“Establishing Shots: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Film Group.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 34.1 (Spring 2025): 148-152.
Establishing Shots: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Film Group
Kevin Nikkel
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023), 456 pages.
Establishing Shots: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Film Group, edited by the filmmaker and historian Kevin Nikkel, is a follow-up to Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group (2017), a documentary co-directed by Nikkel and Dave Barber. Barber, of course, was the celebrated programmer for the Winnipeg Cinematheque (now the Dave Barber Cinematheque) from its opening in 1982 until his passing in 2021. The book contains thirty-two previously unpublished interviews conducted by Nikkel and Barber and includes major Canadian figures such as the filmmakers Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin, the performance artists/filmmakers Shawna Dempsey and Darryl Nepinak, and the animators Leslie Supnet and Mike Maryniuk, as well as unsung heroes such as the administrator Carmen Lethbridge. It is divided into four sections that mark different eras of film production at the Winnipeg Film Group (WFG), with the last section looking at new forms of experimental methodologies and community engagement that emerged after 2000.
While the WFG has been the subject of many books and articles, this is the first comprehensive collection of interviews with the filmmakers and administrators who were deep in the trenches of Winnipeg’s thriving artist-run culture, and it paints a fairly complete picture of both the centre and the spirit of the films being made there.1 In addition, the book complements the material found in Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, a history of the organization that is as entertaining as it is informative. While the film features more voices and includes perspectives from insightful outsiders such as the Toronto-based filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, the Toronto-based film critic Geoff Pevere, and Piers Handling, the former director of the Toronto International Film Festival, the book provides more in-depth coverage of those insiders who played key roles in the organization.
In his interview with Nikkel, filmmaker Mathew Rankin attempts to define the “Winnipeg School” of filmmaking. He suggests that it has “a brazenly anti-establishment spirit, almost outsider art,” that frequently expresses itself through three main aesthetic tenets: “First, there is an obsession with the materiality of film emulsion and/or video static. Second, there is a pathology for reprocessing outmoded film language. Third, there is a very keen sense of weird humour and the absurd” (341–2). Indeed, for many years, there was an unwritten expectation that the works produced at the WFG would fall into the category of what Geoff Pevere once labelled “prairie post-modernism” while discussing the work of the Winnipeg filmmaker John Paizs, an early mainstay of the organization. But as the filmmaker Shereen Jerrett explains, the notoriety that this approach to filmmaking created came with baggage: it created “a skewed view of what we were,” as well as a “pressure to make those kinds of movies”—zany ones—“which isn’t everybody’s vision” (199).
Filmmakers who worked outside of these tags have often been relegated to what Rankin once described as “the periphery of a periphery city.”2 One of the most notable of these characters was Winston Washington Moxam, whose fiercely independent films dealt with issues of social justice and Black identity and were shamefully ignored until his death in 2011. In a city known for its surrealist, experimental, and transgressive film productions, he made dramatic films that dealt with real-life issues. His films are politically engaged, yet deeply personal, and they were made with very little institutional support. For instance, his 35mm film Barbara James (2001) was shot on short ends with a volunteer crew. In a post-screening discussion included in the book, he describes how the footage sat in his freezer for over a year since he didn’t have the money to process it, causing him to worry about water damage. He eventually raised the money to send it to the lab. When not filmmaking, Moxam worked as a projectionist at the Cinematheque, building a “visual Rolodex” (298). Moxam’s interview captures his self-determination, resilience, and defi- ant spirit and constitutes an important contribution to this collection.
In addition to interviews, the book contains many photographs that illustrate the spaces that the WFG occupied, as well as demonstrating both the types of films produced and the working conditions under which they were made. For example, in a photograph taken in 1976, we see the late filmmaker and University of Manitoba film professor Howard Curle sitting in the upper corner of a room, balancing precariously on a window ledge. He uses a Super 8 camera to shoot filmmaker and University of Winnipeg film professor John Kozak, and the photograph’s Dutch angle serves as a metaphor: an off-kilter image documenting an offbeat movie production (184).
In another photograph taken during the shooting of John Paizs’ Crime Wave (1985), we see the cinematographer Tom Fijal standing perilously on a small wooden plank that extends off the side of a haul truck loaded with a car they are shooting. He is standing behind a 16mm Bolex on a wooden tripod wearing a helmet, a leather jacket, and biker gloves (10). These photographs capture the spirit of the low-budget filmmaking practices that continue to thrive in Winnipeg. They are emblematic of an ethos: films produced at any cost, including the risk of personal injury.
As filmmaker and media archivist Walter Forsberg observes, “one of the things I saw lacking at artist-run centres is this self-documentation process, of marking time” (333). This book is one attempt to fill this gap, but it also suf- fers from what remains unvoiced, the conflicts and crises that no one is willing to address while wounds are still healing. Anne Golden’s fictional meta-history From the Archives of Vidéo Populaire (2016) covers similar territory but does so with great candour, featuring all the gossip, shit-talking, in-fighting, slander, and hearsay that is so frequently a part of artist-run culture, but that tends to be left out of this sector’s official histories. Golden’s book weaves the inter- views together in order to manufacture dialogues between the interviewees. In contrast, each of Nikkel’s interviews stands alone, a strategy that helps to illuminate the individual filmmaker’s practice in addition to exploring the artist’s relationship to the organization itself.
