My Winnipeg (2008) is a film seemingly made in line with Marshall McLuhan's maxim 'The medium is the message'. McLuhan - a Canadian, like the film's director Guy Maddin - stipulated that the way a story is told influences how it is perceived: the medium and the message exist in a complex symbiotic relationship. Maddin set out to paint a portrait of 'the most soporiphic city on Earth'. He accomplishes that through languid shots of dark streets that have no beginning or end, by placing characters into train carriages that go nowhere, by sharing historical and fictional events, by circling back to locations already revisited. Almost all of the footage is shot in black and white, and so you remember it as a snowstorm at night.
The result is a story both bleak and lovingly told. It is personal - even intimate on occasion - but, as any other myth, My Winnipeg aspires to rise above the particular and engage with the archetype.
Actual documentary footage (absolutely fascinating!) is liberally mixed with re-enactments of landmark events in the history of Winnipeg. Maddin's personal accounts cut through both, reaching the culmination when the narrator brings in Mother (played by film noir legend Ann Savage, introduced as the director's actual parent) and a cast of actors hired to play his siblings, the way those used to be decades ago. Revisiting Maddin's childhood, revisiting the beginnings of Winnipeg, never truly engaging with either, leaving vaguely disappointed by the gap between the memory and the re-enactment.
My Winnipeg has been described as a docu-fantasy. That is an apt term for the film: it leaves you with an impression of the city. It is a dark one, sure, but I wonder if it is also not the kindest depiction of the Manitoba capital - 'the heart of the heart of the continent'.
The result is a story both bleak and lovingly told. It is personal - even intimate on occasion - but, as any other myth, My Winnipeg aspires to rise above the particular and engage with the archetype.
Actual documentary footage (absolutely fascinating!) is liberally mixed with re-enactments of landmark events in the history of Winnipeg. Maddin's personal accounts cut through both, reaching the culmination when the narrator brings in Mother (played by film noir legend Ann Savage, introduced as the director's actual parent) and a cast of actors hired to play his siblings, the way those used to be decades ago. Revisiting Maddin's childhood, revisiting the beginnings of Winnipeg, never truly engaging with either, leaving vaguely disappointed by the gap between the memory and the re-enactment.
My Winnipeg has been described as a docu-fantasy. That is an apt term for the film: it leaves you with an impression of the city. It is a dark one, sure, but I wonder if it is also not the kindest depiction of the Manitoba capital - 'the heart of the heart of the continent'.