My Winnipeg

Before I drove up to Winnipeg last week, I recall seeing Guy Maddin's eccentric film essay, My Winnipeg (2007) about his home town some years ago.  I didn't remember much about the film and it didn't make an impression on me.  I'm a great admirer of Maddin's films, but this picture was too idiosyncratic and solipsistic -- I don't  think I understood the movie.  But, now, that I have been to Winnipeg and seen many of the sights depicted in the film, I like it better and hold the film in higher regard.  Maddin's sensibility is distinctly Canadian -- rueful, abashed, self-effacing, and too stoic to take any misfortune or hardship too seriously.  For much of the world, the notion of being born and, then, living in Winnipeg, the place that Maddin calls "the world's coldest city," dubbed "a frozen hellhole" by other Canadians, would be misfortune enough.  But, somehow, Maddin manages to make Winnipeg, an ugly, stolid, unassuming place, into one of Calvino's Invisible Cities, a place of strange and sinister enchantment.


Maddin's documentary, really an elaborate filmed essay, is a wild fantasia.  This kind of picture can readily decline into undisciplined self-indulgence.  Maddin uses sequences showing his surrogate riding on a phantom train through Winnipeg while tossing and turning in uneasy sleep as punctuation and connective tissue.  "Winnipeg," Maddin claims, "has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city."  At the outset, he announces that the project of the film is make a movie that frees him from Winnipeg, that authorizes him to leave the city of his birth.  To leave Winnipeg would be to become fully awake.  But Maddin's film is mélange of delirium and nightmare -- instead of awakening the sleeper tormented on the moving train, Maddin's strategy is to plunge the character inexorably deeper into dreams and visions.  This strategy is epitomized by a Kafkaesque parable announced early in the film -- I'll relate that story below.  It suffices to say that the filmmaker, someone who has carved "dyslexically" his name as "YUG" ("Guy") has come to Winnipeg to undertake certain "experiments" in the house where he grew up.  This home he describes as a "block", a square structure located at 800 W. Ellice in Winnipeg -- I saw his house when I was there and it is unchanged from what is shown in the movie.  In this house, part of which was occupied by his mother's hair salon, Maddin was raised with three siblings, two brothers and a sister who is a Pan-Canada track star.  Maddin's father was the manager of the Winnipeg hockey team, the Jets, I think.  Maddin casts a faded blonde movie star, Ann Savage (she was the femme fatale in Edgar Ulmer's 1945 Detour) as his mother and, then, attempts to recreate certain key moments in his childhood, presumably to better appreciate as an adult what happened when he was a child.  The incidents don't seem too consequential -- in one the family members try to adjust a perennially disarranged carpet runner; in other sequence, his mother interrogates Maddin's sister viciously implying that her account of hitting a deer on the highway to Kenora is a euphemism for sexual intercourse; in one scene, the children demand that their mother cook them some meatloaf (she has retired to her bed and says that she has forgotten all her recipes and will never cook again).  We see the family gathered every noon to watch a TV show called "Ledge Man" -- in the show, a young man threatens to hurl himself to his death from the ledge of a building downtown; in each episode, his mother talks him out of suicide.  (At the end of the film, we see the family sitting lying somnolently on couches watching TV and Maddin informs us that his brother, Curtis, killed himself when he was 16, information that casts a powerful light on the fantasy of the family watching "Ledge Man" every day.)  These episodes involving autobiography are tied to larger currents in the city's history most of which are defined by absence and loss.  Places that were important to Maddin when he was small are now gone, eradicated by the march of progress.  He claims to have been born in the old hockey rink where his father worked -- and we see the building demolished after Maddin uses the trough urinal in the rink one last time.  Eaton's, Winnipeg's most beloved department store, is also destroyed and replaced with a new hockey rink and event center.  An old public baths said to have three separate pools each superimposed above the other is mostly closed -- the two most subterranean baths are now shuttered. An amusement park called Happy Land is dismantled and becomes a shanty-town occupied by First Nations squatters on the roofs of the downtown buildings.  On the top floor of the Hudson Bay Company department store, a tavern called the Paddlewheel Lounge suffers from a lack of patrons and is threatened to be closed -- this is after we have seen the Lounge used for a decadent spectacle called "The Golden Boy" male beauty pageant.  ("The Golden Boy" is the gilded figure atop Manitoba's unicameral legislature building -- a place that Maddin also characterizes as the "largest Masonic Lodge" in the world, an almost true statement, since the building was designed by high-degree freemasons and secretly incorporates much of their hermetic lore into the structure.  When I was in Winnipeg, I saw a tour guide illumining the arcana in the legislature building and it was, in fact, mind-boggling.)  Maddin likes secret maps imposed on existing public places -- he claims that the Cree believed that there were subterranean rivers flowing under the Forks where the Assiniboine and the Red River combine, thus creating a place of distinctive "magnetism".  He imagines a grid of alleys that represent the real thoroughfares in Winnipeg concealed in the interstices of the actual roads.  A séance in the capitol building, under the enormous bronze bison flanking the steps to the rotunda, results in sleepwalker's ballet using members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company -- vast amounts of ectoplasm are extruded and it becomes confused in the film's imagery with the never-ending snow fall, the dark streets like tunnels between ramparts of snow, the alleys between houses buried in the stuff, snowflakes always falling over the occult and unreal city. 




