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Archangel (1990) More at IMDbPro »


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Overview

User Rating:
7.1/10   412 votes
MOVIEmeter: ?
Up 7% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.
Director:
Writers:
John B. Harvie (story)
Guy Maddin (screenplay)
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Contact:
View company contact information for Archangel on IMDbPro.
Release Date:
25 April 1991 (Germany) more
Genre:
Tagline:
A Tragedy of the Great War
Plot:
A surrealistic film in which a strangely assorted group of people come together in the Russian Arctic at the height of the revolution and World War One. full summary | add synopsis
Plot Keywords:
Awards:
1 win more
User Comments:
Eisenstein's Smooth Stones of Forgetfulness more (6 total)

Cast

  (Cast overview, first billed only)
Michael Gottli ... Jannings
David Falkenburg ... Geza
Michael O'Sullivan ... Doctor
Margaret Anne MacLeod ... Baba

Ari Cohen ... Philbin
Sarah Neville ... Danchuk
Kathy Marykuca ... Veronkha
Kyle McCulloch ... Lt. John Boles
Victor Cowie ... Sea Captain
Ihor Procak ... Monk
Robert Lougheed ... Kaiser Wilhelm II
Stephen Snyder ... Stage Kaiser (as Snyder)
Michael Powell ... Red Cross Nurse
Sam Toles ... Young Philbin
Lloyd Weinberg ... Priest
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Additional Details

Runtime:
90 min
Country:
Language:
Sound Mix:
Certification:
Filming Locations:
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Fun Stuff

Quotes:
[first lines]
Lt. John Boles: Goodbye Iris.
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Movie Connections:
References Arsenal (1928) more

FAQ

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7 out of 13 people found the following comment useful.
Eisenstein's Smooth Stones of Forgetfulness, 14 July 2006
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

I only know a few of Maddin's projects. This seems to be the earliest available.

I'm really beginning a deep appreciation of this man's visual soul. While this project didn't change my life, it demonstrated the power to do so, like a strutting policeman among weak minds.

What I like about his mind is how he seats the thing first in the soul, then in the cinematic vocabulary instead of the usual path which values character, motivations, narrative clarity. What he's done here is revisit Eisenstein. I don't suppose many filmgoers have much truck for a Russian silent filmmaker who was primarily occupied in Soviet propaganda. He developed some important ideas about how a scene (never a movie — only a scene) can be constructed from visual fragments — what it means to "see."

His particular solutions aren't popular today, and the whole idea of slicing the eye has been appropriated to the service of now-conventional values of storytelling and the cult of celebrity — some few jokes and even fewer emotions destinations.

Eisenstein's idea is based on the notion of readable cells of retinal comprehension, more or less of the same size which when combined give an impression. The more discrete the components in presentation the more comprehensible the assembly, what he called the collage.

What Maddin does here is make a metaEisenstein. The story is set in Russia and populated by international warriors, all of whom have only a groggy notion of why they are there. Our hero, like Maddin, is Canadian. It is essentially a silent movie. There is a parallel movie that is a talkie, into which this silent, main piece is embedded.

Within the silent movie is a sort of "movie within," exactly as abstract from the silent portion as the silent portion is to the talkie portion and thence not to our world (as is the usual case with folding) but to the world of normal movies.

That "movie within" is the "illumination" a set of stage tableaux depicting famous battles. If you experience nothing but these — or rather if you skate over all the surrounding context and focus only on these — you will be rewarded. There's so much reference there.

The overall theme of the thing is the hard boundary of memory, where the continuity of knowing begins and ends. In the story, this exhibits as amnesia plus a sort of quantum identity shifts — of women, who else? That's good, its valuable. But the interesting thing is how this is seated in the collage itself. Eisenstein's idea is that each cell, each image, of the collage needs to have some reference to the others. The art is in the nature of that reference.

Maddin makes that reference sit on the cells. In his case they are not bubbles in transparent foam that light can shine through. Instead they are stones, smooth stones with hard impenetrable skins that only know themselves and keep forgetting those they are nestled against. So they forget who they are.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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