My Winnipeg

MY WINNIPEG   ****

Guy Maddin

2007

IDEA:  Stuck on a train full of sleeping passengers, Guy Maddin dreams of finding his way out of Winnipeg.

BLURB:  An exemplary, modestly magisterial work of autobiography and folk confabulation, city symphony and urban mythologizing, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg seizes the spectator like a lucid dream. Carried along on relentless flurries of memory, history, and imagination, it creates a portrait of place not in its concrete reality, but in its lived and remembered experience, its psychic undercurrents and affective reverberations. In a kind of culmination of his fixation with making the past return, Maddin sculpts from the snowdrifts of his mind his most cohesive primal fantasy, reanimating his-story by answering the archaic anxieties and drives that fuel the cinematic project. Through his hypnagogic vision of Winnipeg, he creates the ultimate urban origin myth to restore, however briefly, presence and historicity to a city blurred by blizzards; analogously, to relocate his identity by enacting his self-formation, harnessing the psychical traces of his childhood and inscribing them in an external imaginary world. Although Maddin, as ever, sometimes overdoes the cuteness of his conceits, My Winnipeg has such a bottomless supply of mystery, humor, and poignancy it is rarely hobbled. There are few films that so intimately understand the roles imagination and metaphor play in how we give meaning to places, that reflect Ben Highmore’s conception of the city as a “tangle of physicality and symbolism, the sedimentation of various histories, the mingling of imaginings and experience.” My Winnipeg makes palpable the reciprocity and interpenetration of body and place, psychology and geography, past and present, one endlessly shaping the other.