Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands (2003)

Director:

Guy Maddin

Writer:

Guy Maddin (writer)

Release Date:

29 December 2004 (France)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Plot:

It's time for hockey! There's no telling what will happen when the Winnipeg Maroons' own star player...

Plot Keywords:

Hair Stylist | Loss Of Loved One | Topless Female Nudity | Male Frontal Nudity | Wax Museum

Awards:

1 win & 1 nomination

Cast

Darcy Fehr	...	Guy Maddin
Melissa Dionisio	...	Meta
Amy Stewart	...	Veronica
Tara Birtwhistle	...	Liliom
Louis Negin	...	Dr. Fusi
Mike Bell	...	Mo Mott
David Stuart Evans	...	Shaky
Henry Mogatas	...	Chas
Victor Cowie	...	Maddin Sr.
Herdis Maddin	...	Grandma
Marion Martin	...	Mrs. Maddin
Aurum McBride	...	Baby
Bernard Lesk	...	Stickboy
Erin Hershberg	...	Customer / Stylist
Erika Rintoul	...	Customer

Also Known As:

The Blue Hands (Canada: English title) (subtitle)

Runtime:

60 min

Country:

Canada

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Certification:

Singapore:R21

Filming Locations:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Trivia:

Originally presented as a gallery installation at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2003, and then two months later at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, in which viewers watch the movie through ten peepholes lining a wall, each one revealing a different six-minute chapter of the film.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Weird Sex and Snowshoes: A Trek Through the Canadian Cinematic Psyche (2004) (TV)

Dead Life

When you love someone deeply, everything seems deep. When you love them in reality, sometimes the experience is ordinary.

Real films have that element of romance and in a way a filmmaker has arrived in my life if he or she makes a film that doesn't affect me. But of course that's after this person has already burned a door into my heart.

Maddin is on my list of the very best filmmakers, and on a much shorter list of the ones that matter and are still working. He's changed the way I dream. Some of the visual humming I do to myself is his tunes. So I consider it a sort of triumph to have a relationship with him where he says something that matters to him, and he says/shows it with the same skill as before... and it doesn't matter to me.

Its a sort of transcendent Zen thing to be able to know something so deeply to be able to discard it easily.

This is a film put together from his own life. Its a different sort of narrative adventure than we usually get from him. Usually we have an inner substrate, a narrative model made explicit in the movie that is preserved enough for us to see the contrast between it and the way we are seeing it. A virgin's diary, a sad song. Here, the narrative is a life proper. The reason it fails for me is that I already know what I need to about this mind, because he gave us sticky artifacts that are sent out into an ether where souls flit. This time, he cannot do that, the artifacts stick to his embodied life, not mine. For me to accept this, I'd have to have some sort of resonance with him as a human.

And I don't. I cannot. Its part of the arrangement when you begin as we have: he's the sender, I'm the lucid receiver. We both cannot be receivers, the way he has structured his art. I think I will advise you to stay away from this if you are serious about Maddin. It will take me some time to recover the ability to accept things from him as selfless, world-connected art.

He knows this. There's a bunch of business about humans as wax statues.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.