Canada

THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD

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 sync-sound 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.