Guy Maddin’s new short film “Night Mayor,” which won the Short Film Jury Award for Experimental Shorts at SXSW is now available online thanks to NFB. We previously reported Maddin had postponed his next feature, “Keyhole,” so he could work on this short for the National Film Board of Canada which he described at the time as “an imaginative cinematic riff on the significance of a public film producer.” And rest assured, the end result is just as fresh and insane as Maddin’s previous work (“My Winnipeg” and “Brand Upon the Brain”).
The film is about Nihad Ademi, an inventor from Bosnia who immigrates to Winnipeg. He builds, with his children, a machine called the “Telemodium” which uses the waves of Aurora Borealis to broadcast footage of “every day life for every day people.” The footage is shown in different parts of Canada, coast to coast. Eventually, people begin to take to these images and start broadcasting their own, that is, until the police get involved.
Like Maddin’s two previous films, it is shot in black and white and is handled like a film from the early 1900s. The cutting style is frantic, even more-so when the family is building the machine (which is about half the film). Tony Scott and Paul Greengrass take note — it is possible to have have a film filled with quick cuts and not make audiences ill. Also, the film features narration by both Nihad (delivered in a My Winnipeg-esque fashion combining thought fragments and normal narrative lines) and his children. It is a brief 13 minutes, and it is definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re a Maddin fan.
There’s no word yet on the status of “Keyhole” that Madden was prepping to shoot this past winter. Last summer in a conversation with Isabella Rosellini for Bomb magazine, he asked the actress to join the film which he described as “a crime film about a family of gangsters holed up in a big house, but there’s been a fissure along gender lines and everyone trembles in fear and loathing within a house divided. In the backstory, you’d [Rosellini] be the adoptive mother of an Amazon warrior. I want to adapt Kleist’s Penthesilea of the ‘30s, an incredibly intense play about the literal battle of the sexes, between the armies of the ancient Greeks and the Amazons. The beautiful Penthesilea and Achilles hate each other so much they transmute the hatred into lust, naturally. They are constantly tearing away at each other’s flesh but don’t know why, or to what end, whether mortal or sexual. The lust is almost entomological….” Um, wow.
While we wait for “Keyhole,” enjoy Maddin’s latest below: