The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2004, Qupperneq 50

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #3
Book Reviews
FROM THE
ATELIER TOVAR:
From the Atelier Tovar:
Selected Writings
By Guy Maddin
Coach House Books, 240 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by David Jon Fuller
Welcome to the mind of Guy Maddin.
The eccentric filmmaker, known for
such movies as Tales From the Gimli
Hospital, Careful, and Dracula: Pages
From a Virgin’s Diary, opens a door to his
inner thoughts in From the Atelier Tovar:
Selected Writings. Included are essays,
excerpts from Maddin’s diary, and film
treatments.
Maddin’s films are characterized by
melodrama, a quality he espouses (and dis-
plays) throughout the book. In one essay,
“Bully for Bollywood’s Musical
Melodramas!”, he writes, “Western white
folk . . . don’t even know what melodrama
is, other than it’s an invasion on good taste,
an easily detected enemy.” This is too
harsh an attitude, he feels; “These magnifi-
cations happen in our nightmares and our
movies again and again, not because of
lapses in taste, but because they are
TRUTH.”
Maddin himself has no trouble with
hyperbole, particularly when taking him-
self to task for laziness: “Having turned
forty recently, I may as well arbitrarily
choose now as the time to assess my life: at
least thirty-five years wasted, if not more.”
He periodically creates “Gatsby lists,”
itemizing his own faults and prescribing
action to change his ways.
Despite lingering guilt over his treat-
ment of loved ones—Maddin seems full of
regrets—what emerges from both journals
and essays is sardonic wit. Maddin has a
keen sense of the absurd, and it seems the
best antidote to looming personal debt and
a repeatedly diffused focus.
If the journals reveal much of
Maddin’s personal history, the film treat-
ments, particularly “The Child Without
Qualities,” reveal, perhaps, his personal
mythology. Full of bizarre and surreal
images, dreamlike in their logic and ten-
dency to dissolve, the stories that emerge
fit with Maddin’s private and public writ-
ings.
“The Child Without Qualities,” as yet
unfilmed, is the longest and most cumber-
some of the treatments. Based on what the
book has already revealed, it is a thinly-
veiled autobiography—and this is perhaps