Guy Maddin

FILMHAUS POTSDAMER PLATZ

Opening reception Friday 11.02. 20:00

daily 11:00-22:00

The ghosts of cinema loom large in Guy Maddin’s body of work. Hauntings is a series of very short films. For years, he has been collecting tales of unrealized, half-finished or abandoned films, potential masterworks doomed to oblivion as they slipped out of their creators’ control. This impulse rhymes remarkably well with Maddin’s thematic obsession with regret and the perils of wild abandon found in both his film and installation works. (Noah Cowan)

Cinema is a haunted medium, a projection of people, places and things not really present. As we know a film can summon before our eyes, like ghosts invoked from the beyond, performances from the past, performances by actors no longer with us, in settings changed forever. But when a movie is lost, as so many great works from the medium’s earliest years are, it’s a double haunting, for a misplaced film is an artwork consigned to limbo, a narrative with no known final resting place. (Guy Maddin)

Hauntings I (Fragments) were originally part of Hauntings I, a large-scale projection work, commissioned by TIFF (the parent organization of the Toronto International Film Festival) for the opening of its new year-round film and moving image facility, TIFF Bell Lightbox. The installation, composed of eleven projections of thirteen films, was featured as part of the facility’s inaugural exhibition, Essential Cinema. Hauntings II is a multi-channel site-specific installation commissioned by TIFF that featured exterior projections of ghostly figures across a 100-foot bank of windows during the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. In Berlin, the ghostly visions will appear periodically on a screen in the Arsenal foyer.

Guy Maddin lives and works in Winnipeg. His films include 1988: Tales from the Gimli Hospital; 1992: Careful; 2003: The Saddest Music in the World; 2006: Brand Upon the Brain! (Forum 2007); 2007: My Winnipeg (Forum 2008); Night Mayor (Forum Expanded 2010); Little White Cloud That Cried (commissioned by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and HAU/Hebbel am Ufer for LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in A Rented World, 2009).

Directed by: Guy Maddin

Producer: Phyllis Laing, Jean du Toit & Jody Shapiro

Cast: Louis Negin, Udo Kier, Tattiawna Jones, Kim Morgan, Teresa Braun, Suzanne Pringle, Darcy Fehr, Jeff Bruyere, Teddy Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, Paul Madziak, Cynthia Wolfe-Nolin

Production design: Richardo Alms

Supported by the Wexner Center for the Arts Media Arts Residency Award, The Ohio State University. Presented at TIFF Bell Lightbox.