(Guy Maddin, Canada 2007, 80 min.)
A chronicle of the life of the wintry Canadian city, writer-director Maddin’s latest feature provocatively mixes the fictional and real to explore various aspects of Winnipeg life. Maddin’s self-described “docu-fantasia” on his Canadian hometown contains some of the strangest and most stirring imagery in any film of recent memory: dreamy sleepwalkers in the snow, a floating kielbasa, and horses encased in ice. Alternately hilarious and haunting, My Winnipeg is an enormously entertaining meditation on myth and memory.
Program Notes
Can you ever leave your home? This is the question that Guy Maddin attempts to answer in his ninth feature film, My Winnipeg. The picture, which Maddin calls a “docu-fantasia,” deals with “home, hometown and family,” elements that are all interwoven, in his mind.
Guy Maddin was born in Winnipeg in 1956, the youngest child of a prominent hockey coach and manager, and the proprietor of a local beauty shop. The careers of both his parents’ would have a profound effect on the future filmmaker. Whether watching the teams practice at the Winnipeg Arena or playing with his friends at his mother’s salon, Maddin’s unique take on every day eccentricities was fueled by numerous unforgettable childhood experiences, such as the advancement of a common cold into an intense neurological disorder that resulted in strange physical sensations. He admits that many of his early films had hidden trace elements of his personal life in them. One example is a tale describing how his grandmother accidentally poked out his father’s eye, which would later be memorably recreated in his first feature.
Starting relatively late in the film world, Maddin did not make his first film until 1985 at the age of 29. With no training beyond endless weekends of watching films, his creation was a 16mm surrealist and darkly comic black-and-white short, called The Dead Father. He would continue to make shorts, averaging one a year, but quickly turned his attention to features, starting with Tales from the Gimli Hospital in 1988, a film which gained him international attention. He would follow-up his initial success with Archangel in 1990 and Careful in 1993, his first color film. His early work and films that have followed have come to be recognized for their surrealistic, dreamlike style, and their striking visuals and obscure sensibilities. These elements have often led Maddin to be referred to as the “Canadian David Lynch”.
Commissioned by the Documentary Channel of Canada, My Winnipeg was originally intended to be a documentary about the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Instead Maddin created a film that interweaves a reenactment of his childhood, using scenes both real and exaggerated, with episodes from Winnipeg’s past, both factual and fantastic, and blended the elements together with a voice-over narration by the director himself. This unique narration aspect of the film was influenced by the 16mm travel log films that Maddin viewed as a child, which had always been accompanied by live commentary; in fact during several of the film’s screenings, Maddin preformed the narration live for the audience. In order to authenticize the filming of the childhood re-enactments Maddin actually rented his childhood home for one month, hiring actors to play his siblings and 1940s B-movie icon Ann Savage to play his mother.
My Winnipeg builds upon Maddin’s earlier works in its use of flickering black and white images reminiscent of the silent films that continue to be a major influence on his works. The film itself is intercut with archival films from the Winnipeg archives, which presented a challenge to the filmmakers since much of the modern documentary footage was shot in HD. Maddin solved this by projecting some of the footage onto his fridge and shooting it with a film camera in order to gain the grain and flicker look. By having an outline and scripted sequences, Maddin was able to avoid one of the main criticisms of his previous features, which were said to be too long to sustain audience interest.
My Winnipeg found critical success not only at home, winning Best Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival but also in the US and internationally, opening the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival, considered one of Europe’s top three film festivals devoted to avant-garde and experimental films. Maddin wanted to make a film that would endow Winnipeg with its own mythology and identity, or as he has said, “to dress Winnipeg up for the rest of the world the way the rest of the world had been dressed up for me”. The result is a film, which intentionally blurs fact and fiction to produce an odd yet touching tribute to the Canadian hometown of Guy Maddin.
~Elisabeth Rennie, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
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