Photo by Noam Gonick
Guy Maddin represents a curious case in contemporary cinema. He is the award-winning director of nine feature films and at least twenty-six shorts – a prolific output for any filmmaker – and yet he is working in a narrative and visual style that is as un-conventional by today’s standards as any in film history. Maddin’s films mix pulp melodrama with a bizarre and dizzying antique look that is a throwback to the production methods of the silent film era and the highly artificial aesthetic of 1920s and 30s Expressionism. These days Maddin is perhaps best known in popular cinema circles for his 2003 feature The Saddest Music in the World, which starred the ineffable Isabella Rossellini, but many of his films are small masterpieces that have gained a devout cult following and are blockbusters among the art-film elite. Movies like Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Careful are some of the strangest and most surreal visions ever to seduce a screen audience.
A mercurial man-child, the enigmatic Maddin is both a conventional hockey-loving Canadian and a very weird dude. In his published journals he is a compulsive list-maker – things like nostalgic smells (old nautical rope, old rotting fishflies) and what kills fathers (new lawn mowers, new television sets). His movies are often blackly comic psychosexual fantasies that somehow come off as being naïve and perverted at the same time. The storylines abound with love triangles, earnest suitors, repression, necrophilia, lots of incest, and the mayhem of absurdity. According to Maddin, these pathologies may be partly accounted for by the fact that he has lived and worked in the small city of Winnipeg, Manitoba his entire life. Winnipeg is notorious among Canadians for having the coldest, bitterest, most inhospitable climate in the country – a feat considering Canada as a whole is known for its epic winters. In Maddin’s own writing he has called Winnipeg “a Siberia… a vast plain of ice… an Expo of melancholy”. In other words, about as far from Hollywood as you can get.
Yet, not only has Maddin managed to produce all but one of his films in Winnipeg – often during winter – he has now put the entire city in the floodlights of his mind, in grainy close-up, as the unlikely subject of his most recent film, My Winnipeg. A “docu-fantasia” about the particular Winnipeg in which he has lived and dreamed, the movie builds a mythology of Winnipeg that is a strange mixture of fact and fiction. Oh yes, we can hear your confused shouts. Why Winnipeg? What is so fascinating about Winnipeg? Why a larger-than-life mythic documentary on this icy Canadian nowhere? But, as Maddin points out in the film, there is a sense in which Winnipeg’s frigid isolation makes it the “heart of the country”. The film is now accompanied by an annotated book version published this spring by Coach House. After the book launch, Maddin was kind enough to speak with me by phone from Winnipeg (where else!).
Sean Starke. — My Winnipeg is ostensibly a film about a city, but it is also a film about you and your nostalgic fantasies.
Guy Maddin. — I realized when I went about making the film, My Winnipeg, that I was assigned the task of making a movie about Winnipeg, but I found I couldn’t make a movie about my city unless I included myself and my childhood home in it as well. It was all one thing to me.
— Ironically, it is one of your most personal and biographical films. It seems more common for an artist to express his life or autobiography in terms of a character study, but in My Winnipeg, (and in many of your films) you have made it a study of place…
— Yes. I guess because I’ve spent my entire life in the same city that for me person and place are really inseparable, you know. I’ve only seen a limited number of places, seen a limited number of homes. There’s a cottage that is only an hour’s drive from Winnipeg that I’ve gone to every summer of my life, and that I was probably conceived in. Most of the things I’ve experienced have been experienced in these few places. And so it’s quite natural for me to dial back from biography to place.
