warm memories in a cold climate : My Winnipeg (2007)

My Winnipeg. IFC Films; the Documentary Channel presents; produced by Jody Shapiro, Phyllis Laing; conceived and directed by Guy Maddin; written and narrated by Guy Maddin; produced with the participation of The Canadian Television Fund and Manitoba Film and Sound; produced by Everyday Pictures/ Buffalo Gal Pictures; a Documentary Channel original production; Paddlewheel Productions Inc. and February Pictures Inc. Director-approved DVD special edition. New York, N.Y. : The Criterion Collection, c[2015]. 1 videodisc (80 min.). Originally released as a motion picture in 2007. Director of photography, Jody Shapiro; editor, John Gurdebeke; production designer, Rejean Labrie; costume designer Meg McMillan; art director, Katharina Stieffenhofe; animation, Andy Smetanka; executive producer, Michael Burns; dialogue by George Toles. Performers: Ann Savage, Louis Negin, Amy Stewart, Darcy Fehr, Brendan Cade, Wesley Cade, Lou Profeta, Fred Dunsmore.
Summary: “The geographical dead center of North America and the beloved birthplace of Guy Maddin, Winnipeg is the frosty and mysterious star of Maddin's docu-fantasia. A work of memory and imagination, Maddin's film burrows into what the filmmaker calls ‘the heart of the heart’ of the continent, conjuring a city as delightful as it is fearsome, populated by sleepwalkers and hockey aficionados. What is real and what is fantasy is left up to the viewer to sort out in Maddin's hypnotic, expertly conceived paean to that wonderful and terrifying place known as My Hometown." - Container.


   I finally got around to watching My Winnipeg – my local library has the DVD – and it was a total delight, so much so that I pay it the greatest compliment I can to a movie: I simply didn’t want it to end. My Winnipeg conjured up many cinematic associations: Citizen Kane, 1920s German expressionist films, the early Thirties surrealist fantasies of Luis Buñuel, also overtones of television programs like One Step Beyond and The Twilight Zone. But for me the film closest to My Winnipeg is the similarly pastiche-esque semi-documentary L A. Plays Itself.

   A confession: this is the first Guy Maddin film I’ve seen, though I’d heard about The Saddest Music in the World and actually seen snippets. At first I thought MW would be a documentary, which it is, sort of, and further, upon finding out Ann Savage was in it assumed she would play herself, which she (almost) does, in a bizarre sort of way. But not the way I’d expected, which would have been a q&a interview type thing. And I also presumed Miss Savage was a resident of Winnipeg, which it turns out she wasn’t.

   In any case Maddin’s phantasmagoric take on his hometown is a combination of affection, nostalgia, sadness and sometimes (barely concealed) bitter irony. He recreates – albeit mostly fancifully – the wintry, drowsy city’s by turns colorful, bland and absurdist history using surreal montages, faux newsreels and other visual tricks of the trade.

   The flickering, rather frantic pacing notwithstanding, My Winnipeg is just plain beautiful to look at, even, especially, all those snowy vistas which Maddin doesn’t try to hide. How could he? Moreover, and underscoring MW’s vaguely leftist vibe, Maddin doesn’t conceal his contempt for the city’s inexorable march toward progress and modernity at the cost of demolishing much that is true and beautiful in Old Winnipeg. And let it be said our subject city isn’t a unique case: hardly a metropolitan area has escaped the grim reaper’s pitiless scalpel. Thus Maddin’s beloved city is a place whose people have been let down by their politicians and whose cultural inner life has much in common with the sleepwalker.

   My favorite tableaux include Citizen Girl; the bit about the horses’ heads; Ledge Man; and most of all, the séance, a brilliant set piece evoking silent movies and ballet as strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde waft gently if ominously in deep background. Indeed the mostly gloomy music throughout serves as the perfect undercurrent. The way the jangly, creepy music perfectly complements the grainy black & white look recalls yet another film, the cult horror classic Carnival of Souls. A true treat is the legendary Ann Savage in her last film as Maddin’s mother. She still has much of the same fiery attitude she strutted in her most famous role Vera in Detour some six decades prior.

   After being thoroughly wowed by the film’s bizarre, dreamlike vision, I’m tempted to say Guy Maddin is the Orson Welles of the Twenty-first century – but I won’t. And yet, like Welles with Citizen Kane, Maddin impresses not only by way of technical razzle-dazzle but by the emotional content and narrative drive present in My Winnipeg.

   Still, even with its state-of-the-art techniques, the film has much the look and feel of a silent movie, and for all Maddin’s insightful and immensely entertaining narration, I have the sense that the spoken track could have been omitted entirely and sufficed with story cards, and the film’s emotional impact wouldn’t have lessened a bit.

   I confess I’ve been to Winnipeg – once, about thirty years ago – and have a vaguely positive memory, but after viewing My Winnipeg I pay the film a valedictory compliment: it makes me want to go back to the city again – just not in January.