Lev Manovich, Cinema, and Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg" as narrative/database

Hi all--

If you're bored, here's another piece I wrote for my Media Poetics class.

If you've never seen "My Winnipeg", or even if you have, I'd suggest you watch these two links first.







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Lev Manovich, Cinema, and Guy Maddin's "My Winnipeg" as narrative/database

As Marshal McLuhan pointed out with his tetrads, and as Lev Manovich points out in "Database as Symbolic Form", the rise or development of a particular communication medium brings certain things to the fore, and obsolesces or modifies others. In this regard, Manovich's attention to film and the motion picture, and its relation to the database/narrative duality, becomes particularly interesting.
Manovich stresses that in the twentieth century, the rise of internet technologies have made database, rather than narrative, the dominant communication form, even as most cinema continues to have a narrative structure. While he mentions a few cinematic exceptions to this rule, one that Manovich fails to mention is Guy Maddin, whose 2007 work My Winnipeg engages with some of these ideas, borrowing from and critiquing the conventions of early cinema, of documentary film-making, and of archival or database research.
In titling his film My Winnipeg, Maddin immediately places himself and the film outside of the realm of authoritative documentary into an uncertain realm of the creator's fantasy, questionable research methods, and his less-than-perfect memory. The ideas of archival and database authority are therefore in doubt throughout the film, so that we don't know how much we can trust the narrator's claims about his city having ten times the rate of sleepwalkers of any other city, of the taxis that only run in the backlanes, or of the 11 horses who became frozen into the ice on the Red River one winter, where for the next few months they formed a grisly local attraction.
In presenting "his" Winnipeg, rather than "the" Winnipeg, Maddin explores some of the failings or complications of any claim to authority in the presentation of history, and the ways its telling is immediately subject to the distorting effects of bias, fantasy, even love--in this case, love for a place.
As far back as 1926, however, pioneering film critic Gilbert Seldes wrote about some of these same issues in "The Motion Picture as Art", discussing the relatively new art of cinema, and both its possibilities and weaknesses. Appearing as an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work that in and of itself certainly aspires to a database-like authority Seldes notes that commercial interests had thus far largely trumped artistic concerns in cinema, meaning that most movies (particularly American ones, he notes), used title or text cards to hold the plot together. With the exception of slapstick comedy and a single ambitious German film (which was a commercial failure in America), Seldes notes that the actors and the scenes often formed simply a backdrop to help animate what was still very much a written medium. So despite Teddy Rosevelt's famous declaration that cinema was "history written with lightning", Seldes points out that in fact one of the great failings of early cinema was its dependence upon text, rather than images, to convey its narrative. More than being written with lightning, Seldes laments, cinema in 1926 was still mostly written on the page--white words on a flickering black screen.
This early work of film criticism looked forward to an age when cinema could become a more distinctly visual and narrative form, when directors' work could be recognized individually, simply by its visual qualities. And even as he calls the advent of sound and colour the "twin mistakes" of the motion picture, Seldes recognizes that they too might one day help push cinema beyond its dependence on text cards. The ideas Seldes puts forward are interesting partly because of how much they show that, while there was narrative in the early films, it was presented in much the same way an internet database presents information today, i.e. as a series of titles interspersed with images. And in this regard, Guy Maddin's work can be seen to exist simultaneously in both traditions.
In referring to the informational structure of new media, Lev Manovich writes that "(d)atabase (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (syntagm) is dematerialized. Paradigm is privileged; syntagm is downplayed" (Manovich 49). And yet as Manovich points out, modern cinema presents a different structure than that of the database.
It's significant then that in My Winnipeg we watch narrative be dematerialized into a seemingly unorganized series of memories, re-enactments, and bits of archival footage. In its affected disorder, the film mimics the database, as we almost have the sense of clicking involuntary on one link after another and of trying to piece together the story from these random and jumbled text cards/database files. The rabbit-hole journey through the reams of information on the internet is mimicked in Maddin's cinema, as if we're watching the narrator compiling a database before our eyes, with only his voice providing a sense of continuity or order. At the same time, a loose narrative of one man's love/hate relationship with his home town, and of his ongoing attempts to leave it, provides the film with its structure.
Just as McLuhan's tetrads point us to the idea that each technology enhances certain things and obsolesces others, Maddin's film seeks to engage simultaneously with the enhanced and the obsolesced. In this regard, it's not insignificant that as the narrator provides his voice-over, we often see him writing, in long-hand, in a notebook. There is no database, My Winnipeg suggests, and there is no narrative, even as all of it is somehow a database, and all of it is somehow a narrative.


Works cited:

Manovich, Lev. "Database as Symbolic Form." Database Aesthetics. Victoria Vesna, editor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007. pp 39-60.

Seldes, Gilbert. "The Motion Picture as Art." The Treasury of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Clifton Fadiman, editor. New York: Viking, 1992. pp. 246-253.