The border between fiction and non-fiction has evolved for decades by means of the continuous emergence of new techniques and technologies, each one considered more appropriate than its predecessors to represent reality. This vertiginous succession has followed the dynamics of a paradigm shift, replacing old styles with new ones in an apparently endless process: Grierson’s reenactments, for example, ceased to be truthful when direct cinema developed its observational mise-en-scène, while this was in turn challenged and replaced by the participatory approach of cinéma vérité.
Throughout the last century, documentary film was filled with all kinds of codes of authenticity to guarantee its scientific truthfulness, resulting in ‘the elaboration of a whole aesthetic of objectivity and the development of comprehensive technologies of truth capable of promoting what is right and what is wrong in the world, and by extension, what is “honest” and what is “manipulative” in documentary’, as postmodern theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha has criticised (1993: 94). In view of the codifying of documentary film as a genre or style, she has argued that ‘it no longer constitutes a mode of production or an attitude toward life, but proves to be only an element of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics)’ (1993: 99). Therefore, if documentary film is simply a matter of conventions, its visual features can be easily imitated, as many fake documentaries have demonstrated, from The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1966) to The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) through David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1967), Vérités et mensonges (F for Fake, Orson Welles, 1973), No Lies (Mitchell Block, 1973), Daughter Rite (Michele Citron, 1979) or This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984) to name just a few examples.
Fiction has always been present in one way or another within documentary film. Michael Renov talks about ‘fictive elements’ to refer to ‘instances of style, structure, and expositional strategy that draw on pre-existent (fictional) constructs or schemata to establish meanings and effects for audiences’ (2004: 22). His short-list of these elements includes ‘the construction of character as ideal type; the use of poetic language, narration, or musical accompaniment to heighten emotional impact or create suspense; the deployment of embedded narratives or dramatic arcs; and the exaggeration of camera angles, camera distance, or editing rhythms’ (ibid.). The degree of development of these borrowings from fiction determines the position of any documentary in the non-fiction spectrum, which has been defined by Craig Hight as ‘a continuum of fact-fiction forms that cross over generic boundaries’ (2008: 208). That is to say that, contrary to what the discourse of sobriety usually maintains, there is no strict opposition between the two poles of this spectrum, but rather a subtle gradation which admits multiple combinations.
The use of fiction techniques in documentary film has increased exponentially after postmodern theorists argued that modernist attempts to find a truthful representation of reality were just an aesthetic choice among many others. Nowadays, found footage has become a useful tool to reflect on the film construction of reality, and reenactments are again considered a valid strategy to represent what the camera, for whatever reason, could not record. This return to Griersonian old practices does not meant a step back regarding the modernist search for the real, but rather a broadening of the available resources to continue with ‘the search for the real within the fictional’, as Catherine Russell has written (1999: 254). According to Antonio Weinrichter, the main goal of these practices is not exactly to bring a hidden reality to light, but to reveal its deep meaning through real elements that acquire a strong metaphorical sense (2010: 272). Consequently, defining the documentary at the end of the last century required, in Brian Winston’s words, ‘turning back to considerations of how materials could be subjected to “creative treatment” and yet not totally fictionalised’ (1993: 56).
Regarding the limitations imposed by the discourse of sobriety, Renov has clearly argued that ‘the documentary image functions in relation to both knowledge and desire, evidence and lure, with neither term exerting exclusive control’ (2004: 101). Accordingly, the documentary gaze is ‘constitutively multiform, embroiled with conscious motives and unconscious desires, driven by curiosity no more than by terror and fascination’ (2004: 96). This claim to subjectivity indirectly supports the use of fiction techniques, provided that they serve to convey unconscious elements. In fact, avant-garde film had already paved the way for them by developing abstract forms that ‘metaphorically represent states of mind and emotional estates’ (Lane 2002: 13). These films renounced photographic realism to achieve what Bill Nichols has termed ‘emotional realism’, in which the audience still recognises a realistic dimension to the depicted experience because ‘it is like other emotional experiences we have had: the emotion itself is familiar and genuinely felt’ (2001: 93).
In the last few decades, the search for emotional realism has taken advantage of fiction techniques to explore intangible realities such as memories, feelings, perceptions and even fantasies, looking for a truthful way to represent both collective and individual imaginaries beyond the hazy line that separates fiction from non-fiction. Many autobiographical films, in particular, locate themselves on both sides of that line in order to ‘seek a self which is often hidden behind a mask, disintegrated or recomposed’, as Gregorio Martín Gutiérrez has pointed out (2010: 373). These hybrid works swing between ‘the “life story”, the search for a direction, an itinerary, one’s roots, and a continuous fragmentation in which the self seems to flee or dissolve’ (bid.). They are not fully faithful to the facts (when including facts) but rather to the feelings and emotions that lie behind them. Their main concern is thereby the inscription of the filmmaker’s subjectivity in the film, even through a blatant blend of real events and personal fabrications that ultimately leads autobiographical approach into the domain of self-fiction.
The two case studies in this chapter, Porto da Minha Infância (Porto of My Childhood, Manoel de Oliveira, 2001) and My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007), are two urban self-portraits made from explicit self-fictions: on the one hand, Portuguese filmmaker de Oliveira mobilises all kind of means of representation to recall his childhood and youth memories in his hometown, Porto, from fictional sequences to archival footage; while on the other, Canadian director Maddin reaches the point of appropriating real found footage to fake it in reenactments shot by himself, turning his fantasies into an alternative history of Winnipeg. These films, however, are still documentaries because they depict, above all, the filmmakers’ relation to their hometowns from the fictional logic of memory, exploring what should be named ‘the creative fake of reality’. Thus, both Oliveira and Maddin use their imagination to document their memories, portraying not only what they actually remember – missing cityscapes, past events, fleeting emotions, etc. – but also the way they recall these memoryscapes as artists and inhabitants of those cities.
Porto of My Childhood: A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man
1
Manoel de Oliveira’s extraordinary longevity (at the beginning of 2015, he was one hundred and six years old) has allowed him to develop a film career that spans from the silent era to the digital age. His lifetime has elapsed for almost the whole twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, although his mentality can be traced back to the nineteenth century since he was born in 1908 in a conservative Catholic family of wealthy industrialists and agricultural landowners. Considering these life circumstances, Galician critic Xurxo González argues that Oliveira’s film style has established a link between different periods of film history, from certain movements related to modernity, such as the avant-gardes, neorealism or the new waves, to the postmodern reinterpretations of older genres, such as costume drama or the historical film (2004: 35, 72).
