Last month, we travelled to New York to screen the original ending of John Paizs’ Crime Wave for the first time in 35 years – from Paizs’ own 16mm print!
In December 2021, we took our Tales from Winnipeg programme to Brooklyn, NYC. We went there at the invitation of Spectacle Theater, the legendary microcinema/”goth bodega” situated in Williamsburg (see the 2020 roundtable we hosted with Caroline Golum, Isaac Hoff & Garrett Linn of Spectacle here). Originally presented online in August 2020 (everywhere except North America), the headliners of our programme are three features – Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee (with Ela Orleans’ re-score), Dave Barber and Kevin Nikkel’s documentary Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group and John Paizs’ seminal Crime Wave, in its 2K restoration. We’ve screened Crime Wave many, many times, and because of that and because we love Spectacle so much, we were keen to do something particularly special. Thankfully, the stars aligned, spectacularly so (pun not intended). John Paizs allowed us to ship the original 16mm print of his film, unprojected since its fateful festival debut in 1985, from Winnipeg to New York. And, crucially, this particular print contained Crime Wave‘s original ending.
The story of Crime Wave‘s premiere – on Friday 13th September, 1985 – has taken on quasi-mythical status. After that “disastrous” first screening, the story often goes, distributors demanded Paizs reshoot the end of his debut feature, which he did, ensuring its status as the Great Canadian Cult Comedy. Truthfully, the version of the film screened then, at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (precursor to TIFF), is the same one that led critic Jay Scott to proclaim, “If the great Canadian comedy ever gets made, John Paizs might be the one to make it.”
As far as distributor’s demands, John may ultimately have pre-empted them, but he didn’t even sign Crime Wave‘s ill-fated deal until the following year. The “disaster” that night in Toronto was a sound problem that brought the film’s projection to a screeching halt, lighting up the auditorium, just as the third act began. When the film resumed, the belly laughs of the preceding hour were gone, and the audience’s muted response convinced Paizs to do the unthinkable – return to Winnipeg to rewrite and re-shoot the entire final act of his debut feature, having long since exhausted its meagre budget (round about $67,000 Canadian).
Detail from the original, hand-typed Crime Wave screenplay, corresponding with the scene pictured above
The Crime Wave that you may well know and love – the best-known version of the film is still, as far as we’re concerned, criminally underappreciated – has a very distinctive third act. The film ascends into a rattling montage tracing the sharp rise and lonely fall of film-maker Steven Penny (Paizs himself), a frenzied crescendo that fulfils the promise of the first two acts by adrenalising all their wit and invention. Crime Wave goes out on a high, complete with deadpan musical coda as the credits roll. The original ending arrives at something like the same spot, narratively, but detours significantly into darker territory. As Jay Scott noted, elsewhere in that oft-quoted review, “the tone switches from mildly nuts and robustly funny to robustly nuts and mildly funny.” At the premiere, the sharpness of that tonal shift coincided perfectly with the 10-20 minute interruption. The comparatively subdued atmosphere in the room afterwards (and a smattering of early departures), alongside some caveated reviews, was enough to convince Paizs he needed to completely rethink the ending.
As the festival buzz dissipated over the next six months, Paizs regrouped in Winnipeg and determinedly reconstructed Crime Wave, his stubborn focus – arguably one of the hallmarks of his hometown cohort – on his own vision and on posterity. Paizs raised a further $10-15,000 and, with the support of his Winnipeg compatriates, who passed the hat around to support the endeavour, delivered the much-loved, “faster and funnier” final cut to premiere in Vancouver on 21st March, 1986. By some estimates, though, that half-year diversion was enough to leave Crime Wave in the wilderness for good. A vaunted distribution deal failed to deliver a theatrical release and, worse, left Paizs’ film in the rights quagmire that it remains in today.
Writer and programmer Geoff Pevere, an early champion of Paizs and Crime Wave responsible for its sight-unseen invite to Toronto, remembered the 16mm print only arriving on the day of the screening, with Paizs. “Later, I heard the director had actually picked up the just-completed print from the lab on the way to catch his plane.” So: struck, screened once and stored for 35 years – that’s the print we showed at Spectacle. When we asked after it, John offered to check some carefully kept 16mm cans, soon confirming some of the heretofore “mystery” reels contained the premiere cut – and not, we hasten to add, the “Director’s Cut”. If one thing’s clear, it’s that John Paizs made the film he wanted to make, though both versions belong on a beautiful boutique blu ray release. Meanwhile, Crime Wave‘s reputation grows, year on year, with every new viewing, hopefully towards the point Paizs’ “lost” classic can find its way home.
Sean Welsh
Our Crime Wave New York story in pictures
1 | We flew into New York on the evening of Thursday 9th December, and the next morning wandered up to recce the fabled goth bodega and take some jetlagged selfies. We’re big fans of Spectacle’s programming, so figured best to get it out of our system.
