Cycle index

Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Baloon Mounts Towards Infinity

dir. Guy Maddin / Canada, UK 1995 / 5’

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

Jim Keller, Brandy Bayes, Caelum Vatnsdal, Evan Richards, John Teunissen, Ron Eyolfson

Film description

A surreal series of dark images full of incestuous sexual tension. The film, commissioned by BBC, was inspired by a graphic drawing by one of the most important French symbolists, Odilon Redon (1840-1916). The picture was one of a series of illustrations for the French translation of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Maddin was not interested in copying either Redon's drawings or Poe's stories. He made a film referring to the tarry texture of charcoal graphics, greasy like an engine. Another source of inspiration for this film was Abel Gance's The Wheel. (ar)