A Conversation with Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin discusses why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form. Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007). In the winter of 2015/16 he and Evan Johnson will launch their major internet interactive work, Seances, which will enable anyone online to “hold séances with” movies fashioned out of fragments of long-lost films.