"My sister hit and killed a deer. My mother sees through this euphemism, for it is a euphemism. Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism. Mother understands in a second what this deer blood and fur means. And somehow, she's right. She can read our family and our civic secrets, our desire and our shame, as easily as she can read a newspaper." -- Guy Maddin (narrator)
In July 2015, I spent the night in Winnipeg. I had the free time to stay longer, but one night was enough. Even in the warmer months, Winnipeg somehow managed to maintain its gloomy winter exterior. I would like to go back some day to see if it's actually like I remember it, but who knows it I will. Even though I live in Minnesota, it's still an eight-hour drive, plus the time spent crossing the border.
But today I went back to Winnipeg with Guy Maddin as my tour guide. I need Maddin in my life. So many films are predictable, cut-by-numbers affairs. They're supposed to be. That's what audiences feel comfortable watching, and that's how rich production studios make money.
Isn't it funny, though, that as bad as, say, Scream 7 might be, many more people than not would rather watch that than take a risk and be somewhat challenged by a film that blends documentary, memory, and fantasy?
Can you imagine?
Give some filmgoers a challenge, and they may claim "boredom." How can anyone be "bored" watching Maddin at play? Boredom happens, I guess, when filmgoers are made uneasy by the new and different, when they watch film to escape rather than to be intellectually challenged and forced to observe and engage with every scene.
Okay. So, I watched My Winnipeg, not sure if the film was really a documentary, not knowing what to believe. On the interview with Robert Enright included on the Criterion DVD, Maddin confirms that it was a documentary. His only instructions from the Documentary Channel: "Don't depict Winnipeg as the frozen hellhole we all know it to be." In other words: the Documentary Channel was looking for something different, and they went to the right filmmaker.
Maddin notes in the interview that film is the 20th century's premier way to create mythology, much as the campfire in ancient times used to be. Watching the film, I wonder how he pieced it together. Did he write the basic narration first? Then did he locate the archival footage he wanted to use? I guess I'm just wondering if he had the whole idea for the film in his mind, or did he work on it step by step.
According to Maddin, his initial goal was simply to create a mythology for Winnipeg -- a city that really didn't have its own mythological story. For most people, Winnipeg is a blank slate. That is, it's not a place people visit on purpose.
Maddin indicated that he was at a Q&A in Paris, and when he was asked a question about Winnipeg, it sparked the idea for how he would make this documentary, and he raced back to his hotel to write the script for what he describes as "docu-fantasia." So. yes, he did start the film with a full script, and whether he wanted to or not, he utilized the full editing process to make sure the structure of the narrative worked.
In the interview. he also mentioned the approach to recording the narrative. Every day at 4 p.m., he'd go to the recording studio; he had the script, but he still utilized a sort of daily improv session. The only rule was to not stop talking. Maddin was doing free association, a kind of "oral freewrite" to develop on the ideas he had already mapped out. Eventually, the entire narrative was put together as a "radio play." That was the initial step in the process.
Ann Savage, by the way, plays Maddin's mom, but that's never acknowledged in the film. This is odd, because he does mention that the other people doing the family reenactments are actors. Savage hadn't been in a film for over 50 years, with her best-known film being Detour (1945). In the interview with Enright, he mentions that Savage almost was the right age to be his mom, and in fact, she retired from acting just a year or two before he was born... so it would "work" for her to be his mother. Maddin's biological mother was still alive at the time the film was made. She was even on set from time to time, but Maddin -- joking or serious -- said that he purposely made sure they weren't on the set at the same time. He didn't want them to meet.
In a film with crazy images, perhaps the craziest segment was the reenactment of If Day. On Feb. 19, 1942, the Canadian military dressed up as Nazis and "invaded" Winnipeg. Why? To raise money for the war effort, but like much of the film, the "reasons" blur or go left unexplained, or the explanations offered are based on the childhood memories of Maddin, or his "fantasies" of how things might have been.
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