There’s a nostalgist In all of us: Guy Maddin’s "My Winnipeg"

There’s a nostalgist in all of us: Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is a self-described “docu-fantasy.” Offering an experience similar to floating in Maddin’s own reverie moments before he drifts into dream, My Winnipeg features a distinct style that creates a hazy, mysterious representation of his hometown. Although Maddin’s approach in My Winnipeg appears to be a scrapbook of personal imagery and distant memories, a closer reading of the film reveals that Maddin is nostalgic not for his past; but for a past he’s never had. This fantastical past is conveyed through Maddin’s use of early film forms (film noir, melodrama, surrealism, German expressionism, and, most notably, Soviet montage) and his inclusion of aged local lore—stories from the distant ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s—decades before Maddin was born.

The first shot of My Winnipeg is a close up of Ann Savage, an actress most notably known for her performance in Edgar G. Ulmer’s film noir Detour (1945). Savage seems to be screen testing, with an off screen voice directing her dialogue delivery. Savage plays the part of Maddin’s mother, although Maddin deceives the audience by telling them his mother is in fact playing herself. This screen test scene supports Maddin’s claim of having a mother “with the force of all the trains in Manitoba,” as Savage, with her constantly raised eyebrows—as if to look down on her subjects—and condescending tone of voice, often interrupts the off-screen voice, suggesting Mother knows best. Maddin paints his mother as “superhuman,” a villainous “force.”

In casting a film noir female lead for the re-enacted moments of his childhood, Maddin shows a yearning to cinematize his upbringing and create, for himself, new images and atmospheres of his early years. Maddin, who was born in 1956, does this by using film forms that precede him. If he wanted to create a film tone true to his time, perhaps he would’ve shot the film in Cinemascope or Technicolor. Instead, we see black and white almost exclusively—except when Maddin references the modern developments of the city, which he views distastefully.

We’ll start with Maddin’s use of film noir and melodrama techniques, areas where the use of Savage as Mother fits in nicely. In the family-reenactment scenes, Maddin references film noir by using low-key lighting to cast heavy shadows upon his figures. These scenes contain the bleak tone often seen in film noir, with Savage’s cynicism and complete totalitarianism—an ode to film noir’s theme of corruption—over her family contributing to the mood. “Gloomy” and “dark,” Maddin’s reenactment sequences also draw from a melodramatic style because of their hyper-dramatized situations (Bordwell and Thompson 215). Aside from “Ledgeman,” this is most notably observed during the “car accident” reenactment, when Janet Maddin (Amy Stewart) confesses her situation to her mother, to which Mother replies, “There’s no such thing as an accident.” The overacting of Janet, when combined with the upward-swirling orchestral arrangements in the soundtrack, creates a heightened pathos seen in many Douglas Sirk melodramas of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Maddin commented on his use of melodramatic style in My Winnipeg, saying, “In melodrama the characters get to do all the things that you’d get arrested, or at least socially censured, for doing in real life. You know, the way you get to sob loudly, scream, steal from, seize, hit, or even kill people in your dreams.” (Melnyk 52).

Maddin refers to melodrama, but at the same time he covers the ideology behind surrealism in his statement—the surrealist manifesto in fact states, “Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content.” Surrealists of Paris in the 1920s would enjoy My Winnipeg—and the city of Winnipeg for that matter, since it has the “sleepwalking rate ten times of any other city in the world”—because it is built upon the same concepts as the surrealism ideology: wonderment, delving into the subconscious, and the theme of dreams. Maddin’s distortion of reality and fabrication in historical terms, along with his use of nudity, also lends itself to the surrealism movement.

One scene in particular, Gwenyth Lloyd’s séance at the provincial Legislative Building, best demonstrates Maddin’s use of surrealist filmmaking. The sequence begins with Gwenyth conducting the séance, where we get the intertitle, “Under the influence of…” We see a quick cut to a statue of a buffalo. “Broken head,” “The spirit buffalo!” intertitles read. Cut back to Gwenyth’s face as she closes her eyes. We then see the buffalo statue again, this time in full, and slowly the Legislative Building becomes a marshland surrounding the statue. “Gwenyth becomes,” “otter heart,” the intertitles read. She then proceeds to dance, choosing one of the participants, Young Viscount Gourt, to join her. Peppered throughout the sequence are shots of partakers’ hands on the table and their reaction to the séance’s contents. A broken plot about “Hermes” crossing the “underworld forks” unfolds, with “Athea Cornish,” the mayor’s daughter, joining in on the dance. The scene ends with Athea having her way, as she threatens Gwenyth, who retreats back to the buffalo statue, with “bitter cold” and kisses Hermes. It’s a surreal sequence, using quick juxtaposition of nonsensical images that only hint at a cohesive storyline.

