Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg... Guy Maddin discusses his first docu-phantasia, psychic traps, cold facts, the true nature of truth, and Ann Savagery

Narrated by its author, laden with lyrical repetition so as to send viewers into a wintry trance, My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s new “docu-phantasia,” proposes a prairie citizenry of somnambulists afflicted with acute nostalgia, geographically isolated, perpetually snowed-in, surrounded by vestiges of history, lulled by muffled train whistles, cursed with a labyrinthine conspiracy that keeps them from ever leaving, architecturally enveloped by a geometry of symbols alluding to occult municipal histories, grotesque sporting atrocities and aboriginal mysticism.

My Winnipeg delves headlong into Maddin’s private obsessions, actually going as far as re-enacting seemingly banal moments from Maddin’s childhood with a cast of professional actors—one of whom just happens to be Ann Savage, the long-retired star of the masterful, dream-like poverty row film noir Detour (1945). Comically inspired, a frenetic flurry of far-fetched facts, imminently id-soaked, and mostly shot in beautiful, grainy-as-all-hell black and white, the modus operandi of My Winnipeg pleasingly remains very close to that of Maddin’s blatantly autobiographical—and shamelessly fantastical—Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain! (06). Like those films, it deserves to be seen as among the most finest works in his 20-year career.

Maddin spoke to us by phone from his family’s cottage in Manitoba, where children could be heard uttering bloodcurdling screams in the distance. This interview was hosted by Vue Weekly.

JB: My Winnipeg opens with a close-up of Ann Savage—the actress, we later learn, who will be portraying your mother—taking some rather stern line-readings from you, while you remain off-screen. This choice of starting point has really stuck with me, because in a sense it seems to tell us right off the bat that what we’re witnessing is a sort of incantation on the part of the author, a history willed, even dictated into being.

Guy Maddin: That’s a nice way of putting it. It wasn’t in the script, but it seemed the simplest way of portraying what kind of thoughtless, self-centered lengths I as the documentarian was willing to go to. Even if you had to figure it out backwards, it was my way of saying, Hey, I’m just bullying my way into your field of vision to show you a mythology I’ll do anything to make. The idea of starting out by forcing a woman against her will to say a line a certain way struck me as potentially confusing, but apt.

JB: How concerned were you with getting things right with regards to the Winnipeg history, the Winnipeg culture, the Winnipeg persona?

GM: I just felt that, having been commissioned to make a highly personal portrait of my hometown, if I was honest with myself I wouldn’t have to research anything other than my feelings. Canadians are such lousy self-mythologizers: the preferred medium for mythologizing for the last century has been motion pictures, yet Winnipeg has never really attempted to exploit that, so I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to get the greatest hits all into one movie. I’m always asked how much of My Winnipeg is true. People expect me to say none of it, but the truth to closer to all of it. I did make some factual errors, unintentionally. For example, Winnipeg isn’t actually the coldest city in the world—Ulan Bator, Mongolia is colder. I remember reading that Winnipeg was the coldest when I was a kid. Maybe they have more accurate stats now. Maybe global warming has shifting the standings. Anyway the factual part of My Winnipeg is mostly oral history stuff. I like to break the film down as one-third fact, one-third legend—which is usually truer than fact—and than just one-third wishful thinking, laments and complaints.

JB: To use Werner Herzog’s very useful terminology, I think My Winnipeg trades in “ecstatic truth” rather than “the accountant’s truth.”

GM: When I first heard Herzog use that term, I was thrilled. But I think what I’m after is maybe almost more of the hysterical truth.

JB: For me at least, My Winnipeg feels part of a trilogy with Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! They circle around the same carrion. They all share this particularly urgent delirium. And building on the strengths of its predecessors, My Winnipeg turns out to be one of your most fluid films. It sort of just clips by.

GM: Well Brand Upon the Brain! had a live element, the live narration and live foley and so on. And I think I became more of a showman than a filmmaker then. Filmmakers tend to make things only for themselves, but once we added that live element, I wanted to make sure that people in the theatre were engaged. I really learned the rewards of making that connection, so I always had the audience in mind while making My Winnipeg, from start to finish.

JB: How have Winnipeggers responded to the film? Were you at all apprehensive?

GM: I really didn’t know what to expect. I thought they might just go berserk with anger, because whenever I showed the movie in other cities—Berlin, Sydney, didn’t matter where—there was always some irascible Winnipegger who’d stand up and complain that I left out the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football club, or the Taste of Manitoba food fair, something like that. All the Winnipeggers I ran into were really unwelcome sights, so I thought, Holy smokes, 1600 Winnipeggers crammed into our old vaudeville palace could really turn into a dangerous mob. But they ended up being a really generous, warm crowd. They seemed delighted by these jokes that seemed wedged in there just for them. They even gave my mom a standing ovation.

JB: How much do you consider your development as a filmmaker to be inextricably linked to your essential confinement to Winnipeg?

GM: I don’t think I would have made the same work elsewhere. I remember when I first started out I was determined not to have any association with Winnipeg and went out of my way not mention it. But I eventually found that the more I addressed directly the place where I dwelled I’d feel more connected with the work.

