Cowards Bend the Knee

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Cowards Bend the Knee
Cowards.jpg
Directed by Guy Maddin
Written byGuy Maddin
Adam Gierasch
Produced byPhilip Monk
Starring
CinematographyGuy Maddin
Edited byJohn Gurdebeke
Release dates
  • February, 2003 (Canada)
  • October 26, 2003 (UK)
  • July 11, 2004 (US)
Running time
60 min.
Country Canada
Language Silent

Cowards Bend the Knee (also known as The Blue Hands) is a 2003 film by Guy Maddin. Maddin directed Cowards Bend the Knee while in pre-production on The Saddest Music in the World, shooting entirely on Super-8mm film [1] with a budget of $30,000. [2]

Contents

The feature film was initially developed as a series of ten short films, commissioned as part of an installation art project by Toronto art gallery The Power Plant (curated by Philip Monk). [3] Cowards Bend the Knee is the first in Maddin's "autobiographical 'Me Trilogy'" of feature films starring protagonists named "Guy Maddin," the second being Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) and the third My Winnipeg (2007). [4]

Maddin based the film's premise loosely on the story The Hands of Ida and Euripides's play Medea , although Maddin also claims that the film can be viewed as an autobiography (although the events of his life are not being represented so much as the events of his inner life). [5]

Plot

Cowards Bend the Knee is set in a vague time period that is stated in the published script and on the DVD commentary as the 1930s, although certain of the film's events (e.g., the Winnipeg Maroons winning the Allan Cup) did not occur until the 1960s. [6] Guy Maddin (played by Darcy Fehr), star hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, is told by his father Maddin Sr (Victor Cowie), the team's announcer, to visit his mother in the hospital since she is gravely ill. Maddin instead takes his girlfriend Veronica (Amy Stewart) to get an illegal abortion at the home/beauty salon/bordello of Liliom (Tara Birtwistle). During the operation, Guy more or less forgets about Veronica and ends up leaving with Liliom's alluring daughter Meta (Melissa Dionisio). Veronica dies as a result of the botched abortion and perhaps despair at her abandonment.

Meta reveals that her father, Chas, was murdered by Liliom with help from the police captain Shaky, who also plays hockey with Guy. Chas' hands, stained blue from hair dye, were severed during the murder and Meta keeps them with her in a jar. She rejects Guy's sexual advances, saying that she won't be his until he murders Liliom and Shaky to revenge Chas. The hockey team's doctor, Dr. Fusi (Louis Negin) agrees to sever Guy's hands and suture Chas' hands in their place.

However, while Guy is sedated and Meta is gone, Dr. Fusi just throws the hands away and paints Guy's own hands blue. Believing himself possessed by Chas' murderous hands, Guy sets out to kill Liliom but instead ends up trying to seduce her and eventually "fists" her in the beauty salon. Veronica's ghost has meanwhile risen and takes a job at the beauty salon, as does Guy. Guy becomes infatuated with Veronica's ghost, not recognizing her as the girlfriend he abandoned to die on the operating table (he has forgotten Veronica completely by this point).

Tormented, Guy discovers a wax museum that has been hidden and forgotten in the rafters of the Winnipeg hockey arena. The museum features wax sculptures of famous Winnipeg Maroons, including Chas. Meta continues to coerce Guy to carry out her revenge plans. Guy ends up murdering Shaky during a hockey game and, feeling guilty, attempts to confess his crime to the policeman Mo, but Mo refuses to arrest Guy and tries to get him to stop confessing. Guy then strangles Mo to death in the middle of the police station but none of the other officers notice.

