| The Green Fog | |
| Director: | Guy Maddin Evan Johnson Galen Johnson |
| Editing: | Evan Johnson Galen Johnson |
| Studio: | Development Ltd. |
| Distributor: | Balcony Booking (USA) |
| Runtime: | 63 min |
| Country: | Canada/USA |
| Language: | English |
The Green Fog is an experimental film directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, that loosely revisits the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo through a collage of found footage repurposed from old movies and television shows set in San Francisco.[1] 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.[1] 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.[2]
The Green Fog was selected to screen at the following film festivals:
The Green Fog was nominated for the C.I.C.A.E. Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2018, and has won the following awards:
The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reporting a 95% approval score from critics based on 22 reviews.[5] Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from film critics, posts a rating score of 78 based on 10 reviews.[6]
While the film has not received any negative reviews, New York Times critic Ben Kenigsberg, noted Maddin's "slight arrogance in presuming that one of the greatest films of all time [Hitchcock'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."[7]
Ty Burr, writing for the Boston Globe, called the film "eerie, witty, and unexpectedly moving" and compared it to Christian Marclay's installation film The Clock.[8] 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),[9] the film pays homage to the city of San Francisco and its stature in film history, serving as "a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures."[10]