City filmmaker’s work a low-tech labour of love

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This article was published 31/07/2015 (3925 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The recipient of the $15,000 2015 Manitoba Film Hothouse Award, Winnipeg filmmaker Mike Maryniuk automatically falls into the realm of other Winnipeggers celebrated for film work that successfully traversed the Manitoba border: Guy Maddin, John Paizs, Noam Gonick.

But it would be futile to compare Maryniuk’s films with those other guys. Their only common ground is that they are utterly distinctive.

This is especially true of Maryniuk, 37, whose work is distinguished by a diligent, do-it-yourself work ethic combined with a playful sensibility and the patience of the proverbial saint.

His films films are handmade and stitched together with hand-processing, hole-punching, and pixilation, fusing elements of collage art, lo-fi cablevision, cartoons and found footage, all filtered through Maryniuk’s incredible sense of humour.

That esthetic is on view at Cinematheque’s Prairie Surrealist program at Cinematheque tonight, featuring 18 shorts directed or co-directed by Maryniuk.

Take for example, Maryniuk’s one-minute film Tattoo Step. Revered experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage once made a short film, Mothlight, by gluing parts of dead moths to a strip of celluloid. Maryniuk manages the same trick using nothing but temporary tattoos.

“It was thousands of tattoos that I would purchase from BJ’s Super Toy Sales,” he says. “I’d buy $100 worth of tattoos and the lady selling them to me said, ‘Oh, it must be a birthday party.’ And I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I was doing so I said, ‘Yeah, a birthday party.’

“A week later, I come back and buy another $100 worth of tattoos and it’s the same lady and she says: ‘Another birthday party?’

“Three days later, I came back to buy another $100 worth. And she just stared at me and didn’t say anything.”

The other distinguishing feature of Maryniuk’s work is a collaborative spirit and an affection for people and institutions vanishing from the world. In fact, he co-directed a couple of films on the program, Cattle Call and The Yodeling Farmer with Matthew Rankin and John Scoles, respectively. Both are animated documentaries celebrating auctioneer champ Tim Dowler and Manitoba cowboy Stew Clayton, both dying breeds.

“I’m really attracted to underdog stories,” Maryniuk says, adding he can relate to practitioners of dying arts as a filmmaker who still works with celluloid as opposed to digital media.

“That’s just part of my own thing,” he says. “It’s like someone who is really into railroads and trains, knowing that not a lot of people take the train anymore.”

Following tonight’s screening, Maryniuk will participate in a conversation about his films.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca