Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Despite the lack of feature film production in Canada
many short films have been made by various government
agencies for educational, information, and propaganda
purposes. The Scotsman John Grierson (1898–1972),
documentary film producer and advocate, who developed
an important government documentary film unit in
Great Britain, was invited by the Canadian government
in 1938 to help centralize and develop a national film
unit. Based on his recommendations, the National Film
Board of Canada (NFB) was officially established in May
1939, just three months before Canada officially entered
World War II, with Grierson as its first commissioner.
With strong government support, Grierson joined experienced filmmakers from Britain with Canadian talent,
and the NFB quickly moved to fulfill its mandate to
‘‘interpret Canada to Canadians and the rest of the
world.’’ Churchill’s Island (1942), a documentary about
the Battle of Britain, and one of the films in the early
NFB series Canada Carries On (1940–1959), won the
first Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1942, the first American Academy Award given to a Canadian
film.
Beginning in 1942, a system of traveling projectionists was created to bring NFB films to small communities
throughout rural Canada, showing films in libraries,
church halls, and schools. When television was introduced
to Canada in 1952, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation) regularly showed NFB productions as part
of its programming. During the war and into the 1950s,
the NFB expanded significantly. While other countries
closed down their national film units, the NFB established
itself as a central part of Canadian culture. All Canadian
citizens had free access to NFB films, which were frequently shown in schools and as short subjects before
American features in theaters.
For decades the characteristic style of the NFB was
shaped by Grierson, who emphasized documentary’s
social utility, its ability to provide public information,
and its ability to shape public opinion regarding the
nation and national policy. Many NFB films featured
the traditional expository structures that offered solutions
or conclusions, and a voice-of-God narrator (in the early
NFB films, typically the commanding voice of Canadian
actor Lorne Greene [1915–1987]), who later became
famous in the United States for his role as the benevolent
patriarch Ben Cartwright on one of the longest-running
American TV westerns, Bonanza).
According to Grierson, the NFB’s mandate was to
make films ‘‘designed to help Canadians in all parts of
Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems in other parts.’’ Yet despite strong regionalism in
Canada, for propaganda purposes the NFB’s wartime
documentaries necessarily showed Canadians all working
together to win the war. This myth of pan-Canadianism,
the representation of a unified Canadian identity,
emphasized common values over ethnic and political
differences.
For many years the NFB was organized as a system
of units, each devoted to making films about particular
subjects. Unit B was responsible for both animation and
films on cultural topics. The broadness of the category
allowed the filmmakers in Unit B, under the encouraging
leadership of executive producer Tom Daly, to experiment with the newly introduced portable 16mm syncsound equipment, resulting in a series of pioneering
direct cinema documentaries. The group included Wolf
Koenig, Roman Kroitor, Colin Low (b. 1926), Don
Owen (b. 1935), and Terence MacCartney-Filgate,
who had been a cameraman on the Drew Associates’
pioneering direct cinema documentary Primary (1960).
Their films, such as Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway
Switchman (1954), about a Polish immigrant who sweeps
the snow from the streetcar rails on wintry Winnipeg
streets, anticipated the work that Unit B would produce
as part of its Candid Eye (1958–1959) series. One of the
most famous of Unit B’s documentaries, Lonely Boy
(1962), examines the rapid success of the Ottawa-born
singer Paul Anka as a pop music idol; rather than merely
celebrating Anka’s success in the American music industry, the film offers a trenchant commentary on the constructed artificiality of pop stardom itself.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the most interesting work at
the National Film Board was done in Studio D, which
made films by and about women. Under the leadership
of the producer Kathleen Shannon, Studio D produced
such important and controversial films as Not a Love
Story (1981), a powerful antipornography tract, and If
You Love This Planet (1982), featuring a speech by the
peace activist Dr. Helen Caldicott that was condemned
as ‘‘propaganda’’ by then-US President Ronald Reagan.
During the same period the NFB also produced important documentaries about First Nations peoples by the
First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin (b. 1932),
including Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993),
about the dramatic 1990 armed standoff between
Mohawks and the Canadian army that held the nation’s
attention for weeks, and a number of co-productions
with the private sector, including the CBC miniseries
The Boys of St. Vincent (1992), about a case of sexual
abuse by the Catholic church that shocked Canada years
before similar scandals grabbed the attention of the
media in the United States.