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¡We Love You Colonel!
2 minutes / Super 8 / 2019
Souvenir of Craig Baldwin's trip to Mexico in August of 2017, as guest of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine. Starring Colonel Baldwin, himself, Paulina Suárez Hesketh and Elena Pardo. Shot on Ektachrome 7285 Super 8 film by Walter Forsberg.
Screenings------
December 2019: Other Cinema (San Francisco, USA)
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Bandera Churubusco
480 frames ~ 20 seconds / 16mm / 2018
A visual guide to the history of filmmaking in Mexico, made with illustrations from second-hand books on Donceles Street in Mexico City. Created as part of the Laboratory Experimental de Cine's 2018 residency at Studios Churubusco.
Screenings------
December 2019: ShapeShifters Cinema (Oakland, USA)
December 2019: Other Cinema (San Francisco, USA)
July 2019: LEC Retrospective, Foro 7 1/2, Anarchivia (CDMX, MEX)
June 2019: S8 Mostra de Cinema Periférico (Coruña, SPAIN)
September 2018: Hazlo tu mismo Conference (CDMX, MEX)
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Cellular Immune Response
5 minutes / Super 8 / 2017
OMG LOL ROTF TTYL IRL
What happens when you're on your phone.
Screenings------
Other Cinema (SF, USA)
Pulque Cinema (CDMX, MEX)
Valdivia Int'l FF (CHILE)
Ambulante Gira de documentales (CDMX, MEX)
CODEC International Experimental Film and Video Festival (CDMX, MEX)
ULTRAcinema (Guelatau, Oaxaca, MEX)
CineToro Experimental Film Festival (Cali, COLOMBIA)
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TECHNICOLOR N.G.
Walter Forsberg & John Klacsmann
20 minutes / 16mm Live Projection Performance / 2014-2015
A Technicolor dye imbibition printing error mis-registers a 1967 B-Western, revealing its Cyan ghosts and cinema’s psychedelic underpinnings.
Funding generously provided for by the Canada Council for the Arts.Check out the POSTER
Screenings------
December 2014: Anthology Film Archives (New York, USA)December 2014: Mono No Aware (Brooklyn, USA)September 2014: Other Cinema (San Francisco, USA)September 2014: Exploratorium (San Francisco, USA)February 2014: New York University, Department of Cinema Studies (New York, USA)March 2014: EYE Institute (Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS)March 2015: Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, USA)September 2015: American Film Institute (Silver Spring, USA)***********************************************************************************************************************************************
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Video Preservation (NTSC)
Kodak 7285 16mm reversal film strip array / 2013
I began to think very seriously about the historical longevity of video test patterns while managing the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s XFR STN – an open-door, artist-centered, media conservation laboratory that ran for 3 months in the summer of 2013. There, I provided countless explanations to the public, who passed daily through the fifth floor gallery’s video digitization workstations, as to how the colour bars were merely a representational electromagnetic language about voltages. I wondered how an image so iconic as the SMPTE split-field bars would live on beyond the technological obsolescence of standard definition analog video.
Translating these voltage values into filmic form seemed immediately logical, especially once Kodak discontinued its colour reversal film stocks in late 2012. This occurred to me as one strategy to preserve standard definition video beyond the lifespan of its own magnetic media format. A light leak in the Bolex makes for something of a strange ‘dropout’ in the magenta region, and rendering the 80% gray bar as a filmed 18 gray card is supposed to be funny.
Featured on the cover of issue #4 of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media.
Editioned 11" x 17" archival inkjet prints are available if you contact me directly.
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Tell Her What I Said
5 minutes / Super 8, 16mm & Video / 2012
Commissioned for the Auroratone: New Frontiers in Psychiatric Cinema program at the 2012 POP Montéeal Festival.
With audio commentary by Buckminster Fuller, and music by The Sadies. Special thanks to Kier-La Janisse and Andrea Callard.
Funding generously provided for by the Canada Council for the Arts.
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Digital Preservation (Lincoln)
Walter Forsberg & Clint Enns
Kodak 7222 16mm reversal film strip array / 2012
In the late 60s and early 1970s, scientists Leon Harmon and Béla Julesz published research into early digital imaging. Interested in human perception of things like resolution, quantization, and noise, Harmon and Julesz used Anthony Berger’s 1864 photo portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a source image to try and discern the minimum resolution required to recognize a human face.
While there are parallels to the kinds of flicker works that Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits were making around the same time that Harmon and Julesz were at Bell Labs, I’m most interested in the idea of articulating this ‘digitality’ with analogue media. As someone who works in media preservation I must admit to a little bit of gallows humour at the utopic ideas of digitization as a means of preserving cultural heritage. That this kind of filmic portraiture will long outlive any hard drive, LTO magnetic data tape backup, or website, is just plain great.
Clint Enns helped me with the math.
