Filmmaker Magazine lauds My Winnipeg
'I was born on the 28th of February, 1956, at old Grace Hospital,' Canadian archdirector Guy Maddin muses in the new publication My Winnipeg. 'Fifty years later, after the end of a long relationship with a girlfriend, I found myself...right across the street from the old Grace. Nice to know that in half a century, much of that time spent planning my escape from Winnipeg, I'd ended up precisely 100 feet from my birthplace.' With a homesick lament as earnest and tender as that of Proust's in Swann's Way, Guy Maddin returns to Winnipeg, his greatest inspiration, with a novelization of his acclaimed 2007 docu-fantasia of the same title. As an artist whose cinematic exposition of 'home' has resulted from a 'mapping' of individual and collective childhood fantasies, Maddin's most recent turn toward the written word allows him to pursue a cartography of manifold genres. These include an annotated screenplay of the original film, photographs, doodles, interviews and various other textual bricolage, all of which gives My Winnipeg the aura of both scrapbook and atlas.
A fabulist of Winnipeg's subterranean plat, the author's unique voice — at times both diagnostic and operatic, defender and defamer — shares a common style with Walter Benjamin, whose orotund atlas of Paris known as The Arcades Project is an archetype for Maddin's enchanting dérive. 'It always made sense to developers to build on a grid system, but there were these rivers which screwed the grid along 115 banks, so the city more closely resembles, when viewed from above, a plate with a few waffles randomly dealt out on it, minus the syrup,' Maddin explains of his spatial mapping of Winnipeg, striking a distinctively Benjaminian tone. '...I imagine yet more grids, perhaps subterranean, which would reveal a drop-shadow map of the same streets above... and then another thousand grids — conceptual ones — that intersect each street at right angles...and then why not another plate of invisible waffles hovering above Winnipeg, a faint echo of the streets below.'
Like the minor histories that typify Benjamin's circuitous passages, Maddin's My Winnipeg builds upon the miniature demiworlds and urban legends that flow beneath the grid of a city's official heritage. Thus, within My Winnipeg's desultory archives, Maddin recounts the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal (and its deleterious effects on central Canada's status as a transcontinental trade hub) alongside the simultaneous blinding of Maddin's father by a misplaced broach pin; the founding of Happyland, a collection of shanties which reside on the rooftops of the city's tallest buildings in order to keep the homeless out of sight; or the popular mayor's campaign promise to seal the entire city under a vast plastic dome.
Maddin succeeds brilliantly in this underworld tour of 'Back lanes, Sleepwalkers & Heartsick Architecture' largely because of My Winnipeg's dimensional style. While the columnar orientation of the text allows the author's rich prose to burst from the page in contoured skyline swathes, the use of footnoting conversely draws the reader deeper into the city's velvety heart. As with The Arcades, Maddin is resolutely focused on the interior world — houses, trains, department stores, arenas and secretive offices of the elite — as the most poetic of spaces. Winnipeggers have long-suffered a frost-induced agoraphobia in which the home plays the dual role of dwelling and hearth, explains the author. 'There are days in the winter when no one goes out unnecessarily...lest we die of exposure.' What this produces in the pages of My Winnipeg is a fetish of the threshold, or the exploration of worlds within worlds, to paraphrase Benjamin. Maddin goes so far as to include a floor plan of his childhood home at 800 Ellice Street, including the locations of the family television and toys, and a detailed recollection of the house's persnickety hallrunner. In Maddin's screwball imagination, the house stands in as a miniature dream museum of Winnipeg just as the city is itself a giant house to be wandered through and discovered.
Included as an addendum is a lengthy interview with fellow Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, which provides an excellent introduction for Maddin novices. Their perambulating conversation frames the director's recent work within a larger cinematic and literary canon.
