My Green Mind-Bender

My Winnipeg exists somewhere in the gap between asleep and awake—that time you have your most profound thoughts, the time you know you'll have forgotten come morning. When Guy Maddin ascends by ladder to the box seat from which he'll narrate his dreamy, hyper-stylized film, it's as a cleverly disguised and unassuming sandman, ready to lull his audience into a somnambulistic stupor and then convince us that all of the outrageous yarns he's about to spin on-screen are true.

At this point, I'm ready for anything. I've just seen Isabella Rossellini play a sadomasochistic snail, a horny headless mantis, and an earthworm that digs the ol' soixante-neuf in Green Porno, an earnest endeavor to teach audiences about how bugs do the yum-yum in eight compact (about a minute a pop), colorful, brilliantly staged little films. Oh, and they're also completely freaking hilarious.

"At the beginning of cinema, there was no constraint in time, and you could tell a beautiful story in a few minutes," Rossellini told the full house at Village East Cinemas before last night's double-bill premiere of Porno and Winnipeg. The films certainly make for interesting bedfellows—Maddin and Rossellini paired for gems like The Saddest Music in the World and My Dad Is 100 Years Old and Jody Shapiro, who co-directed several of the Pornos, was director of photography and producer of Winnipeg. But while Rossellini's films were intentionally crafted for the smallest screen possible (Helio will soon present the clips on cell phones, she said), Maddin's is a film best experienced from the steep balcony of an old Moorish playhouse.

From his perch at the crowd's flank, Guy Maddin marshals his audience through a fantastical version of his hometown—a wintry world of geriatric hockey stars, hookers, train yards, underground rivers, snow-packed alleyways, demolished department stores, prepubescent boys' shower rooms, and sham Nazi invasions, all in an effort to "disentangle" himself from Winnipeg. His bobbling, ever-kinetic camera and gauzy visual style elicit a unique physiological response from the viewers—it's the cinematic equivalent of dangling a pocket watch in front of our eyes—and somehow when he asks us to believe that once upon a time the young lovers of Winnipeg made babies under frozen horse heads sticking out of an iced-over river, yeah, we're dazzled enough by the sensuality of the flick and the authoritative cadence of our narrator-wizard's voice to go along with it.

After the film, Madden tells the audience—still struggling to re-establish itself in reality—that he has always dreamed of narrating a travelogue live, of making a real connection with the audience that is often impossible in today's cinemas. "I made it my mission to mythologize on celluloid all the great stories Winnipeg has to tell," Maddin says. When someone in the audience with a very put-on Canadian accent claims to be a Winnipegger and attests to the truthfulness of every outlandish hand-me-down tale presented in the film, I can't help but think he's a plant. But I'll buy it for now. It's more fun that way.

Green Porno and My Winnipeg screen again (sans live narration) on Wednesday, April 30 and Sunday, May 4.