On demand: "Archangel"

1990's Archangel would have been many folks' first encounter with Guy Maddin, the singular Canadian auteur who ended the 20th century making films as they used to at the start of the 20th century: black-and-white, silent-ish (but with rudimentary overdubbing, music and sound effects), flickering, and full of tricks and tropes abandoned around the time the Nazis rode into Paris. The assertion of the Maddin filmography remains that these self-same tricks and tropes - the irises and intertitles, the flagrantly melodramatic turns of plot - still hold a certain value and power, even/especially when wedded to the most knowingly absurd of plots. Here, in a movie that mirrors the shapes thrown by those anti-war message movies that proliferated (and yet apparently went unheeded) between 1918 and 1939, we're introduced to a one-legged, recently widowed, amnesiac Canuck airman (the squarejawed Kyle McCulloch, later a writer for South Park), who finds new love and, indeed, a new leg after being redeployed to Russia to fight on behalf of the Tsar - the kind of rum narrative confection that passes for stock in Maddin's Acme-like plot factory.

This filmmaker's later works would benefit from more money, longer running times, name performers, even colour, yet it turns out the essentials were here from more or less the get-go. Archangel is Maddinism in its purest form, an artefact from a time when all its maker had to go on were the films that first inspired him and his own imagination. Even when its narrative line meanders and blurs, the composition and imagery (something like a party political broadcast on behalf of the Church on the subject of love; a wreath adorned with the odd, funny legend "dispatched by wounds innumerable"; several of the dirtiest Bolsheviks in screen history; a whole world fashioned from chiaroscuro) remain fresh and thrilling, not bad going considering much of it was first arrived at under George V. Even the dead air and clunkiness has the good fortune of seeming like a deliberate homage to that routinely baked into silent programmers; while the sniggering postmodern irony that would come to define Nineties cinema, and eventually result in Quentin Tarantino, is here offset against an abundant affection for all that the cinema had left behind. (Not to mention an at least semi-sincere message about the ways war disrupts lives and loves.) Nobody save Maddin became a star off the back of it, but it surely remains one of the coolest films for an actor to have on their CV, simply by going so far down its own peculiar path. No other 1990 film so completely captured the shellshocked, long-wintered essence of 1919; whether anybody else in 1990 was troubled to do so is almost a moot point. Sample dialogue: "It was my father's leg - I think she wants you to have it."

Archangel is currently available to stream via rarefilmm.com.