Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg

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The trailer is up for Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Obviously one of the films I'm most excited to see this year. The trailer is playing up Maddin's own tendency for tongue-in-cheek Freudian melodrama (with his mother being played former B-movie starlet Ann Savage, who was the femme fatale in the ultra-low-budget 1946 film noir Detour), but I'm more curious about the vignettes of true history Maddin interweaves into the film (I was stunned to find out the most fanciful image, where a fire at a racetrack caused eleven horses to flee into the river which froze up to their necks,  killing them but leaving their heads free for people to discover the next day "like eleven knights on a vast white chessboard" is apparently true)

There's other stuff here I'd like to see that I also know is true (seances held at the Manitoba Legislature, with its Masonic symbolism embedded in its architecture;  the University of Manitoba has an apparently QUITE large archive of spiritualist  photography form our city which fell for spiritual mediums in a big way in the 1920s), the re-enactment of "If Day" where in World War 2 Winnipeggers actually staged in downtown Winnipeg a full Nazi rally in uniform to show others what would happen if we lose.

Of course those incidents are juxtaposed with somewhat more questionable claims like Winnipeg having the most sleepwalkers per capita, and that Winnipeg once had an amusement park named Happyland (true) that was destroyed in a bison stampede (not so true)., so anyone unfamiliar with Winnipeg should keep this in mind when they watch this film.

Maddin also takes a look at more recent history and rails against the destruction of the Eaton's department store building that was the centrepiece of downtown for decades,  as well as the destruction of the Winnipeg Arena, and while he does have a point, I do think this film is a significant turning point for this particular school  of Winnipeg-centric nostalgia. In the past twenty (and especially the last ten years) the population of Winnipeg has significantly changed that I just don't the current generations looking quite the same way at the local cultural debris the same way as my generation does. TV is no longer the focal medium for the new generations, so there are no kids being exposed to the horrors of those Clifford's department store ads where heavily made up women in fur coats and with glassy-eyed smiles wander past fuzzily blue-screened still photographs of Winnipeg while the Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More" played, or the wonders of public access television that gave us Math With Marty and the septuagenarian old ladies who rocked out as The Cosmopolitans, but it might be for the best. While nostalgia can give warmth and a need to reinvent one's past as something better than it really was, it can also serve as the perfect point for one to avoid dealing with the present, and the need to shape our future to be as good as we would prefer to remember the past.

No idea when My Winnipeg will open locally though.