2 | Next day, we picked up the print. Our friends at Anthology Film Archives (who screened Crime Wave on 16mm back in 2014) helped us out by taking delivery of John’s print, sent direct from Winnipeg. Anthology’s Jed Rapfogel raised an eyebrow (justifiably) when he heard this was not only the first outing for the original cut in 35 years but quite likely the only extant print, and as-yet unscanned/unpreserved. Off we went to Spectacle to show it to people! #TeamLanglois
3 | Spectacle had hired a 16mm projector for the special event, and with it came projectionist extraordinaire, artist, film-maker and analogue afficionado Ian Burnley. With the requisite care and reverence (not to mention sense of circumstance), Ian unveiled the reel (actually, four reels – John sent the three original reels plus one with the “official” ending, just in case)…
4 | ..and began to prepare them for screening (note John’s careful new notes and the original “MATURE” label). Ian also gave us some great recommendation for cinemas, art shows, galleries and noodles (we were glad to meet Ian).
5 | We sat down with Spectacle’s Caroline Golum to preview the reel ahead of the screening, making sure the set-up worked and John hadn’t pranked us by sending us footage of a Winnipeg family wedding. He hadn’t!
6 | All that was left was to panickedly chalk up the A-board, pose for posterity (that’s Spectacle’s Elias ZX on the left there, Megan in the middle), welcome the sold-out audience and wait for the reviews…
Anyhow, got to see John Paizs own 16mm print of Crime Wave with its original ending and it ruled. pic.twitter.com/rsGA6Nwodm
— 50 Jenna Ipcar Fans Can’t Be Wrong! (@AgreeableCar) December 11, 2021
Crime Wave’s 2K restoration screens in Spectacle’s Best of 2021 line-up on Saturday, 8th January at 7:30pm EST and Thursday 27th January at 10pm EST, tickets here. NBthis is not the version with the original ending (just the one we know and love).
Thanks to Elias ZX, Caroline Golum and volunteers at Spectacle Theater, Monica at Winnipeg Film Group, Jed Rapfogel at Anthology Film Archives, Ian Burnley and Herb Shellenberger for helping to facilitate this series. And, of course, to John Paizs.
We were very sad to hear this week that Winnipeg Film Group‘s legendary Dave Barber has passed away. We never had the chance to meet Dave in real life, but his documentary Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group featured in our Tales from Winnipeg online programme last year and we were delighted to have his participation in the event. His enthusiasm for WFG, the film-makers and their work was evident and we enjoyed and valued the back and forth we had with Dave before the event and afterwards.
We were also delighted when Dave agreed to write an article on WFG and his documentary for our accompanying zine, which we are publishing online for the first time, below. Our post-screening Q&A with Dave and co-director Kevin Nikkel is also embedded after the article.Winnipeg Film Group are accepting donations in efforts to establish a filmmaking fund in Dave’s name. Donations can be made here.
When I started working at the Winnipeg Film Group in 1983, little did I realise what I was getting into. Hired on to organise a film screening programme called the Cinematheque, I had no idea that I would be a front row witness to so much great, subversive original filmmaking. This nonprofit collective of independent filmmakers had just moved from an old historic block called the Bate Building in downtown Winnipeg into a red brick home called the “Kelly House”, first built in the 1880s.
It was bare bones. I had no chair and no lamp, so I brought them from home along with my dad’s typewriter. My office was upstairs on the second floor with a moose head on the wall and an old fridge. It didn’t take me long to realise that many filmmakers were outlaws at heart, completely dedicated to creating films and pushing everything else out of the way. They would stop at nothing to realise their vision. More than once over the years, a filmmaker would ask if they could grab a prop that was hanging on the wall or in the corner of the room. My chair wound up in a science fiction short. My typewriter wound up in John Paizs’s Crime Wave. Somebody borrowed the moose head and we never saw it again. Our newsletter was christened The Moose.
Dave Barber in Barber Gull Rub (Matthew Rankin, 2008)
In the next 35 years I witnessed some of the best independent filmmaking in the world, survived endless stormy personality disputes, staff turnovers, a bleeding ulcer (a near nervous breakdown) two basement office floods, a revolution in the technology of making, distributing and exhibition of movies, and now a pandemic. In some ways, it was a miracle the organisation survived…deficits and staff turnover prompted much soul searching and fund raising. But those that took the high road always pulled the organisation out of the fire.
The Winnipeg Film Group was formed in 1974 by a collective of independent filmmakers who had a dream. To create a place where they could get filmmaking equipment to rent for cheap. They received a grant from the national arts funding body the Canada Council and, with this seed money, the organisation grew. They bought more and better 16mm filmmaking equipment. With the rise in filmmaking activity, there were more films on the shelf and an increasingly important distribution department. Many films went on to win awards and accolades at film festivals around the world. John Paizs’s wildly irreverent feature Crime Wave put the organisation on the map. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before.
Dave Barber and Kevin Nikkel (photo: Leif Norman)
I spoke to a filmmaker in Chicago so excited by the scene he heard that was happening in Winnipeg that he wanted to move here and make films. Another woman actually did show up but after ten days of thirty-five-below weather she left town and said, “You people are all crazy.” And she’s right. A crazy obsession is what drives filmmakers to create films in Winnipeg – long cold winter nights and a city far from major centres of influence has led to a body of great artistic work that has won awards at film festivals around the world. What is it about Winnipeg? This sleepy prairie town with a population of just over 700,000 is in the middle of nowhere. A strong visual arts scene, progressive arts council funding and endless cold winters all fuel the seeds of creativity.
When the Winnipeg Film Group moved yet again in 1986 into the Artspace Building, this time they had an equipment room much larger than the broom closet at Kelly House and a large empty space which became a studio. (re-named The Black Lodge) Hundreds of films have been shot in that space. If you set up a camera on a pedestal and filmed the room in stop motion over the years you would see a blur of sets being built and dismantled including a locomotive train for Guy Maddin’s Odilon Redon.
