E-Mail This Article to a Friend What a Guy! Fare from the Maddin crowd BY GERALD PEARY

I was once asked by two solemn early-movie devotees, "What’s the greatest year in the history of cinema?" As if there was a proper answer. "1933?" I ventured. Wrong! "It’s 1932," I was informed. Well, what about the years 1929 to 1931, when movies were striving — earnestly, clumsily, desperately — to speak?

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has forged an odd, magnificent career reimagining, in loving comic fashion, the semi-halcyon cinema of 1929-1931, when Hollywood, mannered and stilted, stumbled to find itself. There’s something Borgesian about Maddin’s archaic celluloid world, an œuvre of unburied "lost" movies that never existed except in a musty film library of the mind. Maddin, who lives in Winnipeg, is a film critic’s filmmaker, and many in my profession have written eloquently about his inspired comic vision. Although their essays have bolstered his career, he remains a cult item with a coterie of exuberant fans, those who have chortled a dozen times through his daffy features.

Why can’t such a fabulous filmmaker be more popular? Perhaps it’s frustration over Maddin’s absurd obscurity that led critics to oversell his recent The Saddest Music in the World, writing about it as a madcap crossover film for just about everybody. Bring Aunt Ida and Uncle Fred! Not true. Although it’s Maddin’s largest-budget film by far, and it features Isabella Rossellini, The Saddest Music is pretty opaque, a difficult entry point to "It’s a Maddin Maddin Maddin Maddin world."

I’ve had conversations with sophisticates who were prompted to go to The Saddest Music by the gung-ho reviews but just couldn’t get into it. What to do? Race to your video store and rent Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), his uproarious first feature about a mysterious epidemic that befalls a 19th-century Canadian-Icelandic settlement. Then go for Careful (1992), his feature masterwork, which is described as "a pro-incest mountain träumerei shot in the two-strip Technicolor used in that holy year of 1929." For a recent work, check out Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), a wild-and-bloody filming of Mark Godden’s ballet. Finally, see whether you can’t locate Maddin’s 2001 short "Heart of the World,’ Eisensteinian montage made ha-ha funny, and probably the greatest movie on the globe of the subject of the new millennium.

And for advanced Maddinites? I recommend a recent book of his musings, From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings (Coach House Books, $19.95 paper). What you get: an amusing intro by Toronto critic Mark Peranson. Pages ripped from Maddin’s ongoing diary, which veers from what-I-ate-today minutiae to maudlin erotic longings to thick, almost Faulknerian family memories. Jaunty, astute, journalistic assignments for Film Comment and the Village Voice. Lists: movies to watch, books to read, diets to follow, exercises to do, ways to stop being a self-pitying sloth. Treatments of films made and not made.

Maddin is a delicious writer, and this is the best-scrivened book by a film director since John Waters’s tomes of the 1980s. His movie reviews, usually of long-ago "B" pictures, are amazing, humorous stuff, Manny Farber jazz-solo riffs and beyond. He calls Road to Glory (1936) "a gorgeously mudded-and-mustard-gassed and outright oneiric war drama melodrama that crams every human fear and desire into the baggiest jodhpurs ever worn by a Hollywood leading man." And Howard Hughes’s Hell’s Angels (1930)? "The young millionaire and eventual collector of his own urine was a perfectionist obsessed with aviation when he shot the spectacular dogfights that zigzag across this photoplay. . . . Long may his toenails grow!"

The family memoirs are mordant longings by the guilt-ridden Maddin for his long-deceased aunt, father, and brother; some of the sorrow is eased by his soul-mate relationship with Jilian, his beloved daughter. Did Maddin really do what he claims here, as a sluttish fan of both Hollywood melodrama queen Joan Crawford and Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer? Teach an advanced university course called "Dreyer and Joan"?