A Wild Walk with Guy Maddin — by Trina-Marie Baird
Toronto International Film Festival
Wandering Screens
The Review: Issue, 2015
“Often, during post-schlepp dreams, I find myself walking naked in public. This puts me in mind of the great Eadweard Muybridge, who shot many a nude in ambulatory transition against a fantastic and stark gridwork hung behind his subjects to help the photographer make scientific sense of our anatomies. Long have I wished to stroll the Manitoba countryside as Muybridge’s men and women do!But this puts me in mind of another artist, Mariam Eqbal, who uses, or abuses, her scanner to stretch and mutate Muybridge’s walkers! And this in turn puts me back on course as a walker, because Mariam Eqbal reminds me of scanner master Bruce Checefsky, who makes floral still lives by dragging his scanner out into his garden, or onto the country byways where the wild flowers can be found, and where I might most plausibly take myself of an afternoon. I’ve never met Bruce on one of my tramps, but I swear I’ve seen his flowers blowing in my midst. And I don’t want to mention this in my meandering reverie about walking, but I feel a brief mention of the pub crawl, a different kind of trek away from one’s worries, noble in its way I suppose, is worthy of mention if only by way of contrast.”
