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The ghosts of Winnipeg
Guy Maddin’s Canadian portrait
By Melissa Campbell
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 80 min, 35mm, 2008)
UWM Union Theatre
Friday Nov. 21 @ 7 & 9 p.m.
Saturday Nov. 22 @ 3 & 5 p.m.
Sunday Nov. 23 @ 3 p.m.
Tickets $4/students, $6/general public
Guy Maddin seems content to play in a sandbox of the obscure, irreverent and forgotten. His 2007 film “My Winnepeg” is a biography of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, but not the kind of biography bogged down by dates, people and places. It is a lyrical biography filled with ridiculous rumors and outlandish half-truths, grounded in the feeling of snowflakes on your nose and the blistering sound of a locomotive as it rushes past you.
Are there really two taxi systems in the city, one that sticks to the maps, while the other that travels unmarked back streets? Was there a Golden Boy competition where women gambled as men were objectified? Was Maddin really born in a hockey stadium? I will echo other critics when I say it doesn’t matter; fact-checking would be useless because Maddin is not interested in facts. “My Winnipeg” is a film about a specific place, but it is also a film about home, how it shapes who we are, and no matter how hard we try, we can never escape its wispy grasp.
The film is part historical biopic and part autobiography. We learn about Maddin’s past, his mother’s beauty shop and a traumatic experience in the boy’s locker room at the public bathhouse. But he also tells us about the labor movement, the winter that the horses froze in on the race track and the séances held at city hall. His storytelling is fractured and obfuscated, but it mirrors the act of remembering or dreaming. Memories are not coherent narratives, but collages of small events, some monumental, others insignificant. And such is the way Maddin approaches “My Winnipeg,” with each event as a frame in a kaleidoscope. By revealing and concealing the frames, he creates new meanings, new intersects and new narratives that weave together in a complex web.
Blending archival footage seamlessly with his own, so much so that we lose sight of which images are new and which are old, Maddin lives in a world of forgotten silent cinema. His films carry the mark of inter-titles and irises, and occupy a world of black and white. Maddin reveres the tactility of the film. In its physical presence in “My Winnipeg” he does give us a handful of color images, but the sight of them just leaves us uneasy, longing for the rich blacks and muted grays of his otherworld.
Throughout the film, Maddin addresses the idea of home, in both its literal and metaphorical senses. His main character struggles with leaving Winnipeg, we return to him, on a train and half-asleep, throughout the film. I must stay awake, he tells himself, if I am ever to leave. But no matter how hard he tries, he can never leave.
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