Hinterland Remixed by Andrew Burke

Author:Andrew Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

4.1 The distress of the analogue image in L’Atelier national du Manitoba’s Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (2005).

The bizarre richness of 1980s and 1990s Winnipeg television returns me to the tragedy of the Jets. One way to explain the efflorescence of local programming during that time is the city’s size. Winnipeg was large and isolated enough to need and demand its own in-house productions but small and peripheral enough to allow for a modicum of creative freedom and experimentation for those working in the field, including such local filmmaking luminaries as John Paizs and Guy Maddin, who were affiliated with the vibrant Winnipeg Film Group.20 This mixture of necessity and opportunity generated a televisual culture that would largely disappear with changes to the Canadian Radio and Television Commission’s regulations governing locally produced programming in the mid-1990s and with the end of local television advertising more generally as costs increased and viewership dwindled.21 The Jets’ tenure in the National Hockey League coincided with this moment of odd and extraordinary local televisual production. The history of the team, as well as the history of the city itself in that era, is not simply on video but is also primarily accessible as video. Video mediates but also becomes the texture and format of cultural memory itself, even for those who were there. This connection between medium and memory is, to my mind, as much the substance of Death by Popcorn as is the desire to tell the tragic tale of the Jets and the city that the team left behind.

Death by Popcorn is by no means the sole example in Canadian cinema of a film that explores the connection between memory, medium, and the long ’70s. Brett Kashmere’s video essay Valery’s Ankle (2006) zeroes in on an act of hockey violence that perhaps, more than anything else, marks the beginnings of the modern game. The dominant image of the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union is undoubtedly that of Paul Henderson celebrating his series-winning goal in the eighth and final game. Yet, as Kashmere shows, this triumphant image, which has come to occupy a key place in the Canadian cultural imagination as one that embodies and exemplifies the nation’s heart and tenacity, obscures the spectacular levels of on-ice violence that set it up and made it possible. In game 6, with Canada down 3–1 in the series, Bobby Clarke brutally slashed Valery Kharlamov, taking aim at his already injured left ankle. Kharlamov’s would miss game 7, and even though he returned in the final game of the series, his injured ankle prevented him from being the force he was in the earlier games. Kashmere’s film asks, “What does this image say? At regular speed, it is nearly indiscernible. But stop the flow, split the second, and invisible evidence becomes visible. The two-handed slash, nearly unseen on video, but forceful enough to snap the blade of Clarke’s stick, breaking Kharlamov’s ankle.” Video at once obscures the viciousness of this moment and makes Kashmere’s investigation of it possible.

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