My Winnipeg

For the many artists who resist psychotherapy for fear that somehow it will ruin their art, art performs a therapeutic function for remarkably few. Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg is a bold exception.

In its presentation, the film is as elaborate and complicated a web of style and narrative structure as any Maddin film that precedes it -- perhaps even more so. However, the film's intelligent and intelligible guiding concept provides a straightforward premise that grounds Maddin's art film aesthetic. In an attempt to escape the entrenchment of his past, Maddin examines his personal history concurrently with the history of Winnipeg, where he has always lived. Maddin, as protagonist and voiceover, performs cinematic psychoanalysis, creating a deeply subjective film that takes place as though entirely in his own memory. In this way, the film is as much a documentary as it is a narrative. Although only those sections that chronicle the history of Winnipeg appear documentary-like, in fact the film's document is Maddin's irrational mind, making cacophonous associations between Winnipeg and his own memories.

Once again, Maddin adopts and develops the dictates of surrealist filmmakers. He moves beyond the surrealist impulse to illustrate dreams and subjective visions to draw a specific connection between dreaming and cinema. My Winnipeg draws a distinct parallel between the act of filmmaking and the act of revisiting an old, familiar place, as one does in sleep. Maddin suggests that both exercises are a means toward overcoming the power of the past. He presents this equation primarily through the two threads of the film's narrative: on the one hand, the narrative follows a man on a train without tracks, dreaming his way out of Winnipeg as the train rushes him ceaselessly back to it. On the other hand, the narrative presents the filmmaker with whom the film opens, directing the charcter of his mother in a film designed to reenact scenes from his childhood for the filmmaker to recreate his so-called Happyland by making peace with his childhood memories.

The premise and narrative structure interact in a kind of dissonant harmony: the narrative is causally driven, comes to closure, and yet is structured only by a series of episodes. While the film would appear episodic, Madden states clearly at the film's start that its purpose is to examine his past and Winnipeg's. The dream logic upon which the film is founded lends a cause-and-effect relationship to the episodic events that ensue. The dual narrative structure transforms the indecipherable contents of the filmmaker's mind into a discernible and engaging story. The passion with which Maddin narrates the film encourages viewers to register the haphazard memories from his past in as orderly a manner as the chronological events depicted from Winnipeg's history.

In its style, My Winnipeg similarly pursues two concurrent paths. The film's editing follows the surrealist conventions for expressing inner thoughts. Maddin creates unexpected juxtapositions between shots, motivating cuts with a dream logic, even in those sequences about the city rather than the filmmaker (if there is such a distinction). However, Maddin's films, and this film in particular, also display a French Impressionist desire to experiment with the boundaries of film form, often employing multiple cinematic devices within a single frame. The combination of these two influences on the film's narrative and style manifest in the explosive cutting, layered superimpositions, and chaotic movement of My Winnipeg's plot events--of particular note, his reenactment of the Labor Strike in 1919 and the city's redemption by the heroic Citizen Girl.

The cinematic experimentation in My Winnipeg further proves Maddin's deep understanding that cinema is an art form of space and time. His bold choices of where he places his camera disorient viewers for the sake of orienting them around the film medium. In an early scene, he features a shot of his mother's peering face in rear projection looking into a train window where his character is asleep. He then cuts to position the camera behind her actual body looking into the train set, redefining the sequence's spatial boundaries as well as the limitless boundaries of its artifice.

Maddin's body of work is deeply unified by his recurring sexual themes and silent-filmmaking aesthetic. But My Winnipeg is particularly successful for its surge of his experimental narrative and stylistic traits while maintaining a reasoned arc and an engaged viewer.

                                                      Genevieve Angelson