Andrew Burke

The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserv...

The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin's compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin's mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin's work as well as argue that Maddin's films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.

An unexpected casualty of the Congressional conflict that shut down nearly all government services in the United States in the Fall of 2013 was the Smithsonian Institute’s National Zoo PandaCam. Viewers online, who had been gripped in the weeks prior to the shutdown by the birth of a panda cub, took to social media en masse to express their dismay that petty party bickering meant that the stream showing the early days of the unnamed, and admittedly very cute, baby panda would be cut. This paper argues that ZooCams, such as the two fixed on the panda enclosure at the National Zoo, extend both the exhibitionary logic that structures the traditional zoo experience and the spectatorial desire that underlies a whole history of representing animals on screen. Desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets are, on the one hand, merely the latest set of screens on which zoos are represented. But, on the other hand, this ability to stream animal life online, to have twenty-four hour access to a feed that is both uninterrupted and unedited, marks both a transformation of the onscreen representations of zoo animals and the ways in which we watch these representations. 

Drawing on animal studies, film studies, digital media studies, and fan studies, this paper analyzes the emergence of the ZooCam as both a pedagogical and promotional tool for institutions and a new type of screen entertainment for online viewers. Looking specifically at ZooCams from the Smithsonian National Zoo, the Metro Toronto Zoo, and the London Zoo, I consider how ZooCams can be read with and against other more established forms of animal representation, from the conventional wildlife documentary to the zoo film. While it may initially seem that the distinguishing feature of the ZooCam is that it provides simple unmediated, unedited, and unnarrativized representations of zoo life, I argue that the best way to understand the popularity of ZooCams is in relation to forms of experimental cinema that focus on time and duration or to examples of the long-form television series in which the narrative is drawn out over multiple episode or seasons. It is these kinds of extended spectatorial experiences that allow us to understand both the power and the attraction of streaming animal life online and the affection and attachment that viewers develop for the zoo animals represented.

Comprised primarily of samples drawn from a collection of 80s videocassettes layered over frenetic and fractured beats, the music of VHS Head points to the way in which memory and technology intersect. Occupying the space where glitchy electronica meets hypnogogic pop, the tracks on VHS Head’s debut album Trademark Ribbons of Gold trace a trajectory from the VCR to the mp3. The analogue remnants of the recent past are digitally reprocessed and reconfigured in a way that amplifies their force and menace. The work of VHS Head does not simply represent another example of the contemporary enthusiasm for dead media and obsolete technologies, but also serves as a model for how the recent past resides in the present day: as a discontinuous and disorienting barrage of fragments that haunt and unsettle the present. Drawing on memory studies and thing theory, this paper examines the uncanny as it is embodied in the ungainly material form of the videocassette and let loose through the music of VHS Head.

“‘Trademark Ribbons of Gold’: Format, Memory, and the Music of VHS Head.” Popular Music and Society 38.3 (2015): 355-71.

The work of the art collective L’Atelier national du Manitoba springs in part from the discovery of deaccessioned tapes in a dumpster outside the offices of CTV Winnipeg. These tapes form the basis of Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (2006), a documentary largely assembled from the footage rescued from the trash and gleaned from yard sale VHS discoveries. I will examine the convergence of melancholy and paranoia in the ghosted images of video-era Winnipeg and situate L’Atelier’s aesthetic practice, noting their connection to a history of found footage filmmaking and to the hauntological resonances of video. The seemingly banal objectness of videotapes obscures the uncanny spectrality of the images they contain. Contemporary aesthetic and popular practices that revive this footage are not simple exercises in nostalgia but can, as I will argue Death by Popcorn does, haunt the present by postulating alternative histories and prompting half-remembered dreams and desires.

“Memory, Magnetic Tape, and Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets.” Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada. Ed.Gerda Cammaer and Zoë Druick. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014. 326-50.

While the music documentary traditionally takes as its focus a performer, a group, a scene, or an event, Hans Fjellestad’s Moog (2004) is structured around a piece of technology, the synthesizer that revolutionized music making in the 1960s and 70s and continues to influence today. The film is at once a portrait of Robert Moog, the engineer who manufactured the first commercially available modular synthesizer, and an examination of the legacy and impact of the technologies that he developed and the instruments that bear his name. In the film, Fjellestad examines how the synthesizer Moog created bind together a disparate field of musical practices, from the classical pastiches that defined their early years to their use in prog rock during its heyday to their rediscovery by electronic and experimental artists more recently. Taking its title from a Stereolab song, this paper argues that Fjellestad’s film offers a different model for the music documentary, focusing not on the charisma of a musician, the energy of a scene, or the impact of an event, but on the space of musical possibility opened up by a technological innovation. Moog is about the man, but also about the “Moogie Wonderland”, the world of sonic play and experimentation that the modular synthesizer was instrumental in creating.

“Moogie Wonderland: Technology, Modernity and the Music Documentary.” The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop. Ed. Benjamin Halligan, Robert Edgar, and Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. 185-94.

Objects occupy a privileged place in the work of Douglas Coupland. From the commodity landscapes that populate his fiction to the nationalist bric-à-brac that clutters the Souvenir of Canada project, Coupland has long been interested in how seemingly inert things can generate intense affective force and be subject to all manner of passionate attachment. This paper examines the convergence of cultural memory, everyday materiality, and the national past in Coupland’s work. It focuses on how nostalgia for the nation emerges at the moment of globalization and details some of the political problems inherent in such sentimentalizations, but also considers the way in which everyday objects can serve as the vehicle for the affective reconstruction of a disappearing world, both personal and public. This fascination with residual objects, I argue, need not necessarily be understood as politically retrogressive, but rather is something that reveals the limits and losses of the present.

“The Nature of Things: Coupland, Cinema, and the Canadian Sixties and Seventies.” Double-Takes: Intersections Between Canadian Literature and Film. Ed. David Jarraway. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2013. 259-275.

Blending city symphony and essay film, the cinematic collaborations of Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans, and the pop group Saint Etienne constitute a lament for the disappearance of mid-century modern London. All deeply elegiac in tone, Finisterre (2003), What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (2006) and This is Tomorrow (2007) form a loose trilogy about the ways in which Thatcherite and Blairite efforts to modernize London, to secure its central place in the global circulation of capital, has led to the loss of the idiosyncrasies, even ideals, that characterized the modernizing metropolis of the postwar period. These films seek out the residual traces of older forms of modern life (caffs, council towers, community centres), celebrating and cataloguing them in the face of their disappearance or dilapidation. They operate at the conjuncture of memory, melancholia, modernity, and metropolitan life, and as such form part of a larger effort, cinematic (Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit), literary (Iain Sinclair, Shena Mackay), and artistic (Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller), to excavate a secret history of the city and assert the value of neglected spaces and disappearing forms of modern life. This paper uses the Kelly, Evans, and Saint Etienne collaborations to assess the formal limits of such works of cultural memory, which often threaten to lapse into melancholic despair, and to explore the role music might play in such efforts to remember, record, and preserve the recent past.

On Andrea Dorfman's Parsley Days (2000). Full citation: “Site Specific: Visualizing the Vernacular in Andrea Dorfman’s Parsley Days.” Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Essays on Atlantic Canadian Film and Television. Ed. Darrell Varga. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009. 219-33.

On Pawel Pawlikowski's Last Resort and Andrea Arnold's Red Road. Full citation: “Concrete Universality: Tower Blocks, Architectural Modernism, and Contemporary British Cinematic Realism.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5 (2007) 177-88.