• Rating:
• Genre: Avant-garde / Experimental
• Movie Type: Abstract Film
• Themes: Love Triangles, Sibling Relationships, Unrequited Love
• Director: Guy Maddin
• Release Year: 2000
• Country: CA
• Run Time: 6 minutes

Plot

This six-minute short from Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is an ingenious pastiche of silent-film tropes in the service of what Maddin calls a "subliminal melodrama." Set in a dystopian future as imagined by a 1920s Soviet filmmaker, the movie is of a venerable genre -- a love story (in this case, a love triangle) played out against the backdrop of a catastrophic event. The hyperactive epic opens with an introduction to the characters: two brothers, Nikolai, a mortician, and Osip, an actor in a Passion Play, both of whom are in love with Anna, a state scientist. Anna's conundrum is compounded by her latest scientific discovery: the Earth's heart is failing, and humanity has one day left. Chaos ensues as people prepare for the apocalypse, and as the brothers compete for Anna's love. However, a third man appears, Akmatov, an industrialist. As riots and orgies break out, Anna falls under the spell of the capitalist, oblivious to the world's tumult. At the last minute, she comes to her senses and frees herself from the industrialist's grasp. With the heart of the world on the brink of failure, Anna devises a radical remedy that leads to the Earth's rescue, and a rousing climax. This highly praised short premiered at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival as part of its "Preludes" series of shorts played before feature films. The movie nabbed a few mentions in several year-end best-of lists, and was given a Best Experimental Film award by the National Society of Film Critics. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide

Review

Minute for minute, The Heart of the World serves up some of the most delirious filmmaking of the young century. Enthralling, original, and drop-dead funny, this lightning-quick short -- ostensibly about the end of the world -- is a stirring corrective to banal disaster pictures like Armageddon and Deep Impact. Directed by the obstinately anachronistic Guy Maddin, the movie has some of the same feverishness of Maddin's debut feature Tales From the Gimli Hospital, but this time the vision is more sustained -- Maddin's willful eccentricity and postmodernist posturing packs more of a wallop in this smaller dose. Driven by a propulsive score, a 1965 piece entitled "Time, Forward" by Georgy Sviridov, the movie doesn't so much unfold as hurtle. Spitting out the convolutions of a hilariously retrograde melodrama plot, the short betrays more of a concern with the mechanics of storytelling rather than the story itself -- another Maddin trademark. With both a knowing wink and evident affection, Maddin employs the familiar but forgotten tropes of silent cinema (particularly Soviet silents), seeking to reintroduce their expressive potential just in time for a new century. Indeed, one of the film's central ironies is that it uses such antiquated devices in a story that seems customized, at least tempo-wise, for an ADD-addled MTV generation. Ultimately, The Heart of the World transcends irony to become a rousing meditation on "kino" -- Russian for cinema -- as its exalted climax trumpets. Inspired and breathtaking, this eschatological fantasia seems to suggest that film, at the end of the day, may be what saves us all. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide

Credit

Guy Maddin - Director; Guy Maddin - Screenwriter

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The Five Obstructions; Careful; Archangel; Cowards Bend the Knee; The Falls; A Walk Through H

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