Maddin uses a variety of styles to present this material.  There are delirious point-of-view shots simulating toboggan runs and staggering through the gloomy streets.  A lot of newsreel footage is intercut into the film, some of its exceedingly peculiar -- for instance, women chaining themselves to a tree to protect it from the axes of city utility workers.  (When the women were persuaded to leave someone blew up the tree with dynamite.)  Some of  the footage is in color and contemporary -- but other parts of the film are shot on the distressed, murky film-stock that is Maddin's trademark, imagery from a badly damaged, but transcendentally gorgeous silent film known only to the director.  At the film's conclusion, Maddin still can't quite awake from his slumbers.  Shadows of sleepwalkers stumble through the frozen city.  He imagines a "Citizen Girl" who will defend Winnipeg and restore the sites and buildings that it has lost and this is some comfort to him.  The movie ends with actors simulating Maddin's parents and his brothers and sisters half asleep in the living room watching TV.  An old lady sits with them -- she's sublet the building (it's now a drycleaners and tailor's business) and isn't willing to leave.  Maddin recalls his dead brother and acknowledges that the city's magnetism and strange appeal are too great for him and that he is unable to leave.  At the beginning of the film, Maddin tells this story:  each year, the Winnipeg Free Press sponsored a treasure hunt, hiding a medallion somewhere in the city.  The winner of the treasure hunt, the first person to find the medallion, is to be given an all expense paid train ticket to leave Winnipeg.  But to find the medallion, one must walk all of Winnipeg's streets and pay close attention to everything in the city  and, so, when the person finds the medallion, he or she is so invested in Winnipeg, knows it so well and is so fascinated by the place, that the person can not leave.  "In the entire history of the treasure hunt," Maddin says, "not one of the winners ever actually left Winnipeg."


Maddin's esthetic combines curious, disjunctive elements.  He uses damaged, scratched and scarred film stock to project images that are spectacularly lit and featuring faces that have the transcendent beauty of silent movie stars.  Although he is avowedly heterosexual (the film features his girlfiend's dog, Spanky), Maddin's films are rife with smirking homo-erotic imagery -- in My Winnipeg, the male beauty pageant and a scene involving little boys showing each other their "boners."  His documentary about Winnipeg is almost entirely an account of places and people that no longer exist.  In the midst of whimsy, he often inserts shocking violence or hideous imagery of wounds and death -- in My Winnipeg, horses are frozen in the river, their heads rearing up out of the ice.  (It's a reprise of a famous passage in Curzio Malaparte's memoir about the Russian front, Kaputt).  The dead horses, extruded from the ice become a popular trysting place and people have sex on the frozen corpses resulting "in a baby boom, the following November."