His first work, the short documentary Douro, Faina Fluvial (Working on the Douro River, 1931), is a late urban symphony that displays many similarities to Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Entuziazm (Simfoniya Donbassa) (Enthusiasm: The Dombass Symphony, Dziga Vertov, 1931). From the former, it takes the structure of ‘a day in the city’ and the interest in the inner rhythms of the modern metropolis; while it shares with the latter the idea of depicting an urban community through its daily work activities: coal mining in Vertov’s documentary and dock work in Oliveira’s. A decade later, Oliveira’s first feature film, Aniki Bóbó (1942), anticipated many proposals of Italian Neorealism, such as location shooting, the use of non-professional actors and interest in underrepresented social groups, among which children especially stand out. Unfortunately, the film was not very successful at the time, despite the fact that the 1940s were the only period in which Portuguese cinema had a wide audience able to finance its own film industry. Its commercial failure forced Oliveira to remain inactive as filmmaker for many years, until the making of O Pintor e a Cidade (The Artist and the City, 1956), another short documentary about Porto that completes his modernist trilogy about everyday life on the banks of the Douro River. Given that these three films – Working on the Douro River, Aniki Bóbó and The Artist and the City– are all quoted in Porto of My Childhood, it seems opportune to briefly comment on their similarities and differences, paying particular attention to the last one.
The Artist and the City combines several ideas taken from Working on the Douro River with certain formal novelties – mainly, its experiments with colour – and a higher awareness regarding issues of representation. Its main leitmotifs are the movement of people in public spaces, everyday scenes and city landmarks, such as the Clérigos Church and Tower, the Porto City Hall or the Luís I Bridge, which had already been similarly filmed in Working on the Douro River. This iconography actually comes from previous representations of the city, mostly nineteenth-century paintings, which Oliveira includes in the film in order to acknowledge his debt to this visual tradition.
Once again, Oliveira uses the temporal structure of ‘a day in the city’ by following painter António Cruz through a full working day, in which urban life is depicted as the product of the triad formed by work, transportation and leisure time, while the residents of Porto are represented as an anonymous mass. Nevertheless, the painter’s presence as implied narrator of the film establishes an individualised gaze at urban space that reveals the presence of certain people who stand out in the crowd, such as an elderly beggar and several policemen, brief glimpses of the poor and repressed Portuguese society under Salazar’s dictatorship. Another difference regarding
Working on the Douro River is that the film image of the city is mediated by its pictorial representation: Oliveira films the same places, views and frames painted by Cruz, thereby contributing to their production and consolidation as landmarks. Both artists strive to capture the real, but Oliveira also reveals the artifice of representation, as González has pointed out:
He wants to establish a contrapuntal comparison between reality, understood as a motif, and artistic creation. This documentary was a first step … to present images framed within an aesthetic ritual, analysing the reality of the shadows, making clear the nature of the artifice and gathering information about the configuration of delusion and the peculiarities of perception. (2004: 57; my translation)
By showing the creative process behind António Cruz’s paintings, The Artist and the City makes explicit its condition as reproduction of reality: in the final sequence, Oliveira edits a shot of the waterfront followed by increasingly more abstract watercolours that depict the same view. The film is thus consciously located within the tradition of reflexive documentary, even though it does not include any shot of the cinematic apparatus. Arguably, it even anticipated the reflection on the failure of both cinema and painting to achieve a faithful representation of reality that El sol del membrillo (Dream of Light, 1992) would further develop four decades later. The director of this film, Víctor Erice, has stated in a text on Oliveira’s work that ‘all we see is presented as theatre, which means that cinema, by assuming the idea of modernity, is faced with two alternatives: whether to film the spectacle of life or the spectacle of the stage’ (2004: 30; my translation). Considering that Aniki Bóbó was Oliveira’s clearest attempt to film the spectacle of life, The Artist and the City would be in turn his first film interested in the spectacle of theatre, that is, in the methods and devices devoted to depict – or rather, reenact – reality.
Surprisingly, Oliveira found more opportunities to make movies at the end of his life, when it was assumed that he would retire from filmmaking (see González 2004: 67). In the early 1970s, he obtained funding to make ‘a “last” film’ (Sales 2011: 111; my translation), which actually opened a series of four literary adaptations later known as the ‘Tetralogy of Frustrated Loves’:
O Passado e o Presente (
Past and Present, 1972),
Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (
Benilde or the Virgin Mother, 1975),
Amor de Perdição (
Doomed Love, 1979) and
Francisca (1981). Since then, Oliveira has worked at a furious pace, especially for his age, making practically a film a year. This period, which can be described as deeply postmodern, combines historical films about the discourses and narratives that underpin Portugal –
Non, ou a Vã Glória de Mandar (
No, or the Vain Glory of Command, 1990),
Palavra e Utopia (
Word and Utopia, 2000),
O Quinto Império – Ontem Como Hoje (
The Fifth Empire, 2005) – with titles that deal with more recent problems, such as the plight of the urban poor or the aged rural population –
A Caixa (
The Box, 1994) or
Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo (
Voyage to the Beginning of the World, 1997). The most remarkable feature of these films, as Xurxo González explains, is their tendency to integrate autobiographical accounts and personal statements within their narratives in order to leave proof of the filmmaker’s existence for eternity:
Oliveira gives value to the word, staging conversations that cover ellipses and allow him to integrate his observations about the world. Like a wise old man, the proximity of death enables him to tell exemplary stories and make utopian glosses about the fate of the world. His combative spirit was already relegated to the past: he is currently tired and faces life with detachment, theorising, questioning the relativity of things. His extremely long-lived condition serves him to act as a medium between life and afterlife. […] The filmmaker expresses his nonconformity with the state of the world and the recent evolution of humanity by means of these disenchanted comments, with which he aims to fulfil a double duty: on the one hand, to be exemplary for the audience; and on the other, to redeem his own ‘sins’ in view of the proximity of the ultimate trance. (2012; my translation)
This desire for transcendence has led Portuguese filmmaker João Mário Grilo to state that ‘Oliveira currently films for God’ (2006: 129; my translation). Regardless of whether or not Oliveira feels like ‘a divine instrument’, as González suggests (2012; my translation), he is, at least, ontologically involved in his later works: since each new film he directs might be the last one, the temptation of expressing his last will is always present.
2 Memory has become one of the main subjects of his postmodern works, but he does not understand it as a stable collection of experiences that may be faithfully recovered. On the contrary, he uses it as an uncontrolled source of inspiration for exploring his self, his past and the historical imaginary of his country, reaching the point of faking it when necessary.
