In the years since, such idiosyncratic excavations have helped Maddin carve out a singular niche in the world of film: Over the course of 13 features and several dozen shorts, he has established himself as cinema’s premier nostalgist and one of the purest embodiments of the cult auteur. His aesthetic may be decidedly avant-garde — most of his films were shot in grainy black-and-white, on rudimentary sets, drawing on a bygone cinematic vocabulary of iris shots and Vaselined lenses, intertitles and dissolves. But there’s also an inviting sense of wackiness to his entire project, especially in the way he draws on the overheated, melodramatic narratives of the more lurid silent and early sound eras. Maddin’s work is often described as “experimental,” but that’s not quite right; some of the shorts, maybe, but the features are too entertaining for such a humorless and process-oriented descriptor. The best known of them, “The Saddest Music in the World,” from 2003, looks like the sole surviving (and not very successfully restored) print of a Depression-era film, but the plot is hilarious: It revolves around an Olympics-style tourney of mournful songs staged as a promotional stunt by a 1930s beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini), whose hollow prosthetic legs carry samples of her product. (“You can almost hear the typhoon bearing down on a defenseless seaside village through this tortured flute solo,” an announcer remarks during the performance of a Siamese musician.) “What was exciting about his films is they didn’t necessarily feel like they were paying tribute to anything that had existed,” the director Ari Aster, a longtime fan, told me. “They felt like unearthed movies that couldn’t have existed.”