Canadian Film Forum

carmela · Trimis: 21/02/2012 06:33 Titlul subiectului: My Winnipeg

Theme

The same way as Robert Flaherty is considered today a pioneer of documentary film, I dare say Guy Maddin will soon be regarded as a pioneer of docu-fantasia film, a term already invented by him to characterize his production. Neither of them had training in filming, Flaherty being a mining engineer and Maddin an economist; nevertheless, their documentaries are rated as one of the best in the entire film industry.

My Winnipeg is a 2007 Canadian film co-written and directed by Guy Maddin, a Manitoban-born director of experimental films. Started as a request from The Documentary Channel, Maddin conceived this film with the clear purpose of presenting his unconventional way of seeing and dreaming of his native town.

The capital of Manitoba, Winnipeg is situated in the heart of Canada and located at “the forks” of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Form a historical point of view, this city has been a vital link in all types of transportation, the boats and carts of early settlers giving way to the great railways of the 19th and 20th centuries. Lying midway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it became the centre of a triangular network of rail lines, “the greatest urban train yard in the world”. With the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1885), the city was launched into a period of growth unequalled in Canadian urban development, “the heart of the heart of the continent”.

In his documentary of urban life, Maddin reveals an unusual description of a common Canadian city, which is both mysterious and tragic. The film starts with the main character dozing off in a train; while looking through out the window the viewer starts seeing the snowy sleepwalking Winnipeg in surreal and metaphorical images.

“The Forks, the lap, the fur” are words frequently repeated and suggestive shots follow one after the other. The Forks, which is the confluence of those two rivers, intertwines with the representation of his mother lap and the image of the fur – the bison product which stands at the very basis of the town - subterranean forks of trade and commerce.

Winnipeg is a city of skins on one hand: the bison’s skin sold to build a flourishing commerce, the Aboriginals’ skins forced to live on the roofs of the city, the winter’s skin which entraps the locals in its snowy, freezing and dreamy weather. On the other hand, it is a city of layers: layers of history, of trades, of unusual laws and strange facts, of lies and liars.

In 1906, Winnipeggers built their own Happyland Park – an amusement park which was closed during the World War I. In Maddin’s film, the Happyland is destroyed in 1922 by a gay bison stampede followed by a stampede of men. The vivid metaphor of a past –the nearly exterminated species, and of a future – the newly born breed of merchants and politicians, that turns against the Winnipeggers explains to some extent Maddin’s resentment and anger against the hidden truth and dissimulation.

As long as dreams are sweet and waking is bitter, the citizens prefer sleepwalking on the unsteady barrier between day and night, between reality and make-believe, between truth and self-deceit. Is it only the sleepiness which keeps the Winnipeggers there? I’d say that the reasons they are in Winnipeg, the reasons they have stayed there instead of leaving are “the Forks, the lap, the fur”, in other words, their inheritance, their traditions and the affiliation to the community. They have the keys to their old dreamy addresses but they entered an endless cycle of somnambulism and forgetfulness and they indulge themselves in this situation. Winnipeggers are no longer aware what reality means, their sleep is a state of mind, a sleep of consciousness.

Maddin wants to film his way out of Winnipeg and for this reason he sublets for a month his childhood home and hires actors to play members of his family. Now it is time for extreme measures, it is time to escape from the lies of Winnipeg’s past. Can he really do this? Can he really escape from his mother who is watching him and over him, his mother who knows to read all the signs? Wherever he goes, he is the same person, he stays the same. He was born in this city, he grew along with it and he is a part of it. He only wishes he could stay awake, he has the fitting key for that, but will he use it right? Will he find his Happyland?

Awards:
The film won the Best Canadian Feature Film Award in 2007 at Toronto International Film Festival, the Best Documentary Award in 2008 at San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards, the Best Canadian Film Award in 2008 at Toronto Film Critics Association Awards and the Best Experimental Documentary in 2009 at the International Urban Film Festival, Tehran.

carmela · Trimis: 21/02/2012 06:37 Titlul subiectului: My Winnipeg

Composition

One the one hand, the film has very much in commun with Nanook of the North, as they are both documentaries about Canadian life, they are filmed in negru and white and they are silent. Most of Flaherty’s footage is filmed inside the family’s igloo, in a disperse light. At the same time, Maddin’s film was shot as if all the action had been running under the roof of a giant igloo. The light is filtered and diffuse creating the impression of desolation in all his native Winnipeg.

On the other hand, Flaherty had no other possibilities in 1922, the age of silent film, to use but very simple technique and non-sofisticated cameras, while Maddin recreates on purpose decayed footage and combines it with black images, photos, home movies - a monochrome industry used to make us pay attention to his sadness while he narrates the story and seasoned with coloured animation when presenting the most glorious moments of his town.

A modern visionary on silent film, Maddin mixes simple techniques, recycled footage, still photos of the ectoplasmic séances, bizarre camera angles, telephoto lens and many close-ups to focus the characters, contrasting with his mother’s image which is very often filmed with wide angle lens, a surrealist image of the person who is “a force as strong as all the trains in Manitoba”.

The editing is shocking as he uses very many flashes with subliminal messages and titles which disrupt the narrative, either preceding the reply of the next shot or following it – to intensify the impact as well as to anticipate it.