Dave Barber and Kevin Nikkel (photo: Leif Norman)
New emerging filmmakers walk in the door all the time. Every six years, there are radical changes in what filmmakers are creating. More recently there is a rise of the Indigenous Filmmakers Association and many significant women filmmakers creating great new work nurtured by the Winnipeg Film Group commission program Mosaic Women’s project.
Kevin Nikkel and I faced a challenging task in making this documentary Tales From the Winnipeg Film Group. For years, many filmmakers talked about creating a documentary about the organisation but the idea was too daunting. How do you tell 40 years of history with its endless sea of changes?
Kevin Nikkel and Dave Barber (photo: Leif Norman)
What is the story? Is there any archival footage or photographs? Who should you interview? In many ways, the Winnipeg Film Group is like the great Kurosawa movie Rashomon. Everyone sees their own version of the truth. We received an invaluable commissioning grant from TV producer Cam Bennett in the MTS Stories from Home and drew up a list of over 100 filmmakers, former staff and board members. Kevin travelled to Los Angeles, London, England and Washington, DC with his family and, while there, interviewed some filmmakers who had moved away. We drew a graph chart on the wall and listed high points in WFG history. The birth of the group, from discussions at the Film Symposium at the University of Manitoba. The move into the Kelly House at 88 Adelaide Street. The endless wrangling over the direction of the group. The rise of various filmmaking movements. Some people didn’t want to be interviewed and some were just way too busy making films. It was very tough finding archival footage and photographs. A visiting German filmmaker Sissy Schneider made a great short documentary film in the 1990s called Guys without an Attitude and generously allowed us to include a short except. Another German filmmaker, Alexander Bohr, made a documentary on Canadian filmmakers in 1992 and allowed us to use part of a segment on the Winnipeg Film Group shot inside our production offices in the Artspace Building.
Cam generously allowed us an extension on the deadline to do more research and interview more people. But the clock was ticking and we soon realised we had to stop as the funding strand was collapsing. We wrestled hard in the editing room and the tone of the film changed direction several times. But the filmmaking continued. And it always will. Because it is all that matters.
Dave Barber
Winnipeg Film Group are accepting donations in efforts to establish a filmmaking fund in Dave’s name. Donations can be made here. You can read WFG’s tribute to Dave here.
Ahead of our Tales from Winnipeg season, which features Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee, with Ela Orleans’s new score, Cathy Brennan spoke to the director about the project
In 2017, we commissioned Ela Orleans to write and perform a new score for Guy Maddin’s 2003 film Cowards Bend the Knee. It was a connection suggested by journalist Brian Beadie, a dream project for Ela and, it turned out, a dream come true for Guy. For our first online programme, Tales from Winnipeg, we’re thrilled to present the film with Ela’s studio recording of the score for the first time, and delighted to have Guy’s participation – he’ll introduce the film and joins Ela for an hour-long In Conversation afterwards. Before that, Cathy Brennan spoke to Guy to get his thoughts on the film’s origins.
Cathy Brennan: In your 2002 interview with Robert Enright, you said you thought that Cowards Bend the Knee might be your last film. Given how prolific you’ve been in the years since, how have your feelings about the film evolved?
Guy Maddin: Wow, I don’t remember saying it would be the last film. I tend to be self-pitying and melodramatic, so I probably just say that before every film. What I say now has evolved into “I’m going to make this as if it’s my last film.” In other words I’m going to give it my best shot and hope that it represents what I’ve been trying to do all these years in the best possible way.
I can barely watch any of movies as they age because they represent the work of someone I no longer am. It’s embarrassing, it would be like watching yourself struggling with some things that you’ve long ago since learnt how to do. A lot of people wouldn’t be that comfortable with having non-filmic work put on public display a couple of decades after they’ve made it.
I’ve always viewed my films as inventories of errors rather than an accumulation of accomplishments. There’s a couple of exceptions: I like watching The Green Fog, a movie we made in 2017. We actually watched it with audiences a few times . And I’ve watched Cowards Bend the Knee now maybe five times over the last 18 years and been quite proud of it, actually.
There’s a few things I’d change; the first six-minute chapter gets off to a bit of a slow start, but, then, once it gets going, I’m very proud of it. I remember the feeling I had while I made it. I felt like I was really in a zone, you know, where every time I pointed my camera I found something worth shooting. I made plot connections in my head as I was shooting. It was a real frenzy of creativity and I just made this humble 62-minute long feature. To make it in five very short work days -really just half days-was something I’m very proud of.
Like I say, it just came out in one piece there’s so many autobiographical elements in it I could just assemble my cast of characters and keep them all handy at all times and then start putting them through their uninhibited motions, their disinhibited emotions based on real life events. I dunno, I wish I could make all my films like that.
I followed up by making another silent film that also played with live musical accompaniment Brand Upon The Brain. And that came out in one piece as well but just not quite as insanely. It’s more of an epic and it’s much longer. This one [Cowards] really felt as crazed as I was when I lived the events.
Maya Lawson & Katherine E. Scharhon in Brand Upon the Brain (Guy Maddin, 2006)
I wanted to ask a bit about your working relationship with Ela. How did it start? What are your thoughts on her score for Cowards, and do you have a favourite section in it?