Veronica's ghost has meanwhile begun dating Guy's father, Maddin Sr. after Guy's mother dies, unvisited. Guy is now involved with both Meta and Liliom (who he's promised Meta he will kill) while in love with the ghost of his ex-girlfriend Veronica, whose death he is somewhat responsible for and who is now involved with his own father. The pressure of the situation, in addition to the delusion that he is possessed by the murderous hands of Chas, drives Guy to finally strangle Liliom when she tries to stop Veronica's ghost from having a second abortion of unknown origin (presumably his father's child and thus his sibling, or perhaps his child needing to be aborted a second time). Meta by this time has soured on Guy and demands that Fusi returns her father's hands to her. Dr. Fusi then chloroforms Guy again and amputates his blue-painted hands.

Handless, Guy heads to the hockey arena and suits up for the big game, taping his hockey gloves over his fresh stumps. Guy heads to the urinal pre-game, but finds peeing a difficult tasks with no hands. At the urinal, he encounters his father, Maddin Sr., and sees that his father's penis is exceptionally large (much larger than his own). During the game, Maddin Sr. announces while stroking a block of ice carved into the shape of a woman's breast. Veronica's ghost, aroused by this, walks across the catwalk over the arena's ice towards the radio booth. Guy also climbs to the top of the arena and heads into the wax museum, where tarot cards predict "a mysterious apocalypse." Maddin Sr. and Veronica's ghost enter to announce that Guy's old girlfriend will be his new mother. The anguished Guy invokes the wax heroes of hockey old to aid him, and they in fact do awaken, having revealed themselves not to be wax heroes at all but cowards who have chosen immobility as an escape from life.

Guy and the hockey immortals pursue Maddin Sr. and Veronica's ghost out of the room and onto the catwalk. Meta sees her father Chas among the wax immortals and rushes to meet him. She attempts to reenact the childhood game that Chas and Meta used to play — she swooned and he caught her — but since Chas no longer has hands, he cannot catch her and she falls to her death. Guy then joins the wax immortals in the museum, in cowardly retreat.

Cast

Release

Home video

Cowards Bend the Knee was released to home video on DVD by Zeitgeist Video in 2005. [7] Cowards Bend the Knee is also included on the DVD boxed set The Quintessential Guy Maddin: 5 Films from the Heart of Winnipeg, released by Zeitgeist Video, alongside Archangel , Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary , Twilight of the Ice Nymphs , and Careful . [8]

Book

Guy Maddin wrote a lengthy treatment for the feature film Cowards Bend the Knee, which he published as a book through The Power Plant gallery. [9]

The book contains a foreword by Wayne Baerwaldt (then-Director of The Power Plant) and an introduction by Philip Monk, who also edited the book and curated Maddin's installation. The main text is followed by an interview with Guy Maddin conducted by Robert Enright. The book also contains stills from the film and a list of credits for the film. [9]

Most of the text is Maddin's treatment for the film, which follows the same plot. In the words of Baerwaldt, the story is a fictional "autobiography [that] features a diabolical plot surrounding a coward on a mission [named Guy Maddin] that resembles a cycle of dark spectacles dressed up as, among other things, lewd seduction, Canadian hockey, murder, amputations, hair design, general mayhem, fetish attractions and heartfelt loss." [10]

In the interview with Enright, Maddin notes that the book's genesis began with Maddin's intention to clarify the narrative of his films, since "it is a source of continuing frustration that people would say --- and it was always a compliment --- we really like your films, they're so non-narrative. So I thought, damnit, I'm going to get a story that people are going to recognize, something that has legs. I started reading Greek tragedy, Electra, Medea and stuff like that, and basically I just took some premises from these super-durable stories. The things I end up layering around these rock-solid premises are invariably pure autobiography [. . .] once I slipped away what little remained of Euripides, what was left was some core sample of me." [11]

Maddin's book treatment is written in a highly literary fashion that is not typical of screen treatments, so that the text reads like a literary work rather than a blueprint for the film: "It is the night before the [Winnipeg] Maroons' first game against the Soviets. Meta and Guy lie in bed, in the midst of a particularly spectacular recital of what could be called THE LIMBO-DANCE OF SELF-PITY --- a verbal choreography performed by lovers who manipulate each other through complicated displays of insincere self-loathing. Participants enter the Limbo in hopes of restructuring the unspoken terms of their relationship." [12]

