L'Atelier national du Manitoba was a three-year filmmaking and art project based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada that ran from 2005 to 2008. The club's artistic output was devoted to the artistic study of the history, culture and ephemera of Winnipeg and Manitoba.
In collaboration, and individually under the l'Atelier rubric, the project's members created an array of short and feature-length films, videos, posters, curatorial showcases and essays.
Background
University of Winnipeg scholar Andrew Burke describes the group, thus: "Unlike John Paizs’s fascination with the 1950s, or Guy Maddin’s attachment to the 1920s, L’Atelier was drawn to the detritus of the more recent past—the space stretching from the 1970s and 1990s mediated by video, local affiliates, and public access cable broadcasting."
According to the group's "Horizontalist Manifesto" published in January, 2005, they believed that Manitoba's true country was Québec, not Canada. Winnipeg filmmaker and writer Kevin Nikkel calls the document, "a mischievous yet sincere call for community."
In 2008, filmmaker and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design faculty member Solomon Nagler described L'Atelier as "Winnipeg's Nouvelle Vague," adding, "...pitting Winnipeg against itself, the collective creates nationalistic, sociopolitical, culture-jamming documents that explore the esoteric roots of Canada's other distinct society: Winnipeg, Manitoba."
Garbage Hill Screenings and Kubasa in a Glass (2005)
On August 26–28, 2005, l'Atelier collaborated with Winnipeg artist Daniel Barrow to present the screening series, Garbage Hill: A Showcase of Discarded Winnipeg Film and TV, held at the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque. According to film writer Jeff McKay, "This screening was so popular, unlike some of the broadcasts themselves, that potential viewers in the over-capacity crowd were unable to get tickets." The series was a compendium of former cable access television shows from VPW and Cablevision, locally produced television commercials and under appreciated films from thirty years of Manitoba filmmaking. Barrow presented clips from cable TV shows, such as dance free-for-all The Pollock and Pollock Gossip Show, repertory musical performance show The Cosmopolitans, and the white Persian cat fan club TV-newsletter What's New Pussycat, among others, with his signature overhead projector providing scrolling historical background on each show.
During the Garbage Hill screening series, L'Atelier national du Manitoba presented the history of locally-produced, low-budget TV commercials in the feature-length video Kubasa in a Glass: the Fetishised Winnipeg TV Commercial 1976-1992. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema describes Kubasa in a Glass as, "distinguished by the way in which the accumulation and juxtaposition of found materials is not a simple exercise in civic nostalgia, but rather a thorough investigation of how the structure of feeling of a just-passed historical moment might be visible in its remnants and remainders." A version of the feature-length video Kubasa in a Glass: the Fetishised Winnipeg TV Commercial 1976-1992 was screened at the 2006 Images Festival in Toronto, where the artists' statement in the festival program guide claimed, "the purest form of Winnipeg cinema is the disposable filmmaking of the city's televisual ephemera."
Barrow continued collecting the work of 1980s cable access stars, and in 2009 Video Pool Media Arts Centre released, Winnipeg Babysitter, a DVD compendium of cable access clips featuring early performances of Guy Maddin, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, The Cosmopolitans, the Pollocks, and many more.
In the summer of 2007, l'Atelier presented Beefs and Bouquets, a series of short programs of new films by friends and associated filmmakers such as Deco Dawson, Victoria Prince, Darryl Nepinak, Daniel Gerson and Eve Majzels, at the Winnipeg Cinematheque.
Death by Popcorn: the Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (2005) In December 2005, l'Atelier national du Manitoba presented a 60-minute video-collage Death by Popcorn: the Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets at the Winnipeg Film Group's Cinematheque for three screenings. The video was edited in October and November, 2005. Subsequent to the video's Winnipeg premiere, l'Atelier became involved in a highly publicized public controversy and legal battle with media conglomerate CTV BellGlobeMedia over Fair Use of de-accessioned television footage. Throughout 2006 and 2007, Death By Popcorn screened across Canada and the United States.
Newspaper film critic Randall King described the video as a "comic work in which the Jets become the fulcrum of a meditation on Winnipeg self-loathing."