Cattle Call
Cattle Call is a high-speed animated documentary about the art of livestock auctioneering. Structured around the mesmerizing talents of 2007 Man-Sask Auctioneer Champion, Tim Dowler, and using a variety of classic and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, cut-outs, open-exposures, hole-punching and rubbing lettraset directly on the celluloid) filmmakers Maryniuk and Rankin have created images as dazzlingly abstract, absurd and adrenalizing as the incredible language of auctioneering itself. This hallucinogenic study of what Werner Herzog has termed the poetry of capitalism.
Matthew Rankin
Mike Maryniuk
Also Directed by Matthew Rankin
A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Winnipeg's doomed Second World War hero, Andrew Mynarski (1916-1944). Combining wartime aviation melodrama with classical and avant-garde animation techniques (including stop-motion, silhouettes, bleaching, scratching, hand-painting and rubbing letratone patterns directly on the celluloid) Mynarski Death Plummet is a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.
In the idealism and mutation of his home town of Winnipeg, the filmmaker Matthew Rankin launches a failed campaign of absolute inter-human solidarity entirely in Esperanto, the artificial language of world peace.
On a moonlit street corner, a Parisian waif sits dejectedly on a doorstep, mournfully clutching a dogless leash.
In the aftermath of the 1950 Winnipeg flood, Fernand floats listlessly through the sad, sunken landscape of ruin. His estranged wife prays for the drowned souls of Saint-Boniface.
An examination of Rory Lepine, who sent Winnipeg into a frenzy when he beat local legend Burton Cummings with a beer bottle in a 7-Eleven in 1985
An experimental montage of the exteriors of apartment buildings
Artistic rivalry infects the Winnipeg public service. Strong words are uttered, regretted, retracted.
Self-portrait of the filmmaker seen through the mystical postmodern prism of Iranian cinema
Winnipeg Film Group. Deep in the winter of 1986. Guy Maddin is in the process of filming Tales from the Gimli Hospital and needs to rub a dead seagull on somebody's chest. Immediately, Dave Barber agrees, submitting his bare flesh to Maddin's road kill and to film history. (This film was commissioned by the Winnipeg Film Group'ss Cinematheque for its 25th anniversary, Silverscope)
Also Directed by Mike Maryniuk
Hypnosis Highway. The effects of drinking magical ditch water near the Thompson Crystal Smelter. Shot and edited in a truck on the way to Lynn Lake, Manitoba, near Thompson. This is exactly how the passing trees look after 10 hours.
Best described as a flying-hallucination, dream workbook. Mike's 2010 One Take Super 8 Film, the raw reel as it was shot and presented.
The Yodeling Farmer explores the life and music of Manitoba cowboy yodeling legend Stew Clayton. This playful, animated documentary portrays the charming, yodeling farmer with humour and wit and looks the way yodeling sounds
Working in sublime self-isolation during the strange pandemic spring of 2020, avant-garde filmmaker Mike Maryniuk composes a surreal ode to rebirth and reinvention. Juxtaposing archival imagery with handcrafted animation, he conjures up a shimmering utopian dreamscape, a post-COVID world shaped by the primordial forces of nature—haunted by the genial spectre of Buster Keaton.
After a near-death experience, retired machinist Lorne Collie started making whimsical stringed instruments. His DIY inventiveness transformed lawn rakes, stop signs, and bent pitchforks into fully playable banjos, fiddles and violins.
Using found footage of road trips from the 60's, Maryniuk has crafted a psychedelic tribute piece to a friend who passed away in a car accident. Maryniuk's techniques included hole punching and reassembling, bleaching, painting, scratch animation and boiling the film.
Temporary Tattoos applied to 35mm for eternity. An energetic conjuring of Manitoban spirits.
This deaf-and-dumb young man who is called ‘the Goose’ by his scoffing acquaintances makes the most psychedelic of journeys by fax machine. Like a goose leaving for the sun in the winter, this anti-hero is looking for somewhere else to find his own voice. Absurdist drama that makes eager use of stop-motion carpet figures, silent-film references, computer animation, video and arcade games.
An animated short film made with 6,490 photographs of spin art micro paintings.
Magnetic Energy and Micro Waves create havoc at a game of horsheshoes. Captured in 3DIY.