Multipli-city, My Winnipeg and a pedagogy of the permanent circuit

Abstract

The city is a network of boulevards, thoroughfares, highways and subway systems. The city is also a site of learning, or rather the city houses sites of learning: museums, libraries, schools, theatres and cinemas, for instance. Interestingly, these sites of learning need not be physical; indeed, regarding cinema, for example, they can be websites like Amazon, Criterion Channel, Netflix, where cinephiles can stream movies from the comfort of their home, office, car, on a phone, tablet, television. It is at the intersection of these sites – the cinema and the city – that I wish to situate this article. In particular, I explore how the filmmaker Guy Maddin with My Winnipeg (2007) finagles cinema’s essay-film genre to turn a physical space (in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) from, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, striated to smooth, points to pointillism, in which event replaces essence and multipli-city replaces singular(c)ity. The city is a machine and the machine here is D+G’s assemblage. As such, the city and the citizen/creator become one, symbio[(y)tic], and the two cannot be separated without returning the city to a simpli-city and the filmmaker to a documentarian. This film amounts to an encounter that causes thinking (in Deleuzian terms) and thus learning and thus a way forward for thinking through a pedagogy of the permanent circuit.