All these postmodern films share, according to González, the same elegiac look at people, customs and things that have been left behind by the passage of time (2012). Their mood has to do with what Portuguese call
saudade, a complex emotional state, similar to the Turkish
hüzün or the Romanian
dor, which is not exactly the same as nostalgia, longing, melancholy or loneliness, but rather their deep awareness. The dictionary from the Royal Galician Academy, for instance, defines this term as ‘an intimate feeling and mood caused by the longing for something absent that is being missed and that can take different aspects, from specific realities (a loved one, a friend, the motherland, the homeland…) to the absolute and mysterious transcendence’ (García & González 1997: 1090; my translation). A clear example of
saudade within Oliveira’s work would be the following dialogue from
Voyage to the Beginning of the World, pronounced by the filmmaker’s fictional alter ego: ‘
You’ve embraced your aunt, body and soul,’ he says to a travelling companion who has just visited his father’s home village, ‘
Me, even my childhood friends, my brother Casimiro and all my friends of that time, they are all gone. A long life is a gift from God, but it has its price.’ In this case, the real expression of
saudade is the last sentence, because it goes beyond the nostalgia for the loved ones by referring to the intimate perception of this absence. Similarly, the initial statement of intent of
Porto of My Childhood addresses the act of remembering from a ‘saudosist’ approach: ‘
To recall moments from a distant past is to travel out of time. Only each person’s memory can do this. It is what I shall try to do.’ That is to say that Oliveira’s intention, officially, is to recall, but he implicitly admits, with
saudade, that he will probably not always succeed. Memory, therefore, is regarded as the raw material that fuelled his creativity, because all that he can no longer remember must be imagined through self-fiction. For Oliveira, this is not a problem when making an autobiographical documentary, since any film is always full of ghosts, as he has stated:
Images on the screen are a spell of the camera, they are no more than ghosts of a reality that hides other ghosts, which accompany them in actual life. […] Even when images look very realist, they are simply appearance, they are just cinema, whether they are part of a fiction or come from actual life. They are immaterial. They are still and always ghosts of something that there is no longer or that never was. (Oliveira in Zunzunegui 2004: 87, my translation)
In order to summon the ghost of his past, Oliveira resorts to different techniques and devices that ultimately give rise to a film palimpsest in which several visual materials coexist: archival footage from the first third of the twentieth century, images from
Working on the Douro River,
Aniki Bóbó and
The Artist and the City, current views of Porto at the turn of the century, and finally fictional reenactments of meaningful episodes. Moreover, the soundtrack alternates a first-person commentary read by the filmmaker himself with passages of classical music and popular songs that strengthen the emotional dimension of the images, as in
Of Time and the City. The set of all these strategies aims to represent the logic of memory, assuming that neither images nor stories are enough in themselves to recall the filmmaker’s memoryscapes in their full complexity.
On the narrative level, Porto of My Childhood dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, when Oliveira was a young man in a city that faced a particularly unstable historical period. Two years after Oliveira’s birth, in 1910, the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown by a military coup d’état; then, from 1910 to 1926, the First Portuguese Republic was undermined by the internal division of the Republican Party and the pressures exerted by several strikes and uprisings; and finally, in 1926, another military coup d’état led to António Salazar’s corporatist-authoritarian dictatorship, which lasted forty-eight years, until the Carnation Revolution. In this period, Oliveira completed his high school education in a sort of exile in A Guarda, a town located right across the northwest border between Portugal and Galicia, where the Portuguese Jesuits settled temporarily after having been expelled from the country – in the first half of Voyage to the Beginning of the World, Oliveira’s alter ego precisely recalls these years. Thereupon, in 1924, he decided not to go to college: in view of the well-off economic position of his family, he preferred to devote himself to his passions, which at the time were theatre, sports and bohemian life. In these circumstances, he soon became a moviegoer, and one day he had the chance to see Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. ‘That film touched me,’ he has repeated on several occasions, ‘it was a proposal for which I felt qualified’ (in Andrade 2002: 25; my translation). Cinema thus became his main interest, ‘a passion that stole me from sport, just as the latter stole me from the bohemian life’, as he says in the commentary of Porto of My Childhood.
Like the previous case studies, this film also addresses the relation between the filmmaker and the city by associating memories and places: on the one hand, Oliveira’s past emerges from current urban space; while on the other, his stories recreate a missing city. Indeed,
Porto of My Childhood stands as a precursor for
Of Time and the City: in addition to their most obvious similarities, such as being first-person autobiographical narratives or having been produced within the context of the European Capital of Culture, both films contrast old and contemporary cityscapes in order to criticise their transformations, using music to highlight the emotional perception of the process as well as to stimulate memories. Urban self-portraits, as noted above, are not as interested in recalling the past as in establishing a dialogue with it by means of the act of remembering, through which filmmakers simultaneously depict the past and present of their hometowns and, above all, their own self over time. The feedback between place and self is thus reciprocal: memories allow the film to time travel to the past of the place, while each new visit to these places grants access to increasingly deep layers of the self.
The main difference between Porto of My Childhood and Of Time and the City lies in the degree of transparency with which this mental mechanism is showed: Oliveira is much more explicit than Davies because he does not hesitate to distrust his own ability to remember. For this reason, Porto of My Childhood continuously tends towards self-fiction, staging Oliveira’s memories through fictional reenactments played by professional actors, something that Davies already did at the beginning of his career: the English filmmaker separated self-fiction and documentary, devoting different films to each one, while the Portuguese director has combined them in several works, whether feature films (Voyage to the Beginning of the World) or documentaries (Porto of My Childhood). In the latter case, reenactments and archival footage have the same documentary value as evidences of the functioning of Oliveira’s memory, a feature that recalls Tony Buba’s fantasies in Lightning Over Braddock: in both self-portraits, the staged sequences are not outside reality but part of it, always considering that the product of our mental activity also belongs to reality.
These reenactments do not seek to reproduce the real appearance of Porto in the past, but just Oliveira’s memoryscape. At times, and this is the most astonishing quality of these sequences, the characters help the filmmaker recall forgotten details of his own memories, as when his fictional doubles whisper certain words before he says them. This idea suggests that memories do not pass from the creator to his creations, but conversely: fiction seems to be what guides the filmmaker’s account, instead of his past experiences giving rise to fiction. Furthermore, the actors who embody Oliveira in the documentary are precisely his grandsons, Jorge and Ricardo Trêpa, a casting choice based on their physical resemblance that indirectly reinforces the mastery of the present (fiction) over the past (memory).
Image 8.1: Porto of My Childhood, Oliveira himself playing the role of an actor on the stage
From the documentary point of view, as Laura Rascaroli has explained,
Porto of My Childhood cannot be considered a self-portrait of the artist as a young man because that character is only present in absence, whether described by the voiceover or replaced by doubles (2009: 175). Having no indexical evidence of its existence, the audience has to trust the narrator’s words, which are actually one of the two indexical evidences of the existence of another different character: the artist as an old man. The other evidence is the personal appearance of Oliveira himself in the sequence that reenacts one of his frequent visits to the theatre at the time. This visual inscription is like a game of mirrors: old Oliveira – the real Oliveira – plays the role of an actor who embodies a thief on the stage, while his young double – Jorge Trêpa – is seeing the play from a box seat (
Image 8.1). The latter image is practically identical to a shot from
Inquietude (
Anxiety, Manoel de Oliveira, 1998), in which the camera frames another box seat from a very similar position. Accordingly, if reenactments are inspired by previous feature films, the past automatically becomes a fiction of the present, in which Oliveira portrays himself as an old filmmaker who tries to remember his past through staged sequences. After all, much of the truthfulness of
Porto of My Childhood relies on his director’s testimony, and any testimony, as Bill Nichols has warned, always gives less priority to what happened in the past in a strict sense than to ‘what we now think happened and what this might mean for us’ (1993: 177).