The setting of the film is in Winnipeg, the city being viewed mostly through the unclear window of the train by which the narrator tries to get away from this town. There are also some shots filmed from the back seat of a car, and there is a lot of archaic footage intertwined with some modern one when filming at the house of his childhood.

Narrated by Guy Maddin, the telling mode provides the touchstone for entering the atmosphere: it is essentially a first-person point of view with many recurring words defining feelings and states of fact. The sequence of still photographs and memory bank movies drags the viewer backwards into a narrative of the past. The movement into the past is at once an inner way into Maddin's consciousness, and an outer one into the social space that creates his consciousness. The knowledge of his past determines his present action, and the present experience reshapes the understanding of the past.

In an interesting way, the very structure of the film becomes a struggle to break the imposed form of a documentary, in a very similar way in which Margaret Laurence, a Manitoban-born writer, tried to break the literary imposed form of a novel. When she wrote The Diviners, in 1962, she used a series of still photographs and memory bank movies to narrate her character’s past and later to embellish her grown-up reconstruction of a suitable past.

Maddin tries to stage bits of his childhood in order to give life to those frozen images, to better understand their hidden message. He uses many photos whose backgrounds become alive and more important than the people in them. The transition from the static image of the snapshot to the fluid motion of film marks a shift from a passive state to an active one defined by Maddin’s repeated line, “What if?” In Winnipeg, every day is If Day, and one must be careful not to take the wrong train when changing lines. That is why one must stay awake if he really wants to get to his Happyland.

In the foreground, almost during all the film, the viewer can see snowflakes falling, blown by the icy wind.

carmela · Trimis: 21/02/2012 06:39 Titlul subiectului:

Canadianness

Apart of the fact that Guy Maddin was born in Winnipeg and the film is about the city itself, there are many references to important personalities and historical events such as: the Lap of Labour from 1919, correspondingly to the Winnipeg General Strike; the acclaimed Royal Winnieg Ballet, the oldest ballet company in Canada, co-founded by Gweneth Lloyd, in 1939; the mayor of Winnipeg, Stephen Juba, whose dramatic intervention stopped the cutting of a giant elm tree on Winnipeg's Wolseley Avenue in 1957, resulting in international publicity. Furthermore, there is the ice hockey team, the Winnipeg Jets with their old arena, their sponsorship problems and the construction of a new rink for the league.

In addition to these, there is a similarity with the specific vision of the Canadian director Zacharias Kunuk on the spiritual side of life in Atanarjuat, the unreal intertwining with the reality in a very natural way; Maddin’s film also makes no use of singular effects when crossing the borders between the two worlds. Myths, legends, fantasies are all part of our daily life and Maddin himself supports with this film his belief that “film and television should have the same freedom to be as unreal as fairy tales”.

Over all and around these descend the snow and the freezing cold, key elements of the Canadian survival in an unfriendly environment.

carmela · Trimis: 24/02/2012 02:22 Titlul subiectului:

Grammar film - sequence 09'19"-09'50"

One of the most strange and powerful sequences is that where the main actor, dozing off in the train he seems to have taken with the intention of escaping from his native city, remembers the reasons he is there, the reasons he has stayed and the reasons he is leaving now. They are “The Forks, the animals, hunters, boatways, trains and Mother.” And they are also the very things that are going to help him get out of there. Or, at least, he thinks so.

The sequence starts at 9’19” with a negru shot where the viewer can read “Mother” before the narrator starts speaking about her, followed by a series of subjective shootings showing Mother from her back side, the images being blurred on the left and right sides. After that we can see Mother’s eyes in a few subjective close-ups while looking inside the compartment through a small window. The images are very similar to the ones of a warden checking his prisoners through the peep hole and the narrator backs them up with his line, “Mother appears occasionally on the train to check on the passengers. My mother…”

Mother’s image is very often filmed with wide angle lens showing a surrealist image of the person who is “a force as strong as all the trains in Manitoba”, at the same time giving us the impression that she is the very guardian of both Winnipeg and the entire province.

The sequence is filmed in black-and-white, in a diffuse light, with a steady camera which takes trembling shots similar with the images we get when looking to a moving train. At the first glance, one might have the impression that this is the work of an amateur but Maddin uses this technique to give authenticity to the film and the feeling of taking part in the action.

Placing the centre of the interest mostly in the middle of the shots, Maddin forces us to look Mother in the eyes and comply with her force which enslaved him and all the Winnipeggers, as in fact, she is not a simple mother, but Mother Nature itself. To emphasize this idea, the last shots of the sequence are edited using double exposure, distinct images appearing simultaneously with Mother in the foreground superimposed on three successive other images: the snow falling, the bison running and the water of the Forks flowing. Moreover, the narrator describes her being “as perennial as the winter, as ancient as the bison, as supernatural as the Forks itself”.

The editing is also shocking as the director uses many flashes with subliminal messages and titles which disrupt the narrative, such as, “Mother”, “Force”, “Supernatural”, “Magnetic”, to intensify and anticipate the idea as well as to suggest the fact that Mother is the origin and force of all things, the magnet from which no one can escape, her image dominating the screen the same way she controls all their daily lives.