Cowards Bend the Knee2004

"Cowardice!! The New Sexy!!!" squeals Guy Maddin about his shot-on-Super-8, expanded-to-35mm silent "autobiography" involving beauty salons, cowardice, femmes fatale, a father's severed hands (and the daughter who wants them sewn onto her lover's arms), orgies and the Soviet national ice hockey team. A John Waters plot filmed by a Super-8-cranking Sergei Eisenstein, COWARDS… continues Maddin's fixation on Soviet-era silent film. But its wondrously overheated visual aesthetic seems inspired by more modern devices (like amphetamines): sudden zooms, shaking cameras, a black-and-white lighting scheme seemingly controlled by a nine-year-old off his Ritalin (and a cast that appears to have been mainlining it). Like any good autobiographer, Maddin polishes his past to a fetishized gleam, with memories unfolding as if through hypnosis: fragmented, slowed-to-a-crawl and unusually lurid. Originally commissioned for Toronto's Power Plant art gallery, COWARDS was designed as an installation to be viewed through peepholes, increasing its voyeuristic thrills and recalling film's notorious beginnings in the disreputable realms of fairgrounds and peepshows, where cowards and perverts bent their knees for a peek at passions described and, ultimately, thrills denied. - Jason Sanders