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COURTESY OF PLATFORM/WNDX Enlarge Image

Originally commissioned for the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, Guy Maddin’s multi-screen installation Hauntings I opens Friday at Winnipeg’s PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts, co-presented by WNDX: Winnipeg’s Festival of Film and Video Art.

The exhibition runs to Oct. 2, with an artist’s talk from Maddin on the afternoon of Oct. 1 as part of WNDX 2011. A closing night party will take place that evening at PLATFORM, located on the main floor of the Artspace Building at 100 Arthur St.

"Hauntings I will be different than it’s been in the past," says Jaimz Asmundson, Winnipeg filmmaker and co-coordinator of WNDX.  "It’s going to be a bit more theatrical, like a ‘haunted house’ of lost film."

For years Maddin had collected stories of unexecuted, uncompleted or neglected films that might very well have been cinematic masterpieces. He then collaborated with poet John Ashbery to devise actual scripts; these were shot in Winnipeg in 2010, in collaboration with fellow Winnipeg auteurs Caelum Vatnsdal, Mike Maryniuk, Darcy Fehr and Clint Enns, among others.

Hauntings I involved 11 shorts projected within the front part of the TIFF Lightbox theatre’s main gallery. Among the lost films "adapted" are Fritz Lang’s Lilith and Ly, Josef von Sternberg’s  Woman of the Sea and F.W. Murnau’s Satanas — Part 3: Revolution.

The multi channel installation at PLATFORM features the films projected on bedsheets, cheesecloth and other surfaces around the gallery in sometimes obscured fashion, facilitating a greater sense of discovery.

"We’re playing with the presentation," says  Asmundson, who co-ordinated the new set-up with Maddin himself. "It remains entirely Guy’s creation, though.

"And while he won’t be there in person, he’ll be there in some capacity at Friday night’s opening," he chuckles.

Hauntings I was also presented at the Berlinale, and most recently as a part of the show My Winnipeg, named for Maddin’s 2007 film and organized by Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, presented at contemporary art foundation La maison rouge in Paris.