The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin, budgeted at $3.8-million (a large budget in Canadian terms) and shot over 24 days. The film was Maddin's first collaboration with Isabella Rossellini, who subsequently appeared in a number of Maddin's films, and co-created a film with him about her father Roberto Rossellini.
Maddin and co-writer George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by Booker Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest – to determine which country’s music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. Like most of Guy Maddin's films, The Saddest Music in the World is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920s and early 1930s cinema, with grainy black-and-white photography, slightly out-of-sync sound and expressionist art design. A few scenes are filmed in colour, in a manner that imitates early two-strip Technicolor.
Read more about The Saddest Music In The World: Plot, Cast, Release, Awards and Honors, Critical Reception
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“Man
You beheld the saddest and dreariest of all the flowers of the earth
And as with other flowers you gave it a name
You called it Thought.”
—Jacques Prévert (1900–1977)
“Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)