Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
John Grierson’s famous definition of documentary as
‘‘the creative treatment of actuality’’ would seem also to
express the two traditions of filmmaking at the National
Film Board. For along with documentaries, the NFB also
produced many experimental and animated films that
hardly seemed to fit into the Board’s mandate. Some
created films that combined a documentary impulse with
the stylistic strategies of experimental film. Arthur Lipsett
(1936–1986), for example, in such films as Very Nice,
Very Nice (1961) and Free Fall (1964), used a collage
style of found footage—frequently outtakes from other
NFB films—to create bleak statements about contemporary alienation. The interest in using documentary footage unconventionally informs Canadian experimental
film from Circle (Jack Chambers, 1967–1968), which
consists of shots of four seconds taken each day for a
year from the same camera position, to Moosejaw (Rick
Hancox, 1992), which is a documentary of the filmmaker’s prairie hometown in Saskatchewan and a poetic
meditation on memory, home, and the process of documenting the past.
Outside the NFB, experimental filmmakers such as
Joyce Wieland (1931–1998) and Bruce Elder, who is also
an important film critic, have been influential in the
development of an experimental film culture in Canada.
But the country’s most well-known experimental filmmaker is Michael Snow (b. 1929). Some of Snow’s films
reveal the influence of documentary, as in La Re ´gion
centrale (1971), which is shot by a camera positioned
on a hilltop and attached to a machine with preprogrammed movements. Snow’s somewhat infamous
structural film Wavelength (1967) is a 45-minute zoom
shot across a room. Despite the challenging nature of his
non-narrative films, Snow is known popularly for his
installation of Canada geese in the Eaton Centre,
Toronto’s first urban mall (and home of Cineplex’s first
multiplex) and the sculptural facade of the Rodgers
Center (formerly Skydome), home stadium of the
Toronto Blue Jays baseball team.
The NFB also produced many important short animated films by artists such as Richard Conde, George
Dunning (1920–1979) (who went on to head the international team of animators that produced the Beatles’
animated feature Yellow Submarine [1968]), Co
Hoedeman (b. 1940), Derek Lamb (1936–2005), and
Gerald Potterton. At the NFB, a number of artists experimented with unusual and innovative animation techniques. In The Street (1976), an adaptation of the Canadian
author Mordecai Richler’s story, Caroline Leaf (b. 1946)
animated drawings composed of sand on a glass slide, lit
from below; the German-born Lotte Reiniger (1899–
1981) used silhouette cutouts in Aucassin et Nicolette
(1975); and the Russian expatriate Alexandre Alexeieff
(1901–1982) used his unique pinscreen method in En
Passant (1943), a wartime sing-along film. Norman
McLaren (1914–1987), both an animator and an experimental filmmaker, was the NFB’s most acclaimed artist.
In many of his abstract films, McLaren painted directly
onto the filmstrip, as in Begone Dull Care (1949), which
is set to the jazz music of Canadian pianist Oscar
Peterson. But McLaren’s work could also draw inspiration from the real world: the pixillated Neighbours (1952)
is a powerful antiwar fable that won an Oscar for Best
Short Documentary in 1953.