I don’t have a great handle on Canadian history. I know that around sixth grade, I started learning about it in school, and it’s possible that at one point I knew a lot about it, but it didn’t get a lot of foot traffic in my mind and so has largely faded away. I’m sure the curriculum has changed since I was a kid, but in the early 2000s I believe we learned a lot about our nation’s humility, which was framed as a good thing. We didn’t fight a bloody war for independence like our southern neighbours did; our independence has come gradually, through hard work, suffering, and an awareness of our place. For example, because we sacrificed so many young men during World War I, we earned the right to wait a whole week before following Britain into World War II.
Canada’s population is much smaller than the United States’, and our national self-conception is less grandiose, so our corresponding Historical Media Complex has been much less impactful. Thanks to a lifelong immersion in American media, I know more about the historical significance of, say, Ross Perot than I do of certain Canadian Prime Ministers who served in my lifetime (who was Paul Martin again?). In fact, all of my schooling probably had less of an impact on me than those Canadian Heritage Moments that would play on TV in the ‘90s, teaching a generation of kids that basketball was first played in Canada with peach baskets, and that the bear who inspired Winnie the Pooh was a fellow countryman. My memories of these 60-second TV spots are melded with my memories of where I saw them: the Etobicoke house where I grew up and my grandmother’s home where I often went after school. Those spaces are long gone and also a little hazy to me now.
*
There is a memorable section of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) where the filmmaker tells us of a fire that struck his home city’s racetrack in 1926. The horses fled their stables and tried to run across the frigid Red River, and then for the next five months of winter, 11 dead horses’ heads protruded from the ice. At first a tragic site, the frozen heads quickly became part of the city’s fabric—a site for passersby to gawk, stroll, and even have picnics. It became such a popular date spot that a small baby boom was recorded in the city the following year. Without bothering to look into it, I’m going to assume that none of this actually happened—well, maybe there was a fire—but that versions of this tall tale were told and retold with varying degrees of seriousness until the frozen horses became as important a structuring myth for the community as events that were actually true. I’m reminded of how when I was very young, we used to make up stories on the schoolyard about what happened if you went into the woods next to the school after dark, and then, slowly I started to believe them.
"He is among the rare filmmakers within that system drawn to Canada’s strangeness and who finds its identity somewhere in its haze."
Canada is vast and largely unpopulated, with most of us crowded near the border of a country whose presence can overwhelm ours. We don’t have a revolutionary myth nor a sense of manifest destiny and have built our identity in direct relation to two countries—first Great Britain, then the United States. Like most Canadian filmmakers who work within the country’s borders, Maddin has been reliant on funding from the sorts of government bodies tasked with deciding who gets to define the Canadian identity through art. He is among the rare filmmakers within that system drawn to Canada’s strangeness and who finds its identity somewhere in its haze.
The Manhattan of, say, Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) looks close to the one we know now, but the Toronto we see in A Cool Sound from Hell (1959) and Nobody Waved Good-Bye (1964) looks tiny and unformed, as if emerging from the primordial swamp. Those films’ black and white photography makes the city look like a lantern in the darkness. The Saddest Music in the World (2003) takes place in one such lantern—Winnipeg in 1933, the height of the Depression and the year that Prohibition (never nationally enforced in Canada) was lifted in the United States. In this sociopolitical climate, the local beer baroness, Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), announces a contest to re-establish Winnipeg as the beer capital of the world. It will be an international contest to determine which country can produce the world’s saddest music, but the drama centers on one deeply wounded Winnipeg family whose various members have spent years suppressing their traumas.
The tangled web: Lady Helen was rendered legless after a car accident, when she was ineptly amputated by the alcoholic town doctor Fyodor (David Fox). Her ex-lover and Fyodor’s son, Chester (Mark McKinney), fled to New York after the incident to become a Broadway impresario, but has returned for the competition in debt. Meanwhile, Chester’s brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) fell into a long depression after the death of his son and the disappearance of his wife, reinventing himself as a Serbian cellist called “Gravillo the Great.” But now, his missing wife Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) has returned to town on Chester’s arm, having completely forgotten Chester and their son. In the competition, Chester directs Narcissa in a maudlin performance of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—an old slave song co-opted and rendered tacky. From America, they’ve learned that sad memories must be either repressed or Disneyfied. Roderick, meanwhile, has adopted the identity of a country perceived as instigating the Great War, absorbing its sadness to drown out his own. In Canada, Fyodor’s sobriety rests on the fragile hope of one day winning Lady Helen’s love. Surrounding that flicker of hope is cold and darkness.
*
Maddin is an artist whom I have had, and hope to continue having, an evolving lifelong relationship with. I first saw his The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg when they were new and I was in my teens, and his use of “old” aesthetics appealed to my burgeoning cinephilia. I’m 34 now, which is not that old, but is still old enough for me to have seen friends grow older, loved ones die, and all the places I’ve ever known steamrolled—and for Maddin’s film’s to speak to me in a more textured way.
"If memory is non-literal, perhaps it can also be a canvas."
A key section of My Winnipeg concerns Maddin's indignation that the local Eaton's department store—once the very center of the town’s social and economic life—has been razed to build a new hockey arena—a slick monstrosity without enough seats to host an NHL team. Worse, the building of a new arena has ensured the destruction of the old, historic one, where so many memories lived. Losing a department store or a hockey arena might not sound like losing the Library of Alexandria, and Maddin’s seriocomic tone leaves room for that ambiguity… but he raises real questions of what and whose memories matter, and why, and how much. Two symbolic pillars of the community are gone, and we’re told to accept the inevitable march of progress. Is there more to a site than its commercial function? What responsibility do we have to honour that? Can we at least be allowed to mourn what we've lost? And can’t we at least recognize that progress is not an inexplicable force, but is rather the result of political decisions?
Memories are not tangible, nor are they trustworthy; they’re constantly adapting to accommodate our evolving self-conceptions. Memories also don’t exist in one convenient place, like a toy trunk; they’re attached to objects, places, and senses, and can’t always be retrieved at will. All of this can be scary when memories are all we have left of people. If you’ve ever had to sort through a dead person’s belongings, you’ll know how fraught the decisions around getting rid of anything can be. Give away an object and you might also lose the memories attached to it.
If memory is non-literal, perhaps it can also be a canvas. Maddin’s short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), written by and starring Isabella Rossellini, is both a tribute to her father Roberto on his centennial as well as an attempt to communicate with him. Voiced by his daughter, Papa Rossellini is seen only as a bulbous, jiggly torso—the part of him that met her line of sight as a child and which her memory has rendered the most vivid. For most of the short, Rossellini imagines a dialogue between her father and four of his peers—Hitchcock, Fellini, Chaplin, and Selznick—each representing radically different filmmaking philosophies. After, she interviews herself as her mother, reflecting without regret on the scandal that derailed her career and the marriage that couldn’t last. She concludes by holding her father’s enormous, blob-like torso, telling him sadly that his films are slowly being forgotten and that he has inspired no apostles. I think she’s wrong—I see the influence of neorealism every fall festival season—but I can empathize with her anxiety, and her desire to still be in touch. If people exist only in memory, then this becomes the realm where dialogue is still possible.
I don’t have a great handle on Canadian history. I know that around sixth grade, I started learning about it in school, and it’s possible that at one point I knew a lot about it, but it didn’t get a lot of foot traffic in my mind and so has largely faded away. I’m sure the curriculum has changed since I was a kid, but in the early 2000s I believe we learned a lot about our nation’s humility, which was framed as a good thing. We didn’t fight a bloody war for independence like our southern neighbours did; our independence has come gradually, through hard work, suffering, and an awareness of our place. For example, because we sacrificed so many young men during World War I, we earned the right to wait a whole week before following Britain into World War II.
Canada’s population is much smaller than the United States’, and our national self-conception is less grandiose, so our corresponding Historical Media Complex has been much less impactful. Thanks to a lifelong immersion in American media, I know more about the historical significance of, say, Ross Perot than I do of certain Canadian Prime Ministers who served in my lifetime (who was Paul Martin again?). In fact, all of my schooling probably had less of an impact on me than those Canadian Heritage Moments that would play on TV in the ‘90s, teaching a generation of kids that basketball was first played in Canada with peach baskets, and that the bear who inspired Winnie the Pooh was a fellow countryman. My memories of these 60-second TV spots are melded with my memories of where I saw them: the Etobicoke house where I grew up and my grandmother’s home where I often went after school. Those spaces are long gone and also a little hazy to me now.
*
There is a memorable section of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) where the filmmaker tells us of a fire that struck his home city’s racetrack in 1926. The horses fled their stables and tried to run across the frigid Red River, and then for the next five months of winter, 11 dead horses’ heads protruded from the ice. At first a tragic site, the frozen heads quickly became part of the city’s fabric—a site for passersby to gawk, stroll, and even have picnics. It became such a popular date spot that a small baby boom was recorded in the city the following year. Without bothering to look into it, I’m going to assume that none of this actually happened—well, maybe there was a fire—but that versions of this tall tale were told and retold with varying degrees of seriousness until the frozen horses became as important a structuring myth for the community as events that were actually true. I’m reminded of how when I was very young, we used to make up stories on the schoolyard about what happened if you went into the woods next to the school after dark, and then, slowly I started to believe them.
"He is among the rare filmmakers within that system drawn to Canada’s strangeness and who finds its identity somewhere in its haze."
Canada is vast and largely unpopulated, with most of us crowded near the border of a country whose presence can overwhelm ours. We don’t have a revolutionary myth nor a sense of manifest destiny and have built our identity in direct relation to two countries—first Great Britain, then the United States. Like most Canadian filmmakers who work within the country’s borders, Maddin has been reliant on funding from the sorts of government bodies tasked with deciding who gets to define the Canadian identity through art. He is among the rare filmmakers within that system drawn to Canada’s strangeness and who finds its identity somewhere in its haze.
The Manhattan of, say, Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) looks close to the one we know now, but the Toronto we see in A Cool Sound from Hell (1959) and Nobody Waved Good-Bye (1964) looks tiny and unformed, as if emerging from the primordial swamp. Those films’ black and white photography makes the city look like a lantern in the darkness. The Saddest Music in the World (2003) takes place in one such lantern—Winnipeg in 1933, the height of the Depression and the year that Prohibition (never nationally enforced in Canada) was lifted in the United States. In this sociopolitical climate, the local beer baroness, Lady Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), announces a contest to re-establish Winnipeg as the beer capital of the world. It will be an international contest to determine which country can produce the world’s saddest music, but the drama centers on one deeply wounded Winnipeg family whose various members have spent years suppressing their traumas.
The tangled web: Lady Helen was rendered legless after a car accident, when she was ineptly amputated by the alcoholic town doctor Fyodor (David Fox). Her ex-lover and Fyodor’s son, Chester (Mark McKinney), fled to New York after the incident to become a Broadway impresario, but has returned for the competition in debt. Meanwhile, Chester’s brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) fell into a long depression after the death of his son and the disappearance of his wife, reinventing himself as a Serbian cellist called “Gravillo the Great.” But now, his missing wife Narcissa (Maria de Medeiros) has returned to town on Chester’s arm, having completely forgotten Chester and their son. In the competition, Chester directs Narcissa in a maudlin performance of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—an old slave song co-opted and rendered tacky. From America, they’ve learned that sad memories must be either repressed or Disneyfied. Roderick, meanwhile, has adopted the identity of a country perceived as instigating the Great War, absorbing its sadness to drown out his own. In Canada, Fyodor’s sobriety rests on the fragile hope of one day winning Lady Helen’s love. Surrounding that flicker of hope is cold and darkness.
*
Maddin is an artist whom I have had, and hope to continue having, an evolving lifelong relationship with. I first saw his The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg when they were new and I was in my teens, and his use of “old” aesthetics appealed to my burgeoning cinephilia. I’m 34 now, which is not that old, but is still old enough for me to have seen friends grow older, loved ones die, and all the places I’ve ever known steamrolled—and for Maddin’s film’s to speak to me in a more textured way.
"If memory is non-literal, perhaps it can also be a canvas."
A key section of My Winnipeg concerns Maddin's indignation that the local Eaton's department store—once the very center of the town’s social and economic life—has been razed to build a new hockey arena—a slick monstrosity without enough seats to host an NHL team. Worse, the building of a new arena has ensured the destruction of the old, historic one, where so many memories lived. Losing a department store or a hockey arena might not sound like losing the Library of Alexandria, and Maddin’s seriocomic tone leaves room for that ambiguity… but he raises real questions of what and whose memories matter, and why, and how much. Two symbolic pillars of the community are gone, and we’re told to accept the inevitable march of progress. Is there more to a site than its commercial function? What responsibility do we have to honour that? Can we at least be allowed to mourn what we've lost? And can’t we at least recognize that progress is not an inexplicable force, but is rather the result of political decisions?
Memories are not tangible, nor are they trustworthy; they’re constantly adapting to accommodate our evolving self-conceptions. Memories also don’t exist in one convenient place, like a toy trunk; they’re attached to objects, places, and senses, and can’t always be retrieved at will. All of this can be scary when memories are all we have left of people. If you’ve ever had to sort through a dead person’s belongings, you’ll know how fraught the decisions around getting rid of anything can be. Give away an object and you might also lose the memories attached to it.
If memory is non-literal, perhaps it can also be a canvas. Maddin’s short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005), written by and starring Isabella Rossellini, is both a tribute to her father Roberto on his centennial as well as an attempt to communicate with him. Voiced by his daughter, Papa Rossellini is seen only as a bulbous, jiggly torso—the part of him that met her line of sight as a child and which her memory has rendered the most vivid. For most of the short, Rossellini imagines a dialogue between her father and four of his peers—Hitchcock, Fellini, Chaplin, and Selznick—each representing radically different filmmaking philosophies. After, she interviews herself as her mother, reflecting without regret on the scandal that derailed her career and the marriage that couldn’t last. She concludes by holding her father’s enormous, blob-like torso, telling him sadly that his films are slowly being forgotten and that he has inspired no apostles. I think she’s wrong—I see the influence of neorealism every fall festival season—but I can empathize with her anxiety, and her desire to still be in touch. If people exist only in memory, then this becomes the realm where dialogue is still possible.