Courtesy Soda Pictures
Lettre à Freddy Buache, Jean-Luc Godard
Lettre à Freddy Buache, Jean-Luc Godard
My Winnipeg
A celebrated one of a kind ‘docu-fantasia’, director Guy Maddin’s award winning ‘surrealist mockumentary’ performs an ode to his Canadian hometown. Conjuring a dreamlike cinematic reverie out of personal and urban biography, this singular psychogeographic portrait re-invents the documentary genre, to prove the film’s tagline: ‘the truth is relative’
Canada, 2007, Dir. Guy Maddin, 80 mins
Trailer:
Lettre à Freddy Buache
Approached by the city of Lausanne to create a film in celebration of its 500th anniversary, Godard controversially created an elegant short film of refusal addressed to Swiss film critic Freddy Buache. ‘The city is fiction. Fiction is a necessity that can make the city beautiful’, intones Godard in his voiceover, whilst searching for three shots to describe Lausanne, and offering a concise essay on cinema, place and urban experience in the process.
Switzerland, 1982, Jean-Luc Godard, 11 mins
Cold
Maddin-collaborator Johnson’s hauntalogical-noir, surreally reflects upon the gaseous cold of the galaxy and human settlement in the bowels of the earth.
"These brief cine-essays by my friend and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Evan Johnson, represent an ongoing documentation of the city we share. Johnson makes sketches in miniature of our life here, or, rather, of isolated details within our environs, producing with each effort what amounts to a pointillist dot of paint for a single civic aspect, over and over, a different aspect for each mini essay, until that day comes when Johnson's "paranoid brush," one that finds certainty in the vaguest of dotty patterns, has finished the long task of recreating this city point-by-point."
– Guy Maddin
Canada, 2014, Evan Johnson, 4 mins