JB: I realize of course that you do escape Winnipeg on a regular basis, but at this point, would you say that it’ll likely remain your permanent residence for the rest of your life?

GM: [Sighs] Yeah, probably. [Sighs again] Might as well just buy the burial plot now. It’s true that whenever I’m in another city I’m happy there for a month, but then I start missing home. And then as soon as I go home it’s… disappointing somehow. I don’t know…

JB: I’m not trying to depress you here.

GM: [Laughs] It’s okay… Really.

JB: But, cementing its connection to Detour, I got this sense in My Winnipeg that you’re like Tom Neal, and Winnipeg itself is your femme fatale, that you’re doomed to return again and again to her, like she’s this maternal siren.

GM: That’s very true. I’ve never thought of it that way, but maybe you’ve put your finger on it. She’s my Barbara Stanwyck and I’m her Walter Neff. We have kind of a mad love relationship, where if Winnipeg looks at me the wrong way I’ll slap it across the face, and then lose myself in its curves… Gee, I really like that.

Inland Empire: Lynch and Dern crawl deep inside to break out, crack up, throw down the gauntlet for exploring the new digital landscape

A new neighbour with a Martian-like head drops in on actress Nikki Grace (the fearless, inimitable, marvelous Laura Dern). She accurately predicts that Nikki will be selected for a much-sought-after role and then recalls a folktale about a boy who, leaving his house one day, catches sight of himself in a mirror, inadvertently releasing evil unto the world.

The notion of evil residing in one’s reflection exists in many myths; in Inland Empire it brilliantly manifests as the fearful fascination one finds when one’s image looks back at them from a movie screen.

Polish mobsters, Hollywood prostitutes, movie people, a Balkan circus troupe, anthropomorphic rabbits confined to a room like the trio in No Exit: each of these milieus intersect, refracting off each other over the course of Inland Empire. Things shift from menacing, basically realistic intrigue into a layered world of overlapping anxieties and violence. Causality becomes overwhelmingly tenuous, lucidity evaporates and fantasy takes hold, clenching the fabric of the established reality in its bared teeth. Nikki’s new movie, it’s discovered, has secret, cursed roots in an earlier, unfinished production. She comes to identify with her adulterous role, so closely that her persona blurs into it completely.

While aligning to his previous tropes and unbridled appetite for portent, the self-distributed Inland Empire breaks much new ground for David Lynch. It’s an epic set—not on some vast landscape but in a largely insular, even interior region. It’s visually dynamic, hauntingly image-saturated, yet shot with low-grade DV cameras. It’s more resistant to simple summation than anything since Eraserhead, and so rich with a sense of discovery, goofy humour (enter a panhandling Harry Dean Stanton) and billowing strangeness as to be considered among Lynch’s masterworks.

Exiting a press screening for Inland Empire, I overheard one critic say, “Good thing they didn’t cut that down to only two-hours; then it wouldn’t have many any sense!” A clever quip, but misleading commentary. Yes, Inland Empire is three hours long, much of it audaciously perplexing, rippling with ambiguity even in its resolution. Admittedly, there’s the sense of Lynch being somewhat indecisive, inviting one too many freaks for dinner, but still I’d argue that the movie’s protracted duration itself is a key factor in how it works on you.

Like Hitchcock, Lynch is interested in “putting the audience through it,” the “it” signifying normally unpleasant sensations such as terror and unease. Inland Empire is extremely successful at inflicting unease and one of the ways in which it does so is through sheer hallucinatory relentlessness. Spend enough time in Nikki’s nightmare and you’ll leave the theatre feeling very much like you’ve been through something—and I don’t know about you, but this sort of transporting experience is precisely what I go to the movies hoping to have.

At a crucial juncture, Nikki is putting some groceries in her car when she spots some cryptic writing on a wall. She’s compelled to enter a darkened door and, in a memorably chilling sequence sees—in a manner of speaking—her reflection. From here, Nikki tumbles down the rabbit hole, where she’s lost for a very long time. She enters what appears to be a two-dimensional set. Once she’s inside, however, it proves to be a real, furnished bungalow, one Dorothy Vallens might have inhabited if she moved to the Los Angeles suburbs. She’s entered the labyrinth of Inland Empire, crossing over into a realm where identity, place and even time assume a tempestuous fluidity.

And Lynch himself has crossed over into new territory. His grainy DV creates unstable, textured shadows, looming close-ups, distorting rays of light and the most ghostly hand-held camerawork I think I’ve ever seen. (Lynch says what he loves about these cameras is that he can hold the image in the palm of his hand—accordingly, the camerawork assumes an unusually physical, choreographic quality.) He’s renovated his sensibility to embrace a now primitive technology, ironically employed to capture images of glamour; in doing so, he’s revealed glamour’s darkest underbelly, picking up where Mulholland Drive left off and moving even deeper into the empire of our movie-infected subconscious. 

