The Plight of the ‘Peg

He's come undun: Burton Cummings suits up for a charity hockey game in Death by Popcorn. Courtesy l'Atelier-National du Manitoba.

Delivering a hard bodycheck to received wisdom, the art collective l’Atelier-National du Manitoba proclaims that history is written by losers — in this case, dazed and defeated Winnipeggers, who lost their professional hockey team to a city that doesn’t even have snow.

Using found footage, Atelier members Walter Forsberg, Matthew Rankin and Mike Maryniuk crafted Death by Popcorn, an art-house documentary about the long, unhappy demise of the Winnipeg Jets, who debuted in 1972 and were sold off in 1996 to become the Phoenix Coyotes. There are no happy endings, no big heroes, no last-minute cavalry charges in this tale. Just defeat piled on defeat, and that’s the way the Atelier likes it.

“I feel there are these very American models of nationalism, which are very triumphalist in nature, and they aren’t suited to Canada, definitely not to Winnipeg,” says Rankin.

The Atelier’s attempt to hammer out a new, loser-friendly Manitoba mythology includes a mockumentary interview with the fan who claims to have thrown the fateful box of popcorn on the ice in game six of the 1990 Stanley Cup playoffs. The resulting break in play supposedly killed the Jets’ momentum and sealed their loss to the despised Edmonton Oilers. The film makes much of the longstanding Edmonton-Winnipeg rivalry. Back in the days of the World Hockey Association (WHA), Jets owner Barry Shenkarow reportedly had the chance to play a game of backgammon to win the young Wayne Gretzky. Shenkarow declined, thus adding to Winnipeg’s crushing legacy of what ifs.

According to the 28-year-old Maryniuk, this is typical Winnipeg thinking. “There’s this idea, ‘Oh, it would all have been different if we’d just gotten Gretzky. If Shenkarow had just played backgammon….’”

Death by Popcorn is a cinematic collage made up of scavenged footage that expresses the Atelier’s perverse fascination with such neglected forms as homegrown commercials, public-service announcements, station identification jingles, sports phone-in shows and the forced high jinks of local TV personalities. Using distortion and hand-processing techniques usually associated with avant-garde filmmaking, the Atelier transforms its trashy pop-culture material into something new, and often bizarrely beautiful.

The marriage of experimental film and professional sports may seem unlikely, but Forsberg, Rankin and Maryniuk use the travails of the beleaguered NHL to advance the Atelier’s ongoing investigation into Winnipeg’s hidden histories and chronic tendency to “civic self-loathing.” In a recent press release, the Atelier suggests that the “ironic epic of the Jets seems to mirror the mysterious trajectory of Winnipeg history itself. Both tell a story about people whose triumph was short-lived, whose defeat was monumental, whose drama was played out upon a cruel bed of ice, and who, at the end of their lives, moved to faraway Phoenix, Arizona.”

In this saga, which the Atelier renders both comically over-inflated and anticlimactic, recent NHL figureheads (Alan Eagleson, John Ferguson, Gary Bettman) become archetypes. The filmmakers sample a sports-dinner speech by Dale Hawerchuk so that it becomes a rapping melody of “ums” and “uhs,” thereby turning the Jets Hall of Famer into a mute hero who expresses himself best with slapshots. (This Hawerchuk hagiography also leads to a fascinating sidebar: an interview with Les Dales Hawerchuk, a band from Roberval in the Lac-Saint-Jean area, whose single Je suis Dale Hawerchuk is currently getting play in Quebec.)

Agent 99: Wayne Gretzky. Courtesy l'Atelier-National du Manitoba.

The other major player is Gretzky. As a supremely accomplished athlete playing for the dynastic Edmonton Oilers in resource-rich Alberta, #99 was — in conventional terms — the prototypical winner. As such, this loser-oriented narrative casts him as a villain, using tricky editing, threatening music and selective stills to make his wholesome cereal-box visage look positively satanic. The fact that Gretzky ended up coaching the Coyotes has the Atelier boys practically fainting from sheer poetic irony.

The Atelier does love its irony. Founding members Forsberg, 24, and Rankin, 27, met at McGill University, where the former was studying film and the latter was taking history. They ended up in Rankin’s home province of Manitoba. They formed the Atelier in the frigid, irony-inducing February of 2005, “to compose ciné-poems about our civic prison of misery.” In collaboration with Winnipeg artists and filmmakers like Maryniuk and media archivist Andreas Goldfuss, the Atelier has since honed its sense of romantic melancholy with old videotapes picked up in bargain basement bins or snagged from friends. Almost all of the raw material for Death by Popcorn came from the bins outside the old CKY television studios after the Atelier received a tip-off last March about a major round of corporate “de-accessioning.” Forsberg and Rankin went dumpster-diving and ended up with literally kilometres of footage in their basement.

“We have about 4,000 tapes,” confirms Forsberg. “We have old two-inch reels we can’t even watch and we kept them anyway.”

As Winnipeg’s self-appointed alternative historians, Forsberg and Rankin first created Garbage Hill, which played to sell-out crowds at Winnipeg’s Cinematheque in August. A lo-tech manipulation of ’80s amateur advertisements, Crimestoppers re-enactments and local talk shows, the film alternated between comic moments too SCTV-ish to be believed and passages of lyrical mourning for a lost city.

The Atelier members are nostalgic in a way that only the young can be, and there is something adorably, self-consciously recherché about their whole artistic stance. They describe merely living in Winnipeg as an “avant-garde act,” and they like writing manifestos, which has been something of a lost art since the early modernists. They also have weird, Winnipeg-centric obsessions, like Doug Henning, the Winnipeg-born magician who veered off into yogic flying and a new destiny with the Natural Law party; Monty Hall, a former North Ender who became the host of Let’s Make a Deal; and Burton Cummings, the Guess Who rocker whose grinning face (along with the words “Stand Tall”) is the Atelier’s unofficial logo. (Burton makes a surprise guest appearance in Death By Popcorn, suiting up to play a charity hockey game in what are clearly awkward TV outtakes.)

So what happens when aesthetes turn their attention to athletics? Forsberg says that after screening dozens and dozens of hours of footage, he came to love watching Dale Hawerchuk score goals. Rankin’s fandom, meanwhile, seems more conceptual. “The Jets became immediately more interesting to me the second they were gone,” he admits. “I like dead hockey teams: the Nordiques, the Winnipeg Maroons.”

For him, this ghost story is “hilarious and tragic at the same time. I have a hard time distinguishing between the two.”

There’s a genuinely tragic moment in Death By Popcorn, when a TV reporter wonders: now that the city no longer has a major-league hockey franchise, why would anyone stay in Winnipeg? The approach seems killingly negative, even by local standards.

The Atelier, at least, is hanging on to its hometown. The filmmakers are even celebrating it, with a cinematic approach that falls somewhere between earnestness and irony, high comedy and high art, love and loss.

Alison Gillmor is a writer based in Winnipeg.