I love the whole score. Ela may have a different version of this but I think she just asked if she could make a score and I said “yeah” and then she sent me her work as it progressed. I think she just worked through it in order or at least that’s how I got it – Chapters 1 through 10, in script order from her.
I’m very grateful for her opening, the chapter 1 score because I basically just DJ’d the original movie with old classical music chestnuts and the piece of music I had put in there before was so dreary. The opening six minutes felt like 20 minutes and felt like just a list of character names to be memorised for a test, or something like that. She just came up with a piece that brought it to life much more. It didn’t change the visual content, but it sure seemed like it did. It quickened the pace of the cutting. The pure exposition clumsily conveyed by me in that chapter was just made more pleasurable to assimilate, made it seem more part of the story rather than just exposition shovelled down the throats of the viewers. So, I’m most grateful for that.
I love the way she keeps shifting gears and even when she brings vocals in at one point which surprises me and which comes as a really welcome surprise. I don’t think I really thought of a favourite section, but I’ve just kind of marvelled at her sense of pacing and how she changes it up. I often think in baseball metaphors, so I don’t know how useful that is for you over there [in the UK], but just the way a pitcher is more successful if he changes speeds and location and curves each pitch in the idea is to keep the variety coming. So, in Ela’s case, I just like the way she startles the ear every few minutes and it just feels right. She’s got a really strong intuition for it.
I hesitate to use the word, because it sounds so corporate but there’s this great synergy between Ela’s score and your film. I believe you you mentioned in that 2002 conversation about the atmosphere, while filming Cowards, being very mischievous, and I sort of detect that same sense of mischief in her score, particularly with sound effects. I think there’s one bit dressing room and Dr Fusi just smacks one of the players on the butt and there’s a cartoon “thwack” sound.
Some of the sound effects came over from the original soundtrack, but she was smart enough to keep them, another she deleted, and then others she created herself and I think she created that one. I dunno, she’s just she’s just really on the right wavelength, that’s all I know.
I’ve had other alternate scores done for this very movie, actually. It’s been really interesting comparing them, but Ela really comes closest. Not closest, Ela is a true collaborator. I was going to say she comes closest to getting what I’m up to but, no, it’s more than that. A collaborator’s actually supposed to make you look better, and she does do that.
It’s kind of like you know Bernard Herrmann and Hitchcock not that I’m Hitchcock. It’s just you can feel when Bernard Herrmann’s score in Vertigo was actually making the movie way better, and I love that. but I just think of it as a collaboration among all of its makers and you can feel the with Ela in that first chapter. She really gets the movie going off to the start that I failed to supply. I remember an anecdote about Vertigo where Hitchcock handed the reel where Jimmy Stewart is just driving around for 10 minutes in front of rear screen projection. And he [Hitchcock] just handed it to Herrmann and said, “This reel is all yours,” you know, something to that effect. It feels good to make a movie, knowing you can just hand something off to somebody and know they’ll make you look better.
My version of synergy is, every now and then, I come up limping and have to hand it off to Ela and I know she’ll haul me out of the trenches and across no-man’s-land in spite of all the mustard gas and deliver something that looks a lot better than my carcass.
That’s really sweet.
Oh, yeah.
Cowards Bend the Knee with Ela Orleans score poster (Illustration by Marc Baines, 2020)
If you don’t mind. I just wanted to shift the little bit to talk about about the Winnipeg Film Group. The documentary Tales From was kind of a whistlestop tour of the history of the group.
I haven’t seen it, you know? It’s strange. I’m in it, I think, but I was scared to watch it. I can’t stand watching myself.
You were in it for about five minutes and come across very well, if I may say so. I just wanted to know a bit more about the role that the film group had on the production of Cowards specifically.
Right. I don’t remember them having much to do with Cowards. Let’s see, I owned the cameras. I had about six Super 8 cameras just in case one broke down, I’d keep five spare Super 8 cameras in the boot of my car and whenever one wound down I’d run out and go get another one. I own the light I think we only used one light most of the time we might have rented a few lights from the film group and as a member I got cheap rates – $10 a light a day or something like that.
Since making Cowards, the film group have taken to distributing it and they’ve been very good about that. But I remember making the film almost secretly. I was in pre-production on another film at the time in 2003 I shot The Saddest Music in the World which was a much bigger budgeted movie. It was $3.5 million then. Still small I guess but the biggest I’ve ever had. and Cowards Bend the Knee was $5,000 to build a few sets and to get the film stock purchased and processed. My producers on Saddest Music in the World would have been very upset to know I was working on another project so during pre-production I would sneak away for the greater part of five days in a row and shot Cowards Bend the Knee. And, so, no-one really knew about it other than the cast members of Cowards and and then some of them later appeared just a few weeks later in Saddest Music in the World.
