Guy Maddin has served as his own director of photography on the six-minute short The Heart of the World and on some of his features, and for that he won’t apologize.

‘It’s simpler just to grab a camera,’ the experimental Winnipeg-based director explains. ‘The fewer people the better.’

Maddin was the cinematographer on his first two features, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) and Archangel (1990), then shared duties on Careful (1992) with camera operator Mike Marshall. It is a rarity in the film business, but it has also become the preferred working method of director Steven Soderbergh, credited as Peter Andrews for his lensing on Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven.

‘I applaud [Soderbergh] until my hands are sore,’ Maddin says. ‘It’s just such a relief. I’ve had to justify doing this for so many years, and now I can point to an A-list, Academy Award-winning director who makes big-budget Hollywood movies and does his own cinematography.’

Despite doing most of the shooting on THOTW, Maddin is quick to credit deco dawson, a former student of his at the University of Manitoba. Dawson was initially assigned to document the production with a Super 8 camera, but also contributed to Maddin’s lighting.

Executive producer Niv Fichman and producer Jody Shapiro approached Maddin and other notable Canadian directors including David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and Don McKellar to produce short films for the Preludes series. The Preludes shorts, which opened features at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, were intended to fete the fest’s 25th anniversary. While the pieces by Egoyan and McKellar deal with TIFF history more directly, the esoteric Maddin chose a different path altogether.

THOTW, which cheats the Preludes requirements by an extra two minutes, celebrates the history of film itself, throwing the groundbreaking styles of Soviet montage innovators Sergei Eisenstein and V.I. Pudovkin in a blender with the German expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, creating a delirious cocktail of a film.

The film is a black-and-white silent with a rousing score. Its lunatic allegory, set in a timeless, nameless place, has something to do with state scientist Anna (Leslie Bais), who studies the earth’s core and is torn between suitor brothers Nikolai (Shaun Balbar), a mortician, and Osip (Caelum Vatnsdal), an actor playing Christ in a passion play. But industrialist Arkmatov (Greg Klymkiw), who casts an evil spell over Anna, usurps them both, resulting in the world starting to die of heart failure. But before the apocalypse arrives, Anna snaps to it and assumes the role of heart of the world herself, saving all. But really, the film is about cinematic technique.

Maddin decided on the Soviet agitprop approach because of the nature of the invitation from TIFF, which reminded him of Joseph Stalin inviting directors to make films celebrating his greatness, even though, he adds, ‘[TIFF president and executive director] Piers Handling is far more benign and a little less genocidal than Stalin. He even volunteered to play Stalin in the movie.’

Phallic coffins

Maddin spent a couple of weeks in preproduction and five days shooting the film. Each director was given about $20,000, although with all volunteer work and free equipment and services in, Maddin estimates it’s a $110,000 film, of which he is slightly embarrassed. He shot it in a dormant steel factory in the ‘Peg, with production designer Rejean Labrie helping to recreate the retro-futuristic look of Metropolis. Olaf Dux built factory sets and props including ‘phallic coffins.’

Maddin wanted to avoid a flat look, adhering to the starkness of primitive filmmaking by often using one direct light source. He lit one scene involving a crowd of 35 with a single 20K light obtained from PS Winnipeg.

‘I have a penchant for placing the light directly above a subject, which I learned from the great cinematography in Josef von Sternberg’s Marlene Dietrich pictures,’ he says.

The director was impressed with what he saw from dawson’s film diary.

‘In a lot of cases his rushes looked way better than mine, so we included his footage as well,’ Maddin admits.

Maddin used a 16mm Bolex camera, and even shot a couple of rolls on a 1930s Victor Animatograph 16mm camera. He proceeded to edit his sequences, originated on 7222 Eastman Double-X negative film, while dawson cut his material shot on Kodak Tri-X Reversal black-and-white Super 8 stock. Dawson optically printed his work up to 16mm at the Saskatchewan Filmpool Co-Op’s optical printer in Regina, and then they cut it all together. The juxtaposition of stocks and styles – Maddin’s and dawson’s – was perfectly suited to the film, which jolts the viewer with 200 shots and 600 cuts, including melodramatic inter-titles. The director estimates that dawson contributed one-third of the footage.

The finished film even looks like a print that has degraded over 70-odd years, due equally to logistics and artistic intent.

‘With 600 cuts I couldn’t afford a negative cut, so once the movie was edited together on a Steenbeck with Scotch Tape and crayons, we just rephotographed it on the optical printer,’ Maddin says. ‘We photographed the dirt, static and scratches.’

Maddin is currently completing post-production on Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, a 73-minute ballet film to be broadcast on CBC Feb. 28. In this case, he did use a DOP – Paul Suderman (DOP of Hey, Happy! and camera trainee on Maddin’s 1997 feature Twilight of the Ice Nymphs). But Maddin and dawson shot a good deal of footage as well.

Of the 10 Preludes filmmakers, only Maddin and Cronenberg – for Camera – have been nominated for this year’s Genie Award for best live-action short drama. Although acknowledging the quietly competitive nature of Preludes, Maddin remains modest: ‘I had so much spare time, unlike the other filmmakers, who probably had more things going on in their lives, so I was able to devote a month and a half to making this.’

Zeitgeist Films is releasing THOTW later this month on DVD with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and Archangel. The Movie Network has exclusive English-language world broadcasting rights to Preludes, and the shorts can also be viewed on the TIFF website at: www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2001/fflashback/preludes.asp.