The Green Fog

A dazzling, studious exercise in found footage excavation and reconfiguration, laced with tongue in cheek.

It is, in effect, a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures, a record of the social and architectural changes the city has endured over more than a century.

The Green Fog is part city symphony, part playful tribute; but primarily an example of pure, unadulterated cinematic delirium.

Even working with some of the most mainstream ingredients one could possibly find (including, in a funny moment, an NSYNC video) and one of the most familiar settings on earth, Guy Maddin knows how to make things strange.

They get at the essence of Vertigo, haunting us via ghostly transmissions.

The Green Fog is a cinephile’s mash note — and a glimpse of the beautiful film library of Babel that lives in Guy Maddin’s head.

As a chronicle of how San Francisco has changed over the years — and as a salute to the city’s role as a back lot for masters like Erich von Stroheim and Howard Hawks — The Green Fog is a wonder of excavation and urban history. What it says about Hitchcock is more ambiguous.