It was 18 years ago that I shot it in like October or September 2002 so there are snow plows just out of frame all the time. There’s some real hockey ice and a nearby hockey rink that we went to on the very first morning and shot off all the hockey, so slightly out of script order and then went back and shot all the dry land stuff in this snow plow garage. I don’t recall anyone noticing and I would have meetings about Saddest Music in the World that I would have to hop in my car and drive a few blocks over to the other studio to make Cowards and then come back and keep shooting Saddest Music. Of the two, I loved making both those movies , but I really love the outlaw aspects of making a movie on the sly. Normally you think of guerrilla filmmaking you think of hiding from the police and not using permits and and running from one suspicious person to another out on the streets, but I covertly went into the snow plow go up and was hiding from no police officers at all. I even insured the movie shoot in case someone fell to their deaths at the Winnipeg Arena. So it was legitimate that way. I just didn’t want my producers the other film to know so in that way it’s a strange form of guerrilla film-making. Another example of how sketchy and sneaky I am sometimes for no reason when I could have just been straight up and said, “Hey, I’m shooting this thing, please permit me to miss a few hours of work in this other place.” Instead, I had to prop up a dummy that looked like me in my office of this other shoot and set it off so I could make my escape Alcatraz-style.
The secretive nature of the production fits that underworld, psychological aspect of Cowards, like the salon/bordello and the secret wax museum.
I think everything everything fitted but that just repressed the whole endeavour and seemed to make it even more urgent and more explosively powerful when I did let spill on some really humiliating confessions. because the movie is nothing if it’s not a big ejaculation of shameful reminiscences and ejaculations were far better for being shot illicitly.
I just want to picture it back to the Film Group. This is a bit of a selfish question, but when I was watching the documentary I found myself making a list of films and film-makers to watch. Are there any young filmmakers working at the group now whose work you’re excited by?
Yeah, I haven’t seen much lately, but I know Matthew Rankin has made a feature recently called The Twentieth Century, which a lot of people loved. I’ve seen the shorts made leading up to it and I really like them and so I would say that one’s worth a look among the new ones.
I also like Mike Merinec. He might be working just outside the film group. You know what film co-ops are like:people fall in love with each other and then there’s inevitably some kind of falling out. So Mike’s working may well have been made after a falling out or something. There’s often a board that’s at odds with the film-makers and all sorts of inner intrigue. Or people start sleeping with each other accidentally and grudges start to form and all sorts of stuff. That’s just sort of inevitable. It’s sort of like a rock band in that way.
One last question: your film films often hark back to the past. How do you think the meaning of that backward-looking perspective changes depending on how a viewer engages with the film? For example, if it was shown in a cinema or through an online screening like Matchbox are doing with Cowards Bend the Knee, where people may be watching on their phones or tablets.
Yeah, it’s beyond me, in a way. I kind of just made it the way I did. I started off in 16mm and always assumed I would move graduate to 35mm and then, God knows, maybe even 70mm Cinerama. Y’know, big budget Hollywood films. But I quickly stalled after getting a chance to make a film in 35mm in the late ’90s, a film I didn’t like at all, and so I wandered around in a desert for a few years.
Then one of my students, a guy named Decko Dawson, with whom I made a short film called Heart of the World which is shot in both 16 and Super 8. This student of mine had this film that just looked so cool and I just realised that 35mm and all the corporate sophistication that I was just starting to get whiffs of could be just ignored utterly. If I made a plunge back into the more primitive gauges of Super 8 where green and shadow, the tendency towards high-contrast imagery because it has an auto aperture on it, would just plunge me more into a kind of a mythic past.
Since the subject matter that interested me most was the dawn of my memory and even my prehistory, sort of a mythological figuring out of my earliest years or my earliest attempts at being sexual or ethical. Just those early primitive attempts at doing the right thing seemed almost Euripidean in their flaws and murkiness and timelessness somehow. I seem to be making exactly the same mistakes as characters in 2,500-year-old Euripedes plays and I seem to be making them with some atavistic connection to the darkest roots of such mistakes.
It just seemed like the lower the gauge, the deeper I punished myself into the very Earth, the depths of my most murky thought processes. The kind I guess when you’re just beginning and you’re just forming your lips into a hungry circle in the hopes you’ll be fed, to the slightly more sophisticated point where you’re lying to a friend to seduce his girlfriend.
It just all seemed to line up: the black and white, the wordlessness. I guess silent film is just one step closer to cave painting than talking pictures. They’re just images saying things. Now I do have intertitles with plenty of text and I’ve even thought recently about replacing all those with bright, crisp, new digital ones. But I like the way I shot the intertitles in that movie with the same kind of reckless spirit with which I shot all the humans acting things. It turns out they’re all out of focus, but I decided to keep them anyway because I felt this should come out in one piece. And so it did.
Tickets for Tales from Winnipeg are on sale via Eventive here.
An edited/alternative version of this interview appears in our Tales from Winnipeg zine (free for weekend pass holders, available to purchase separately here).
Keep up-to-date with the Tales from Winnipeg Facebook event page here.
The season is part of Film Feels Connected, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk.
The season is supported by Film Feels Connected, Film Hub Scotland and the High Commission of Canada in the UK. #CanadaGoesDigital
If you’re joining us for Tales From Winnipeg, our first online screening season, we have a few helpful recommendations and information to help you fully enjoy your viewing expereince at home.
Matchbox Cineclub: Tales From Winnipeg is a limited online-only season in celebration of the Winnipeg Film Group, hosted on our new online platform, here. The programme, which features rare and exclusive work from John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Kevin Nikkel & Dave Barber, takes place over three days, 28th-30th August 2020. Festival passes are available here and single tickets are available via each film’s page, here. To help you get the best from the season, we’ve put together the following guide. If you can’t find what you need here, send us an email: info@matchboxcineclub.com.
