The Dead Father (1986)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin

Cast: D.P. Snidal as The Dead Father, Margaret Anne MacLeod as The Widow; John Harvie as The Son; Angela Heck as The Daughter; Rachel Toles as Little Girl I; Jilian Maddin as Little Girl II; Stephen Snyder as Cesar

Ephemeral Waves

 

A short review for a short film, this is the first work by Guy Maddin and, whilst the presentation would improve over the years and decades, the Canadian auteur began with dealing with neurosis and psychodrama from the start. Told in first person, this is one of the many unfinished books for the protagonist being written of his life, one of which is the compelling title "My Fear of Bushes", which immediately set up Maddin's interest in curious personal behaviours, ticks and obsessions.

What story is told however is The Dead Father, as much a reflection, if accurate to the bio of Maddin in his own My Winnipeg (2007), to the death of his own father, whilst not quite the conventional tale of grief and overcoming the loss of a young one you would normally get either. Most films on grief do not lead to the son eating his father's stomach and contents with a spoon, but despite the late patriarch of the family in this short being dead, he is like a Raúl Ruiz character. When his prone body is not on the family dining table, that late does wake and wander. More uncomfortable for the family than this, which is just accepted as a matter-of-fact occurrences, behaving as he normally did, is that he wanders to a different address, fully alert and awake but preferring someone else's home to his wife and children's.

Early, at the beginning of his career, the aesthetic of Guy Maddin's work is not here. It is crude, knowing that Maddin himself would continue making as many short films and return to the medium over the decades, an era as important to his career (like The Heart of the World (2000)) as it is an area worthy of introspection in itself, his craft being sharpened just by telling his own short stories as it has been with the feature length titles. Saying The Dead Father is crude is not an insult, as this still has the psychodramatic nature of his work that would last into the decades on, only in primordial form. Parents haunting their children, even when still alive, becomes a significant trope of his work which is here, as is the tinges of very twisted sense of humour which can be bleak yet is compelling to see. This does compel, and shooting in black and white, he begins with his desire to work in an unconventional aesthetic. Knowing this as well, Guy Maddin also came from the school of independent budget cinema from the eighties, and the arch of unconventional Canadian cinema from this era. Growing into his later films, The Dead Father is important as a step, one where Guy Maddin would become a truly unique filmmaker, the template found here in pieces.