You are here: Home | Resources | Doc Reviews | My Winnipeg

My Winnipeg

Other articles in "Doc Reviews"

by Rita Ribas
Standing confidently in a genre of its own, My Winnipeg sweeps us on a whirlwind journey into the core of Guy Maddin’s frenetic creative genius. Seamlessly blending fact and fiction, past and present, this film acts both as an autobiographical essay and an oddball account of the history of Manitoba, Maddin’s hometown.

The first 15 minutes of the film are the hardest to watch. For someone who’s never been introduced to Maddin’s films it takes a while to settle into his particularly wacky style and to get a feel for where the film is going.

Maddin drops us right into his feverish dream-like world and we spend the first few minutes wondering if and when we are going to ‘wake up’. But soon enough you realise that it’s not about ‘waking up’, but letting yourself drift along this stream-of-consciousness type journey, narrated throughout by Maddin’s highly poetic, almost tactile prose.

With the chugging, repetitive rhythm of a train, this film takes us simultaneously backwards and forwards in time. History is understood not as a linear progression, but a dream-like labyrinth of memory that traps fragments of the past and the present, distorting our notion of history and reality. You really get the feeling of being lost in time in what Maddin describes as “snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg.”
The main themes explored in My Winnipeg are the notions of home and memory. Home is both a place and time to long for, but also something that Maddin is desperately trying to escape or ‘wake up’ from – much like the Freudian concept of the uncanny or the ‘unheimlich’.

One rather funny way in which Maddin attempts escape is by ‘filming his way’ out of the city. He experiments with the re-imagining of his autobiography by juxtaposing home movies and photos with re-enactments of scenes from his past, using actors in place of family members.

This autobiographical account of Maddin’s personal history is juxtaposed with intriguingly odd facts about the history of Manitoba, his hometown.

It really is very hard to discern reality from fiction. Some of the ‘facts’ Maddin feeds us seem so odd that they couldn’t possibly be made up. One such fact includes the day there was a fire at a paddock and the horses escaped, only to flee into the icy river where they drowned and were frozen in place for several months, with their heads protruding from the snow like, Maddin says, "11 knights on a vast white chessboard."

Whether Maddin is telling the truth or not, it doesn’t matter. You get the sense that he is painting a heartfelt picture of his personal notion of ‘home’. Fictions become poetic metaphors for the very real and very personal relationship he has with his hometown. So although My Winnipeg isn’t quite a documentary in the traditional sense, there is certainly a profound truth within this special breed of what he calls ‘docu-fantasia’.

Back to Doc Reviews