Stanlkey Kubrick once said that Bergman, Fellini and De Sica were the only filmmakers who he thought weren't "artistic opportunists", meaning that whatever they made they had to make, not for any real financial consideration and that either they wrote or had other people write films for them. While I might not yet put Maddin quite as high in the ranks of masters as those Kubrick mention (albeit I've yet to see some of Maddin's obscurer efforts like Careful), I would add Maddin to that list of those in terms of never making a film to sell out or go for commercial pursuits. He has to make films like My Winnipeg just as Allen Ginsberg would have to pick up a pen and write about the city. And every time he makes a film it's about film-making, about himself, about life and history and family and finding oneself over and over. Maddin is more accurately like Fellini in that if one were to ask "are you self-indulgent" they would say (maybe deadpan maybe not) "Yeah... And?"
In the case of My Winnipeg he takes a character on a train as the centerpiece (very loosely one at that) and transposes on him going through history - of the city of Winnipeg, of childhood, of and of his own sort of mental state connected to both. This "character" of sorts, if he even is one, is making a film about his family (because nothing says self-portrait like that) casting actors in the roles of his brothers and sister (even if one of them has been deceased for decades) and Ann Savage as his "mother" who in the film within My Winnipeg is a slightly loopy actress who can't always remember her lines. But for Maddin this isn't enough, of course, so he puts in folklore, the lineage of hockey in the city, of the tragedy of the hockey arenas (one being demolished the other sprouting up like a corporate weed), of what the city is like in January, what it's like to go to the local three-tier swimming pool, or the mystical power of forks - not silverware, like forks in the road.
As with other Maddin works like Brand Upon the Brain, one cannot really see My Winnipeg as classifiable. You just have to see it for yourself. I'm not sure if this is the best place to start with My Winnipeg, but it couldn't hurt. The only very slight thing, not exactly a downside, is that the completely and wonderfully cracked sense of humor Maddin has is not quite as in full force as in his masterpiece Brand Upon the Brain. And while the scenes with Ann Savage are rather incredible just for their 'is-it-or-is-it' sense of autobiography (maybe the deer scene is based on a real thing and the 'give-us-dinner-or-parakeet' isn't is a juicy question), they don't quite strike the same person chord as when Maddin goes into, oddly enough, documentarian mode with the city.
In part this is through him talking, as if in a mode not too unlike Michael Moore in Roger & Me on Flynt, to begrudge something like the old department store being demolished into a gaudy hockey arena that barely even counts as anything, in his eyes. It's moving to see him, as narrator, describe what happened to the hockey teams, those arenas, and then how one level didn't demolish since it was added on by the NHL in the 70s. Even better still is to see him insert "footage" of an senior-citizen hockey team that continues to play even as demolishing is taking place in the old Winnipeg arena. It all gets capped with a reminiscing of his father, who he says died a slow death, "shrinking in smoke until he was gone" once he lost his job at the hockey arena.
My Winnipeg is loaded with visual wonders that include the three "symbols" that seem to overlap the dreamer on the train (one of these might be a woman's crotch, I still can't be sure), the images of Ann Savage as a super-omniscient Mother of Winnipeg, and that pug, apparently a girlfriend of the director's, wandering around in the snowy January nights. My Winnipeg is epic poetry and epic film-making, but compact and made personal and warped, like digging through a wizard's scrapbook.
In the case of My Winnipeg he takes a character on a train as the centerpiece (very loosely one at that) and transposes on him going through history - of the city of Winnipeg, of childhood, of and of his own sort of mental state connected to both. This "character" of sorts, if he even is one, is making a film about his family (because nothing says self-portrait like that) casting actors in the roles of his brothers and sister (even if one of them has been deceased for decades) and Ann Savage as his "mother" who in the film within My Winnipeg is a slightly loopy actress who can't always remember her lines. But for Maddin this isn't enough, of course, so he puts in folklore, the lineage of hockey in the city, of the tragedy of the hockey arenas (one being demolished the other sprouting up like a corporate weed), of what the city is like in January, what it's like to go to the local three-tier swimming pool, or the mystical power of forks - not silverware, like forks in the road.
As with other Maddin works like Brand Upon the Brain, one cannot really see My Winnipeg as classifiable. You just have to see it for yourself. I'm not sure if this is the best place to start with My Winnipeg, but it couldn't hurt. The only very slight thing, not exactly a downside, is that the completely and wonderfully cracked sense of humor Maddin has is not quite as in full force as in his masterpiece Brand Upon the Brain. And while the scenes with Ann Savage are rather incredible just for their 'is-it-or-is-it' sense of autobiography (maybe the deer scene is based on a real thing and the 'give-us-dinner-or-parakeet' isn't is a juicy question), they don't quite strike the same person chord as when Maddin goes into, oddly enough, documentarian mode with the city.
In part this is through him talking, as if in a mode not too unlike Michael Moore in Roger & Me on Flynt, to begrudge something like the old department store being demolished into a gaudy hockey arena that barely even counts as anything, in his eyes. It's moving to see him, as narrator, describe what happened to the hockey teams, those arenas, and then how one level didn't demolish since it was added on by the NHL in the 70s. Even better still is to see him insert "footage" of an senior-citizen hockey team that continues to play even as demolishing is taking place in the old Winnipeg arena. It all gets capped with a reminiscing of his father, who he says died a slow death, "shrinking in smoke until he was gone" once he lost his job at the hockey arena.
My Winnipeg is loaded with visual wonders that include the three "symbols" that seem to overlap the dreamer on the train (one of these might be a woman's crotch, I still can't be sure), the images of Ann Savage as a super-omniscient Mother of Winnipeg, and that pug, apparently a girlfriend of the director's, wandering around in the snowy January nights. My Winnipeg is epic poetry and epic film-making, but compact and made personal and warped, like digging through a wizard's scrapbook.