History and hilarity in Guy Maddin’s tales from ‘The Peg’. By DAVID LEVINSON.

RIFFING phantasmic in My Winnipeg – a delirious paean to his lifelong place-of-residence, commissioned by The Documentary Channel – Guy Maddin ponders: “What’s a city without its ghosts?” The answer arrives when – after two reels spent subsumed in a flickering underworld – the film jolts into the near-present, allowing Maddin to commiserate the loss of a lost totem of his youth, the Winnipeg Arena. As it turns out though, even the garish stratum of archival footage isn’t enough to vanquish the film of Maddin’s catalogue of hang-ups, by now firmly secured across the body of his work; in the case of the hockey rink, Maddin boldly – and creepily – asserts that, growing up, it was “like a father to him”. His biological father, meanwhile, takes shape as a mound of dirt – stranded in a mock-up of his family living room, and granted physiognomy by an adorning rug – constituting the one demand made by his mother (played by B-movie hangover, Ann Savage) in return for her appearance in reconstructed scenes from his childhood. More than mere pomo chicanery, the movie draws its sense-of-purpose from Maddin’s untiring love affair with the genre tropes of yesteryear: Conjuring the arch hysteria of early melodrama, he turns Winnepeg into a shadowy limbo, whose triumvirate of keepers (a forked-river, the bison population, and the female lap...) exert an indefinable hold over him. Meanwhile, Maddin himself appears as a hostage on a train – forever falling victim to the city’s blanket spell of narcolepsy (as he dubiously attests, Winnipeg is home to the world’s highest sleepwalking rate), while offering a hilarious, literate commentary that dances between paranoiac ranting, autobiographical reminisce, and the frank unearthing of historical skeletons. In creating a world where fact freely colludes with folklore, and time itself seems like a distant entity, Maddin confirms that home is – in the most meaningful way possible – a state-of-mind.

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» Winter Sleeper: My Winnipeg