The history of the WFG is a turbulent one. As Shawna Dempsey remarks, “the WFG sometimes is a real shit-show, actually. I don’t know why that is. Maybe a lot of creative people in one spot, trying to make things happen, in a culture of hierarchy” (287). While there is much talk about the various dramas that occurred at the WFG, the details are vague despite the fact these internal struggles are an integral part of artist-run culture. As the filmmaker and arts administrator Jeff Erbach observes in his interview,
I don’t think that what the Film Group has seen [in terms of stormy politics] is different than any other arts organization. I really don’t. I’ve worked with hundreds of arts organizations in different capacities in my life, and these things are really common. I just think [artist-run culture] is a cauldron for sometimes there being explosive stuff. (272)
Still, it is unlikely that Establishing Shots would have been published if too much attention had been devoted to the organization’s internal strife. Such matters are delicate, and the fact that this book exists speaks to Nikkel’s diplomatic nature and the respect he and Barber hold within the community.
That said, to anyone familiar with the history of the WFG, it is immediately obvious that Cecilia Araneda is absent from the book and the film. Araneda was the truculent former Executive Director of the WFG from 2006 to 2017, whose signal achievement was the diversification of the organization. She initiated programs such as the Mosaic Film Fund, a mentorship program that supports women and femme and non-binary-identified people from Indigenous or diverse cultural backgrounds to produce short moving image works. Araneda’s absence produces a major gap in the book, one that we might help to fill in if we turn to her essay “The WFG’s First Decade in a New Century,” which appeared in The New Wave, a 2012 WFG DVD release. Here, Araneda provides a telling anecdote about the complexity of creating a history of an organization like the WFG:
A film producer stopped me on the street in 2010 and told me he was interested in making a documentary on the WFG—he wondered what I thought of the idea. Ambitious, I told him, because for every filmmaker in the city, there is a different Film Group, and each of these versions of reality is true, even if they are in direct opposition to other versions. The WFG is an enigmatic entity that is very hard to define because it is not one absolute thing, but rather a compendium of individual experiences and sometimes very fleeting relationships. In the absence of one absolute true history existing, the best a documentary could hope to do is to tackle the roots of its immense and evolving mythology.3
While Araneda does not name the film producer, one can only imagine that it was Nikkel pitching his film Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group, the film that became the foundation for Establishing Shots. One must also assume that Araneda was invited to participate and refused. In his own personal essay on the subject, “Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group” (2020), Barber describes the subjective nature of “truth” for those who contributed to the history of the WFG: “How do you tell forty years of history with its endless sea of changes? What is the story? [. . .] Who should you interview? The Winnipeg Film Group is like the great Kurosawa movie Rashomon (1950) in which everyone sees their own version of the truth.”4 As Golden’s book suggests, some truths can only be told as fiction. Yet some may believe the truth is best expressed in silence, which is, of course, their prerogative. But silence in an oral history can only be expressed as an absence, and, in this case, that seems like a lost opportunity.
This book is highly recommended to those seeking a deeper understanding of Canada’s regional filmmaking traditions, as well as anyone with an interest in artist-run culture, Canadian media arts, and experimental, independent, and low-budget cinema production, exhibition, and distribution. The concerns of the WFG are similar to those of countless other artist-run centres in Canada. The combination of low stakes, big personalities, and little funding create the conditions for a perfect storm with the ability to bring people together and to tear them apart. The oral histories of the WFG are testaments to the storms encountered by any artist-run organization driven by members with divergent ideologies and a shared passion.
- Books about films produced at the WFG include Gilles Hébert (Ed.), Dislocations (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Film Group, 1994); Cecilia Araneda (Ed.), Place: 13 Essays, 13 Filmmakers, 1 City (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Film Group, 2009); and Walter Forsberg, Starvation Years: Album de l’Atelier national du Manitoba 2005–2008 (Winnipeg: L’Atelier national du Manitoba, 2014). Histories of the WFG include Patrick Lowe, “The Winnipeg Film Group Aesthetic: A View from Within” in Dislocations, pp. 63–73; George K. Godwin, “Far from the Maddin Crowd: Thirty Years of the Winnipeg Film Group,” Cinema Scope 20 (Fall 2004), pp. 14–18; and Dave Barber, “Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group,” in Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group (Winnipeg: Matchbox Cineclub, 2020), pp. 4–7. [↩]
- Matthew Rankin, “From the Outside Looking In: The Films of Winston Washington Moxam,” Place, p. 99. [↩]
- Cecilia Araneda, “First Decade in a New Century,” in The New Wave [DVD Booklet] (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Film Group, 2012), p. 1. [↩]
- Barber, “Tales from the Winnipeg Film Group,” p. 6. [↩]