For 30 years now Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has been escaping into the early cinema, shooting and editing his eerie, eccentric comedies in the style of silent films and primitive talkies from around the world. Archangel (1990), his sophomore feature, draws on the heroic imagery of the Soviet cinema; The Saddest Music in the World (2003), his biggest critical success, recaptures the rickety magic of the earliest screen musicals; and his recent triumph The Forbidden Room (2015) is a fever dream of reheated Saturday-matinee genres—the submarine drama, the jungle adventure. With a master’s ease, Maddin incorporates old-fashioned materials (black-and-white photography, low-grain film stocks, color tinting) and editing conventions (wipes, irises, intertitles) to re-create the cinematic experience of a bygone era and indulge his personal obsessions and fetishes. His films preserve that sense of mystery lost in so much other contemporary cinema.

Fortunately that old film can be taped together too, and Maddin’s interpolation of footage from different movies is captivating. In one highly formal sequence, anchored by a shot from The Streets of San Francisco, Cotten sits on the patio of a fancy home overlooking the hills; when he looks up, Maddin inserts a low-angle shot from another movie, and when Cotten looks down, a high-angle shot follows. Again and again the actor looks up and then down, until Maddin has exhausted his store of images. Shots of reel-to-reel tape recorders and electronic surveillance (courtesy of The Conversation and other suspense films) allow Maddin to connect otherwise unrelated scenes. Characters watch projection screens or TV monitors showing images from other movies, and the transitions can be surreal. After a scene from Basic Instinct (1992) in which Michael Douglas gets out of bed naked and walks into a bathroom, Maddin cuts to a scene from The Streets of San Francisco two decades earlier in which Douglas watches a 16-millimeter projection. “You really look good, Mike,” his character cracks, appearing to comment on the previous scene. “Did you ever think about going into show business?”

Directed by Guy Maddin. 63 min. Fri 4/27, 4:30 PM; Sat 4/28, 3:45 PM; Tue 5/1, 8 PM; and Thu 5/3, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.