'Films of Guy Maddin'

In the 1920s, the Marx Brothers, playing Winnipeg, went one night to see Chaplin there on stage. Imagine, all of them! That vaudeville merriment still dances in the Manitoba air, since Winnipeg has produced some of the funniest screen humor in the world. Too few Americans have been exposed to the hilarious movies of John Paisz, Richard Condie, the Winnipeg Film Group. Or to Guy Maddin, a one-man Monty Python of cinematic absurdity, who'll be in town this weekend for a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Maddin stands tall as one of three world-class contemporary English-Canadian filmmakers, alongside David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan. He's a comic surrealist/symbolist and an old-movie freak, whose ingenious features, complete with Méliès-like, magical, home-built sets to offer shimmering echoes of silent classics. The MFA series starts Friday at 7:15 with Noam Gonick's engrossing documentary of Maddin on the set, Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997), with narration by Tom Waits, a devoted Maddin fan. It's followed at 8:20 p.m. by the filmmaker's latest, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997), which is set on the ostrich-filled island of Madragora. Shelley Duvall is great in what is Maddin's most heartfelt work, but, alas, Ice Nymphs may be too private for general appreciation. An easier entry is the marvelous Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Saturday at 11:45, which combines mock Icelandic sagas with Teutonic flashbacks to Sunrise and Dr. Caligari.

Maddin will appear in person at Archangel (1991), Saturday at 3:30, a screwy World War I story of Arctic amnesia and obsessive love. Make time this weekend for this visionary filmmaker down from the Great White North. At the Museum of Fine Arts.

-- Gerald Peary