MY WINNIPEG (2007/15)
Directed by Guy Maddin
Buffalo Gal Productions
* * * *
This documentary
created a small stir when it first came out in 2007. Earlier this year it was
re-released in Blu-ray and, if your tastes run toward the offbeat and surrealistic,
it’s well worth watching—even though parts of it are now outdated.
Winnipeg, Manitoba
native Guy Maddin is the director/writer/narrator/central character of what he
calls a “docu-fantasia.” That’s not a bad term, though “autobiographical tone-poem”
might be an even better one. The film really is about Winnipeg—sort of. Maddin
is from there, but his film’s central hook is the attempt to escape. To that
end, Maddin imagines himself among a car full of disreputable passengers on a
rail-less train hurtling down the city streets and speeding toward the outlying
districts, but never quite making it into the surrounding prairie. It is filmed
in black and white (at times with deliberately scratched emulsion) and most of
the outside scenes are wintry—an effect he uses to add grit, and to blur the
boundaries between past and present. (By washing out detail and rendering
everything in the same tones, an old photograph has the same clarity and visual
value as the present.)
Maddin’s Winnipeg is
one weird place and he too has, in popular parlance, “issues.” Among the strange revelations about Manitoba’s
largest city: it is among the world’s coldest cities, it was once a hotbed for
spiritualism, the city used to hold an annual treasure hunt whose winner got a
one-way rail ticket out of town, and it has the highest measured level of
sleepwalking of any known city. The latter is so pronounced that a local
ordinance gives citizens the right to possess keys to former residences in case
they wander there in a sleepy stupor. If that’s not weird enough for you,
consider this factoid: a 1935 winter fire at a local racetrack allegedly sent
horses rushing into the Red River, where the ice trapped them and preserved
them. Locals strolled through upon the frozen river to visit grotesque
monuments: the frozen heads of horses pushed through the ice with their faces
captured in the final throes of death.
Maddin’s film is
heavy on metaphors such as sleepwalking and frozen horse heads. His most
powerful is that of the “Forks,” the place where the Red and Assiniboine rivers
merge. At numerous junctures he juxtaposes the Forks with a woman’s torso—both a
sexual and birth allusion—and uses these to explore his considerable
disagreements with his stern mother (played by Ann Savage) and his deceased
father. This film could occupy a Freudian for months! The thread that holds
everything together is the reoccurring question, “What if…?”
Those what ifs apply
to both Maddin and to Winnipeg. In a Michael Moore-like shift, Maddin also
explores changes in the city: a provincial sports hall of fame that moves more
often than someone in the witness protection program, the demolition of both
the downtown Eaton’s Department Store and an iconic ice hockey arena, the loss
of the Winnipeg Jets NHL franchise, the impending doom of The Bay…. In this
guise, Winnipeg comes off as Flint-upon-the-Prairie and it underscores Maddin’s
desperation to flee.
Ever notice how
people who make films about getting out often don’t? Maddin also plays on the
metaphor of Winnipeg being the geographic center of North America. (Note to US
residents: Take a look at how much of Canada lies to the north of Winnipeg.)
Winnipeg might be weird, but it’s also defiant, a spirit represented by its
1919 general strike. In like fashion, people there must put down pretty deep
roots if they hold onto door keys in case they sleepwalk into the parlor.
Maddin’s running
commentary is, by turns, poetic, irreverent, wistful, and even hopeful. Since
2007, the Bay closed, but the Jets returned. Like frozen horse heads, Winnipeg’s
cycles are marked by ephemeral monumentality yet signs of struggle and life.
-- Rob
Weir
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