This dialogue between past and present is developed in both temporal and spatial terms. For example, a usual strategy to insert the filmmaker’s memories within historical time is the editing of fictional reenactments as reverse shots for authentic documents: in the sequence in which a man climbs to the top of the Clérigos Tower, the real footage of the event is punctuated by several high-angle shots of Oliveira’s double looking up, giving the impression that the image of the man climbing the tower comes from the filmmaker’s gaze. Other times, certain scenes of old bourgeois life are showed twice, like the after-dinner stroll in the Avenida das Tilias, which is first seen through archival footage and then reenacted in the same location. This detail reveals that Oliveira is always careful to match his memories with the real settings where they took place, as when he juxtaposes old images of his places of memory with shots of their current avatars on the urban surface: his favourite cake-shop, the Confeitaria Oliveira, was a clothing store in 2001; the Café Central, where he met his bohemian friends in the 1930s, had become a banking office; and the first movie theatre built in Porto, the Cinema High-Life, was transformed into the Cinema Batalha in 1947, a venue that unfortunately closed at the turn of the century. In all these psychogeographical comparisons, Oliveira’s laconic voice usually states ‘this is it today’.
The only exception to this dynamic is the Café Majestic, which still remains open thanks to the beauty of its art deco interiors. In 1983, it was declared Building of Public Interest and then, in the 1990s, it was restored and reopened as a relic of the Belle Époque. There, Oliveira films the exact corner where he wrote the shooting plan for
Gigantes do Douro (
Douro Giants), a film that he could not make at the time because of censorship. This idea of returning to the crime scene already appeared in
Les hommes du port, although in that film Alain Tanner went back to an empty office that bore almost no resemblance to the one he had known. On the contrary, Oliveira finds everything in place in the Majestic, but he does not seem particularly pleased about that. In this sequence, his voice keeps the same ‘saudosist’ tone as in the rest of the film, perhaps because the success in preserving this space makes more evident his own process of aging. For this reason, he emotionally feels more attached to missing places, like the old nightclubs, than to those that still stand.
Image 8.2 & 8.3 (top): Workers Leaving the Confiança Factory, the fist Portuguese moving picture, (bottom): Porto of My Childhood, rewriting of Workers Leaving the Confiança Factory
The psychogeographical comparison that offers the key to the film is the rewriting of the first Portuguese moving picture:
Saída do Pessoal Operário da Fábrica Confiança (
Workers Leaving the Confiança Factory, Aurélio Paz dos Reis, 1896).
Porto of My Childhood includes its whole footage (almost a minute in length) as well as its contemporary version, in which Oliveira recreates the original scene (Images
8.2 & 8.3). The old shirt factory located at No. 181 Rua de Santa Catarina curiously became the headquarters of Oporto 2001, European Capital of Culture at the turn of the century, one of the production companies of this documentary along with Madragoa Filmes, Gemini Films and the RTP, the Portuguese public television. Thus, by replacing the seamstresses who left their workplace in 1896 by other workers in 2001, including an actor who embodies the pioneer Aurélio Paz dos Reis, Oliveira combines up to four reading levels in the same shot: first, it documents the Rua de Santa Catarina in 2001; second, it reproduces a previous document of the same place; third, it partly reenacts its filming process; and finally, it makes real his own fantasies.
This tribute to Paz dos Reis suggests that cinema is an essential element to preserve the memory of the city and recall the filmmaker’s memoryscape. The direct quotations from
Working on the Douro River,
Aniki Bóbó and
The Artist and the City also contribute to giving the impression that Oliveira remembers the past of his hometown through the films that he shot there, a strategy that relates his urban self-portrait to the metafilm documentaries discussed in chapter nine. The sum of these four works set in Porto –
Working on the Douro River,
Aniki Bóbó,
The Artist and the City and
Porto of My Childhood – constitutes a tetralogy that shows the evolution of the cityscape and its representations through time, establishing a visual history of the city from images belonging to different film periods and styles. This praise of cinema’s ability to stimulate memory is nevertheless far from naïve, because the filmmaker admits the limitations of this device in the commentary. His frustration about the impossibility of remembering everything is, again, an expression of
saudade:
Thanks to the cinema, we can see these bits over and over again. But only each person’s memory can recall things that only we did live through. And is doing so not the best way of showing who we are? But many of my memories, in going back into the past, have been lost and today are entombed.
Oliveira has assumed that cinema can only preserve tiny fragments of memory, which does not prevent him from filming to create new memories. In this sense, he has arrived at the same conclusion as Nicholas Ray in Lightning Over Water (Nicholas Ray & Wim Wenders, 1980), in which the American filmmaker stated, in a lecture at Vassar, that ‘the closer one comes to an ending, the closer one moves to a rewriting that is a beginning’ (in Scheibler 1993: 137). Reenactments in Porto of My Childhood are not only an attempt to recover past memories, but also a way of creating new ones for the future: the memory of making another film, and even the memory of the act of remembering, because we do not always remember our experiences directly, but rather through their later account.
The film ends with a carscape that resembles those recorded by Tanner from Genoa’s elevated highway in
Les hommes du port. This time, the camera is placed on a car that slowly traverses the Viaduto do Cais das Pedras, a small bypass over the Douro that runs about two hundred metres in parallel to the waterfront. Thanks to the curve of the bridge, the city is seen from the river for a few seconds, as if it were a boatscape instead of a carscape. Oliveira adopts this perspective to reproduce the view of the city that the old Portuguese navigators had before departing into the unknown. The end of this shot reinforces this idea by zooming into a tiled mural that represents a portrait of Prince Henry the Navigator, the patron who encouraged Portuguese exploration in Africa.
3The conclusion of
Porto of My Childhood metaphorically relates, on the one hand, the mouth of the river with the end of Oliveira’s autobiographical account, and on the other, overseas discoveries with his discovery of life through film: the closing shot precisely shows a lighthouse in the midst of the evening, a symbolic image that matches the infinite spaciousness of the horizon with the infinite possibilities of the film screen. This lighthouse in particular is the Farolim de Felgueiras, which had already appeared in the opening and closing shots of
Working on the Douro River. Therefore, by looking for an ending to his urban self-portrait, Oliveira encounters the foundational image of his film career and rewrites it, establishing a cinematic eternal return that allows him to fulfil his purpose of travelling out of time: ‘
the city is being renewed’, he says, ‘
but no matter how much it is changed, it will always be the Porto of my childhood with a gold stream running at its feet.’
4 Thanks to cinema, Oliveira’s return to his beginnings implicitly entails a new beginning, which actually simply follows the example of his hometown: to update certain features in order to remain the same as ever, even when it is no longer possible to remain exactly the same.
