Jun
Wintry Escapism
If you’re losing your mind at the scorching temperatures and finding your thoughts tending towards the negatory; environmental and economic collapse got you down, etc. Wintry Escapism is they key. Two movies I could recommend to take your mind off of the heat:
My Winnipeg, a “docutasia” by Guy Maddin, combining archival footage, private home videos and typically mannered Guy Maddin style faux-silent scenarios, its a beautiful and hilarious film involving some of my favorite topics. Snow, and train travel, and sleep walking From Imdb:
The film follows a young Guy Maddin (played by Darcy Fehr) on a train trying to escape from ’sleepy, snowing, Winnipeg’ and its mystic pull. To affect his escape Maddin must, through the course of the film, come to terms with everything that binds him to the city (family, home, community, and history). Held together by the barest narrative thread, the film is most like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, though being Canadian it’s much funnier and self-deprecating. The film is narrated by Guy Maddin himself, and despite the fact that he seemed to have many reservations about using his own voice, he does a great job (ranging from the fiery sermon of charged propagandist to the soft relaxing repetition of an experienced hypnotist).
And on the horrific side of things, last year’s nightmarish The Last Winter will definitely bring the chill, but also delivers a heavy dose of environmental anxiety, giving shape to demons that we release from the earth in drilling voraciously for oil in Alaska.
My obsession with remote places also leads me to anticipate Werner Herzog’s latest Encounters at the End of the World, in which the Bavarian auteur chronicles the lives of the curious characters who work in the Antarctic Circle.
