Besotted by the cinema of silence and early talking pictures, Guy Maddin also finds humor in old movies-or perhaps the humor lies more in the distance between our experience of the world and the gestures of an antique art form. In My Winnipeg, the Canadian filmmaker composes a poem for his hometown from the elements he has always loved-black-and-white film stock, bits of archival footage, exclamatory title cards, iris-eyed scenes, pointedly primitive animation and highly pitched drama in acting and screenplay.
My Winnipeg is a poem, literally and visually. The voice-over narrative running through the film is in unrhymed verse and the visuals are a poem formed of images, not the usual prose of cinematic narrative. It's a humorous, sometimes sardonic poem about the snowbound provincial city that shaped the imagination of one of the world's most imaginative filmmakers, as well as a skewed reflection on childhood memory.
Maddin's love-hatred for Winnipeg has a few concrete targets, especially civic leaders who demolish landmark buildings and replace them with faceless sports arenas-all in the name of luxury skyboxes. Mostly My Winnipeg is a half-serious investigation of the elements shaping a city Maddin regards as a place of sleepwalkers and eccentricity. Is it the sun-deprivation of endless winter? The psychic forces of the forked river at the city's heart? Something to do with the First Nation natives?
Even if Maddin's peculiar whimsy isn't to your taste, his cinematography is often beautiful, especially the black silhouettes of sleepwalking citizens wandering the old streets amid a flurry of snowflakes and streetlights glowing white as the moon through the icy camera lens. My Winnipeg is a reminder that in its early years cinema seemed to open up a world of mystery and strangeness now largely forgotten in our video-saturated, blockbuster epoch.
Nov. 21-23, UWM Union Theatre.
