si un jour
by Douglas Messerli
Guy Maddin (screenwriter and director), George
Toles (dialogue) My Winnipeg / 2007
Throughout
much of this early “documentation” Maddin focuses on sleepy
travelers—particularly the actor who plays him, Darcy Fehr—who seem unable to
awaken themselves. In an often fanciful but, nonetheless, illuminating
introduction to the new Criterion edition of Maddin’s film, Wayne Koestenbaum
declares that this train-obsessed film uses the locomotive as a symbol of the
cinematic apparatus, a kind of loop tape that connects it with all the trains
of the 20th century, including the nightmarish rides of the Jews to
concentration camps of World War II represented in Claude Lanzmann’s Soah,
while also calling up Andy Warhol’s “fixed-camera vision of a fellated man’s
ecstatic face” in his Blow Job which resembles, at times, Fehr’s image
as reflected in the constantly shifting light.
If
this duality seems, at first, more than a little irreverent in its comparisons
between the extermination of a race with moments of ecstatic sex, there is,
nonetheless, an element truth to Kostenbaum’s assertions. For Maddin’s
film—while not truly concerned with the extermination of a race—is interested
in the possible death of people who cannot escape their own pasts, connecting
it, in numerous ways with both sexual and spiritual rapture, the kind of
rapture also found in films themselves, which results often in a trance-like,
stuporous state of being. The only way to escape this condition, Maddin as
narrator argues, is to go back and explore life itself through a dissection of
the film, to replay the loop by recreating its intermittent cuts which will
perhaps release him, his fellow citizens, and us from its deadly charm.
Maddin’s My Winnipeg, accordingly, is itself an irreverent voyage
back through memory, combining private life with public, family with the
community as a whole with threads that are
Another
such tale involves the burning of city’s racetrack (a real event) which, in
Maddin’s dark work, ends symbolically in the track- horses attempting to escape
and rushing into the freezing rivers from which, for that entire winter, their
heads protruded, revealing the anguish in which they died, reminding us, again,
of the citizens without the possibility of escape.
In
other words, in Maddin’s black comedy version of his beloved-hated hometown,
sex and death, ecstasy, and destruction are interminably combined; and these
two are linked even closer to the images suggested by Kostenbaum’s opposing
cinematic friezes observed in Blow Job and Soah.
Finally. in the events surrounding a real World War II dramatization of
a speculation (“What if…Hitler were to invade take over our city?”) everything
is linked up within the film’s speculative and disjunctive structure. Through
the perversity of the city fathers, Nazis, in the form of acting and costumed
soldiers and officers, overtake the city, issue edicts, and potentially
terrorize the sleepwalkers in an attempt, apparently, to bring them to their
senses. The citizens of Winnipeg and the surrounding areas financially paid for
these events: during the so-called “If-day” and the weeks following 45 million
dollars through the purchase of Victory Bonds. Yet what wonders what those
citizens, particularly their children, actually learned or even thought about
these dramatized tableaus. Did they viscerally share, if only temporarily and
empathetically, the fears and horrors of those the Nazis had conquered and
despised? Or was it simply an amusement, another day in Happyland or a day at
the Public Baths—beneath which Maddin magically adds two levels lying below the
family friendly pool, worlds divided, once again, by sex, girls, and boys,
wherein, at least in the lowest level, gangs of naked, hairless children raced
about in a kind of sexual ecstasy? Just
as poet Hart Crane asked of Edgar Allan Poe, in his locomotive-like voyage by
subway beneath the East River on his way home to Brooklyn in his long poem The
Bridge, did the poet remain awake or sleep for the remainder of his voyage,
was he drunk or sober at the time of his death in a polling house tavern? so
does Maddin ask similar questions of his fellow Winnepegans.
No
one can sufficiently answer these questions, and, accordingly, Maddin is not
easily freed from the intense ties he has with the past. Like most of his
compatriots he may be forced to emotionally and mentally remain where he began,
a dead-man-walking without the vision for a new life. His solution is to create
a new pin-up, cartoon-like figure, Citizen Girl, the heroine of the 1919
worker’s newspaper The Citizen. In short, he leaves it in the hands of
the brave Winnipeg citizens of the past, those who created the city not simply
by ordering it up or paying for its construction but through the hard work of
their bodies. Neither imagination (or lack of it) nor even art can create (or
recreate) a city; only those who “build it,” sexually and spiritual, and die
within it can do that. A reimagining, as expressed in My Winnipeg, is
just that—a personal dream of a homeland. The real thing—whatever we perceive
that to be—sits still on the prairie, rising out of steel, rust, and glass,
allowing one to safely travel, after all, away from it on a voyage to the rest
of one’s life.
Los Angeles, February 21, 2015
Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February
2015).
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