One extremely strange and weird documentary which resonates the age old notion that fiction can only survive with non.
Where is home and why must we leave it? We gotta pinpoint where on Earth we’re leaving from before we can catch the next train out of there, asleep and harangued by a vortex of dreams and memories that tells us exactly why home is a place you shouldn’t stay too long. Hopefully I’ll wake up in time to catch my station before finding myself back in town again.
Possibly the strangest and most engaging documentary I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing, My Winnipeg (2007) takes you through the personal journey through director Guy Maddin’s childhood growing up there and his reminiscence over his beloved town, slashed to bits by civic bureaucracy, the peculiarities of its citizens and a whole laundry-list of implausible occurrences that have immortalised themselves in the city’s history – or in Guy’s subjectivity. Objective documentation is a thing of the past, we must move past these atavistic modes of representation and leave all of that to the news and the serious fact crazy documentary makers, here personal and public history get tangled in a three-way love triangle with the phantasmagoria of the internal mind. You tend to take absolutely everything he tells you about the city at face value, some of it indeed true, but the more outlandish claims that he delivers as facts with bullet proof conviction, you can’t help but believe those either, because it doesn’t really matter what’s true or not. Reality is one big joke and everything we see is through the narrow funnel of our sensory perception anyway so how does anyone know whether what I’m writing and you’re reading is real or not?
And this is precisely why he touts this as a docu-fantasia.
This is a guy who’s heavily influenced by the silent era films and you can tell where the flairs come out, the subliminal texts, the hazy black and white colour and so on. Both visually and aurally, this film is dense with character, layered to perfection like the inside of a strudel, it tastes just as good – especially with the creamy humour in his narration.
Interestingly enough for how blistering the movie is visually, tugging constantly at your eyes, there’s an innate somnambulance to it that makes you want to get some shut eye – well I suppose that’s because of the sleepwalking Winnipegers, but often times the imagery is very oneiric drifting in and out of consciousness as often as fact and fiction.
I watched the movie today for the first time after my lecturer desperately wanting to show it to us since last year. We got the prime treatment by being given the theatre room for once to enjoy the film on the big screen which really did it justice. The only thing better would be to watch it with my girlfriend as we both crease ourselves laughing. Under all the nonsense and sybaritic storytelling, this is a very intimate, handcrafted film that deserves your attention.
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