Guy Maddin | Night Mayor / 2009

imagined history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guy Maddin (screenwriter and director) Night Mayor (2009)

 

With his tongue planted firmly in cheek, genius Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin documents in 14 memorable moments how Bosnian immigrant Nihad Ademi found a way to harness the power of the Aurora Borealis so that he and his family members, Allan, Selma, Dado, Alma, Sasha, and Bojanna (Mike Bell, Timna Ben Ari, Darcy Fehr, Audrey Neale, Brent Neale, and Shalini Sharma) might broadcast historical moments from the vast landscape of his beloved newly adopted home, Canada.

     The major irony, one of many, is that the most colorful show of lights in the earth’s atmosphere is represented here in black-and-white.

     The method itself is a true madness, and it takes no time at all before Canadian authorities show up at his door to close his idealistic operation down, the way art generally is always silenced since it has not paid its proper dues to commerce.

      But for a short time, Ademi has become the “night mayor” of the underground TV broadcasts, creating a network of his own that circumvents all the foreground noise to present the truth of what’s happening in his world in the background and underground.

 

     Maddin’s work is about mad originality and creativity, always perceived as a danger to society. And in that respect perhaps the highly metaphoric description of this film by a commentator by the name of “brotherdeacon” that appeared on the Letterboxd site, is appropriate:

 

“Somewhere alongside Paracelsus, Nikola Tesla and Nokomis (Daughter of the Moon), Guy Maddin's inventor Nihad Ademi and his immigrant family create mechanical poetry to harness rhizome sap from the knees of wolverine kitts, as well as images from the Aurora Borealis' ticker-tape parade cake-walking the sky route above Peguis, Manitoba. Mostly it looks as it sounds, which is like titanium grass being mowed before dawn. Similarly to most false truths, Nihad Ademi runs afoul of the more judicial population (ones with uniforms and coronation sashes) of his adopted land-locked Province, leaving him and his family to practice a more clandestine method so as to amaze their new brothers and sisters of the Robertson Davies laboratory subscription base. But, don't you fret. Maddin's Telemelodium becomes buried so deeply into Man Ray's limpid black and white glands that it swells sweetly into pre-world-war II sonatinas dedicated to Nihad's naked-breasted daughters of Bosnian-Boreal lore. It intones, even grates, generally well enough to be compatible with kilowatts and megahertz, those twins to whom preachers pay the rent and eulogies bid ghastly recaps. It's a tidy film. It was plainly made for you and me. It hopes and dreams as it must. . . being assiduously Canadian.”

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).