Fear and Self-Loathing in Manitoba
l’Atelier national du Manitoba finds beauty in Winnipeg’s cultural cast-offs
INTERVIEW BY Paul Corupe
Photography by Melissa Forsberg
Armed with a love of experimental film and literally miles of locally produced videotape, l’Atelier national du Manitoba founders Walter Forsberg and Matthew Rankin have made it their duty to dig up and preserve the most ignored, maligned and downright despised aspects of their province’s cultural history.
While studying in Montreal, the two filmmakers’ fascination with the defiant regionalism of Quebec spilled over into their understanding of Rankin’s home province of Manitoba. In February 2005, they formed l’Atelier as an artistic crusade to celebrate what they have deemed the province’s “civic self-loathing.” In addition to a series of public art projects that challenge Manitobans to embrace their own cultural embarrassments, Forsberg and Rankin curated “Garbage Hill: A Showcase of Winnipeg’s Discarded Film and Television History.” Armed with 2000 salvaged videotapes, Forsberg and Rankin screened their film festival at the Winnipeg Cinematheque in August.
What drew l’Atelier to Winnipeg?
Matthew Rankin: Basically, all of the cultural production of Winnipeg is despised by the citizens who live here, vengefully disposed of and rejected by its own people—which is kind of beautiful, in fact. We see our being here and embracing Winnipeg as one of the more avant-garde acts imaginable.
Could you explain your championing of the dehumanization of Canadian film?
MR: One common element in Winnipeg avant-grade film is the degradation of imagery and sound. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in hand-processing—local filmmaker Mike Maryniuk is particularly proficient in this. Degraded imagery like you can’t imagine—literally plunging fistfuls of celluloid into smouldering Chernobyls of chemicals.
Walter Forsberg: This degradation also extends into bad acting and bad continuity—aspects that most filmmakers would just consider poor craftsmanship. However, these films claim a space on the cinematic map and make that Canadian, which is much more interesting to me than having the CN Tower visible in the background of your frame.
MR: It’s intriguing because there are these smaller Winnipeg films which nobody really watches, and then there are films that are very welcome here. For example, there was a recent film made about the Enron collapse that was shot entirely in Winnipeg, but took place in Dallas, Texas. It was like Winnipeg posing as a real city.
WF: We made it big, finally!
MR: People were really glad this was happening. Here comes this film that has nothing to do with Winnipeg and it is seen as a triumph of our burgeoning cinematic industry.
What kinds of materials were shown at “Garbage Hill”?
MR: “Winnipeg ephemera,” I guess you could say—old TV commercials, segments from public access television, and lost auteur films from the 1980s which are really despised in the popular imagination as “bad” film. The exhibit was an effort to vindicate these documents as being the foundation of Winnipeg identity itself.
WF: We’re really performing acts of historical dumpster-diving and trying to preserve a history that, in people’s minds, doesn’t even qualify as history—this is just garbage. We’ve been doing a poster campaign with Burton Cummings’ face, and the words “Stand Tall” underneath as an encouragement to Winnipeggers, and we’re also working on a series of found footage films devoted to the Winnipeg Jets and their demise, and Doug Henning and the Natural Law party.
Where did you get the materials for the festival?
MR: Putting together this exhibit was very difficult, because Winnipeg has systematically holocausted all of these documents. When Winnipeg’s public access station, VPW, was taken over by another company at the end of the 1990s, they felt that the entire canon of the station was completely worthless. They threw it all into a mass grave, including Guy Maddin’s show, Survival.
WF: The gentleman who was ordered to do all of this holocausting said to us that the higher-ups told him to destroy all the videotapes with “extreme prejudice.”
MR: It was a pogrom, a pogrom of television history! This is the thing, there is a danger that Winnipeg’s tendency toward self-loathing can be taken to dangerous extremes—the extreme of erasing history, with all the vengeance of a book burning.
WF: It is terrifying, but that’s the way it goes in Winnipeg.
MR: Yeah, welcome to Manitoba!