Critical reception

Cowards Bend the Knee received very positive reviews, with review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reporting a 95% approval rating based on 19 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10. [13] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from film critics, posts a rating score of 82 based on 10 reviews. [14]

Critic J. Hoberman of The Village Voice called the film "Maddin's masterpiece," noting that the film "not only plays like a dream but feels like one." [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guy Maddin</span> Canadian director, screenwriter and author

Guy Maddin is a Canadian screenwriter, director, author, cinematographer, and film editor of both features and short films, as well as an installation artist, from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Since completing his first film in 1985, Maddin has become one of Canada's most well-known and celebrated filmmakers.

<i>The Heart of the World</i> 2000 Canadian film

The Heart of the World is a short film written and directed by Guy Maddin, produced for the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. Maddin was one of a number of directors commissioned to make four-minute short films that would screen prior to the various feature films at the 2000 festival as part of the special Preludes program. After hearing rumours that other directors were planning films with a small number of shots, Maddin decided that his film would instead contain over 100 shots per minute, and enough plot for a feature-length film. Maddin then wrote and shot The Heart of the World in the style of Russian constructivism, taking the commission at its literal face value, as a call to produce a propaganda film. Even in its expanded, 6-minute version, The Heart of the World runs at a breakneck speed, averaging roughly two shots per second, a pace intensified by the background music, Time, Forward! by Georgy Sviridov.

<i>The Saddest Music in the World</i> 2003 Canadian film

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Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is a 1997 fantasy romance film directed by Guy Maddin. The screenplay was written by George Toles and inspired by the novel Pan (1894) by Knut Hamsun, with an additional literary touchstones being the short story "La Vénus d'Ille" (1837) by Prosper Mérimée. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs was Maddin's second feature film in colour and his first shot in 35 mm, on a budget of $1.5 million. As seen in Noam Gonick's documentary Waiting for Twilight, Maddin was dissatisfied with the filmmaking process due to creative interference from his producers.

<i>Archangel</i> (1990 film) 1990 Canadian film

Archangel is a 1990 comedy-drama film directed by Guy Maddin. The film fictionalizes, in a general sense, historical conflict related to the Bolshevik Revolution occurring in the Arkhangelsk (Archangel) region of Russia, a basic concept presented to Maddin by John Harvie. The film marks Maddin's first formal collaboration with co-screenwriter George Toles.

<i>Dracula: Pages from a Virgins Diary</i> 2002 Canadian film

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is a 2002 horror film directed by Guy Maddin, budgeted at $1.7 million and produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a dance film documenting a performance by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet adapting Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Maddin elected to shoot the dance film in a fashion uncommon for such films, through close-ups and using jump cuts. Maddin also stayed close to the source material of Stoker's novel, emphasizing the xenophobia in the reactions of the main characters to Dracula.

<i>Tales from the Gimli Hospital</i> 1988 Canadian film

Tales from the Gimli Hospital is a 1988 film directed by Guy Maddin. His feature film debut, it was his second film after the short The Dead Father. Tales from the Gimli Hospital was shot in black and white on 16 mm film and stars Kyle McCulloch as Einar, a lonely fisherman who contracts smallpox and begins to compete with another patient, Gunnar for the attention of the young nurses.

<i>Brand upon the Brain!</i> 2006 Canadian film

Brand upon the Brain! (2006) is an avant-garde silent film directed by Guy Maddin and shot in Seattle with local actors. Maddin directed the film from a script co-written with George Toles, shooting over nine days and editing over three months, on an estimated budget of $40,000.

<i>Careful</i> (1992 film) 1992 Canadian film

Careful is a 1992 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. It is Maddin's third feature film and his first colour film, shot on 16mm on a budget of $1.1 million. At one point, Martin Scorsese had agreed to act in the film, as Count Knotkers, but bowed out to complete Cape Fear. Maddin pursued casting hockey star Bobby Hull, but ended up casting Paul Cox.

