Archangel

During the First World War, a Canadian soldier, devastated by the recent death of his fiancee, arrives at the frozen Russian city of Archangel. While billeted with a local family, he is astonished to discover a woman that may or may not be the lover he thought lost. Unfortunately, she is suffering from amnesia and remembers nothing of their former passion. A rival suitor, claiming to be her husband and who may also be suffering from amnesia, is equally unsuccessful at winning her affection. The melancholy story plays itself out against the madness of the Great War.

Filming entirely indoors with homemade props and costumes, director Guy Maddin has created a very strange and intense movie. Cribbing heavily from the look and atmosphere of German expressionist cinema, Maddin goes much further in exploring some very human issues: loss, love, memory and redemption. He also examines patriotism and by stylistically depicting the horrors of trench warfare he delivers a pacifist message that reminds me of movies like Grande Illusion and All Quiet on the Western Front. The ultimate power of this movie, however, lies in the sense of alienation we see among the characters. They are not only unable to love each other, they are barely able to communicate. In fact, under the cloud of forgetfulness that is a major theme in this movie, the characters are often not even capable of recognizing one another at all!

This wierd, dreamlike film goes a long way on a limited budget, creating a completely unreal experience about a real historical event in Archangel, Russia during the Russian revolution.

Like all of Maddin's other films, Boles is and anti-hero, his subversive obsession with Veronika could not be interpreted as love or heroic, a brillliant deconstruction of your average war movie.

The ending is a bit disappointing (out of the brooding character with the rest of the film) but in all a great film.

I only know a few of Maddin's projects. This seems to be the earliest available.

I'm really beginning a deep appreciation of this man's visual soul. While this project didn't change my life, it demonstrated the power to do so, like a strutting policeman among weak minds.

What I like about his mind is how he seats the thing first in the soul, then in the cinematic vocabulary instead of the usual path which values character, motivations, narrative clarity. What he's done here is revisit Eisenstein. I don't suppose many filmgoers have much truck for a Russian silent filmmaker who was primarily occupied in Soviet propaganda. He developed some important ideas about how a scene (never a movie — only a scene) can be constructed from visual fragments — what it means to "see."

His particular solutions aren't popular today, and the whole idea of slicing the eye has been appropriated to the service of now-conventional values of storytelling and the cult of celebrity — some few jokes and even fewer emotions destinations.

Eisenstein's idea is based on the notion of readable cells of retinal comprehension, more or less of the same size which when combined give an impression. The more discrete the components in presentation the more comprehensible the assembly, what he called the collage.

What Maddin does here is make a metaEisenstein. The story is set in Russia and populated by international warriors, all of whom have only a groggy notion of why they are there. Our hero, like Maddin, is Canadian. It is essentially a silent movie. There is a parallel movie that is a talkie, into which this silent, main piece is embedded.

Within the silent movie is a sort of "movie within," exactly as abstract from the silent portion as the silent portion is to the talkie portion and thence not to our world (as is the usual case with folding) but to the world of normal movies.

That "movie within" is the "illumination" a set of stage tableaux depicting famous battles. If you experience nothing but these — or rather if you skate over all the surrounding context and focus only on these — you will be rewarded. There's so much reference there.

The overall theme of the thing is the hard boundary of memory, where the continuity of knowing begins and ends. In the story, this exhibits as amnesia plus a sort of quantum identity shifts — of women, who else? That's good, its valuable. But the interesting thing is how this is seated in the collage itself. Eisenstein's idea is that each cell, each image, of the collage needs to have some reference to the others. The art is in the nature of that reference.