My Winnipeg: The City as a Text to Be Decoded
5
Guy Maddin’s urban self-portrait resorts to self-fiction to convey his subjective perception of the slow decline of Winnipeg, historically one of the main industrial centres in Canada. This ‘docu-fantasy’, a term coined by Maddin himself, lacks the political commitment of Roger & Me or the social conscience of Les hommes du port and Of Time and the City, but it shares with Lightning Over Braddock and Porto of My Childhood their ability to explore imaginary cityscapes in order to depict the emotional experience of urban space. This choice seems quite appropriate to address the love/hate relationship that anyone establishes with their hometown, because it exposes the irrational ties that bind us to it. In the case of Winnipeg, this relationship also includes a supernatural dimension that certainly comes from Maddin’s tendency towards fantasy, a clear transgression of the discourse of sobriety that nevertheless serves to provide the city with a whole urban mythology.
The Canadian filmmaker is best known for his insistence on recovering the aesthetics of silent film in postmodern times. Barry Keith Grant have summarised the contradictions of his style by describing it as ‘so avant-garde that his movies look like they were made almost a hundred years ago’ (Grant & Hillier 2009: 143). Maddin has no problem to imitate, copy, quote or simply plagiarise a wide range of styles, many of them already buried, including German Expressionism, Soviet montage, French surrealism, film noir, excessive melodramas, classical horror movies, trash cinema and even early musicals (see Beard 2010: 7).
6 Such a blend of referents usually leads to pastiche, but it has also allowed him to develop an unmistakable aesthetics based on excess, saturation and, above all, an impressive wealth of visual resources. Like other postmodern filmmakers, from Quentin Tarantino to Todd Haynes, Maddin understands the history of cinema as an inexhaustible source of inspiration from which he can focus on any technique or device to reuse it in a completely different context: thus, despite not having been trained in filmmaking,
7 he has been able to create a work that emerges from the cannibalisation of all the references that he has accumulated throughout his long and omnivorous career as a passionate moviegoer.
The isolation imposed by Winnipeg’s geographical location and its severe climate – the city is located hundreds of miles away from any other major city, and it has below-zero temperatures for five months a year – has indirectly fuelled Maddin’s film activity. He has explained that ‘unlike big cities, where there are lots of things to do and warmer weather, we don’t talk our best ideas out into the café night air. You’re stuck inside, and there’s nothing to do but actually doing your stuff’ (in Darr 2008: 1). Thanks to these restrictions, Maddin has managed to shoot eight feature films and over twenty shorts before making his urban self-portrait, including a couple of self-fictions:
Cowards Bend the Knee, which is also known as
The Blue Hands (2003), and
Brand upon the Brain! (2006). These two films, along with
My Winnipeg, make up an autobiographical cycle called the ‘Me Trilogy’ that contains several repeated elements (see Halfyard 2007).
Firstly, the three films are silent parodies of family dramas starring a fictional double of the author, also named Guy Maddin, although he is played by different actors (Darcy Fehr in Cowards Bend the Knee and My Winnipeg, and Sullivan Brown and Erik Stephen Maahs in Brand upon the Brain!). Secondly, the trilogy presents the same types of parental figures: a domineering mother and an absent father. Indeed, Cowards Bend the Knee and My Winnipeg blend fact and fiction by reproducing the same dichotomy between female space, associated with the beauty salon owned by Maddin’s real mother, and male space, identified with the place where Maddin’s real father used to work as a volunteer for the local hockey team, the Winnipeg Arena. Lastly, these films always include references to traumatic events and sexual intrigues that date back to the childhood or adolescence of the characters. The set of all these features calls into question the autobiographical dimension of the ‘Me Trilogy’, since the content of these films does not rely on actual facts, but on Maddin’s mindscapes. Consequently, My Winnipeg resorts to self-fiction in order to depict the filmmaker’s inner world with the greatest possible depth.
The original idea of making a documentary on Winnipeg came from the president of the Documentary Channel in Canada, Michael Burns, who commissioned Maddin to direct it (see Beard 2010: 313). The main subject should have been the city itself, but the filmmaker quickly realised that, in order to show his Winnipeg, he needed to show himself first (see Halfyard 2007). For this reason, his urban self-portrait explores three superimposed layers: Winnipeg’s local history, Maddin’s family portrait and a series of surreal episodes that belong to the realm of imagination (see Lahera 2008). Accordingly, the narrative of the film constantly combines opposing elements: objectivity and subjectivity, reality and imagination, history and fake, memories and fantasies, etc., an endless list of binary oppositions in which we cannot distinguish what is true from what is invented.
Dave Saunders, however, maintains that
My Winnipeg is ‘more immersed in the “truth” of the city and its psychological effects than any by-the-book chronicle’ (2010: 153), an idea that Grant had previously defended by stating that the film ‘is probably closer to the way most people relate to their environment than the urban celebrations depicted in city symphony films’ (2009: 144). Fake thereby works as a way to achieve an abstract or at least subjective truth, as explained by the filmmaker: ‘The truth lies in the exaggeration. […] I can better control the truth when I know that nothing is literally true. I can be sure that something is true if I control the necessary device to represent a copy of the truth’ (Maddin in Kovacsics 2011: 81; my translation). Thus, by means of this creative fake of reality,
My Winnipeg suggests a model of relationship with our everyday environment in which subjective perception and personal inventions are valid tools to develop a cognitive map beyond pre-established representations.
Maddin’s fabrications aspire to be plausible within the internal logic of the film, which tries to imitate the disjointed logic of memory. In order to achieve this purpose, the documentary deploys up to six different narrative devices: voiceover commentary, archival footage, Winnipeg’s current images, Maddin’s mental images, animation sequences and title cards. The first of these elements, the filmmaker’s commentary, uses a poetic and repetitious tone to recall both memories and impressions of the past from an omniscient position, as well as to control the transitions from one story to another. Archival footage, in turn, corresponds to the images of the past, which usually show people having fun, especially outdoors: much of this footage are scenes of winter activities that recall actuality films such as Ice-Yachting on the St. Lawrence (Joseph Rosenthal, 1903) or Skating for the World’s Championship at Montreal (Joseph Rosenthal, 1903). Maddin has ensured that this footage is authentic, although it is so short that he decided to increase it by filming fictional reenactments as if they were old actuality films (see Brooke 2008: 12; Darr 2008). Since it is not possible to distinguish which images are real and which are not at first sight, the audience has to choose between trusting their authenticity or assuming that any image of the past might be a fake. Any of these two possibilities challenges the conventional perception of archival footage, according to which we must decode old images as ‘authentic signs of their times’ (Nichols 1993: 177) unless the film gives us any reason to think otherwise. In this case, we have every reason to distrust, but the presence of some authentic images forces us to wonder to what extent this device is able to convey that subjective truth.
