Archangel (film)
| Archangel | |
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VHS Cover
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| Directed by | Guy Maddin |
| Produced by | Andre Bennett Greg Klymkiw |
| Written by | George Toles Guy Maddin |
| Starring |
Kyle McCulloch Michael Gottli David Falkenburg Michael O'Sullivan Margaret Anne MacLeod Ari Cohen Sarah Neville Kathy Marykuca Victor Cowie Robert Lougheed Stephen Snyder |
| Cinematography | Guy Maddin |
| Edited by | Guy Maddin |
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Release date
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1990 |
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Running time
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83 min. |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
Archangel (1990) is the second feature film directed by Guy Maddin. The film fictionalizes, in a general sense, historical conflict related to the Bolshevik Revolution occurring in the Arkhangelsk (Archangel) region of Russia, a basic concept presented to Maddin by John Harvie. The film marks Maddin's first formal collaboration with co-screenwriter George Toles.
Maddin shot Archangel in black and white, on 16mm film, on a budget of $430,000. Maddin modeled the film on the style of a part-talkie, an early cinema genre. The "basic situation" of the film's story was "suggested by Henry Green's 1946 novel Back."
Archangel is set in 1919 in the northern Russian area of Archangel, during a brief historical moment of Canadian intervention in the Bolshevik Revolution following the end of World War I. One-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles sighs on the rail of a steamship over the ashes of his dead lover Iris. An officer mistakes Iris' urn for a bottle of liquor and throws it overboard into the sea. A narrator then delivers a sermon on the glories of Love and the horrors of Self-Love/Pride and how it forms the roots of War. (Maddin's daughter Jilian makes a cameo here as a young Cossack girl who orders the execution of a young boy.)
Boles arrives in the town of Archangel as an Allied troop and billets with a local family consisting of a brave son, Geza, a cowardly father, Jannings, and mother Danchuk (who is immediately smitten with Boles) and a grandmother simply called "Baba" along with a seemingly nameless baby. Geza has a seizure as Boles arrives but Boles treats him by scrubbing the boy's torso with horsehair brushes. He then prescribes Geza horsehair to eat (to cure worms) and other folk remedies, while scoffing at the folk remedies Baba offers. Veronkha enters and Boles spies her in a mirror and faints, so affected by her resemblance to his lost love Iris. After reviving, Boles remains convinced that Veronkha in fact is Iris, forgetting that Iris has died. As coincidence would have it, Veronkha's husband Philbin also suffers amnesia, and has forgotten that he is married to Veronkha.
Boles dresses up in full regalia and Geza admires his medals, for which Danchuk decides he should be punished. Jannings is too cowardly to flog the boy, so Boles steps in to whip Geza, which makes Geza admire Boles further. The citizenry of Archangel next participates in staging various battle tableaux, posing as victorious over the Huns while a narrator provides commentary on their bravery. Soon after, a real battle takes place, after which Boles and Danchuk travel over a field of corpses that they discover are mostly just resting. However, they do raise one grave marker for a single dead soldier. Boles next follows Veronkha, hoping to learn where she lives, but instead she goes to meet with Philbin's doctor and is hypnotized so that she can recount her wedding night, during which Philbin first forgets their marriage and Veronkha finds him having sex with the front-desk girl. The doctor mentions a rumour that Veronkha has had a child and Boles somehow jumps to the conclusion that the child is his (belonging to him and Iris, who he still believes Veronkha to be) and confuses Danchuk's baby as this child, heading back to his billet to console said baby.
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