Guy Maddin wins local arts honour

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This article was published 02/02/2006 (7491 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ART may be its own reward. But $30,000 isn’t a bad pat on the back.

That’s the princely sum that accompanies the Manitoba Arts Council’s Award of Distinction, which was awarded yesterday to filmmaker Guy Maddin.

“It was fantastic news. I couldn’t believe it,” Maddin said one hour after he received word that he was the fourth recipient of the annual award, intended to recognize “the highest level of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievements by a professional Manitoba artist,” according to the MAC press release.

“I prefer to speak of the honour,” Maddin said. “But the money is pretty hard to ignore.”

“For the last 20 years, Guy Maddin’s work has played a crucial role in the growth and development of our local film industry,” said MAC chair Dr. Judith Flynn of the decision to award Maddin the prize. “He has used Winnipeg as inspiration for his stories and productions while writing for various magazines and teaching film history at the University of Manitoba.

“And he has chosen not to leave our community once his work garnered well-deserved national and international recognition,” Flynn said. “It is our pleasure to be able to honour him here at home.”

The award comes at a time when Maddin is preparing to venture into documentary filmmaking, which may (or may not be) removed from his more artistic flights of narrative imagination, including his 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World and the Emmy Award-winning Dracula — Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.

One project, commissioned by the Documentary Channel, will be a film about Winnipeg from Maddin’s own unique perspective. The other film, currently in development, is titled Ghosting and will examine the personal and professional life of Winnipeg-born ’50s singer/violinist Giselle MacKenzie, “Canada’s first exported TV star in America,” Maddin says. The title is taken from the ghostly images that appeared on TV sets of MacKenzie’s era, and for the many seances that the performer used to attend.

“Her private life is far more intriguing than her public one, even when she was at the zenith of her popularity in the ’50s,” Maddin says.

The filmmaker says it’s a coincidence that he happens to be working on these homegrown projects at the same time he received this generous affirmation from the Manitoba Arts Council. But he acknowledges that the proximity of the award and the two projects has the appearance of a big mutual love-in.

“I don’t want it to come out that way, really,” Maddin says. “Because nothing can alienate you from your friends and from the community faster than an award and a sense that everyone is loving each other.”

Indeed, Maddin’s Winnipeg documentary, expected to go before the cameras in early March, has been in the works for months, since it was suggested to Maddin by Documentary Channel producer Michael Burns. Maddin last collaborated with Burns and producer Jody Shapiro on the Isabella Rossellini short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, which was shot on location at the former Metropolitan Theatre early in 2005.

The fact that the film — a fanciful, stylized memoir of Rossellini’s father, director Roberto Rossellini — already aired on the Documentary Channel in October proves to Maddin that “the boundaries of documentary and fiction are obviously blurred.

“They always have been,” he adds. “It’s just that people are aggressively celebrating the blurriness of those boundaries … and wherever there’s blurriness, I’m not far from the scene,” he laughs.

Maddin says he has no specific plans for his cash award.

“I have to think about it. It’s a huge sum of money and those sums aren’t the kind Manitoba artists are used to dealing with,” he says. “So it won’t involve cruises or sports cars or anything. It’s going to be something pretty grounded and sensible, I think.”

Past recipients of the MAC Award of Distinction include Manitoba Theatre for Young People artistic director Leslee Silverman (2002), poet Robert Kroetsch (2003) and media artist Grant Guy (2004).

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca