Guy Maddin creates a unique and unusual docu-fantasia in MY WINNIPEG
MY WINNIPEG (Guy Maddin, 2007) & BRING ME THE HEAD OF TIM HORTON (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2015)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 12, $12, 2:00
Series runs through December 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
In 2007, Canadian auteur Guy Maddin presented his (maybe) semiautobiographical work My Winnipeg, an insanely brilliant homage to his native city, at the Tribeca Film Festival, where he had previously wowed crowds with his splendid cinematic installation Cowards Bend the Knee in 2003. This past September, Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World, Careful) was at the New York Film Festival, screening his latest feature, The Forbidden Room, along with the fabulously titled Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, a short he made with regular collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson and which was shown on a loop for free for two days in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater. My Winnipeg and Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton are being paired together December 12 at 2:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “The Hollywood Classics Behind Walkers,” held in conjunction with the exhibition “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” which consists of painting, sculpture, photography, and video that incorporates the art form of cinema. In My Winnipeg, Maddin pays tribute to the long, bizarre history of the title Canadian province, which sits directly in the middle of North America, what Maddin refers to as the “heart of the heart of the continent.” Combining archival footage with re-created scenes, all of which look like faded newsreels and early, degraded prints, Maddin, in voice-over narration, tells of horses buried in ice with their heads sticking out, the Happyland amusement park, Ledge Man, the Hudson’s Bay Company, stampedes, spirit photography and seances, a beauty pageant for men, local scavenger hunts in which the winner gets a ticket out of town, and other strange elements; one of the many joys of the film is not knowing what is exactly true and what is invention, although there is more fact here than you might think. “Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism,” Maddin says, just to keep us guessing. He also gets personal in the film, which he calls a “docu-fantasia,” with many scenes focusing on his mother — or an actress playing his mother. A masterful meditation on memory, My Winnipeg is one of Maddin’s most accomplished, most accessible works, proving him to be the successor to such avant-garde filmmakers as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man), and Orson Welles (F for Fake).
Meanwhile, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, whose title references both Sam Peckinpah’s cult classic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and hockey player and doughnut entrepreneur Tim Horton, who died in a drunk-driving car accident in 1974 while a member of the Buffalo Sabres, takes viewers behind the scenes of the making of Paul Gross’s 2015 Afghanistan war movie, Hyena Road. Of course, this is no standard DVD-extra documentary but instead an exploration of art, violence, money, hockey, and acting — Maddin gets to play a small role in Gross’s film — among other ideals, inspired by Evan Johnson’s “The Cuadecuc Manifesto,” which was derived from Pere Portabella’s Cuadecuc, vampir experimental film created from footage shot while Jess Franco was making his 1970 version of Count Dracula with Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, and Klaus Kinski. Got that? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because as with all of Maddin’s films, it’s all about the experience, a melding of sight and sound as only he can deliver. Following My Winnipeg and Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, the Museum of the Moving Image will be showing Maddin’s latest, The Forbidden Room; unfortunately, the director will not be able to attend that screening, as was originally announced. The series continues through December 27 with such major films as Chinatown, Psycho, The Wild Bunch, and The Last Picture Show, so Maddin is certainly in some pretty fine company.
Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio reimagines the kidnapping of Aldo Moro from the inside in Good Morning, Night, a taut, slow-paced drama that won the Little Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival. Moro, a former Italian prime minister and president of the Christian Democratic Party, was boldly grabbed by members of the radical Red Brigades, who left a bloody mess in their wake. Bellocchio focuses on the three men and one woman who orchestrated the plot and kept Moro locked in a hidden room inside their large rented apartment. While Mariano (Luigi Lo Cascio), Ernesto (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio), and Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) take turns guarding Moro and Mariano spews Socialist rhetoric at him, Chiaras (Maya Sensa), who is Primo’s girlfriend but is pretending to be Ernesto’s wife as a cover, goes to work every day, buys supplies and newspapers, and dreams at night of Moro coming to her as a father figure. Chiaras is the moral conscience of the movie, and a complete invention on the part of Bellocchio, who has said, “I’m not interested in the factual truth.” Even so, much of the real story is still not known, and like the JFK assassination, there are lots of conspiracy theories out there about an event that shocked a nation. Pink Floyd fans get a bonus by Bellocchio’s powerful use of “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Good Morning, Night is screening on December 5 and 16 as part of the MoMA series “Italian Film, 21st-Century Style: A Tribute to Rai Cinema,” a two-week retrospective that consists of ten films from the last fifteen years released by the Italian studio, including Ermanno Olmi’s Il Mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms), Gianni Amelio’s Le Chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House), Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma, and 
Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Gomorra is a violent, intimate look at the modern-day Camorra crime syndicate in Naples and Caserta. Based on the nonfiction novel by investigative journalist Roberto Saviano — who has been living under police protection since the fall of 2006 — Matteo Garrone’s epic follows five distinct yet interrelated stories set around a dilapidated concrete-block housing project, a sort of Godfather meets The Sopranos filtered through Italian Neo-realism. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a tailor who considers sharing his secrets with a Chinese sweatshop to make some much-needed extra cash. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) is having second thoughts training under Franco (The Great Beauty’s Toni Servillo), who runs a toxic waste dumping business. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) has to deal with a delicate, difficult situation when Maria’s (Italian singing star Maria Nazionale) young son joins the secessionists, a rival gang. Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are loose cannons who keep messing with the wrong people. And Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a thirteen-year-old boy who is helping out the Camorra against his mother’s wishes — and is soon faced with a life-changing decision. Beautifully shot by Marco Onorato and featuring a cast of primarily nonprofessional actors, Gomorra is a deeply involving crime drama, all the more frightening because it’s based on real, current situations. Gomorra is screening December 6 & 15 as part of the MoMA series “Italian Film, 21st-Century Style: A Tribute to Rai Cinema,” which kicks off with Garrone’s latest, Il Racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales). The two-week retrospective consists of ten films from the last fifteen years released by the Italian studio, including Ermanno Olmi’s Il Mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms), Gianni Amelio’s Le Chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House), Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma, and 
Winner of the Palme D’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, The Son’s Room is a moving look at life, love, and loss. Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti stars as Giovanni, a psychiatrist who can’t control the dissolution of his family following a terrible tragedy. Moretti (Caro Diario, Ecce Bombo) has made a heart-wrenching work that will always be compared with Todd Field’s powerful In the Bedroom, which came out the same year. Both films examine family tragedy with honesty and believability, but whereas the family in In the Bedroom considers revenge, the father in The Son’s Room, achingly played by Moretti, can’t get over wrongly blaming himself, while his wife (Laura Morante, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for the role) seeks solace in her son’s girlfriend (Sofia Vigliar), whom she had not known about. Moretti is a deeply personal filmmaker; at times you will feel like you are watching a documentary, and it will break your heart. The Son’s Room is screening December 5 & 17 as part of the MoMA series “Italian Film, 21st-Century Style: A Tribute to Rai Cinema,” comprising ten films from the last fifteen years released by the Italian studio. Other films in the two-week retrospective are Matteo Garrone’s Il Racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales) and Gomorra, Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), the Taviani brothers’ Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), and Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA.