It must be comforting to know that thousands of miles away, in completely different continents, there are whole groups of strangers who love the same kind of weirdness as you.
It’s a thought that must have gone through the minds of members of the Winnipeg Film Group, a Canadian film cooperative that has been experimenting with their medium since 1974. Because halfway across the globe, in August 2020, an independent Scottish exhibitor called Matchbox Cineclub has programmed a small festival centered on their daring and surreal works.
The Winnipeg Film Group (WFG) was established in 1974 by a group of artists who felt rejected by the contemporary Canadian filmmaking scene. Feeling like outcasts to the big city film centers of Toronto and Vancouver, the WFG wears its outsider status with pride, in defiance to the idea that you can only make great films where the big industry is. The group wanted to pool together their talents and resources to make films that challenged themselves and their audiences, and have crafted a variety of challenging, experimental, and downright weird films over their 40-year-plus lifetime.
Matchbox Cineclub, however, finds its home some 5,700 miles away in Glasgow, Scotland. Devoted to all things cult cinema, the independent exhibitor hosts events promoting strange, unseen works across the city and further afield. For them, the more obscure a film is, the better – whether it’s the short films of Japanese director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi or the completely unhinged thrills of Miami Connection (1987). When they do present more well-known features, like Cage-a-rama (Scotland’s first Nicolas Cage festival) or Turkish Star Wars 2K, they’re presented with an offbeat sincerity, and you’re left bemused at the amount of effort that’s gone into showing audiences something so bizarre.
But it’s this fascination with cinematic outsiders that makes Matchbox’s program celebrating the WFG a match made in heaven. The festival, Tales from Winnipeg, moved completely online in the wake of COVID-19, meaning Matchbox now enjoys global accessibility that spreads far wider than the trendy theatre-bars spaces of Glasgow. The three films, screening 28-30 August, are all rich with sheer willpower to see an outrageous idea executed to completion, as well as genuine surrealist skill and plenty of absurdist laughs. The two narrative features, Cowards Bend the Knee (2003, dir. Guy Maddin), and Crime Wave (1985, dir. John Paizs), both make clear the directors’ distorted nostalgia for long-gone styles of filmmaking. The documentary Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group (2017, dir. Kevin Nikkel, Dave Barber) traces the history of the WFG, giving great insight into the passionate oddballs that populate the cooperative. Each of their curations says something about Matchbox Cineclub and their dedication to championing the outliers of cinema.
According to Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, director Guy Maddin is “obsessed with old forms of filmmaking,” although you probably don’t need to be told that if you’ve seen Cowards Bend the Knee. His silent film apes the expressionist melodrama of the 20s, its twisted plot lurches forward at a jagged and relentless pace, shocking and amusing the audience with every turn. Star hockey player Guy Maddin (Darcy Fehr) akes his girlfriend to get an illegal abortion at a brothel disguised as a beauty salon. It’s here he meets the Madame’s daughter, Meta (Melissa Dionisio), who he immediately falls in love with. Meta’s idol, her father, was murdered by her mother, and now Meta will only be satisfied once Guy murders her. The only thing more head-scratching than the convoluted plot is the fact that Guy Maddin considers it autobiographical.
The editing is both frenetic and dreamlike. Maddin shows us singular moments replayed in multiple takes, adding to the hazy and confusing atmosphere of the piece. The dialogue cards intrude on the narrative with impeccable comic timing. Some lines, like “Daddy! The finest man!” and “Feeding time at the wax museum,” are filled with such brilliant absurdity that they’ve been circling around my head for days. The camera is fascinated by hands, watching their delicate movements as if they have a mind of their own. The more Freudian and grizzly aspects of the film center around Meta’s father’s hands. Meta won’t let Guy caress her body until her father’s severed and jarred hands are stitched onto his wrists. Guy’s agency is progressively stripped back as the domineering ensemble around him takes over, leaving him helpless and timid.
Cowards Bend the Knee feels like a film dredged up through time. Its classical, melodramatic flairs so authentically evoke works from a century ago that its 2003 release date seems nearly impossible. What makes it stand out as modern are the moments of nudity and violence that would not fly with early-20th-century sensibilities. While Cowards would have been too extreme to be appreciated by the audiences of its cinematic influences, Maddin and the WFG brings new life to old styles, breaking the boundaries that restrained expressionist films in their time. In addition, Matchbox Cineclub brought to the film a newly commissioned score by Ela Orleans.
This illustrates a key goal in Matchbox’s curation of lost cinema – their programming not only helps grow the audience of an obscure film, but it also injects life into the film itself. Viewers are given an opportunity to bridge boundaries of time to engage with a compelling narrative. Just as in making Cowards, Maddin recalls century-old cinematic styles to tell a personal story, mixing a fascination with silent cinema with modern energy, Matchbox further revitalizes the film by updating key elements and widening its viewership. Maddin took the films he loved and created something that was both indebted to them whilst also creatively building upon them, and the same can be said of Matchbox’s addition of Orleans’ fantastic score. Both within the film and through its inclusion in Matchbox’s festival, Cowards sees the past and present brought together to manifest a novel film-viewing experience.
