GUY MADDIN IN PERSON!

The subject of many series and screenings at our cinematheque and of a recent retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Guy Maddin, master of moth-eaten myth and dredger of dreamworlds, triumphed this decade with the one-two salvo of The Heart of the World and My Winnipeg. The Maddin that won the greatest critical favour—it made Sight and Sound best of the year poll as a late interloper—was this brilliant, chill-bitten “docu-fantasia” in which personal memoir (unreliable, as always in the director’s autobiography) is interleaved with the history of the place that made Maddin and remains his muse: Winnipeg. Part Freudian fever dream—his mother’s lap is repeatedly rhymed with the forked confluence of two mighty rivers—part secret history of a city, whose most outrageous imaginings have been taken by the gullible as documented truth (watch for the frozen horses!), My Winnipeg acts as a kind of summation of Maddin’s art and his state of mind. By casting nasty B-movie icon Ann Savage as his mom, the accent is on familial weirdness and trauma (Lynch and Nick Ray come to mind); and Maddin, prairie Proust clutching a crumbling Oreo as his would-be madeleine, exploits familiar settings, his aunt’s erotically charged beauty salon foremost among them, to invoke his own brand upon the brain. “Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic” (Chicago Tribune).

Rated PG

Director Guy Maddin will join us to introduce our presentation of MY WINNIPEG and THE HEART OF THE WORLD. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A.