Desire, or Woody Allen’s Manhattan. These films know a basic truth: Where we live determines who we are. And the way we know who we are, most often, is through the stories we tell each other about where we live. “Half of the myths that go into making a country’s identity are based on fact and the other half are generated out of some species of campfire story. So you get, in America’s case, things like Johnny Appleseed and Daniel Boone and Paul Bunyan,” Maddin told an American interviewer recently. “Canadians are such lousy selfmythologizers — they refuse to do it, as a matter of fact — they have no national identity. So I had to make up for a hundred years of negligence in this one movie, and put all the Winnipeg history that I had heard into one big boulliabase.” You’d think a mash-up of historical and personal anecdotes about Manitoba’s snowbound capital couldn’t possibly find an audience, but it did. My Winnipeg won raves around the world, from publications as diverse as the Irish Times, Wall Street Journal, and Der Spiegel. Not bad for a movie that cost $600,000 — the equivalent of what the City of Victoria spends in two years just on printing brochures. I mention all this because, theoretically, such a movie could’ve been made here. Victoria has been home to an equally respected and idiosyncratic director, Atom Egoyan. Many times he’s wanted to set a feature film in this city — Felicia’s Journey, for example — but never had the financial backing to do so. (Egoyan is working on a short called Victoria Year One, but it sounds purely autobiographical.) And, Lord knows, we have just as many stories and characters that deserve to be elevated into cinematic legend. Think of Emily Carr, a social outcast who found enlightenment in our forests, a century before British Columbians invented Greenpeace. Francis Rattenbury, who designed the BC Legislature building at the age of 25, and then was murdered by his wife’s young lover. (I’m told Pacific Opera Victoria’s Timothy Vernon has wanted to make a Rattenbury opera for years. Someone should finance that.) Or the seductive cult leader Brother XII, who evaded the RCMP by blowing up his island hideout and disappearing with a crate of gold. Ambition, genius, romance, madness, death — it’s all here. Too daring a slogan for Tourism Victoria, perhaps, but can’t you just picture the movie? Obviously, having a popular story set in your city provides spinoff benefits. Da Vinci Code fans flock to Paris, Harry Potter kids visit London — even Port Angeles gets the teen readers of the Twilight vampire tales. True, such traffic is partly a matter of luck, dependent on the whims of novelists and bestseller lists, but I’d argue that cities can also encourage it. I’m not suggesting that our governments create
Stops traffic. and itself.
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