Maddin makes that reference sit on the cells. In his case they are not bubbles in transparent foam that light can shine through. Instead they are stones, smooth stones with hard impenetrable skins that only know themselves and keep forgetting those they are nestled against. So they forget who they are.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Part black comedy, part romantic drama, and part horrific war film-"Archangel" manages to blend these genres with its consistent surrealist style, the style that practically all of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin's films are made of. Before I continue this review I'd like to point out that I absolutely ADORE the films of Guy Maddin. I think of him as the Canadian David Lynch (and Lynch is my all time favorite filmmaker, so that's high praise), but comparing him to other icons doesn't truly do his work justice. He certainly has his own, distinct style, his films always mimic the visuals of a silent film, particularly those of Eisenstein. He also experiments a lot with use of overdubbing dialogue, a dreamlike atmosphere, and bizarre, dark humor. His style is not for everybody, but for those that can appreciate this oddball genius his films come across like underrated treasures, and "Archangel" may just be my very favorite.

This film is both gruesome and powerful, it makes a statement about dealing with love and loss, while also entertaining us with its wacky plot and laugh out loud humor. I had a ball watching this bizarre, tragicomic tale, mainly due to its fast paced nature and heavy surrealism. Those who seek an other wordly experience will likely adore this film, for I think it best captures Maddin's famously odd style. The acting is at times somewhat wooden, but its obvious that this is the movie's intent. Much of the jokes are performed in a completely deadpan and slightly awkward manner, which makes them even funnier.

The dialogue is great, the visuals are beautiful, the story is brilliantly weird, and I cannot find a single problem with this little masterpiece. Those who enjoy the avant garde must see this film as soon as possible!

It's not worth really pointing to one particular performance or even the music (which is eerie and sublime all at once) even though everything needed to come together to make this as absorbing as it is. What Archangel has above all else in Guy Maddin's vision and concepts, somewhat like David Lynch's Eraserhead before it and not many other films since, is the singularity and commitment to placing you directly into a world that you know is not realistic, but that is the point after all. You are in the hands of someone who is showing you artifice and you know these people are often in rooms or in a warehouse somewhere in Canada, and (not but, and) it's is an epic of despair.

This is a capital D Deam of silent and experimental/avant-garde cinema, and excavation practically of a dream in a sense, and a dream-cum-nightmare of war, and it looks at the world of Patriarchy (from male romantic dominance to how someone disciplines a child. There is also such glorious absurdity and as soon as those folks packed into that small house on the outskirts of Russia tend to that child who just had a stroke for some reason (!) With careful and gentle horse brushes all over his body (!!), you know this is something you have to take on its crazy terms.

But then again war is crazy, and the people who create Boogeymen out of the likes of the Bolsheviks - big monster men with big ears and big claws, after all, and can only be taken out after a coward uses his expunged intestines to strangle the brutes - should be mocked. Like in a Dream, or a nightmare, or a mix of light and dark together (like an Avant-Garde cup of coffee), it is not something that you piece together logically but by how it is based in spme unidentified place in time with a protagonist who is losing his grip on his own constructed reality (if it was there at all).

Archangel is unique also as both romantic and ironic storytelling at the same time, and it is an incredibly tricky prospect for Maddin to balance both tones but he kind of gets there, and I don't mean just that with Boles and the woman named Veronika who he says/demands/confusingly misremembers is Iris; the shots where characters get on horses or carriages, which you know was done in a room with like fake snow being blasted at someone's face and a rocking from side to side on a low grade rig, it speaks to something we love about how tactile the movies can be and how they conjure such visions that can *only* be done on film. This also goes to moments and shots where it is those two actors sharing the frame or looking at one another (sometimes with memories intact and sometimes... not).

Is some of the dubbing sketchy? Actually, not as much as you'd think (or now that I told you the movie is dubbed with dialog it already has an uphill battle, right), and because of the milky and smoky black and white atmosphere and the equally play-dress up and believablity Maddin has some breathing room to have his actors mouth to their movements and the artifice plays into it all. And are there moments or times when the pacing gets a little odd? Sure, it's an Expressionistic Canadian (post?! Kind of WW1 memory piece about memory loss and gruesome male dominated violence!

But it is so much fun and you can feel the heart and sweat put into it while none of it feels like it had so much effort as could have happened on a low/microbudget. There's madness and kindness and, again, rabbits and weird gooey blood, and it all works.