1. We recommend using Google Chrome. We have found Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge and Safari to be less reliable for streaming films.
To download Chrome on your computer or to get the latest update click here.
Or search “Google Chrome” in the App Store / Play Store if you are using a phone or tablet.
2. We encourage you to watch the film in full-screen mode by hovering your cursor over the video window and clicking the symbol that appears in the bottom-right corner (see below).
3. The stream is available in up to 1080p quality, which you can opt for by hovering your cursor over the video window and clicking the Resolution symbol, then selecting a resolution option (see below). Please note your internet speed may not accommodate seamless viewing at 1080p.
4. You can switch on SDH/captions/subtitles for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing audieneces, or French language subtitles, by hovering your cursor over the video window and clicking the “CC” symbol that appears in the bottom-right corner.
5. Issues such as looping and lagging are most often sorted by refreshing the page.
6. To improve the strength of your internet connection, try to limit the number of devices connected to the router you are using. We also recommend closing all other windows, programmes and apps on the device you are using to watch the film.
7. It can help to bring your device closer to your router if you find your internet connection is poor.
8. If the film unexpectedly stops playing, please check your internet connection and try restarting your router.
Tales from Winnipeg-specificguidance
To access each film, pass holders must log in with the email they booked with, click the “Buy tickets / use pass to unlock films” button on any film programme, and you will be able to use your pass to unlock it.
Before a film programme goes live, you can pre-order your ticket. Once it’s live, unlocking a film is immediate.
Festival pass holders have access to all content once each event goes live until midnight on Tuesday 01/09.
Festival pass holders will receive a Tales From Winnipeg zine via post once they have emailed us their delivery address at info@matchboxcineclub.com
Your individual ticket booking gives you automatic access to all content in a film’s package – you do not need to reserve any additional tickets for additional content such as short films, Q&As, introductions and live performance.
Ela Orleans’ live performance will live stream from 6pm on Friday 28/08, and will be archived for viewing shortly afterwards.
Feature films and other additional content, including short films, Q&As and introductions can be viewed in any order, once the event goes live.
For further queries and troubleshooting please contact the Matchbox Cineclub team at info@matchboxcineclub.com
Matchbox Cine’s Tales from Winnipeg event is part of Film Feels Connected, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk
Supported by the High Commission of Canada in the UK
Matchbox Cineclub launch online and internationally with Guy Maddin, Ela Orleans and John Paizs exclusives
We are thrilled to announce our new online platform, launching with a trip to weirdest Canada with our inaugural programme, Tales from Winnipeg. Following our contribution to Glasgow Short Film Festival’s DIVE IN Cinema project, this marks a significant step for us into the world of screening films online. The four-day online event celebrates the output of the legendary, renegade Winnipeg Film Group, with exclusives from icons of cult cinema Guy Maddin and John Paizs. The season runs online at talesfromwinnipeg.eventive.org from August 28th to 30th, with a new film premiering each day and remaining available for the duration of the programme.
Tales from Winnipeg opens with Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee, presented with Ela Orleans’ director-approved re-score, commissioned by Matchbox Cineclub in 2017. Ela will perform a live set via Zoom before the film debuts. Guy Maddin will introduce the film, and joins Ela in conversation afterwards. John Paizs’ cult classic Crime Wave joins the line-up on Saturday, with the online debut of Toronto International Film Festival’s 2K restoration – the beloved film has never looked or sounded better. The 2017 documentary Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group debuts on Sunday evening, framed with an introduction and post-screening conversation with directors Kevin Nikkel and Dave Barber. All films in the programme come with brand-new, director-approved subtitles for D/deaf audiences.
The Tales from Winnipegprogramme is full of specially-curated bonus content, in the form of pre-show reels, introductions, live performances, Q&As and short films. Matchbox Cineclub have also produced an accompanying print publication, featuring brand-new artwork by Paizs and Maddin, new poster illustrations by Glasgow-based artist Marc Baines, an exclusive interview with Guy Maddin, an article by Geoff Pevere on John Paizs and Crime Wave, and newly-commissioned writing by director and Winnipeg Cinematheque programmer Dave Barber.
Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee
Matchbox Cineclub programmer Sean Welsh says, “When the pandemic hit, like everyone else, we found our entire upcoming slate wiped clean. As independent exhibitors, we face a longer journey back to normal than cinemas do, since socially distant events are much less viable for us. At the same time, we can take the opportunity to explore all the new possibilities that online events offer, particularly in terms of accessibility and international reach. We’re very excited to present this first programme with optional captions/SDH throughout, and for the first time we can offer French subtitles on our feature presentations too. We’re also thrilled to work with some of our heroes, Guy Maddin, Ela Orleans and John Paizs, to present their work online for the first time in the best way possible.”
Weekend Passes, which grant unlimited access to all films, additional content and a physical copy of the print publication, are £20. Individual tickets to a single film for a limited period are priced on a pay-what-you-can-afford sliding-scale ticket from £0-8, with reference to Matchbox’s Sliding Scale Guide. The programme is available to audiences everywhere, with the exception of North America.
Tickets for Tales from Winnipeg are on sale via Eventive here.
Buy the Tales from Winnipeg zine (free for weekend pass holders) here.
Keep up-to-date with the Tales from Winnipeg Facebook event page here.
