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My Winnipeg is both a retaliation against cultural amnesia (as Maddin crafts a loving tone poem of sorts for his hometown, one of the coldest cities on the planet) and a revelation of the functionally dysfunctional Maddin family clan, which Maddin recreates with actors - including 1940s and 1950s B movie/noir star Ann Savage in her final role, as his mother - the better to understand and revisit classic Maddin family arguments. My Winnipeg is the third and final installment in Maddin’s autobiographical trilogy. The first film, Cowards Bend the Knee, remains unseen by me, but consists of 10 six-minute installments that were originally presented as an art installation and meant to be viewed through peepholes, the better to draw out the voyeuristic aspects of its sleazy noir tale (peppered with details and incidents drawn from Maddin’s own life). Brand Upon the Brain! (with the subtitle A Remembrance in 12 Chapters) was the middle child in this progression and would seem to straddle the line between Cowards and Winnipeg, mixing elements of the generic interplay from the former with an undercurrent of loss that is more overt and “sentimental” in the latter as its hero, Guy Maddin attempts to escape from the Winnipeg of his childhood dreams and his adult nightmares on a train that seems to endlessly chug through the night on tracks leading nowhere.

The title suggests a lost, lurid 1950s sci-fi tale that might have gotten bottom billed on a pairing with a William Castle effort like The Tingler. The story plays like the fevered (wet) dream of a sexually awakening adolescent boy, replete with toiling orphans, dark family secrets, midnight black magic ceremonies, fictitious childhood crushes come to life, and gender bending, homosexual, and/or nearly incestuous romantic couplings , triangles, even (I think) quadrangles. The conceit behind Brand Upon the Brain! is that it is a silent film with musical accompaniment, a choir, a skilled 10 person foley (sound effects) team and a narrator.

Around the time of the film’s release, a series of shows were staged nationwide featuring all of those elements live as well as one of a far-flung group of personages assuming the role of the narrator: Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover, Eli Wallach, and others, even Maddin himself. On the DVD, several of these live performances can be excerpted on the soundtrack and there are three studio-recorded narrations/accompaniments to choose from. I chose Maddin’s own based on my enjoyment of his My Winnipeg voiceover (particularly his attempt to maintain composure while relating a particularly dark anecdote involving his mother and an ill-fated pet bird of some family friends). His tones resonate with a little bit of the radio announcer imploring listeners to tune in next week for the electrifying conclusion (an advantage with the mini-cliffhangers for each part of Brand Upon the Brain!, and a little dash of Garrison Keillor whimsy for the quirks of one’s small-town home life.

“Guy Maddin . . . house painter” is the protagonist of this particular childhood reverie. Returning to the family island after 30 years absence to slap a couple of coats of paint on the lighthouse that housed his father’s untoward medical experiments, the family business (an orphanage), and his mother, father and older sister “Sis”, Guy soon finds himself lost in a cascade of unfolding memories, confronting some long-buried truths about his family and himself in the process. (When the nature of Guy’s father’s work is revealed, I was reminded tangentially of the aims of the antagonist in Jeunet’s City of Lost Children, another grown-up fairy tale.) Each “chapter” runs about eight minutes calling to mind movie serials and “penny dreadful” publishing endeavors alike. Brand Upon the Brain! doesn’t so much build to a climax as it serves to reveal the ever-shifting moods of Guy, accented by Maddin’s purple-prosed voiceover musings, which are mirrored in some hilariously choice intertitles (“Dirt is Wrong!”, attributed to Guy’s mother as she taskmasters the orphans and smashes plates about simply for good measure.)

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