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Fahrenheit 7-Eleven
Directed by Walter Forsberg & Produced by Matthew Rankin
15 minutes / 16mm & Video / 2011
A new experiment in Winnipeg Film Group-produced documentary, The Burton Cycle is an amalgam of accounts by native Winnipeggers about rock god Burton Cummings and the fateful 1985 encounter between a beer bottle and his head. Recounted in Part One, Fahrenheit 7-Eleven, by fans, admirers, and devoted patrons of Cummings’ burger joint Salisbury House, the urban myth of this legendary civic tale is re-enacted with great care and acerbic absurdity.
Screenings: Hot Docs; Winnipeg Cinémathèque
Funding generously provided for by the Canada Council for the Arts
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Man Matters Fall 2011 Recruitment Video
90 seconds / HD Video / 2011
Exercise video, with energetic soundtrack
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Negativipeg: The Confession of Rory Lepine
Directed by Matthew Rankin & Produced by Walter Forsberg
16 minutes / 16mm & Video / 2010
Negativipeg tells the story of Rory Lepine, who shot to Herostratic fame in 1985 when he attacked Winnipeg rock legend Burton Cummings with a beer bottle in a North End 7-Eleven. Narrated by Lepine himself, the film meditates on this mysterious act of destruction and suggests that Winnipeg might have an attitude problem.
Screenings: Sundance Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; DOXA; Rooftop Films; American Film Institute
Funding generously provided for by the Canada Council for the Arts
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Burton's Favourite
4 minutes / Super 8 / 2006
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Death by Popcorn: the Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets
by l'Atelier national du Manitoba
61 minutes / Analogue Video / 2006
Peppered with action-packed cameos by Winnipeg All-Stars Dale Hawerchuk, Burton Cummings, Teemu Selanne, Billy Van and a recent interview with the man who sent the Jets straight into the jaws of death by throwing a cataclysmic box of popcorn onto the ice in Game 6 of the 1990 playoff series, Death by Popcorn: the Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets follows our ill-fated team through their many travails with arch-enemies Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers, soul-crushing NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and many other agents of Winnipeg annihilation. Sadness on ice!
"Part of the force of Death by Popcorn is that the poor quality of some of the material is precisely the index of its importance: skew lines at the top and bottom of the image, for instance, points to something rewound frequently and played repeatedly. This tape stress suggests both passion and pathology. In Death by Popcorn, moments of triumph bear these signs of repeated viewings, but so do sequences of failure, suggesting a compulsion not simply to figure out what went wrong but to dwell on it in an almost pathological way."
--Andrew Burke, Department of English, University of Winnipeg
[from the forthcoming: Gerda Canmaer Zoe & Druick eds., Cinephemera: Moving Images at the Margins of Canadian Cinema (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014)]"The information in this Notice of Copyright Infringement is accurate, and under penalty of legal action by CTV Television Inc. Should you choose to ignore any or all requests outlined above CTV reserves the right to seek immediate equitable, injunctive, and other relief, including damages claims."
--Ken Peron, Operations Manager, CTV Television Inc.Watch on UbuWeb
Read Matthew Rankin's "The Seven Pillars of Winnipeg"
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Kubasa in a Glass: The Fetishized World of the Winnipeg TV Commercial, 1976-1992
by l'Atelier national du Manitoba
60 minutes / Video / 2005
"Winnipeg is an Ephemeral City. A Disposable City. It is not a City of Love or of Light. It is a Grozny, a Vladivostok, a Tashkent-of-a-City, doomed to defeat, forgetfulness and extinction.
Only the citizens of “Canada” might remember Winnipeg. And if they do, it will be a vague disdainful wisp of memory; something about winter and insects. But the worst injury of all comes from those who actually live in Winnipeg. Their hatred for this city—manifested variously in murder, glue-sniffing and downtown beautification projects—can assure that there will be no Winnipeg left for posterity.
For the cinéastes of Winnipeg, this vanishing city has become something of a fetish object, the cinematic negotiation of which has generated a staunchly regional—indeed, national—cinema. The most notorious example of this phenomenon would of course be Guy Maddin. Maddin’s visual and thematic denigration of Winnipeg alerts us to the two central tropes of Winnipeg national cinema: demean and destroy.
But the purest form of Winnipeg cinema is the disposable filmmaking of the city’s televisual ephemera. Like Winnipeg itself, the TV Commercial and the daily weather report is morbidly aware of its limited lifespan. This consciousness of being born only to be swiftly annihilated and forgotten is the metaphor in which we may identify Winnipeg society. Furthermore, the ATELIER NATIONAL DU MANITOBA contends that Winnipeg ephemera from the 1980s will soon rival the cult hegemony of Rick Prelinger’s 1950s and Matt McCormick’s 1970s.
Telle est l’épopée de la nation ouinipégoise, et telle est notre lutte collective! Une lutte pour la destruction totale de notre civilisation bien-aimée! La sagesse se trouve dans la reduction.
On the basis of this indignant polemic, the ATELIER NATIONAL DU MANITOBA has designed a programme in order to introduce the uninitiated film-goer to Winnipeg National Cinema and brood feverishly upon its deeper meanings. This programme explores themes of degradation, disposal and destruction as it pertains to the televisual ephemera and national identity of Winnipeg." --- Matthew Rankin
Watch trailer
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Thunder on the Track
5 minutes / Video / 2004
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