ABSTRACT
Guy Maddin's Seances provides a spirited, twenty-first-century affirmation to fuse primitive cinema with paranormal return. The Canadian filmmaker and self-admitted "primitive" has recently shot dozens of re-makes of lost, destroyed, or unrealized films from across cinema's history. Holding seances with actors, Maddin plays the role of medium, channeling the spirits of these films through his own surreal vision. In My Winnipeg describes a seance conducted by prominent Winnipeggers of the 1920s as a "nocturnal confabulation" connecting their present to a "world they expect to inhabit in the future". One of the most inspired of artists making silent cinema anew, Maddin sees media through the haunted eyes of a medium. In many of features prior to Seances, the more moved into the subjective, personal, or autobiographical, the deeper one reached into film history. The more Guy Maddin became a character in films, the more film history cloaked that character in its earliest forms.