Meanwhile, Winnipeg’s current images document the real cityscape, sometimes including traces of the filmmaker’s inscription within the film, such as his shadow or his footprints. These images are the closest ones to the autobiographical approach: for example, in the sequence in which the filmmaker walks his dog at night, he himself holds the camera to personally capture the feeling of walking over snow. On the contrary, the mental images are always reenactments performed by actors and filmed in studio settings: the bulk of the sequences devoted to his family life clearly fit into this category. The most implausible events, such as the death of racehorses in the frozen river or the destruction of an amusement park due to a bison stampede, are visualised through Andy Smetanka’s animation sequences, whose primitive style has been compared to Lotte Reiniger’s since they both use the technique of silhouette animation (see Darr 2008; Beard 2010: 314). Finally, the title cards serve to introduce new sequences and, above all, to emphasise certain ideas that are already present both in the images and the commentary.
These narrative devices are not always associated with a single style in particular, given that they all share a hybrid visual texture that comes from the juxtaposition of eleven recording formats: Super-8mm film, 16mm film, Super-16mm film, analogue video, mini-DV video, HD video, cell phone, animation shot on video, animation shot on Super-8, several archival footage formats, and finally rear projections that were originally shot on video and later reshot on film (see Halfyard 2007; Beard 2010: 313). Such a variety of media helps to hide the texture differences between archival footage and staged sequences, resulting in an anachronistic aesthetic that seems to be out of time, to the point that Maddin’s Winnipeg looks like a Central European city in the interwar period: the real cityscape thereby becomes an imaginary place composed of parts of other cities, other films and other representations, that is, an urban palimpsest shaped according to the filmmaker’s visual referents.
This imaginary city is built through the counterfactual logic of ‘what if?’ Maddin explores all those denied futures that Winnipeg never developed, beginning with his own escape from there, a scene defined by William Beard as ‘the film’s narrative locus, to which it returns with great regularity throughout its entirety’ (2010: 315). In that sequence, the main character – Maddin’s fictional double – attempts again and again to leave Winnipeg by train, but he is trapped in a labyrinth (memory) from which he will only get out once the narrator (Maddin himself) relives all his past experiences there. This endless journey through the urban surface symbolises the act of remembering, as the commentary clearly implies: ‘I just have to make my way through town, through everything I’ve ever seen and lived, everything I’ve loved and forgotten.’ Later on, as this purpose is not easy to fulfil, the narrator explicitly suggests filming his way out of Winnipeg, a self-conscious statement of intent that directly reveals the inner workings of the film.
The metaphor of the journey through time and space serves to delve into Winnipeg’s local history and collective memory in search of those places and stories that better express its contradictory identity. The main criteria for choosing them has to do with their ability to summarise its idiosyncrasy which, according to Beard, seems to consist of everything that ‘symptomatizes the place’s sickness, forgottenness, isolation, inauthenticity, decay, pathology … just what makes it home, just what makes it lovable’ (2010: 335). This negative perception of Winnipeg had already appeared in
The Saddest Music in the World (2003), and it may be a consequence of the excessive expectations placed on the city when it was the staging point for the colonisation of western Canada (see Beard 2010: 336). In recent decades, Winnipeg’s economy seems to have stalled in comparison with the prosperity of other western provinces of the country, such as British Columbia, Alberta or even the neighbouring Saskatchewan, whose gross domestic product currently surpasses Manitoba’s.
8 This has led Winnipeggers to develop an inferiority complex towards their neighbours that has adversely affected their self-esteem.
The search for meaningful places and stories imitates the local tradition of ‘buried treasures’, an annual contest organised by the Canadian Pacific Railway in which, according to the filmmaker’s account, Winnipeggers wandered around their city in search of hidden treasures. The prize for the winner was a one-way ticket on the next train out of town, but the idea of the contest was right the opposite: to strengthen the link between the city and its residents by encouraging their sense of belonging to the place, supposing that, as the commentary states, ‘once someone had spent a full day looking this closely at his own hometown, he would never want to leave’. This story provides another metaphor for the narrative device of the film: like his fellow citizens, Maddin also explores the cityscape in search of ‘buried stories’ that expose a mythical city hidden beneath the surface. Through this process, he rescues from oblivion quite a number of urban legends that ultimately restore Winnipeg’s right to have its own mythology, a claim that appears in several interviews:
Canadians … are a bit shy about mythologizing themselves and they feel the need to make their historical figures and historical events smaller than life rather than bigger than life. So I just thought, every other culture in the world, including the Inuit in Canada, are great at mythologizing, so let’s just give Winnipeg its fair shake. (Maddin in Halfyard 2007)
In order to render visible certain episodes forgotten by official history, Maddin undertook the task of conducting an archaeological survey in public and private film archives. Nevertheless, the lack of enough stock footage compelled him to produce his own historical documents, a solution that had previously been successfully used in the documentary
History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri, 1992). From this perspective,
My Winnipeg is almost a work of experimental archaeology, because it strives to create replicas of historical images through techniques similar to those used in the past. Moreover, the film understands the city as a set of layers of meaning that need to be decoded: the commentary explicitly describes Winnipeg as ‘
a city of palimpsest, of skins, of skins beneath skins’, a place, in short, whose identity is successively inscribed and reinscribed by the spatial practices of its inhabitants. This archaeological-semiotics approach expresses the alleged local clairvoyance, according to which ‘
Winnipeggers have always been skilled in reading past the surface and into the hidden depths of their city’. This faculty allows the filmmaker to interpret the slightest detail as a euphemism for a much more sordid truth, establishing a permanent confusion between everyday anecdotes and historical events. For instance, he juxtaposes the Scandal of the Wolseley’s Elm, a neighbourhood protest to avoid the felling of a tree in 1957, with the Winnipeg Revolutionary Strike of 1919, the first labour riot in North America after the Russian Revolution. For the discourse of sobriety, this comparison would be unacceptable, to say the least, but it actually makes sense within the logic of memory, in which everyday anecdotes and historical events share the same mental level.
The film systematically twists and trivialises any story about the city’s past: the sequence about the Revolutionary Strike, to continue with the same example, ends by focusing on the very unlikely clash between armed nuns and lustful Bolsheviks, who supposedly would have fought to protect or rape the female students of Saint Mary’s School. In this case, real data (the spot where the major clashes of the uprising took place) degenerate into an implausible episode (the sexual menace against the daughters of the local bourgeoisie). The same dynamic is repeated throughout the film: the male beauty contests held in the Paddle Wheel Club were the iceberg tip of a shameful political corruption scandal, the remains of the amusement park destroyed by the bison stampede served to build invisible shantytowns on the rooftops of downtown Winnipeg, and the tragic death of a group of racehorses during the first cold snap of 1926 gave rise to a macabre landscape that soon became a pleasant place for local couples (
Image 8.4). Despite their exaggerated tendency to fabulation, most of these sequences are inspired by true stories – the story of the frozen racehorses comes from local archives (see Kovacsics 2011: 81) – although their truth value is much less important than their metaphorical ability to draw attention to the most controversial aspects of the city. Thus, the shantytowns on the rooftops would be a consequence of ‘
a law which keeps homeless out of sight’, while the transformation of the horse cemetery into a
locus amoenus would symbolise the local gloomy character. ‘
We grow used to sadness,’ the narrator says in this sequence, ‘
simply, [we] incorporate it into our days.’
