Flights of fancy at the Aero

After quietly reopening Santa Monica’s much-loved Aero Theater on Montana Avenue two weeks ago, the American Cinematheque now presents its first series -- “Like a Waking Dream: An In-Person Tribute to Director Guy Maddin” -- at its newest venue. It’s safe to say that as one of the last neighborhood theaters in the Los Angeles area, the Aero in its 60-plus years has never screened anything like a Maddin movie. But then there isn’t anything like a Maddin movie, period.

Maddin is an experimental Canadian filmmaker, a master of pastiche who draws frequently upon the techniques and vocabulary of the silent cinema and Hollywood melodrama from the ‘30s through the ‘50s, who nonetheless transcends mere camp or spoofery. All his work can be described as outrageous, but his artistry reflects a highly developed sense of the endless possibilities for the absurd besetting the human condition -- and a vast appreciation for myriad cinema artists who came before him.

The Maddin series, which will be accompanied by movies that influenced him, commences at 7:30 p.m. Friday with a double feature -- “Cowards Bend the Knee” (2003) and Maddin’s first feature, “Tales From the Gimli Hospital” (1988) -- which will be followed at 10:15 by a Maddin favorite, “Naked Jungle” (1954), starring Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker.

In the amusingly frenetic “Cowards,” set in the early ‘30s, Maddin has given his hero, played by Darcy Fehr, his own name. He’s a hockey player, a clean-cut innocent undone by the pregnancy of his girlfriend (Amy Stewart) and the charms of a blond-wigged beauty salon cum bordello operator (Tara Birtwhistle) and her exotic Anna May Wong vamp of a daughter (Melissa Dioinisio).

In a sense, virtually all Maddin films seem like nightmares in which events and emotions go crazily out of control. In “Tales From the Gimli Hospital,” which recalls the style of early experimental talkies, he has fun with the folk history of an Icelandic fishing village struck by a mysterious epidemic. Sultry nurses try to heal Einar the Lonely (Kyle McCulloch) and Gunnar (Michael Gottli) by rubbing their sores with dead seagulls, among other remedies, as they lie, with increasing mutual hostility, in an unspeakably filthy makeshift hospital. A discussion with Maddin follows the screening.

Samuel Fuller’s fevered jaw-dropper “Forty Guns” (1957), with Barbara Stanwyck as a dominatrix of the Old West, screens at 5 p.m. Saturday as a curtain raiser for the 7:30 p.m. Maddin double feature, “Archangel” (1990) and “Careful” (1992).

“Archangel” is a kind of crazed cross between the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Kenneth Anger. Set against the Russian revolution and World War I in a remote snow-covered village called Archangel, it is a tempestuous tale of confusion caused by mustard gas and, apparently, shellshock. A Canadian lieutenant (Kyle McCulloch) mistakes a Russian nurse (Kathy Marykuca) for his dead love; she in turn confuses him with her Belgian aviator husband (Ari Cohen), who keeps forgetting he’s married to her. So much for the plot -- what’s important is Maddin’s witty, knowing evocation of vintage movie kitsch.

A fanciful, absurdist celebration of early cinema, “Careful,” a tad too precious to sustain a 100-minute running time, is set in the 19th century in the Alpine village of Tolzbad, where silence is truly golden: The slightest sound can trigger a lethal avalanche. The repressed villagers seem in fact to be suffering from terminal quaintness, but all this changes when the young Johann (Brent Neale), who has just become engaged to the demure Klara (Sarah Neville), has a dream in which he imagines himself seducing his own mother (Gosia Dobrowolska). And that’s just the beginning of an avalanche of emotions and kinky shenanigans. There will be a discussion between the films with Maddin.

Sunday’s double feature begins at 5:30 p.m. with one of Maddin’s finest, “Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary” (2002), which features members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. It’s paired with George Cukor’s “A Woman’s Face” (1941), in which a scarred Joan Crawford is transformed when she undergoes plastic surgery. They will be followed by a selection of Maddin shorts.

Reviving silent cinema may be Maddin’s strongest suit, as his inspired filming of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s provocative variation on the Bram Stoker tale suggests. Starting with a tale of a blond beauty (Tara Birtwhistle) contemplating three suitors only to be besieged by Count Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang), the film then segues deftly to the familiar Stoker plot told from the point of view of Mina (CindyMarie Small), the virginal fiancee of estate agent Jonathan Harker (Johnny Wright), who has been summoned to Castle Dracula. The erotic aspect of the Dracula legend has never been emphasized more potently.

“Twilight of the Ice Nymphs” (1997), a cockeyed “Midsummer Night’s Dream” set on an Atlantis-like island and screening at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, represents Maddin at his most problematic. His stretches of deliberately arch or flat dialogue become tedious. In the film, a young political prisoner (Nigel Whitmey) returning on a ship to his native island of Mandragora encounters a goddess-like beauty (Pascale Brussieres) who unleashes in him a deathless passion. Once home, however, he is quickly drawn to a winsome widow (Alice Krige). His dippy spinster sister (Shelley Duvall) has the same intense feelings for a dashing mesmerist (R.H. Thomson), while her goofy handyman (Frank Gorshin) lusts for her and her ostrich farm. Also screening: “Waiting for Twilight” (1998), a documentary on Maddin.

The Maddin series concludes next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. with “They Won’t Believe Me” (1947), which finds Robert Young caught up with Susan Hayward and Jane Greer. Following it is Maddin’s most recent -- and costly -- movie, “The Saddest Music in the World” (2003), in which a Depression-era Canadian beer baroness (blond, bewigged Isabella Rossellini), who lost both legs in a darkly comic mishap, offers a $25,000 prize in a contest to discover the most sorrowful music ever. Rossellini is, however, caught up in a crazed family of two brothers, a slick would-be Broadway producer (Mark McKinney) who has latched on to an amnesiac beauty (Maria de Medeiros) and who has an epically morose brother (Ross McMillan) and a father (David Fox) mad for Rossellini.

It’s strained at times but considerably more buoyant and entertaining than “Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.” But, like that film, “The Saddest Music” suggests that Guy Maddin flourishes on tight budgets that challenge his formidable resourcefulness as well as his imagination.