Guy Maddin’s sophomore feature, Archangel, takes place in a fantastical crossroads of history, in a hamlet in Russia so remote that the twin shocks of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution have only just reached town limits in 1919. Its plot—of a love triangle between a traumatized WWI veteran (Kyle McCulloch), the woman (Kathy Marykuca) he believes is his dead wife, and her own amnesiac husband (Ari Cohen)—offers something of a précis of narrative tropes and themes that would pervade Maddin’s cinema. There’s the juxtaposition of archaic film form with more risqué sexual exhibition, the slipperiness of memory, and a notion of projection heavily indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Nonetheless, Archangel feels more like a repository of references to the cinema of a hundred years ago than something fully imbued with Maddin’s signature idiosyncrasy. Verohnka, for one, habitually wears a spiky, chintzy crown redolent of the tiara in Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 silent Aelita, The Queen of Mars, while an extended reverie in a hallucinatory WWI battleground suggests Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front as filtered through an expressionistic prism that turns trenches into jagged, vertiginous lines in soil and crucifix grave markers into angular, looming obelisks that cast ominous shadows over the still-living.
These are imaginative touches, but they often come across like a young painter’s studies of the classics. Still, Archangel represents a step forward for Maddin from Tales from the Gimli Hospital, especially in terms of how he uses small aesthetic flourishes to heighten the film’s oneiric atmosphere. Most notably, Archangel’s replication of early sound dubbing’s primitive qualities (from the tinny lack of depth to the awkward juxtapositions of canned Foley effects) is so precise that this straight-faced tribute becomes the film’s funniest running gag.
Image/Sound
The transfer included on this disc comes from a 4K restoration that walks a tightrope between offering a major upgrade of Zeitgeist’s 2002 DVD release in terms of image clarity and contrast while respecting the film’s deliberate replication of the print damage and debris that afflicts so many films of the silent and early sound eras. The black levels here are far richer than on the DVD, as is texture; close-ups reveal new depths of details on the actors’ faces, including their stylized makeup. Like the images, the soundtrack comes with built-in flaws to mimic the limitations of early sound technology, but the lossless mono track more clearly separates canned noise, diegetic and narrated dialogue, and music than the track included on the earlier DVD.
Extras
Zeitgeist’s release comes with an audio commentary by Guy Maddin, who offers an informative (and often self-deprecating) rundown of the production and its cinephilic reference points.
Overall
Now on Blu-ray boasting a lovely new transfer, Guy Maddin’s sophomore feature reveals a young director mastering his influences before coming into his own.
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