Image 8.4: My Winnipeg, a macabre landscape turned into a pleasant place for local couples
The only time Maddin lies blatantly is when he seems to tell the truth: right after deciding to film his way out of Winnipeg, he announces that he is going to stage his childhood memories at his old family home, for which he admits having hired professional actors. According to this assertion, his closest relatives would be fictional doubles with the sole exception of his mother, who would play herself. The latter is utterly false, because the mother is none other than Ann Savage, the
femme fatale of
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), a professional actress without any kinship with the filmmaker. Furthermore, it is not clear either that these reenactments were filmed on location rather than in a studio set. The reasoning suggested by the editing to convince the audience is so simple and effective that it might well be a fallacy: first, we are provided with authentic documents of the filmmaker’s past, such as family pictures and home movies, that demonstrate that he did live at 800 Ellis Avenue; and thereupon we are told that he rented the house for one month in order to film the reenactments there. As there is no way to verify this information, we must take it for granted, but nothing guarantees its truthfulness, not even the fact that the house still stands today.
These red herrings about the construction of the film seek to erase the distinction between documentary footage and fictional reenactment. Such mise en abyme begins at the prologue, in which Anne Savage rehearses a scene that will be shown later: Maddin’s voice prompts her lines from off-screen and the actress repeats them immediately afterwards, creating the effect of ‘a reverse echo’, as described by Denis Seguin (2008: 1). These images must be considered documentary footage, because they are a record of the actual shooting of the film, while the scene that is being rehearsed belongs in turn to the domain of fiction, because it loosely recreates a traumatic memory with a very high level of parody and affectation. Hence My Winnipeg arguably borrows certain features from the reflexive mode (the persistent references to the creative process) and especially from the performative one (the obsession with staging new versions of the past).
The first of these reenactments is the family reunion around the television set to watch their favourite programme, ‘Ledge Man’, a local soap opera which tells the same story every day since the filmmaker’s birth year, 1956: an oversensitive man, played by Darcy Fehr, threatens to jump from a ledge and only his mother, played by Ann Savage, can convince him not to do it. Every day, the man goes out to the ledge, and every day the mother prevents him from jumping. Her eternal intervention as a saviour, as well as Savage’s and Fehr’s casting for the roles of mother and child, has been interpreted by Saunders as an allegory of the anchor, the chain or even the umbilical cord that keeps Maddin in Winnipeg:
The parallels with Maddin’s struggle to escape the clutches of his hometown, and his mother’s apron strings, are abundant: Ledge Man’s leap into the unknown world, the world outside Winnipeg, is constantly prevented by his mother’s hectoring and infantilising; the Maddin surrogate … is unable to get away, or to fulfil even the death drive for fear of matriarchal reprimand. […] ‘Archetypal episodes’ from the psychoanalytic id become literal episodes of a still ongoing daily drama, the struggle and ultimate failure of its protagonist acted out on television for all to see and maybe to mock. (2010: 160)
Other reenactments refer to the tedious task of straightening the hall runner or to the mother’s two main phobias: fear of birds and, above all, fear of being dishevelled. These scenes reveal the existence of family tensions and traumas hidden beneath the banality of the everyday, meaning that Maddin pursues the same goal both in his family portrait and his urban self-portrait: to discover what lies below the surface. The sequence that Ann Savage rehearses in the film’s prologue – a violent argument between mother and daughter due to a traffic accident – explains by itself the interpretative dynamics of the film. One night, the daughter came home late after having hit and killed a deer with her car, but the mother identifies the traces of blood and fur on the bumper as unquestionable evidence of a sexual encounter (
Image 8.5). ‘
No innocent girl stays out past ten with blood on her fender,’ she concludes after having mercilessly insulted her daughter. According to her interpretation, which is the filmmaker’s, a car accident in Winnipeg has to mean something else, it has to be a euphemism for something darker, something that we are not always willing to admit because it may disclose the real reasons for our actions. That is to say that euphemisms provide access to thoughts, opinions, desires, experiences and even memories that belong to the realm of the unconscious, whether individual or collective. Therefore, by similarly addressing the secrets of his family and his hometown, Maddin balances both narratives and, what is more important, turns them into interdependent accounts.
Image 8.5: My Winnipeg, a car accident as euphemism for something darker
At the beginning of the film, a brief review of Winnipeg’s founding myth establishes a first connection between local history and the filmmaker’s mindscape. According to the official chronicle, the city was born from a fur trading post built on the confluence of the Assiniboine and the Red River of the North, a place located at the crossroads of many commercial routes that soon boomed as meeting point. Maddin visually compares this spot with a female pubis while he rhythmically recites the words ‘
the forks, the lap, the fur’, each one matched with its respective illustration. Their insistent repetition as if they were a spell suggests two mental associations: on the one hand, the city is related to the filmmaker’s family through the connection between the river confluence and his mother’s lap, which justifies the autobiographical approach of the film; and on the other, the city is associated with fantasy since it is introduced as a mythical crossroads, which explains, in turn, Maddin’s choice of fake and self-fiction as narrative devices. The latter connection is based on a native legend about a second subterranean confluence located right underneath the two rivers, from which supernatural powers would emanate. If we believe the story of ‘the Forks beneath the Forks’, as the filmmaker does, Winnipeg’s magical nature should be at the very foundation of any attempt to describe its identity and idiosyncrasy. From this viewpoint, Maddin’s fabrications would then be a reflection of the collective unconscious of the city, which has been shaped by beliefs, traditions and myths similar to this legend.
The emphasis on this imaginary dimension inevitably overshadows the actual cityscape, leading to the replacement of the city-referent by a city-character. At first sight, Winnipeg’s visual identity does not differ from the generic image of Midwestern cities: its skyline consists of a few pretentious skyscrapers that stand over a small downtown surrounded by an undifferentiated mass of identical neighbourhoods. Given this lack of personality, Maddin avoids most of Winnipeg’s usual landmarks and historic sites to focus instead on what he calls a ‘heartsick architecture’, a term referring to those buildings, constructions and places that have not been able to fulfill their original purpose. The first example of this local peculiarity is the story of the Arlington Street Bridge, an iron viaduct that crosses the huge train yards of the city: according to the myth, this structure was manufactured by the Vulcan Iron Works of London at the beginning of the twentieth century in order to be subsequently brought to Egypt, where it was supposed to span the Nile. Unfortunately, ‘a mistake in specs made the fit with that river impossible, and the bridge was sold at a bargain price to bargain-crazy Winnipeg’. Again, this story is not entirely true, but it is not easy to know which data have been tampered with by the filmmaker. The following quotes try to solve the mystery, but even so they disagree regarding the origin of the bridge:
The bridge was in fact built by the Cleveland Bridge Works. It was commissioned for Egypt, but there was nothing wrong with the specs; rather, no one took delivery. But it was indeed purchased at auction by the City of Winnipeg for considerably less than it would have cost new. (Seguin 2008)
It has long been rumoured that the Arlington St. Bridge was originally built to cross the Nile in Egypt and how it later ended up in Winnipeg. It was indeed designed for Winnipeg as its width would not have spanned the much wider Nile. That it was built in Birmingham, England, by the Cleveland Iron Works, which also did bridges for places around the world, probably lead to this speculation. (Siamandas 2007)
Despite its lack of historical accuracy, Maddin’s version succeeds in conveying the oppressive atmosphere of the place by humanising the bridge through a prosopopoeia: the narrator interprets the dilation of its iron structure in the cold winter nights as a disconsolate moan, an expression of sorrow that would arise from the longing for what should be its promised land, the Nile Valley. Accordingly, the reference to Egypt is essential to define the
genius loci of this junkspace, even though it has nothing to do with its true story. Far from being just a witty joke, the idea of a heartsick architecture provides Winnipeg landmarks with an emotional biography, which sometimes also serves to denounce ‘architectural tragedies’ such as the replacement of Eaton’s by the MTS Centre or the demolition of the old Winnipeg Arena (Images
8.6 &
8.9).
