''The Green Fog'' is an experimental film directed by

Guy Maddin Guy Maddin (born February 28, 1956) is a Canadian screenwriter, director, author, cinematographer, and film editor of both features and short films, as well as an installation artist, from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Since completing his first film in ...

, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, that loosely revisits the plot of

Alfred Hitchcock Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 featur ...

's 1958 film ''

Vertigo Vertigo is a condition where a person has the sensation of movement or of surrounding objects moving when they are not. Often it feels like a spinning or swaying movement. This may be associated with nausea, vomiting, sweating, or difficulties w ...

'' through a collage of found footage repurposed from old movies and television shows set in San Francisco. The film was commissioned by the San Francisco Film Society for the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival’s and premiered at the festival's close on April 16, 2017. It then entered limited release on January 5, 2018 and began to tour international festivals.The film features an original score by composer Jacob Garchik and

Kronos Quartet The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. It has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for almost 50 years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classic ...

Festivals

''The Green Fog'' was selected to screen at the following film festivals: * 2017

San Francisco International Film Festival The San Francisco International Film Festival (abbreviated as SFIFF), organized by the San Francisco Film Society, is held each spring for two weeks, presenting around 200 films from over 50 countries. The festival highlights current trends in in ...

* 2018

Berlin International Film Festival The Berlin International Film Festival (german: Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin), usually called the Berlinale (), is a major international film festival held annually in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 1951 and originally run in June, the festi ...

* 2018

Hong Kong International Film Festival The Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF), is one of Asia’s oldest international film festivals. Founded in 1976, the festival features different movies, filmmakers from different countries in Hong Kong. HKIFF screens around 230 films ...

* 2018 France's Cinéma du Réel festival * 2018 Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema * 2018 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Festival Internacional De Cine * 2018 South Korea's Jeonju International Film Festival * 2018 Ukraine's Molodist International Film Festival * 2018 New Zealand International Film Festival * 2018 Greece's Thessaloniki International Film Festival * 2018 BFI London Film Festival

Awards

''The Green Fog'' was nominated for the C.I.C.A.E. Award at the

in 2018, and has won the following awards: * 2018 Golden Lady Harimaguada (Best Film), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Festival Internacional De Cine * 2018—Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, The Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award

Critical reception

The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with review aggregator

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

reporting a 95% approval score from critics based on 22 reviews.

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a

weighted average The weighted arithmetic mean is similar to an ordinary arithmetic mean (the most common type of average), except that instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others. The ...

score out of 100 to reviews from film critics, posts a rating score of 78 based on 10 reviews. While the film has not received any negative reviews, ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' critic Ben Kenigsberg, noted Maddin's "slight arrogance in presuming that one of the greatest films of all time itchcock's ''Vertigo'' ...could be approximated, even a little, using clips from lesser directors" but also notes that "if trying to recreate a lost object of obsession from the materials at hand was Hitchcock’s subject, then he couldn’t ask for a more fitting tribute" and calls the movie " a marvel of film scholarship." Ty Burr, writing for the ''Boston Globe'', called the film "eerie, witty, and unexpectedly moving" and compared it to

Christian Marclay Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records ...

's installation film '' The Clock''. Critics also noted that, in addition to serving as a tribute to Hitchcock's ''Vertigo'' and a method of deconstructing its own self-critical aspects (which Maddin has discussed in interviews), the film pays homage to the city of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

and its stature in film history, serving as "a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures."

References

External links

The entire film on Guy Maddin's official Vimeo channel
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Green Fog, The English-language Canadian films Films directed by Guy Maddin Films shot in Winnipeg 2017 films 2010s English-language films 2010s Canadian films Canadian avant-garde and experimental films Collage film