Hinterland Remixed
Media, Memory, and the Canadian 1970s
An examination of the legacy and cultural afterlife of the Canadian 1970s in film, television, and the visual arts.
Description
Like the flute melody from Hinterland Who's Who, the 1970s haunt Canadian cultural memory. Though the decade often feels lost to history, Hinterland Remixed focuses on boldly innovative works as well as popular film, television, and music to show that Canada never fully left the 1970s behind. Andrew Burke reveals how contemporary artists and filmmakers have revisited the era's cinematic and televisual residues to uncover what has been lost over the years. Investigating how the traces of an analogue past circulate in a digital age, Burke digs through the remnants of 1970s Canadiana and examines key audiovisual works from this overlooked decade, uncovering the period's aspirations, desires, fears, and anxieties. He then looks to contemporary projects that remix, remediate, and reanimate the period. Exploring an idiosyncratic selection of works – from Michael Snow's experimental landscape film La Région Centrale, to SCTV's satirical skewering of network television, to L'Atelier national du Manitoba's video lament for the Winnipeg Jets – this book asks key questions about nation, nostalgia, media, and memory. A timely intervention, Hinterland Remixed demands we recognize the ways in which the unrealized cultural ambitions and unresolved anxieties of a previous decade continue to resonate in our current lives.
Reviews
"Written with force and clarity, Hinterland Remixed now stands as a key text for students and scholars invested in questions of media, memory, and culture in Canada. It is accessible in a way that will serve non-experts yet robust in its theoretical underpinning so that it may inspire further research. It stands alongside recent work including Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (2014), edited by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, and Darrel Varga's Shooting from the East: Filmmaking on the Canadian Atlantic (2015) in its thoughtful examination of marginalized and overlooked works within Canadian film and media studies history. It is quite simply a masterful work of cultural history that synthesizes the canon of Western popular culture and media studies in service of a deeper probe of the role media objects play in our understanding of – and attachment to – a Canadian historical past and present." Canadian Journal of Film Studies
"Hinterland Remixed is an elegant paean to a decade some prefer to forget. As Burke writes in his coda, "The 1970s are still with us" ... it remains possible to harness the decade's energies to positive ends.” Border Crossings
"We need this book. Not only does Hinterland Remixed provide extremely compelling readings of 1970s objects and contemporary works that revisit this decade's artifacts; it accomplishes the interpretive goal of bringing the past inside the present." Peter Urquhart, Wilfrid Laurier University
"Hinterland Remixed is as engaging as it is innovative and intelligent. I cannot overstate the quality, timeliness, and elegance of this work." Jennifer VanderBurgh, Saint Mary's University