As a post script, I think it's also worth mentioning that Inland Empire pretty much has my new favourite closing credit sequence ever, employing Nina Simone's rendition of 'Sinnerman' to a very different yet equally tremendous effect as Golden Door did the same year. It's wonderful, flashy, loopy, sort of delirious, featuring numerous cast members, friends, lip-synching performers, a monkey. It's also a shrewd move, a way to keep exasperated audiences in their seats (if they've made it this far...) rather than jolt up or run out screaming, to come down a bit from a long, frequently insane ride. 

Blood in the woods, occult geometries across the Atlantic: New American novels about 20th century catastrophe

Books time travel with a freedom and ease not granted to other mediums. Not having to physically show us the past, save what it plucks from its imaginary landscape to evoke in our minds, the novel need not concern itself with tracking down a dozen Model Ts or 3000 extras in togas to convince its audience that we’re in another time. The novel conveys the past with such immediacy because it does so through the consciousness of individual characters –though this is perhaps the greatest challenge posed to any artist. The new year has thus far deposited two striking new American novels into my hands that transport us to another time, one from a long-established master, one from a formidable emerging writer making a hell of an impression with his second work. Both concern distinctive moments in the 20th century and summon up scenes of iconic violence to punctuate intimate stories.

It’s tough to know what exactly to make of Russell Banks’ The Reserve (Knopf, $32). Set in the 1930s, it begins with the first meeting between Vanessa Cole, a man-eating, mentally unstable heiress and divorcée, and Jordan Groves, a married-with-children painter and pilot known as much for his scarlet politics, Hemingwayesque travels and extramarital adventures as his painting. That these two might collide in some unruly erotic entanglement seems a no-brainer, but Banks has set a course for an altogether more sanguine melodrama, making the intermittent chapters alternately describing the flight of the doomed Hindenburg and an air strike on a Franco military stronghold more than mere historical context. There will be blood, indeed.

I’ve long admired Banks’ work. In the case of Affliction, I was awestruck by the way in which Banks seemed to stake out some territory within the nightmare world of Jim Thompson –whose brilliantly chilling crime novels The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 set the mould for stories of small town lawmen with deep roots in their local communities and even deeper troubles in their fragile psyches– and making it all his own, bringing a certain expansion of character background, subjective psychological tension and finely detailed atmosphere than was typical of Thompson’s concise, more genre-bound prose. Yet with The Reserve, which is also set in an isolated community, that of wealthy vacationers and poor townees in the Adirondacks, Banks is not just exploiting select elements of a thriller for literary ends. He’s diving right in and just whipping up an unabashed thriller of his own.

There’s an unmistakable trashiness to Vanessa and Jordan’s tale of lurid transgression, replete with an aiding and abetting local yokel named Hubert St. Germain, a guy who could have easily narrated any number of Thompson novels, a lonely widower who’s sweetly natured but just too soft in the head to prevent catastrophe when presented with the opportunity. And there’s a singular strangeness in reading something of this sort realized by the likes of Banks. The result is, as you might expect, a bit uneven, but once you get an idea of what you’re in for, The Reserve does offer its share of salty thrills and moments of elegant, subtle, insightful imagery and emotional depth –and all in the same 287 page novel.

Zachary Lazar’s Sway (Little, Brown, $27.99) sweeps us forward into the 1960s and focuses from page one on the overtly sinister currents that ran through that decade that finally choked on its own rhetoric of peace and love. Its cast of characters will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the popular culture of the period: Brian Jones, founding member and first casualty of The Rolling Stones, Kenneth Anger, the occultist and underground filmmaker behind ‘Scorpio Rising’ and ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother,’ and Bobby Beausoleil, the would-be rock star who featured prominently in ‘Demon Brother,’ became a member of Charles Manson’s “family,” and was convicted in 1970 for the murder of Gary Hinman. How these three connect, in the flesh and otherwise, seems in its own way the manifestation of some occult geometry, but what’s at the base of each individual story is some magnetic attraction to the mystery and power of darkness.

The very first scene in Sway is loaded with a potent air of hazy menace, with Beausoleil taking a quiet little ride with Charlie into town, where some anonymous middle class residence waits to be penetrated in the mid-afternoon suburban stillness. Lazar then takes through a tour of cold water flats in London where skinny English boys try to channel a certain demonic spirit out of their guitars and, soon after, to a blur of nightclubs where these same boys discover that this spirit can make girls go crazy and boys charge the stage. They’re playing music from America, and that music contains a key to intoxicating violence. Finally, Lazar chronicles Anger’s cultivation of his long, arduous career in the international fringe, his films forging alliances with Jean Cocteau and later on Mick Jagger, who gradually usurps Jones as the guiding hand of the Stones. And Lazar writes a haunting, if decidedly unsentimental elegy to Jones as he shrinks away from stage and studio, from his weirdly symbiotic relationship with Anita Pallenberg –who winds up in the arms of the rather fun, amiably portrayed Keith Richards– and finally into that swimming pool, the unlikely site of his unexplainable death at the age of 27, just one of many sour notes that brought that revolutionary decade to a morbid, exhausted close –and brings Sway to its fascinatingly shadowy conclusion.