The season is part of Film Feels Connected, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk.
The season is supported by Film Feels Connected, Film Hub Scotland and the High Commission of Canada in the UK. #CanadaGoesDigital
John Paizs is a legendary figure in Canadian cinema whose pivotal and influential cult masterpiece Crime Wave (1985) continues to entrance audiences but elude mainstream recognition. Following our UK premiere of the restored Crime Wave at Glasgow Film Festival, 2017, we are delighted to present his first major work, The Obsession of Billy Botski, on its 40th anniversary, as part of Glasgow Short Film Festival’s DIVE IN Cinema season. Watch it now here.
In The Obsession of Billy Botski, “a young man meets his obsession, a ghostly 60s Playboy-bunny styled “Connie”, and is never the same!”
The film is accompanied by The Obsession of John Paizs, a brand-new 26min video created by Matchbox Cineclub, featuring a rare and exclusive interview with Paizs himself. Our DIVE IN programme is live for only 48 hours from 10am on 18th July, and The Obsession of John Paizs will not be available anywhere afterwards. The entire programme features all-new optional English SDH/captions for D/deaf audiences, created by Matchbox Cinesub.
DIVE IN Cinemais a donation-based online season, coordinated by Glasgow Short Film Festival’s Sanne Jehoul and programmed by a cohort of Scottish independent exhibitors and film festivals.
Thanks to John Paizs, Winnipeg Film Group and VUCAVU.
The Winnipeg Film Group, founded in 1974, is an artist-run education, production, exhibition and distribution centre committed to promoting the art of cinema.
VUCAVU is an online screening platform working with independent film and video distributors from across Canada to improve access to Canadian works and to provide greater national and international awareness of Canadian filmmakers and video artists.
DIVE IN Cinema is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and Lottery funding from the BFI.
Brian Beadie interviewed director John Paizs on his cult classic debut Crime Wave, on the occasion of the tour we organised for Scalarama 2018
One of the absolute highlights of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival was Crime Wave, an unduly neglected Canadian comedy from 1985 which, despite being over 30 years old, emerged as one of the freshest and one of the funniest films to be shown at the festival. The film was programmed by Sean Welsh of Matchbox Cineclub who, after its rapturous reception at the festival, is bringing the film back for a limited engagement for Scalarama.
Crime Wave is as visually inventive and playfully pomo as an early Coen Brothers or Sam Raimi film (no, it’s not the film they collaborated on), but its director, John Paizs, would never make it big, despite being part of the innovative Winnipeg Film Group, whose other alumni include Guy Maddin. I would go so far to say that I prefer his dark comedy on the perils of scriptwriting to the Coens’ take on the same subject, Barton Fink – it’s far less pretentious, and has far more charm.
To give you an idea of the hectic invention of the film, here’s Paizs describing the film’s genesis:
“You could say it was a slight exercise in making lemonade from lemons. I was feeling pressured because I’d just written two feature length screenplays I wasn’t happy with, one of them called Crime Wave — a completely different story — and the other, Crazy Casey. Then one night at this time, sitting at my kitchen table, in front of a blank page, I just started writing ‘THE TOP!,’ and wrote out the rest of what would become the opening narration to this second go at Crime Wave. In a jokey way, it was expressing exactly my big secret dream for myself at this time with this new movie — which was to be a big success with it, bursting onto the scene — FROM THE NORTH! Ha — OK — scene one. Then, what next? Well, often when you hit the ground running like that in a story, it turns out that that opening bit was a dream, or something staged in the story, or just otherwise not ‘real’.”
John Paizs as Steven Penny in Crime Wave
“And so I thought — well, it could have been the opening scene to a movie that someone had written — like me. OK, so what next? OK — now, in Crazy Casey, I had a guy staying in an apartment over this family’s garage, and the family included a daughter, Casey, late teens, and the guy, who’s a freshman in college, has a thing for her — and next thing, that got reversed, she has a thing for him, she’s now ten, her name is Kim, and he’s a wannabe filmmaker — Steven Penny — who’s just capable of writing fun crap like we’d just seen opening this new Crime Wave. OK, so she comes on in scene two, she’s just finishing reading what we’d just seen in scene one, which is the beginning to one of Steven’s discarded screenplays, all of them called Crime Wave, and, breaking the fourth wall, she tells us about it. OK, so then what? Well, how about then she starts reading the ending to this same discarded Crime Wave, and we jump to that? More fun crap. And then — and this may have been my best idea in all of this new Crime Wave — we come back to her, in scene four, and she says that Steven’s problem is he can’t write middles! Boom. Writer’s block comedy. At that point I knew what it was I was writing. I didn’t know it until then. That’s when I found it out. And that’s what I went ahead and wrote.”
What Paizs wrote was a wildly unpredictable comedy with a shockingly high gag rate, taking potshots at everything from film form to current fads of the eighties – you can almost feel his delight in coming up with more outlandish scenarios, throwing in everything from self-help to the death of Sid Vicious into the mix.
