The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”


The recovery of the fragments of history, as WB, has told us can shed light on the dialectical promise and failure of the modern project. The Angel of History launches into the maelstrom of the past, relieves a object and in so removing it from its context gives it a new meaning. The recovered, like pearls or coral to be discovered, unveil an object in crystalized and fragmentary form. All this to highlight how one can "wrest thought fragments from the past... to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and corals in the depths and carry them to the surface" (HA, 1968: 51-52). Benjamin methodology gives us the form to see how decay is crystallization, and how fragments of history survive to be reformed.

The historians-turned-video-artists known as L’Atelier national du Manitoba attempted such a recovery with forgotten fragments of Winnipeg's collective loss. Upon hearing that video footage of the now-vanished Winnipeg Jets hockey team had been left in the CKY-TV dumpster and was destined for the scrap heap, these Angels of History went into action. The artistes–cum-dumpster divers rescued the debris from certain destruction and fashioned a 60-minute “video-collage-opera,” Death by Popcorn, thus recovering video footage to look back on the false promise.

The movie sold out every night at Winnipeg art-house theater, Cinémathèque, to glowing reviews. Yet, it’s own death was looming; its own success ephemeral. The makers of the film boasted of their dumpster-diving recovery and were soon pursued by the hounds of copyright infringement. They were asked to return the material, and to destroy their film. “It’s appropriate,” Rankin noted in 2005 “Our whole movie was about how corporate interests removed the Jets from Winnipeg. Now, corporate imperatives may remove our movie.” An appropriate recovery, only to be lost again, the moment of meeting its promise was once again fleeting.