The Green Fog

THE GREEN FOG   ***1/2

Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson

2017

IDEA:  A pastiche reimagining of Vertigo, comprised entirely of clips from other San Francisco-set movies.

BLURB:  One of Maddin’s fleetest and most purely joyful creations, The Green Fog finds the director turning to the found footage format to plunder the collective cinematic imagination. Instead of his usual phantasmagorias, Maddin (alongside wavelength-sharing collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) constitute this febrile realm out of pop-cultural representations of San Francisco, one of the most eternal US cities in visual art. Through a feverish assemblage of interlaced Hollywood classicism and kitsch, the filmmakers condense and loosely recreate the narrative arc of Vertigo, from rooftop police chase to final thudding plummet. But the specifics of Hitchcock’s opus – which would color the proceedings even had it been ignored completely, such is its permeating trace – are not as important here as the themes and motifs that underpin it: obsession, repression, fetishism, voyeurism, grammatical recursions, understood by both Hitchcock and Maddin as equally primal to the psyche as to the cinema. As such, The Green Fog is a film made of films that ineluctably speak about film, in an ad infinitum discourse. Its extensive, humorous use of nested clips reinforces this structure, suggesting an endless feedback loop, a hall of mirrors without a beginning or end. Where is the reality and where is the dream? Is there even a way to tell them apart? And is it possible anymore to watch a pensive, implacable Chuck Norris with anything but smirking reverence?