Maddin utilizes another film technique from the 1920s: German expressionism. The cramped train car Maddin sits in is the richest example of this. A dark, cylindrical figure hangs form a string in front of Maddin’s window. As the train continues to steam ahead, we see the object sway back and forth on the string, right in front of Maddin’s face. It’s as if even the train is against his pursuit of freedom, hypnotizing him into dream. Also on the train, after Maddin explains why it’s been so hard for him to leave—“the forks, the lap, the forks, the lap”—we see two people huddled against Maddin, who is looking out the window. In a style similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s use of expressionistic shadows in Blackmail (1929), horizontal shadows cover the entire frame, with some running over Maddin’s face. These shadows, when combined with the vertical panels of the train car walls, resemble prison bars, confining Maddin and his longing to escape—or change—his past.

The easiest of Maddin’s homages to identify in My Winnipeg is Soviet montage. Maddin himself said that he would like to live for a long time in the Russian film archives (Melnyk 49). Although traces of montage can be seen throughout the film, Maddin’s recollection of his mother’s beauty salon rings clearest. Maddin uses close ups and quick cuts to match the quick-cutting scissors he frames. Hairspray is blasted into the air as Maddin remembers the “cutting of hair, the torture of hair.” We see customer’s eyes, combs, and hairdryers in de-realizing close-ups as Maddin narrates. He concludes the montage by layering images of scissors cutting hair, the hair chute, his basement stairs, and the air vent on top of one another, suggesting visually that hair clippings from the beauty salon found their way to other parts of the house.

Essential to the Soviet montage movement, Sergei Eisenstein’s auteurist techniques can be seen in Maddin’s film as well. Maddin recreates Eisenstein’s use of silhouettes in front of backdrops, as seen in Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) when the workers gossip—“there is trouble brewing”—at their factory. In the “sleepwalking” scene toward the beginning of the film, we see silhouettes of men in trench coats lazily walking around the alleys of Winnipeg. The sleepwalkers are framed often in low-angle shots jingling their keys in front of images of the city. Eisenstein’s influence in these scenes is undeniable.

Left: Eisenstein's Strike (1925); Middle/Right: Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007)m>

Equal to Maddin’s use of early film form to create a new past for himself is his discussion of Winnipeg’s history. He appears to delve into his own past, splicing in stock footage with original shots. He revisits the city’s general strike of 1919, séances from the 1920s, the Royal Winnipeg ballet of the 1930s, and the Nazi’s invasion of Winnipeg in 1942, among others. But if we remember that Maddin was not living during these events, it begs the question of why he is talking about them. After discussing the aftermath of the final Golden Boy Pageant in 1940, Maddin reveals, “By the ‘60s there was nothing much left than memories of better times.” “Happy Land” theme park, which he wants reconstructed by Citizen Girl toward the end of the film, opened in 1906 and closed in 1922, but Maddin strongly identifies himself with the theme park, saying “we” built it, and it was for “us” Winnipegers. The park’s title is ironic—if only Maddin could go back in time to a true “Happy Land.”

Maddin rewrites the pages of Winnipeg history, and all of the aforementioned events are up for discussion as to whether they happened as described—or if they happened at all. For instance, Maddin tells the story of horses that froze while trying to cross the river during a stable fire. The event, which Maddin says happened in 1926, resulted in a score of horse heads sticking out of the ice—apparently, this image acts as an aphrodisiac to young Winnipegers. By altering Winnipeg history in this way, it suggests that Maddin is conflicted, not sure of who he is or what he wants from his hometown—certainly not what he had.

This leads us back to Maddin’s meticulous obsession with re-enacting his past. We see scenes, often comical, of childhood memories retold through these different cinematical lenses—again, not knowing what is indeed fact. Through these reenactments, the term “docu-fantasy” becomes not just a genre for the audience to relate to, but a term for Maddin himself; these scenes construct a more stirring and permanent vision of Maddin’s life, as if to turn his existence, in addition to the history of the city, into a timeless legend.

Maddin has admitted he was having a form of a mid-life crisis around the time of the film’s production. He explains: “Time’s once-sweet passage, my comfort within buildings, avenues, and memories that have always meant so much to me—everything’s gone flavourless. It feels like I’ve used those memories too much, that I’ve sucked the flavour out of them and I can’t reconstitute any of it” (Melnyk 41). So Maddin, being a cinephile, calls upon early film methods, casting choices, and content in order to “film his way out” of this predicament. He “sleepwalks,” unknown to himself and his strange nostalgia for things he’s never had. In a city that is the heart of the heart of the continent, where there are forks beneath the forks, a pool beneath the pool beneath the pool, and streets on top of streets, Maddin, the puzzled nostalgist, looks to find a past before his past.