My Winnipeg

The past is “contemporaneous” with the present that it has been.

- Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism

My Winnipeg comes off as the masterful somnambulist conclusion (though hopefully not) to a primitivist cycle of films beginning with Guy Maddin’s first short, the intentionally Donald Barthelme-cribbing The Dead Father (whose novel of the same title Maddin has said he found for sale, improbably, in a Winnipeg 7-11 after his dad died), and continuing through his two previous (and so far greatest) features, Cowards Bend the Knee and The Brand Upon the Brain! – each a Bergsonian plane of detemporalized immanence where matter and memory are liberated from slavish determinism and the realities of dream and feeling are more real than the narratives we impose; the very chronos which handcuffs lived experience. These last three features also owe a great deal of the lustrous, speed-of-thought montage technique to the collaboration w/ artist/editor deco dawson on the masterful 2000 short The Heart of the World, the film that truly reinvigorated a career that seemed stuck in something of a rut. My Winnipeg – what Maddin calls a “docu-fantasia” – is really more of an essay film incorporating into it the sub-genre of city film with the superimposed surrealist trope of dream modalities allowing for a more slippery re-invention of these genres than found in such reimaginings in related works by Ross McElwee (particularly Bright Leaves) and even that always-slippery master Chris Marker (personal essay films), or inestimable super-artists like the montage master Dziga Vertov of Man With a Movie Camera (complete w/ plenty of Prokofiev) and, more à propos (as My Winnipeg is something of a pisstake), the Jean Vigo of À propos de Nice (revolutionary modernist city films). Narrating himself into and out of the city and family clutches (the pubic, furry, buffalo lap of each) in a vain attempt to have done with both his mother and his city – a truly impossible task – Maddin also uses his usual, Whitman-esque declamatory poet voice (also found in his marvelous essays and reviews) to try once and for all to unbury that blasted dead father who went out so quietly like a “puff of cigarette smoke.” Maddin lets us know that he has sublet his childhood home and cast lookalike actors as his siblings, but ingeniously pretends that Ann Savage (castrating untra-vixen of his favorite poverty row noir, Detour) is actually his real mother and that his father has been buried under the living room rug, a bulge of hardly repressed abject presence. The whole thing is routed in a dream on a train leaving “the heart of the heart of the continent,” but these ghosts and obsessions, living and dead, always have a way of subverting escape attempts as in the labyrinthine stories of Jorge Luis Borges. As with Cowards and Brand, this is world cinema at its most exploratory, personal, and profound. It is also fucking hilarious in its acute dispensation of paradoxical goosepimples (particularly if one knows Winnipeg at all). Nothing in contemporary Canadian cinema touches this shit save maybe for the eerily similar, but not even remotely funny, opening Toronto section of Peter Mettler’s Gambling, Gods, and LSD. As Bergson says in The Creative Mind: “it grasps a succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into the present which is already blending into the future.” My Winnipeg is just that: an unmissable evolutionary work of the creative mind. In that sense, at least, one needn’t know Winnipeg at all. We all have our own palimpsest of furry laps.