Cycle index

The Dead Father

dir. Guy Maddin / Canada 1986 / 26’

subtitles: Polish and English

retrospective: Guy Maddin A Trip to the Orphanage, Archangel, Berlin, Brand Upon the Brain!, Careful, Collage Party, Cowards Bend the Knee, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Footsteps, Glorious, Hospital Fragments, It's a Wonderful Life, It’s My Mother’s Birthday Today, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, My Winnipeg, Nude Caboose, Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Baloon Mounts Towards Infinity, Odin's Shield Maiden, Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair, Sissy-Boy-Slap-Party, Sombra dolorosa, Spanky: To the Pier and Back, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, The Dead Father, The Heart of the World, The Saddest Music in the World, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Workbooks Section index

Cast

Dr. D.P. Snidal, Margaret Anne MacLeod, John Harvie, Angela Heck, Rechel Toles, Jilian Maddin, Stephen Snyder

Film description

This first film by Maddin was planned to be made within a few days, but the work took three years. The director was inspired by dreams he had after his father's death. The theme is similar to Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz. Maddin has never actually exhausted the issues he touched upon in his first piece and they are present in almost all films he has made. A son feels the powerful presence of his dead father because he constantly feels guilty. The most famous fragment in The Dead Father is the paralysing scene in the garden where the son eats the white, barren and sickening body of his father with a spoon. (ar)