“My Winnipeg” at the CCA tonight

WHAT? Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg
WHEN? Tonight at 7pm
WHERE? Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920 Baile (Guy metro, St. Mathieu exit)
HOW MUCH? Free!

For some reason I’m not surprised that a city as cold, isolated and haunted by ghosts as Winnipeg has produced a filmmaker like Guy Maddin. Like a feverish dream, Maddin’s films are bizarre in a way that is alternately off-putting and enticing. Now, Maddin has made his first “documentary,” My Winnipeg, turning his attention to the city that has given him so much inspiration. Here’s a bit from a CBC article on the movie from last September:

Maddin superimposes his cinematic obsessions onto his civic narrative. Winnipeg is a city where historical eras are stacked up on top of each other, so it makes sense to tell its story in a montage of Soviet propaganda (Citizen Girl, a sort of a proletarian pin-up, flies around righting social wrongs), German Expressionist dance film and throbbing ’50s melodrama. With all these layers, even old-time Winnipeggers will have a hard time sorting out Maddin’s revisions. (Was the Happyland amusement park really flattened by a bison stampede?) What outsiders might think is impossible to say. “My dream is to show this film at the Berlin Film Festival and have hundreds of Germans watching it as a travelogue of Winnipeg,” says Maddin.

As Maddin narrates, his camera digs for hidden histories, with footage of the Masonic messages built into the architecture of the provincial legislative buildings; or still photos of the ectoplasmic seances that gripped the city in the 1920s. He gives erotic dimensions to the 1919 General Strike (in silhouetted animation re-enactments, the chaste girls at St. Mary’s Academy eye those work-hardened Bolshevists). He even makes explicit political points: In a rare comment on the contemporary scene, Maddin mourns the loss of the Eaton’s building and curses what he perceives as the bland, blind mediocrity of Winnipeg city leaders.

The film mines the poetic in the mundane, whether it’s the city’s mysterious labyrinth of back lanes or the orange Jell-O at the The Bay’s Paddlewheel restaurant. Always, Maddin envisions the city as snowy, drifting, somnolent, stupefied by nostalgia. “Winnipeg has 10 times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world,” the narrator claims authoritatively, a statement clearly more metaphorical than statistical.

My Winnipeg will screen this evening at the CCA, for free, at 7pm.