Guy Maddin’s version of his hometown of Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of this birthplace, by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms once and for all with his fever stream of memories, real and fabricated, inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!”

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• Jurgen Fauth has nothing but praise for Heavy Metal in Baghdad (we felt pretty much the same when we saw it in Toronto), the screening of which, Jurgen says, “was so oversold that I ended up in the front row, effectively watching a distorted fun house mirror version of Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s documentary.”
• “Most of the European critics came down pretty hard on Petri Kotwica’s Black Ice, a film in competition from Finland,” notes Filmbrain, “But I found this deliciously dark drama about dangerous deceptions to be a good bit of trashy fun.” Mr. Grant is far less enthusiastic about In Love We Trust and Just Anybody.
• Daniel Kasman is not entirely sold on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, but he concedes “Maddin’s humor comes through perhaps stronger in this film than any other (he narrates himself, with dialog by regular collaborator George Toles), pushing an obsessive, if not repetitive, theme of the life of a city and the life of a boy being an inescapable series of traumatic, almost unreal conflicts and co-minglings of unreturnable pasts and their dream-like traces in the present.” Also at The Auteurs Notebook: an extremely memorable one-liner from Klaus Kinski’s “notorious one man show,” Jesus Christ Saviour.
• 3..2…1…and the Filth and Wisdom backlash has arrived.

• Jurgen Fauth twitters: “Highlight of my day: Paul Thomas Anderson telling me he loves idrinkyourmilkshake.com and Daniel-Day Lewis giving me two thumbs up. Yay!”
• Shane Danielson’s Shine a Light review at indieWIRE focuses mainly on how the Rolling Stones concert doc completely fails at relevancy. But if the film itself represents “a sixtysomething non-Berliner’s idea of cool” complete with “a cameo from guest-star Jack White, to drag the show all the way into 1937!”, as a red carpet spectacle it seems to have been a success.
• When asked at a Berlin press conference to diagnose what’s “wrong” with George W. Bush, Neil Young declined on the grounds that “it would take too long.” Instead, he struggled to come up with something “right about Bush,” and eventually concluded, “Well, he’s a good physical specimen.”
• In a single paragraph on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, David Hudson not only notes that he had “a marvelous time,” he also manages to get Freudian: “Two rivers form ‘the Forks,’ lines directly paralleled with ‘the Lap’ - his mother’s. The pull is inescapable.”

• Oh, the perils of being an organization built on starfucking: if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association can’t get the WGA to issue a waiver to allow writers to pen lame banter for the Golden Globes, then there’s a strong chance that most stars will refuse to cross the (real or theoretical) picket line to attend the ceremony. No stars=no photo ops=virtually no point in going through with the awards. Variety says the HFPA’s chances at landing a waver look slim, although the WGA just issued a similar pass to the SAG awards.
• In other awards news: Juno and Into the Wild lead the nominations for the Critics Choice Awards; Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, one of my favorite films of this year, and Bruce Greenwood McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments made the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of the Year. Winnipeg will also open the Forum sidebar at the Berlin Film Festival in February. It’s screen alongside Green Porno, a collection of three short films by Isabella Rosselini about the sex lives of insects.
• This story is days old, but I missed it: a German producer has acquired the remake rights to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

If you’re someone who takes note of advances in technology and reacts to them in some way, you’re most likely in one of two camps: the Nostalgia Camp or the Opportunity Camp. But it’s possible to have a foot in both camps, valuing the past and envisioning the future all at the same time. A somewhat recent revival of silent films with live performances is a good example.

John Brownlee of Wired recently wrote a post about this, “Filmmakers Seek Future in Past.” He says the silent film medium was pretty much killed about 80 years ago, with advances in sound recording. Now, Brownlee writes:

Prolific modern-day directors like Guy Maddin work largely in the medium of silent film to convey postmodern tales. Silent film festivals are held annually around the world: from San Francisco to Kansas, from Italy to Australia. The Chilean subways are plastered with thousands of still images, coming to life as contiguous strips of film as the trains rumble by. And numerous groups throughout the United States have been inspired to compose and perform live original scores to silent film.

Silent film has much to offer, creatively–it doesn’t have to be left in the Museum of How We Used to Make Movies. It’s true that although certain stories and messages are very difficult to communicate in a silent film, other material can be more fully and less-awkwardly communicated without sound, or at least without words. Adding a live score allows even more opportunities to communicate and convey emotion. (Check out the Alloy Orchestra, which some of the Spout team heard accompany Lonesome at Telluride last year.)

In all, I think the revival of silent films is an exciting development, especially for musicians and composers who have a whole slew of classics to pick from and play with. But will filmmakers get excited about potential new opportunities for them? And are the opportunities really new, or are they just exercises in nostalgia? Obviously, it can go in either direction, depending on the intentions and visions of the people behind the project. In terms of moving the medium forward, here’s an interesting prediction from Cherchi Usai, the director of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive:

Curiously, it is in the ubiquitous digital advertising displays littering modern cities that Cherchi Usai sees the future of silent film, pointing to the Going Underground film festival, a weeklong event in January where silents from local filmmakers were shown in Berlin’s subways.

“Silent cinema is penetrating our lives in new, unpredictable ways,” says Cherchi Usai. “There is a paradigm shift. This is an evolution of the silent film experience into a completely different technology. And it could not have happened before.”