"My Winnipeg" is filmmaker Guy Maddin's touching goodbye letter to his Canadian hometown. As such, you might expect tenderness, nostalgia, tears. You'll get some of those, but you'll also laugh and at times you might struggle a bit to get what Maddin's talking about.
That's because the 80-minute "My Winnipeg" isn't a straight-up documentary, nor is it a historical narrative of the city. It's got aspects of those things, certainly, but it's a surrealist documentary, one that is part history, part personal history, part chronicle of a city that -- like the filmmaker, but not always in unison with the filmmaker -- has changed over the years.
Much like "One Great City!" by The Weakerthans -- which proclaims "I hate Winnipeg" but is clearly a tribute to the city - Maddin has issues with his town, especially when it comes to hockey and its related leagues and arenas.
There is historical footage and there are lots of "facts" presented, but who can really tell if any of them are true? Maybe they were true to Maddin as he grew up in the chilly climes of Manitoba, but their truth is irrelevant to the film and Maddin ("The Saddest Music in the World") is an unreliable witness. If you want a fact-based history of Winnipeg, there must certainly be books on the subject.
No, this film is not called simply "Winnipeg," rather, it's "My Winnipeg" and the cloudy narrative, obscured by industrial smoke and the fog of memory, is Maddin's story in Winnipeg. It's about his mother, about his relationship to a place. Even most of the characters are portrayed by actors.
"As a filmmaker who has spent his entire 50 years in Winnipeg, I've been enchanted, intoxicated and benighted by the city of my birth," Maddin writes in his director's notes. "It's been my muse since long before I ever picked up a camera.
"I've fallen in love with the place, not only for what it was while I loved it, but for what it used to be and for what it could be again!! Like a heedless, irrational suitor I have invested all my hopes for the future in it, only to be left heartbroken by the cold-bloodedly ‘progressive' course it insists on taking as it navigates itself inexorably away from the enchantment I once knew into the bland oblivion and mediocrity it craves for itself. With my hopes mutinied I have grown bitterly disillusioned with my home town."
Maybe the fact that we come away from the film having laughed, having felt twinges of sorrow for the city and its disillusioned, camera-wielding son, but without any real knowledge of the city or Maddin's life there -- again, the question of whether the "facts" are indeed "facts" -- shouldn't surprise us.
After all, Maddin says he, too, is trying to unlock his personal mythologies with the film.
"By wending my way through the very birthplaces of my personal mythologies, by attempting to understand the very nature of memory even while it fabricates what turns out to be an illusory Winnipeg for itself, and by facing down, in a series of singular domestic experiments, the possessive power of my own family, perhaps I can unlock the mysterious forces which occultly bind many a human heart to the past. Perhaps I can finally define for myself the true meaning of ‘home' and make the shackles which bind me here simply fall away."
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
