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from saturday's books section

Prior to the introduction more than a decade ago of annotated DVDs (notes and interviews with director, descriptions of scenes), the concept of a book consisting of an annotated script, notes and interview with director, especially of a documentary, for general public perusal, would have been laughed out of the building by publishers.

With the possible exception of rare major works of unquestionable popularity, such documentation was created only for film students and archives.

So much for changing tastes and breadth of interests. Guy Maddin's new book, My Winnipeg , features the annotated script of his eponymous film and "a cornucopia of illuminating arcana" (some of which are included with this review in the form of photographs). It is very much for the modern reader, who needn't have lived in, glimpsed or even heard of Winnipeg.

  • My Winnipeg, by Guy Maddin, Coach House, 191 pages, $27.95

Furthermore, the reader need not have seen Guy Maddin's documentary film My Winnipeg (though you should) in order to laugh and cry through this unusual saga-like epic poem, replete with Maddin's personal details of every stripe, and nary a reliable nod as to which bits of arcana contain a smidgen of truth and which bits are unequivocal historical facts.

The text is the voice-over of Maddin's film, a brilliant depiction of the universal place from which we come: the snow-shrouded memories of the first stab in the back, the cruelty one visited upon a friend, the distant mother, the brutal cold, the persistent potential for one's tongue to attach to a school fence through the molecular chemistry of ice formation (especially on a dare), the glimpses of naked bodies at a neighbour's house, the unexpected midday presence of a fox near a drugstore, a dead bird with its unborn babies exposed splashed midway across a howling intersection. ... Well, these are a few of my own, but they seem to marry harmoniously with Maddin's fabulous and absurdist imagery because reading the film's poem/text inevitably invokes one's own long-lost diary.

Maddin claims to have written the script/made the film in an attempt finally to escape Winnipeg/his mother:

Winnipeg./ Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg.

Here the text indicates a side note:

A resident of Winnipeg is a Winnipegger , or' Pegger. Significantly, peggered, the Winnipeg bastardization of the Yiddish past participle gepeygert, which means dropped dead, suggests by working backwards to the infinitive, that to pegger means to die ...

My home for my entire life.

In a side note, the author remembers Grace Hospital, where Canada's first candy stripers were introduced ... and a location to which Maddin would return, half a century later, looking for solace at the demise of a relationship.

My entire life. I must leave it. I must leave it. I must leave it now.

We are not only in Maddin's fog-enshrouded dream world, we are eavesdropping with Maddin on his own extended psychoanalytic session, Maddin playing both analyst and analysand. (If this sounds familiar, revisit Woody Allen.) But while Maddin is fabulist, he is also historian. He likes to cite his sources. When he describes the various sports and civic heroes and leaders and villains, the reader doesn't have to take his word for it.

He provides elaborate documentation authenticating his recollections.

The endless game he plays starts with a small personal event that swells with a newspaper reference, then spirals into a catastrophic disaster: It's Maddin's riff on a historical fact taken to unruly extremes. The effect on the reader is to make her laugh and gasp at the twists and turns of imaginative whorls and dashes Maddin creates. All this appears on the screen in the film, and is devilishly documented in the pages of the book.

For Winnipeg has always forbidden the shantytowns and hobo villages that typically pop up in other cities. Still on the books here is a law that keeps our homeless out of sight up on the rooftops of our city, above us, an Aboriginal Happyland.

In the clouds Aboriginal Happyland. Forgotten Happyland Forgotten people, Happyland. Happyland.

Then, in the side notes:

There was also another large shanty village in Winnipeg, an earthbound one called Rooster Town, a squatter settlement comprised of shacks with no running water, sewer or other services ... on the current site of the Grant Park Shopping Centre, for which the flimsy little squat was razed in the late fifties. According to census polls, there seem to have been no babies born in Rooster Town who grew up to be professionals.

The watchful reader might take careful note as to when Maddin's tongue is planted firmly in his cheek. Maddin has created a text we might all like to have written. Fortunately for us, he actually did it. His intelligence, curiosity and imagination work magic by drawing us into his very personal world and giving us a mirror, maybe a distorting mirror from the Red River Ex, but nonetheless a mirror, through which to see ourselves, critically, tenderly, writ large.

Gail Singer, herself a Winnipegger, is a filmmaker and writer now studying drawing and painting and other fine arts.

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