John Paizs’ Crime Wave, the other narrative feature in the festival, also harkens back to the past and focuses on the deep bonds outsiders can have over their bizarre interests. A bright-eyed suburban schoolgirl Kim (Eva Kovacs) becomes infatuated with Steven (John Paizs), an aspiring but struggling screenwriter. Steven is a mute, eccentric loner living above Kim’s family’s garage, writing exclusively by streetlight. Steven’s stories are madcap, excessive, and somewhat trashy, all focusing on a bizarre and twisted search for success which turns criminal in nature. The clash of suburban nuclear family values with the rampaging violence of Steven’s writing seems emblematic of how Paizs and the WFG see their work – an experimental and disturbing artistic intrusion on the conventional values of mainstream Canadian filmmaking. The film is laugh-out-loud funny, showing fantastically earnest sight-gags to great effect. Paizs’ influences, according to Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, were “Walt Disney and some schlock films,” and it’s a combination that he pulls off seamlessly. Paizs has said he wanted to evoke technicolor films of the 50s -the bright color palette and cheerful score only make the dark aspects of Steven’s character and writing even more amusing.
What’s most winning is the central friendship that blossoms between Kim and Steven. What starts as a morbidly curious girl rummaging through the garbage for Steven’s discarded madcap crime stories grows into a fierce dedication and pride of her strange friend’s talent and determination to be the best. Kovacs and Paizs’ performances hold up the film, her endless enthusiasm and optimism are countered by his silent, focused expression. She is non-judgmental when explaining her best friend to the audience and is never being snide about how strange he is. When Steven freezes momentarily in front of his typewriter, she matter-of-factly comments, “That was one of Steven’s attacks of self-doubt,” before the narrative moves swiftly on. You get the impression that there’s a lot of Matchbox Cineclub in Kim, endlessly celebrating and encouraging weirdness with little shade of irony or cynicism.
It’s obviously a film Matchbox has a lot of affection for, screening it at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2017 before partnering with the WFG for a tour throughout the UK. It’s no surprise, seeing as it’s a film that champions bringing people together over their talents and interests, no matter how obscure and strange. Kim loves Steven, who needs her constant motivation to remind him that his stories, no matter how outlandish they get, deserve an audience. She’s the peppy, high-pitched voice he needs to fight his “attacks of self-doubt.”
The quietest moment in the usually high-tempo film is one of its most compelling. Kim and Steven attend a costume party held by Kim’s parents’ friends and Steven, shirtless with dynamite taped to his chest, is seen approaching various laughing groups of people and making them each uncomfortable with his silent presence. Kim fetches him and takes him to see the hosts’ son, Lyle (Scott Barham), saying, “He’s also a quiet man.” Lyle sits in darkness, teaches the pair about dinosaurs and astrology, and shows them the trailer where he counts cars for the city council. The bond between the three of them feels genuine and endearing, more than any of the comparatively phony guests at the party. It’s a moment of connection between the three outsiders. They’ve found company in their strangeness.
This is a major throughline in the festival’s last feature, the documentary Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group. It’s an informative, well-paced look at how the WFG developed from a rag-tag bunch of filmmakers with a crazy dream to an institution highly respected across Canada. The film is packed with clips from all the wonderful experimentations of the cooperative, expertly showing that what these filmmakers find beautiful is stark, unique, and sometimes frightening. In some ways, there’s a sense of entitlement to the WFG, they value their own talents and are confident that they need to be seen, but it’s a well-deserved entitlement because their visions are so brilliantly weird. They’re open about the hiccups they’ve endured along the way; the films that were failures, the drama in board meetings, and the ‘men’s club’ exclusivity of the group. But what’s important is that the stakes were always low, so nothing was off-limits. “Nobody cares what we’re doing,” a filmmaker says. “So we might as well just do what we want.”
It’s obvious that the WFG won’t be going anywhere, thanks to the heavily collaborative nature of the cooperative. They make clear that the formation of the group was partly to provide an alternative education than what was being offered in film schools, making fundamental filmmaking lessons more accessible and direct to those shut out from the more exclusive and expensive centers of learning. The filmmakers know without community and collaboration the WFG would cease to exist, and it’s the main distinguisher from the cut-throat world of mainstream cinema. They have to be there to pass on their skills to the next generation of strange cinema. Crucially, the documentary doesn’t shy away from the more human side of the coop, and how disappointment and resentment can crop up when a film doesn’t turn out the way they hoped. The film is richer for this inclusion – the personal, melancholy reflections of older filmmakers make them realize how special the years of unbound creativity really were.
For the entirety of their lifetime, the WFG has been just outside the limelight, quietly pushing the boundaries of Canadian film. To the average film fan, their films may continue to exist in relative obscurity, but this lack of attention would never impede their work. They will always keep making their weird films because they’re not driven by a desire for validation from the mainstream. They’re doing it for an unquenchable love for what they’re doing and that’s to be valued. Matchbox obviously idolizes the WFG, and the inclusion of Tales makes it clear that they admire not only their films but the way they produce them. Film fanatics should be glad the Winnipeg Film Group exists and should be heartened that organizations like Matchbox Cineclub will be there to amplify their work to audiences who would never normally cross paths with them. Hilarious, intelligent, and profoundly alternative, Tales from Winnipeg is an absolute triumph.
