Five signs you might be watching a Guy Maddin film

Guy Maddin's contribution to Séance Fiction, an exhibit at the Banff Centre's Walter Phillips gallery, is a series of video projections. Each of them is a surreal re-enactment of a lost, Depression-era film.  

If that idea seems very, very Guy Maddin to you, you've probably seen one of his movies.

Following appearances at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox this past weekend, Guy Maddin is heading to the Banff Centre Wednesday for their series of guest talks.

Not sure whether you've got a Maddin movie lodged in your head? Before you head straight to the IMDB, confirm your suspicions. We've prepared a checklist of "Maddin-isms."

1. Black and White?

Maddin's latest, The Forbidden Room, is in colour, and he's reveling in it. ("I'm madly in love with it, and I love everything it does," he told the Toronto Star in July.)

But his 30-year filmography is almost entirely captured in dreamy shades of grey.

"I always thought — but I'm kind of weird — that a film should be shot in black and white unless it had a good reason to be shot in colour," he told Motherboard in 2012.

There's a good reason to go monochrome, too. The world isn't black and white. (Not to most of us, any way.) When we see it on screen, it's like a reminder; what we're seeing isn't reality. Beer-filled prosthetic legs (from The Saddest Music in the World) might serve the same purpose, but still... here's what he had to say to a Bow Valley, AB paper this week, in advance of his Banff Centre appearance: "I have long loved the way the style of older cinema asserts that it is not trying to replace or represent reality. It presents the world in artificially reconfigured ways, much like a fairy tale or bedtime story does."

2. Cinematic Throwbacks?

The last blurb about filming in black-and-white? That's an example of the sort of "out-of-step" detail you'll usually see. Same goes for title cards, or unusually artificial sets or iris shots or melodramatic acting — any of the peculiar flourishes that went out with the silent era.

"I've never tried to imitate old films, you might be surprised to hear. I just borrow underused gestures, ones that are still loaded up with great gobs of flavour, as far as I'm concerned, and mix them up with more modern tropes," he told Motherboard.

Those details have been there since his first short, 1985's The Dead Father. He told CBC about it in a 1997 interview, explaining that the film's look was strategic as much as an artistic homage to his favourite 1920s-era directors. "I better make something dreamlike," he told CBC. "I wanted to stay away from any attempt to make something glossy because of the budget… also the level of experience I had. I was determined to be primitive, and anti-Canadian in a way."

3. Isabella Rossellini?

There are certain faces you'll see repeated throughout Maddin's filmography: Kyle McCulloch, Udo Kier, Darcy Fehr (who plays "Guy Maddin" in My Winnipeg and Cowards Bend the Knee). Rossellini's is the most recognizable, though, and since the early 2000s the pair have collaborated on shorts (Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair) and features (The Saddest Music in the World).

"She's game for anything," Maddin told IFC in 2009. "We're co-directors, sort of. I always direct her and she always directs herself." For her part, Rossellini told the Guardian she's most comfortable working with directors like Maddin. "I think I feel comfortable in a situation which is experimental."

4. Melodrama?

There's another "Maddin-ism" that's a notable throwback to the early days of cinema: melodrama. Extreme emotions, and situations, that ring true no matter how much larger than life they are. "When I started making films in the '80s, I took it as an impossible goal, but a goal to try for anyway, to make someone laugh and cry simultaneously. It seemed like the perfect goal of a filmmaker," Maddin told Dorkshelf earlier this year. "It seems to me that good melodrama uninhibits the truth about us all."

5. Winnipeg?

It's Maddin's hometown, and while it isn't always in a starring role, when it appears on screen you'll second guess everything you ever learned in social studies. My Winnipeg, from 2008, is a surreal mockumentary — a blend of half-remembered history and half-remembered personal memories — where the city is the sleepwalking centre of the world, a place where the CP Rail hosts an annual contest for a one-way ticket out of town. In The Saddest Music in the World, it's "the world capital of sorrow" — one where Isabella Rossellini is a beer-brewing impresario.

"Canadians are lousy self-mythologizers," Maddin told CBC in 2004, speaking about The Saddest Music.  "I really wanted to set things in Winnipeg, give it the old Hollywood treatment and let the mythology machinery take over."

Guy Maddin speaks at the Banff Centre's Margaret Greenham Theatre Wednesday, July 22 at 7:30pm. Free.

What's your favourite Guy Maddin film? Find us on Twitter at @CBCArts and share it with us!