Cowards Bend the Knee

Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) is the Canadian filmmaker's delirious take on his dual preoccupations with ice hockey and beauty parlors. Maddin introduces the Saturday, March 27, screening and signs books at the bookshop at 6 pm.

You can also catch the film (without Maddin's introduction) on Friday evening. Cowards Bend the Knee (64 mins.) was originally presented as a gallery installation at the Rotterdam Film Festival, where viewers watched the film as 10 separate chapters through nickelodeon-like peepholes. It features Maddin at his most lurid and abject. As he modestly notes, the project is "a culmination of all my cowardice into one big ball of cowardly behavior."

Also on the program both evenings is the wizardly Quay Brothers' The Phantom Museum (2002; 11 mins.), a haunting stroll through Sir Henry Wellcome's Medical Archives.