Film and the City by George Melnyk

Author:George Melnyk [Melnyk, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781927356593
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

THE CITY OF TRANSGRESSIVE DESIRES

Melodramatic Absurdity in Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and My Winnipeg (2007)

While Montréal and Toronto have attracted a plurality of cinematic interpretations, smaller Canadian cities generally lack the critical mass of filmmakers to do the same. Winnipeg stands at the same level as Québec City: it has only one prominent narrative filmmaker, Guy Maddin. Jason Woloski, writing in 2003, described Maddin’s importance in the province and the country: “In the pond of the Manitoba film industry, he is easily the biggest fish there is. . . . Within the pond that is the Canadian film industry, Maddin as fish becomes a bit smaller.”1 Since 2003, Maddin’s rise in the film world has accelerated. The two films discussed in this chapter, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg, have made major contributions to his growing stature both nationally and internationally. Maddin has gained this reputation by reimagining contemporary cinema in a style that so far has defied emulation. His creative play on archaic film styles from the late silent and early talkie period (circa 1930) is unique in cinema. When The Artist, a silent film, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2012, Maddin’s vision received a small measure of validation as a postmodernist conceit.

In comparison to the diverse films about Toronto or Montréal discussed earlier, the imaginings of this solo author formulate a singular cinematic Winnipeg.2 Maddin’s construction of Winnipeg is tied to an idiosyncratic artistic expression that makes its urban imaginary difficult to dissect. Maddin confirmed this difficulty when he explained his admiration for surrealist filmmaking, for what he described as “the idea of using completely disparate or unconnected objects and combining them to create a subconscious product and to create an indecipherable effect.”3 Deciphering Maddin’s Winnipeg is indeed as convoluted a task as deciphering films by the earlier surrealists.

In order to discover Maddin’s Winnipeg and to evaluate whether his work speaks for a wider sense of the city, one must first be able to read his style, which is remarkably nonconformist. He is the postmodernist par excellence: his deliberately retro film style is a playful “cocktail of contradictions” that aligns with the pastiche approach of postmodern art in borrowing elements from the past and wedding them to the present.4 In the two films discussed here, the use of this style to recreate Winnipeg leads the audience to see Winnipeg through an archaic lens that automatically turns the city into a historical artifact, a presence whose past is all absorbing. Winnipeg appears as a memory, a reconstructed past, a dream of what once was. While Lepage does something similar in Le Confessionnal through a straightforward use of flashbacks, his film always grounds its audience in the present. Maddin, in contrast, takes us immediately into the past of cinema and therefore the past of Winnipeg.

Both Robert Lepage and Guy Maddin were born in the cities featured in their films and both have created films that directly address their experience of growing up.

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