A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Guy Maddin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guy Maddin. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 7, 2026

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)

Ann Savage in My Winnipeg

Cast: Ann Savage, Louis Negin, Amy Stewart, Darcy Fehr, Brendan Cade, Wesley Cade, Lou Profeta, Fred Dunsmore, Kate Yacula, Jacelyn Lobay, Eric Nipp, Jennifer Palichuk, Guy Maddin (voice). Screenplay: Guy Maddin, George Toles. Cinematography: Jody Shapiro. Production design: Réjean Labrie. Film editing: John Gurdebeke.

A man on a train dozes and dreams, and we see his dreams because they are in a way ours. He is dreaming about the city he is trying to leave, which is at once the real city of Winnipeg, a remembered hometown, and a fantastic extrapolation from the actual place. Guy Maddin's "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg gets its power to seize the imagination from our own experiences growing up in a place with a family. Maddin sets out to recreate the merging of memory and feeling that makes up our dreams about people and places we have known, and he succeeds remarkably. It's a feat that can only be accomplished in the movies, the medium that is most often likened to dreams. I leave the exegesis and interpretation to others because it's a personal work that inspires personal reflection.    

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