Archangel (1991)
Guy Maddin

"(...) Archangel is a reverie on identity (Veronkha tells Boles to call her anything he likes) authenticity, and the ontological essence of the individual, who constructs that identity by shaping narratives that are shown in this film to be wrong-headed. The theme is echoed in its troubled family units, its doubles and reproductions, and the cinematic ghosts that haunt the film. To list the most obvious: the luminous American melodramas of Griffith, de Mille, Borzage and Vidor; the outré gestures of French Impressionists Gance and Epstein; the post-war melancholy of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and La Grande Illusion (1937); the subjective war horrors of Klimov’s Idi i smotri (Come and See) (1985); the avant-garde fragments of Deren, Brakhage and Anger; the post-modern experiments of early Von Trier; the shadowplay of Murnau and technology-fetish of Lang; the homosexual mythologies of Cocteau, Genet and Fassbinder; and the Surrealist-filtered Sadism of Picabia, Buñuel and David Lynch.

The events in Archangel are roughly contemporary with those of the great Russian films mythologising the Revolution, such as October (1927, Sergei Eisenstein) and The End of St. Petersburg (1927, Vsevolod Pudovkin) though because of the polyphony of this film’s bricolage, Maddin is more sparing in his use of the Soviet masters then he would be in the celebrated short The Heart of the World (2000). There are quotes from films like Aelita (1924, Yakov Protazanov), Battleship Potemkin (1925, Eisenstein) and Arsenal (1928, Aleksandr Dovzhenko), and some expert Eisensteinian montages of faces, but it is the Soviets’ symbolic relation to Maddin’s work that is important. Where these propaganda classics extolled the masses and teleological model of society and history, Maddin focuses on anti-social deviants and perverts, caught in the circles of their own primitive obsessions. The Soviet films generally focused on political centres like Moscow, St. Petersburg or Kiev; Maddin, like Pudovkin in Storm over Asia (1928), hangs on the margins. His montage, rather than synthesising opposites for a greater whole in the Eisenstein manner, isolates individuals from society and history, alone in their demented desiring. This is not to characterise the Russians as dull apparatchiks – when given the freedom, as in ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932) and Ivan the Terrible (1945, 1958), Eisenstein was just as capable of the lurid and baroque. Ironically, Maddin’s films, like those of most “independent” film-makers, are often state-subsidised. (...)"

Darragh O’Donoghue in Senses of Cinema