Careful in 4K with Guy Maddin

The Green Fog is a new version, in a wonderfully oblique fashion, of Hitchcock’s Vertigo; it could also have been named San Francisco Plays Itself or, to borrow a title from Peter Greenaway, Vertical Features Remake. Hitchcock’s film is one of the most vertically obsessed films ever, and The Green Fog follows suit, but since this is a work co-directed by Guy Maddin, you can imagine that it’s also obsessive on many other levels that Hitchcock could never have dreamed of. The Green Fog tells a story of sorts, essentially reproducing the shape of Vertigo—with some room for facetiously digressive play—using clips from assorted films and TV series, all shot on location in San Francisco, to stand in for moments of Hitchcock’s film. —Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

Commissioned as a documentary about the director’s prairie hometown, My Winnipeg proceeds from the simple premise that a city is nothing without its ghosts: the mass of memories, legends and fictions that accumulate in any place inhabited by human beings. My Winnipeg is a film about the dream life of a city, a para-documentary about a parallel, phantasmagorical, invisible Winnipeg; it is a séance, a channeling of spirits through the medium of cinema, an exorcism of personal and collective history, as well as a memoir of one soul’s desperate final attempt at an escape from the city and its ghosts. —Tyler Prozeniuk, POV Magazine

Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World exists in a time and place we have never seen before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in 1933. The city, we learn, has been chosen by the London Times, for the fourth year in a row, as “the world capital of sorrow.” Here Lady Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini) has summoned entries for a contest which will award $25,000 “in Depression Era dollars” to the performer of the saddest music. The Canadian filmmaker has devised a style that evokes old films from an alternate timeline; The Saddest Music is not silent and not entirely in black-and-white, but it looks like a long-lost classic from decades ago, grainy and sometimes faded; he shoots on 8mm film and video and blows it up to look like a memory from cinema’s distant past…You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin. —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times