Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Transmedial spaces in film, television, streaming video and, as this paper asserts, architecture are charged with the politics and cultural value of space. These are often mediated through the image of the city. This paper examines the mediated image of a North-American city: Winnipeg, Canada. It examines key examples of moving image media shot here, including both industry and independent film. These often repurpose this city as others – Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit. The paper poses a central question: Why might it be that industry films so frequently harvest Winnipeg’s urban spaces to tell stories of crime, murder, and apocalypse? The paper makes the case that what visiting filmmakers are in fact “buying” is a heritage of historical pain: the legacy of colonialism embodied in urban space, indeed hidden in plain sight. This legacy has only begun to be visible to most Canadians, but it has been there for all to see as harvested and displayed on the screen, a sign or symptom of a deep malaise. A more complex relationship between city and image is revealed by what is done with the same urban spaces by independent film artists – and architects. Their crop, which is explored last in the paper, exposes more completely the potential for new relationships between city and image, buyer and seller, authenticity and fiction, colonial legacy and future city.