Regarding the first, Eaton’s was the largest department store retailer in Canada for decades, and its Winnipeg store, a red brick building that occupied an entire city block on Portage Avenue at Donald Street, was once considered the most profitable department store in the world. However, the company’s bankruptcy in 1999 led to the closure of the store and the sale of its plot, which was finally bought by True North Sports & Entertainment in 2001. After a few brief episodes of token resistance, the building was demolished in 2002 to make way for a new entertainment and sports venue: the ominous MTS Centre, an indoor arena built to bring a NHL team back to the city after the traumatic relocation of the original Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix in 1996.
9In order to summarise the process of replacing a building with another, Maddin juxtaposes a few images of Eaton’s demolition with a contemporary view of the MTS Centre, all framed from the same camera position (Images
8.7 &
8.8). For a few seconds, he even alters the visual style of the film by replacing its outdated black-and-white textures by flat digital colours, an aesthetic choice that helps to emphasise the estrangement effect caused by the new building in the cityscape. To make matters worse, the arena was initially too small for the NHL standards and it could not fulfil its purpose until 2011, when True North Sports & Entertainment bought the Atlanta Thrashers and moved them to Winnipeg.
10 Nevertheless, before that were to happen, Maddin found a malicious pun in the cityscape that expressed his contempt for the building better than any other poisonous joke: due to a temporary failure, the ‘S’ in the neon sign of the MTS Centre did not work when he filmed its façade, so the name of the arena could then be read as ‘empty centre’.
Images 8.6 & 8.7: My Winnipeg, Eaton’s heyday (top) and demolition (bottom)
The construction of this venue was used as a pretext for the demolition of the Winnipeg Arena, the local ‘cathedral’ of ice hockey during the second half of the twentieth century: it was built in 1955, a year before the filmmaker’s birth, and pulled down nearly half a century later, in 2004, only three years before the making of
My Winnipeg. Maddin’s affection for this building, which had already appeared in
Cowards Bend the Knee, comes from its familiar connotations, since his father used to work there when he was a child, as noted above. In another prosopopoeia, the filmmaker states that ‘
this building was my male parent’, and he subsequently projects the image of his father’s face upon its ice rink. The arena is thereby identified as a source of male influence that counters and complements the female influence of his mother’s beauty salon. Of course, this autobiographical reference immediately opens the door to self-fiction: the narrator claims to have been born and grown up in the locker room, where he would even have been breastfed. Consequently, he associates his childhood memories with the smell of breast milk, sweet and urine, ‘
a holy trinity of odours’, as he calls it, which inspires his personal farewell to the arena: he goes to its urinals and documents his ‘last pee’ there, an act of self-expression described by Beard as ‘infantile (reacting to negative stimulus with an excretory event) … animal-like (marking the territory that is about to be destroyed), [and] memorial (ritually repeating an act already performed “a million times before”)’ (2010: 342).
Images 8.8 & 8.9: My Winnipeg, MTS Centre (top) and Winnipeg Arena (bottom)
This tribute to the Winnipeg Arena is again developed in terms of fantasy and testimony: first, Maddin resorts to the logic of ‘what if’ to dream of a hockey team called the Black Tuesdays, which would be formed by Manitoba’s best players of all times; and then, he ends the sequence with an amazing shot of the failed demolition of the building in which a group of nostalgic supporters shout ‘go, Jets, go!’ off-screen. Being aware of the historical value of this image, the filmmaker repeats it up to three times to emphasise the heroic resistance of the Winnipeg Arena to be removed from the cityscape. One more time, the supernatural atmosphere of the film is reinforced by an unusual event which apparently fits the imaginary city better than the real one.
The end of My Winnipeg borrows a similar gimmick to that which closed 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963): Maddin summons all the ghosts of the city, or at least all those who appear in the film, by means of a character called ‘Citizen Girl’. This superheroine would be the imaginary pin-up girl of The Winnipeg Citizen, a collective newspaper published at the time of the Winnipeg Revolutionary Strike of 1919. According to the narrator, this ‘concerned comrade’ would be the only one able to ‘undo all the damage done during Winnipeg’s first trip through time’: with a simple wave of her hand, she might restore Eaton’s and the Winnipeg Arena, bring the Jets back to the city, plant a new elm on Wolseley Avenue or refill the Paddle Wheel Club, among many other incredible feats. At best, Citizen Girl would become a new lap for Winnipeg, allowing Maddin to leave it at last because ‘she would look after this city, my city, my Winnipeg’. Her intervention is a shameless deux ex machina in which citizen awareness meets the filmmaker’s wet dreams, one last example of the close alliance between politics and sex (or Marx and Freud) that shapes My Winnipeg.
Maddin’s concern for the transformations of his hometown places the film in the wake of many other urban self-portraits. Like
Les hommes du port,
Porto of My Childhood and
Of Time and the City,
My Winnipeg is another visual eulogy for a missing city, whose architectural tragedies symbolise ‘the long, gradual slide downhill of a city that had not so many decades earlier been so bustling and full of promise’ (Beard 2010: 336). The Canadian filmmaker attempts to protect his places of memory by filming them, especially those threatened by obsolescence, because he is aware of their great memorial value. This is the reason why he portrays himself as the guardian of Winnipeg’s ghosts and hidden stories, someone able to put the city back on the map again through films and fantasies, many of which, it must be said, only bear a slight resemblance to reality. In conclusion, both Manoel de Oliveira and Guy Maddin understand cinema in general and self-fiction in particular as a means to construct and express their respective identities and worldviews, in which there seems to be no separation between memory and imagination.
Porto of My Childhood and
My Winnipeg are thus closer to fiction than to documentary because they depict a cityscape that has definitely become a mindscape, as already happened in the case of autobiographical landscaping. Therefore, in this third type of urban self-portrait, the representation of the lived city requires the creation of its fictional double, which can only exist as a city-character on the screen.
NOTES