Darcy Fehr is a Canadian actor.

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<i>My Winnipeg</i> Canadian film

My Winnipeg is a 2007 Canadian film directed and written by Guy Maddin with dialogue by George Toles. Described by Maddin as a "docu-fantasia", that melds "personal history, civic tragedy, and mystical hypothesizing", the film is a surrealist mockumentary about Winnipeg, Maddin's home town. A New York Times article described the film's unconventional take on the documentary style by noting that it "skates along an icy edge between dreams and lucidity, fact and fiction, cinema and psychotherapy".

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Keyhole is a 2011 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin, starring Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier and Kevin McDonald. A surreal combination of gangster film and haunted house film, which draws on Homer's Odyssey as well, Keyhole tells the story of a Ulysses Pick (Patric), who returns to his home and embarks on an odyssey through the house, one room at a time. Filming began in Winnipeg on July 6, 2010. Maddin shot Keyhole digitally rather than his usual method of shooting on 16mm or Super-8mm.

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Seances is a 2016 interactive project by filmmaker and installation artist Guy Maddin, with co-creators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, and the National Film Board of Canada, combining Maddin's recreations of lost films with an algorithmic film generator that allows for multiple storytelling permutations. Maddin began the project in 2012 in Paris, France, shooting footage for 18 films at the Centre Georges Pompidou and continued shooting footage for an additional 12 films at the Phi Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Paris and Montreal shoots each took three weeks, with Maddin completing one short film of approximately 15–20 minutes each day. The shoots were also presented as art installation projects, during which Maddin, along with the cast and crew, held a “séance” during which Maddin "invite[d] the spirit of a lost photoplay to possess them."

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Evan Johnson is a Canadian filmmaker from Winnipeg, Manitoba, most noted for his frequent collaborations with Guy Maddin. He was codirector of Maddin's The Forbidden Room, which was the winner of the Toronto Film Critics Association's Rogers Best Canadian Film Award at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 2015.

References

  1. ↑ "Cowards Bend the Knee". Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Archived from the original on 2012-06-18. Retrieved 2012-12-21.
  2. ↑ Beard, William. Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. ISBN   978-1442610668
  3. ↑ Maddin, Guy. Cowards Bend the Knee. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. Print. ISBN   1-894212-02-9
  4. ↑ Wershler, Darren. Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. ISBN   978-1-44261134-4
  5. ↑ Maddin, Guy. Cowards Bend the Knee. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. 9. Print. ISBN   1-894212-02-9
  6. ↑ Beard, William. Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. 197. ISBN   978-1442610668
  7. ↑ Cowards Bend the Knee. Dir. Guy Maddin. Zeitgeist, 2005. DVD.
  8. ↑ Maddin, Guy, dir. The Quintessential Guy Maddin: 5 Films from the Heart of Winnipeg. Zeitgeist, 2010. DVD.
  9. 1 2 Maddin, Guy. Cowards Bend the Knee. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. Print. ISBN   978-1-44261134-4
  10. ↑ Maddin, Guy. Cowards Bend the Knee. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. 9. Print. ISBN   978-1-44261134-4
  11. ↑ Maddin, Guy. Cowards Bend the Knee. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. 131. Print. ISBN   978-1-44261134-4
  12. ↑ Maddin, Guy. Cowards Bend the Knee. Toronto: The Power Plant, 2003. 63. Print. ISBN   978-1-44261134-4
  13. ↑ "Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)". Rotten Tomatoes . Fandango Media . Retrieved 2018-03-05.
  14. ↑ "Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands Reviews". Metacritic . CBS Interactive . Retrieved 2012-12-28.
  15. ↑ J. Hoberman. "Hardcore Hallucination: An Experimental Peep Show" . Retrieved 2012-12-22.
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