Guy Maddin’s self-described “docu-fantasia” My Winnipeg hit the festival circuit in 2007, but I didn’t encounter it until April of 2019. My weekends that spring were spent working on Circle of Fourths, my first and heretofore only short film and a tribute of sorts to Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi classic La Jetée. Like Marker’s film, my little project told its story largely through a succession of still photos. I’d been fairly serious about street photography for a few years by that point, so it seemed like an accessible introduction to filmmaking, both technically and financially. Revisiting Maddin’s film for this newsletter left me feeling a bit nostalgic, so on a whim, I watched Circle of Fourths for the first time in years yesterday afternoon.
Whenever I look at old work, whatever the medium, my focus tends to jump to the flaws. (Pre-podcast Travis didn’t do a great job recording the narration and he probably should’ve reined in his ambitions for a thunderstorm of blood and viscera when his total production budget was $300.) Once I worked through the cringe factor, though, it was pretty clear why My Winnipeg made such an impression on me. In addition to the photographs, my film incorporated maps, scribbled notes, pages torn from books, fake newspaper clippings, and other detritus from a fantastical version of New York City where the seasons had mysteriously reversed their order. It was a fabricated archive of a history that never was and never could have been. Watching My Winnipeg at that point in my life was like stumbling through the bush and happening upon an immaculately groomed trail that someone else—someone who actually knew what the hell they were doing—had already blazed. You’re giddy that the thing exists, even if your ego is slightly bruised for not having gotten there first.
Ostensibly a documentary about Maddin’s hometown and his relationship to it, My Winnipeg includes authentic archival footage, the filmmaker’s own home movies, and freshly shot scenes that are artificially aged and seamlessly incorporated into the final product, leaving fact and fiction hopelessly tangled together. Maddin, who narrates the movie himself, is sometimes forthcoming (like when he tells you he’s hired actors to reenact scenes from his childhood) and sometimes not (like when he insists his mother is playing herself even though he cast the noir-era femme fatale Ann Savage for the role). He invents facts, dryly explaining that Winnipeg has ten times as many sleepwalkers as any other city in the world. Then, just as dryly, he delivers facts that sound fabricated, telling the baffling true story of “If Day,” when Winnipeg staged a mock Nazi invasion of the city in 1942 as a stunt to sell war bonds.
Maddin doesn’t see any contradiction in this slippage between reality and fantasy. “Virtually everything in the film is real,” he’s said. “It’s either real, or it’s a wish, an opinion, or a legend. There are no outright lies in the film.” It’s a typically elliptical explanation from the “mad poet of Manitoba” as a Canadian magazine allegedly called him. (I haven’t been able to track down the original quote, and given it’s Maddin we’re dealing with, it’s certainly possible he bestowed the appellation on himself.) There is, though, something to this idea that wishes, opinions, and legends are distinguishable from lies. Think about the town you grew up in and try to channel the headspace of who you were when you grew up there. My cousin used to claim that the weird A-frame house down the road was home to a family of vampires who sucked their own arms when prey was hard to come by. I’m not sure I believed it exactly, but especially when you’re young, these kinds of stories really do become part of the fabric of home, “true” or not.
Mythology is a powerful part of a place. It offers a primal rootedness that can be both soothing and sinister. The folklore collections of the Brother Grimm, for example, have birthed generations of Disney movies even as they have a history of complicity with German nationalism, including its most noxious strains. Or closer to home, you just need to look at what’s going on in Florida right now, where Ron DeSantis and his dipshit lackeys are pushing their childish myths of a blameless America on students as a replacement for the “woke mind virus” of moral complexity. In the hands of that B-side Orbán, myth is being deployed to obscure facts and vilify anyone who points out the empirical truth that current inequalities stem from past injustice.
There is no good faith justification for DeSantis’ brand of mythologizing, but other cases are harder to adjudicate. In last month’s newsletter about Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film Rome Open City, I quoted the scholar David Forgacs on how that founding document of neorealism spun the history of Italy’s anti-fascist resistance fighters to help the country come to terms with its own trauma:
It would provide a patriotic myth to ease the transition from Fascism to the post-war state, substituting pride for the national liberation movement for the collective shame of having lived, without openly resisting, for twenty years under a political system that had ultimately proved so brutal and brought such damage upon the country.
Did the film’s flattering depiction the priest Don Pietro let the Catholic Church off the hook for its long friendship with Mussolini? Kind of, yeah. In the context of a shattered society trying to piece itself back together, might that tradeoff be defensible? I don’t know, but the argument isn’t absurd on its face.
Walter Benjamin wrote that the project of history isn’t to convey “how it really was,” but rather “to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” What qualifies, then, as a “moment of danger”? The Italy of 1945 was emerging from the wreckage of World War II and decades of authoritarianism. The Canada of 2007 was, I guess, emerging from the Ottawa Senators humiliation in the Stanley Cup Finals at the hands of an American squad named after a kids’ film franchise. But taking control of a memory can still be cathartic even if the danger you’re facing isn’t national in scope or history-bending in scale. My Winnipeg is a hallucinatory letter of love and loathing to the place that made Maddin and from which he fears he may never escape. Near the end of the movie, he fantasizes about leaving his hometown in the hands of Citizen Girl, a personification of the city’s soul, so that she might “undo all the damage done during Winnipeg’s first trip through time,” restoring the demolished hockey arena and replanting the felled elm tree on Wolseley Avenue.
Unlike DeSantis’ distorted curricula or even Rossellini’s historical fiction, Maddin’s reconstruction of the past is honest about its deceptions. The movie self-conscious mythmaking, knowingly postmodern and unapologetically personal—sometimes uncomfortably personal. (The film provides a more extensive excavation of its director’s psychosexual development than this viewer needed.) But all of our psychologies and identities were forged in the crucible of somewhere, and every somewhere is a palimpsest of the memories of its inhabitants. My Winnipeg concludes with Maddin’s mother (or, “mother”) lying in the snow beside the actor hired to play his brother Cameron, who in reality died by suicide in 1963.
“I didn’t used to like being close,” the brother says.
Maddin’s mother takes a breath. “Why?”
“I just wasn’t comfortable.”
“Are you comfortable now?”
“Mostly. I guess I am.”
“Me, too.”
The scene is at once fake and authentic, uncanny and honest, like a fantasy revisited so often that it’s become a memory. The identities of countries, cities, families, and individuals—they’re all held together by their own mythologies. My Winnipeg is a reminder that these myths are always up for revision.
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I swear this post isn’t sponsored from the folks in Cupertino, but My Winnipeg is, weirdly, only streaming Apple TV. It’s well worth the $4 rental.