I. Westin Harbor Castle Hotel, Toronto, Ontario, February 2002

Can you feel it? Genie buzz is in the air!¹ Winnipeg’s own Guy Maddin is eligible for Best Short Film for The Heart of the World (2000), only his second-ever nomination for Canada’s top film awards; the first was for the screenplay of his debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), the script of which was scribbled on a handful of Post-it notes. (The next day, to nobody’s surprise, he will win it.) A little more than a year later, as the token Canadian in the house, I will be on a stage in some Dutch seaport accepting an award on behalf of the director for his first installation, Cowards Bend the Knee, and alluding to a story about a monkey that may or may not be true. But back in the Canadian winter chill, Maddin and I were leaving the hotel after having conversed for an hour about his black-and-white filmed vampire ballet, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2001), which aired on CBC the following week. This was the first time he had put his thoughts on his film-for-hire into words, and he was already apologizing for what he perceived to be a tirade at the incalcitrance of unionized craftsman, his producers, and the Canadian film industry as a whole—when he did no such thing. Maddin, though, had yet to amalgamate his experiences on the film into fabricated thoughts, tall tales, the stuff that myths are made of. He turned to me and added one final anecdote. “There was this certain point in the editing room where I said, much to my own surprise, ‘We’ve done it. We’ve made a watchable dance film.’” He paused. “Don’t print that.”

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The unexpected upswing of the Guy Maddin rollercoaster coincides with a veritable cluster-bombing of North America with Maddinalia, as if the Furies had conspired with the cultural gatekeepers to ensure that the once-obscure visionary who would rather sit in his living room watching The Match Game and eating applesauce has cultural currency again. It all began in 2000 with the cataclysmic rupture of cinema known as The Heart of the World, an addictive six-minute masterpiece that condenses an entire sci-fi apocalyptic melodrama into 800 Soviet-style, rapid-fire cuts. In the past year or so, Guy Maddin Industries has diversified, with a full retrospective at the Rotterdam film festival (immediately followed by another one in Toronto); his first gallery installation, Cowards (with accompanying lavishly illustrated publication featuring the film’s immensely readable screenplay); and excellent lengthy Artforum and New York Times features....