses the aurora borealis to transmit images to citizens across the country, before the inventor is shut down by the government.

For a film that was made with government money, the film -- and especially its conclusion -- packs a subversive punch.

"It doesn't feel like a commissioned film," Maddin says during a round of interviews in Toronto.

"I'm proud of it, of the gentle, sad little lyrical echo of the NFB," he says. "A recent arrival in Canada makes something that helps define Canada, however briefly, because Canada has always had trouble doing that, and then gets shut down by the government."

While the NFB is still alive, its fortunes do tend to rise and fall with each new government elected. Maddin pointedly portrays that dynamic.

"No sooner does our government make something possible that wouldn't be possible in any other country, then they start squeezing the life out of it," Maddin says, acknowledging that he may be biting the hand that's feeding him.

"The government has paid for this movie and paid for my flight here, and I'm well aware of it," Maddin says. "But the government is kind of an amorphous thing at times."

"ö "ö "ö

Night Mayor even has a touch of erotic content -- it's not all that often you see female nudity in an NFB film -- and it appears Maddin is taking sexual content to an even greater degree with his next short film, which he shot near his Gimli cottage residence this summer.

Maddin doesn't offer a title but he says the film, his first colour movie "in a while," was conceived as a tribute to underground film pioneer Jack Smith, best remembered for the orgiastic feature Flaming Creatures.

"I shot my first full-colour, full-tranny orgy out at the lake," Maddin says. "There's a little island almost no one knows about called Pelican Island, an atoll, and we just shot some exotic shenanigans out there with a tranny friend of mine," Maddin says, referring to Lexi Tronic, a transexual who appeared on the documentary TV series Kink.

"Lexi did all the casting and everything. I'm not sure how long it will be, but it will be a real underground film," Maddin says. "It's like a Jack Smith movie should be; it's kind of pornographic ... a feast of polysexuality."

A friend quipped that the sexually diverse cast gave Maddin a case of "tranxiety."

"I didn't know what herding these kittens would be like, but it ended up being a wonderful experience," Maddin says.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 12, 2009 C13