The subjects here are passion, insecurity, and the fear of going unloved. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) is a perfumed fairy-tale romance that plays a little like a cross between Jean Cocteau and Peter Greenaway. An uncredited Nigel Whitmey plays the lead role of a mild-mannered fellow who meets a mysterious woman (Pascale Bussieres) en route to his home country of Mandragora-a fertile island paradise upon which the sun always shines, and where his sister (Shelley Duvall) runs an ostrich farm. Frank Gorshin (yes, The Riddler), the cranky old coot who hopes to one day purchase the farm from her, enlivens the proceeding with occasional rants. To make a long story short, Bussieres turns out to be in thrall to Dr. Solti, a hypnotist (R.H. Thomson); Whitmey wants her but makes the mistake of settling for a one-night stand in a tide pool with a pregnant ditz (Alice Krige of Star Trek fame) who wanders broodingly through the forest all day and whose husband has gone missing, a decision that will make matters difficult by film's end.

The titular ice nymphs? Sisters who so loathed each other that one of them wound up driving a large nail into the head of the other. (Dr. Solti keeps their skulls on display.)

This is all very loopy, and it was a relief to put on the audio commentary featuring Maddin and screenwriter George Toles to ascertain that the man does in fact have a sense of humor about all this. (My favorite bit is the two of them dissing Jim Carrey, hard, for attempting to fill the Riddler-sized shoes of Frank Gorshin in Batman Forever.) The only reason it works at all is the arresting otherworldliness of the imagery. The fuzzy luminosity of the colors suggests Technicolor without really mimicking it, and the studio-built sets evoke old-school American film tradition. The result is a film of estimable beauty that seems bound to no place or time in particular.

In fact, the whole project feels downright primitive. Toles provides exceedingly mannered dialogue that the actors struggle with, and Whitmey reportedly demanded that his name be removed from the film after Maddin made the decision to dub all of his dialogue with a different actor (Ross McMillan, who plays a bit part in the film). The entire soundtrack, actually, seems to have been post-synced, a move that only amplifies the bargain-basement vibe. There are, however, some inspired touches, like Maddin's decision to fill a giant air gun with smashed bull-rish tips before every shot, blasting out a cloud of spores that make the film's backdrop look like the single most fertile forest in movie history. It does become fairly tedious before he can wrap up, but Maddin's loopy conviction goes a long way.

Archangel (1990) is less flowery and more powerfully phantasmal-a surreal treatment of silent melodrama that spins a vaguely distressing yarn about a frigid Imperial Russian village whose inhabitants are afflicted with amnesia-perhaps as the result of exposure to mustard gas. Kyle McCulloch plays a Canadian lieutenant in the Russian city of Archangel. He falls for a nurse (Kathy Marykuca) who resembles his lost love Iris; she, in turn, is apparently married to a Belgian soldier. Confusion and mistaken identities hold sway, but the film plays as a delicious and exceedingly strange dream, so far removed from the real world that it could only exist as cinema.

Maddin constructed Archangel (1990) as though it were a very early sound film, sporting shaky intertitles and sparse dialogue, and the film certainly looks of a piece with the silent era. The battle scenes, in which men and women fight together in the trenches, powerfully evoke a cinematic experience of the war; this stuff is not so completely different from Abel Gance's J'accuse!, which actually was shot in 1919, that you'd imagine 80 years could have passed between them.

If nothing else, this is a fascinating movie about confusion and displacement. The weirdness eventually gives way to exaggerated pathos and exceedingly dark humor (one intertitle reads, "Strangled by an intestine!"), with occasionally excruciating imagery. The only film I can think of to compare this to is E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire, but Archangel is way more lively and less obstinately sullen. It's not quite a knockout, but it is so drenched in movie love that it's hard not to be swept away.

Even Archangel pales in comparison to the real jewel on this disc, "The Heart of the World," a six-minute short originally commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival. It's an inspired parody of a Soviet propaganda film involving a lover's triangle, the seduction of capitalism, and the movies that play in a light generated at the center of the earth. With a reported 850 separate edits in less than six minutes, "The Heart of the World" plays like it was made by a rabid cinephile with a 105-degree fever, a monstrous jones for German expressionism, and about six pots of coffee in him. ("Please watch carefully," Maddin advises in the liner notes.) You feel the power of each image thrown against the screen with the near-physicality of an Eisenstein movie; the frantic piano score (Georgi Sviridov's "Time, Forward!"), casual morbidity and weird sense of humor (keep an eye out for the penis-gun) only add to the intoxicating lunacy.

Again, the film isn't made so much in the mode of silent films as it is to evoke the experience of watching a battered and bruised silent film 80 years on, with scratches all over the celluloid, images jumping in the gate and random frames missing. Moreover, Maddin's rhythmic use of intertitles and sentence fragments (I was thinking back to the opening credits of Bruce Conner's "A Movie") create a forceful visual poetry in counterpoint to the pounding music. A tightly-packed catalog of cinematic obsession, "The Heart of the World" is an exhilarating testament to the psychological force of movie history.