“I never had a method for writing screenplays in those days beyond start with the title, then just jump right into it, no outline, no treatment, just make it up as I go along. And sometimes it would turn out more like a traditional dramatic narrative, and sometimes it wouldn’t, like Crime Wave. But I was never conscious of it being one way or the other at any point. I never thought hardly at all about what I was doing. I just did it. And then, when I got to the end of each script, that was it. No second draft, no revisions pretty much. I’d just apply for grant money to make the movie and that was that. So I guess it’s no wonder Crime Wave turned out the way it did, from a story standpoint. I just did what I liked, wrote scenes that I thought were original and funny, and didn’t think hardly at all about whether they advanced the plot or anything like that. Though actually there was one idea I brought to that script that I hadn’t brought to the others before it: and that was to keep the scenes short, and to keep cycling through the same like four or five types of them — a narrated scene, followed by an action scene, followed by a music scene, followed by a dialogue scene, then back to a narrated scene — that kind of thing, over and over, in a loop. I tried my best to make it that way, to keep things hopping like that, to keep the film hopefully jumping off the screen. I was determined not to repeat my huge mistake of my film just previous to Crime Wave, which was practically nonstop dialogue. Crime Wave was supposed to have learned from that one and be fun and alive.”
Indeed, most of the biggest laughs in the film come from pure sight gags, disrupting the film’s lush but highly controlled visual style, a reflection of Paizs’ background as a graphic artist.
“Because I (almost) never move the camera in the movie, it’s like a series of tableaus, or fixed comic strip panels. And I also lit it with hard light, to give it this ‘50s Technicolor look — high contrast and bright saturated colours — which was going directly counter to the prevailing look of movies at this time. So yeah, its visual aesthetic was one of the big things I was selling with it and that was going to be new and exciting about it. Out with the old, in with the new (old), kind of thing.”
Classic slapstick comedy is definitely another influence in play here – indeed, Paizs plays the lead himself, but mute, as a homage to the master of slapstick, Buster Keaton. “I had Buster’s Great Stone Face in mind for my character. It’s something I thought I could put my own spin on, and give the movie another level of originality at the same time because a non-speaking protagonist forces you to think of alternative — and sometimes very unexpected — ways to get ideas across. And also by doing it, I got to be a lead in a movie, and be good at it, with my extremely limited acting ability were I to speak.”
This device allows the film to be narrated in faux-naif style by his landlord’s daughter, who’s got a giant crush on him (a great performance by Eva Kovacs), which leads to another of the film’s influences – Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. “If Uncle Charlie had murdered prose instead of widows it would have been almost the same movie! I got the whole darkness-in-a-small-town framework from that movie, plus the two Charlies’ relationship has a definite parallel to Steven and Kim’s.”
Eva Kovacs on set as Kim in John Paizs’ Crime Wave
So if Crime Wave is so good – and it really is that good – how come you’ve never heard of it, never mind seen it? Paizs explains the reason for the film’s neglect thus:
“It went down amazingly, actually, at festivals, got amazing reviews — like a few of them almost ridiculously full of praise. But what did it in was a nightmare scenario involving the film’s first distributor. The distribution agreement I’d signed with them had a clause in it saying I’d be paid my guaranteed minimum within eighteen months of the film’s first theatrical release, which they tried not to give it! Instead, they just quickly dumped it onto home video and made some quick pay TV sales, and that they hoped was that, saving them a bundle of dough they’d otherwise be paying in advertising, etcetera, never mind my money. Finally, after taking certain actions, I was able to trigger my payment — like three years later — but by this time it was too late for the film, and I was devastated.”
When I saw the film earlier this year, with Paizs in attendance, he looked slightly nervous about the film’s reception – he needn’t have been. It brought the house down. However, he confesses, “I was so worried about how it would go over in Glasgow, for a million reasons, and was so incredibly relieved and delighted about how well it did go over. But what I hope people can appreciate today, whether they like the film or not, is how new and radical it was back in the day, because it was, then. Time may have eroded the perception of that quite a bit, but it was, what can I say.”
I can attest that Crime Wave stands the test of time very well indeed – its wit and playfulness undimmed – as one of the most inventive cinematic debuts of the eighties, and one that richly deserves a wider audience.
“Imagine if Steve Buscemi’s character from Ghost World made a movie, with levels of deadpan that make Jim Jarmusch look like Baz Luhrmann… but with a lurid perversion in every lovingly Bolexed frame that would make Baz blush.” Castle Cinema
“It’s a joyous, uninhibited film, with each frame fit to burst with visual jokes and ideas. Scenes resemble at times live action Far Side panels, delivering buckets of deadpan, obsidian-black comedy. If there’s a funnier Canadian film out there, we haven’t seen it.” The Skinny
We first screened John Paizs’ incredible lost classic Crime Waveat Glasgow Film Festival 2017. Thanks to GFF’s partnership, not only were we able to bring John across for the screening, we also screened TIFF‘s 2K digital restoration of the film, the first time audiences outside North America had seen it. We then partnered with Canadian distributors Winnipeg Film Group to bring Crime Wave back for a series of screenings, first for Scalarama in September, and then across the UK throughout October and November.
Now, thanks to the Castle Cinema in London (and some final testing at the Grosvenor Cinema, Glasgow), we have our very own DCP to screen from. A DCP is essentially the digital version of a 35mm print. Having one in the UK will hopefully lead to many, many more screenings of John’s amazing, criminally underseen film (read more about Crime Wavehere).
Matchbox Cineclub are acting as proxy for Winnipeg Film Group in booking UK screenings. If you’d like to book a UK/DCP screening of Crime Wave, email us for details/terms: matchboxcine@gmail.com
