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Andrew Burke 259 The Nature of Things: Coupland, Cinema and the Canadian Sixties and Seventies Andrew Burke Since 2002, Douglas Coupland has produced a series of works (several art installations, two books and a film) that examine Canadian cultural identity through the presentation and manipulation of ordinary, everyday objects, most of them culled from the recent past. In gathering together objects, the full force of which, he claims, can only be felt by Canadians (things ranging from the Windsor Salt box to tins of Habitant Pea Soup to packages of Nutty Club cashews), Coupland aims to establish a connection between cultural memory and everyday materiality at a moment when the global future threatens to overwhelm or liquidate the national past. As such, his ongoing project speaks to the tenacity of things, the way in which the nation resides in the residual, and the fact that collective identity might persist only by means of debris: yesterday’s exhausted commodities and those products that exist in the present but somehow seem to belong properly to another era. Yet, in each of the forms his work has taken, Coupland encounters the difficulty of articulating what it is in or about these objects that provides the basis for an imagined national community. Coupland’s ongoing project allows an opportunity to explore how a collection of cultural objects may function as more than an indexical link to the past or mere catalyst for empty nostalgic recollection, but also exposes the limits of such a method, the ways in which the “felt” experience of nation triggered by the remainders of the past finds its supplement in a more traditional appeal to nature and family. Although it initially seems secondary and subordinate in terms of the overall project, the film Souvenir of Canada (2005), directed by Robin Neinstein in collaboration with Coupland, provides the key to understanding why Coupland is driven to track down the bric-a-brac of the recent past and attempt to remember, and even reproduce, in still lifes, installation pieces, and short written fragments, the tones and textures of everyday life in 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s Canada. As the film follows Coupland in his efforts to assemble Canada Coupland and the Canadian Sixties and Seventies 260 House installations in Vancouver and London, it reveals how national nostalgia emerges at the moment of globalization, and how everyday objects might serve as the vehicle for the affective reconstruction of a disappearing sense of national integrity and identity. This desire for a tangible and coherent sense of national identity is inextricably linked throughout Coupland’s project with the desire to identify the foundations of his own identity as well as to reflect upon and restore the connections that bind him to his family. However, it is specifically the film that provides the autobiographical frame through which the correlations between personal and public history are most visible. It becomes clear over the course of the film that Coupland’s attachment to the Canada of his childhood and adolescence derives its strength, at least in part, from a desire to resolve the vexed family relations that govern and colour it. His drive to catalogue and collect those things that give material form to the remembered, affective experience of a national past also serve as a vehicle for the reconstruction of his own past and family history.1 Oscillating between celebration and melancholia, Coupland’s efforts to save and savour Canadian things dramatize how a sense of self and nation may at once be derived from and projected onto seemingly everyday objects, the sheer ordinariness of which belies their semiotic and psychic significance. Coupland’s project has its analogues, even precedents, in other national situations elsewhere. Perhaps the nation most strongly identified with this kind of object nostalgia is Germany, where östalgie, nostalgia for the disappeared world of communist East Germany, frequently manifests itself in the sentimentalization of commodities from the East that largely vanished with reunification . The semiotic resonance of these objects and their ability to regenerate , if only momentarily and patchily, the structure of feeling of a past time and space, also formed part of the appeal of Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003). That film translated into gentle comedy the ways in which identity and ideology distribute themselves in everyday objects and maintain their continuity in the cycles and repetitions of everyday life. In Requiem for Communism , Charity Scribner examines the force that post-socialist nostalgia exerts throughout both Eastern and Western Europe. That it...

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