Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
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first American Academy AwardÒ given to a Canadian<br />
film.<br />
Beginning in 1942, a system <strong>of</strong> traveling projectionists<br />
was created to bring NFB films to small communities<br />
throughout rural Canada, showing films in libraries,<br />
church halls, and schools. When television was introduced<br />
to Canada in 1952, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting<br />
Corporation) regularly showed NFB productions as part<br />
<strong>of</strong> its programming. During the war and into the 1950s,<br />
the NFB expanded significantly. While other countries<br />
closed down their national film units, the NFB established<br />
itself as a central part <strong>of</strong> Canadian culture. All Canadian<br />
citizens had free access to NFB films, which were frequently<br />
shown in schools and as short subjects before<br />
American features in theaters.<br />
For decades the characteristic style <strong>of</strong> the NFB was<br />
shaped by Grierson, who emphasized documentary’s<br />
social utility, its ability to provide public information,<br />
and its ability to shape public opinion regarding the<br />
nation and national policy. Many NFB films featured<br />
the traditional expository structures that <strong>of</strong>fered solutions<br />
or conclusions, and a voice-<strong>of</strong>-God narrator (in the early<br />
NFB films, typically the commanding voice <strong>of</strong> Canadian<br />
actor Lorne Greene [1915–1987]), who later became<br />
famous in the United States for his role as the benevolent<br />
patriarch Ben Cartwright on one <strong>of</strong> the longest-running<br />
American TV westerns, Bonanza).<br />
According to Grierson, the NFB’s mandate was to<br />
make films ‘‘designed to help Canadians in all parts <strong>of</strong><br />
Canada to understand the ways <strong>of</strong> living and the problems<br />
in other parts.’’ Yet despite strong regionalism in<br />
Canada, for propaganda purposes the NFB’s wartime<br />
documentaries necessarily showed Canadians all working<br />
together to win the war. This myth <strong>of</strong> pan-Canadianism,<br />
the representation <strong>of</strong> a unified Canadian identity,<br />
emphasized common values over ethnic and political<br />
differences.<br />
For many years the NFB was organized as a system<br />
<strong>of</strong> units, each devoted to making films about particular<br />
subjects. Unit B was responsible for both animation and<br />
films on cultural topics. The broadness <strong>of</strong> the category<br />
allowed the filmmakers in Unit B, under the encouraging<br />
leadership <strong>of</strong> executive producer Tom Daly, to experiment<br />
with the newly introduced portable 16mm syncsound<br />
equipment, resulting in a series <strong>of</strong> pioneering<br />
direct cinema documentaries. The group included Wolf<br />
Koenig, Roman Kroitor, Colin Low (b. 1926), Don<br />
Owen (b. 1935), and Terence MacCartney-Filgate,<br />
who had been a cameraman on the Drew Associates’<br />
pioneering direct cinema documentary Primary (1960).<br />
Their films, such as Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway<br />
Switchman (1954), about a Polish immigrant who sweeps<br />
the snow from the streetcar rails on wintry Winnipeg<br />
Canada<br />
streets, anticipated the work that Unit B would produce<br />
as part <strong>of</strong> its Candid Eye (1958–1959) series. One <strong>of</strong> the<br />
most famous <strong>of</strong> Unit B’s documentaries, Lonely Boy<br />
(1962), examines the rapid success <strong>of</strong> the Ottawa-born<br />
singer Paul Anka as a pop music idol; rather than merely<br />
celebrating Anka’s success in the American music industry,<br />
the film <strong>of</strong>fers a trenchant commentary on the constructed<br />
artificiality <strong>of</strong> pop stardom itself.<br />
In the 1970s and 1980s, the most interesting work at<br />
the National <strong>Film</strong> Board was done in Studio D, which<br />
made films by and about women. Under the leadership<br />
<strong>of</strong> the producer Kathleen Shannon, Studio D produced<br />
such important and controversial films as Not a Love<br />
Story (1981), a powerful antipornography tract, and If<br />
You Love This Planet (1982), featuring a speech by the<br />
peace activist Dr. Helen Caldicott that was condemned<br />
as ‘‘propaganda’’ by then-US President Ronald Reagan.<br />
During the same period the NFB also produced important<br />
documentaries about First Nations peoples by the<br />
First Nations filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin (b. 1932),<br />
including Kanehsatake: 270 Years <strong>of</strong> Resistance (1993),<br />
about the dramatic 1990 armed stand<strong>of</strong>f between<br />
Mohawks and the Canadian army that held the nation’s<br />
attention for weeks, and a number <strong>of</strong> co-productions<br />
with the private sector, including the CBC miniseries<br />
The Boys <strong>of</strong> St. Vincent (1992), about a case <strong>of</strong> sexual<br />
abuse by the Catholic church that shocked Canada years<br />
before similar scandals grabbed the attention <strong>of</strong> the<br />
media in the United States.<br />
A FEATURE FILM INDUSTRY BEGINS<br />
The NFB has been drastically downsized since the 1980s,<br />
the result <strong>of</strong> a series <strong>of</strong> government funding cutbacks, to<br />
the point that it has little presence in Canadian culture.<br />
Nevertheless, the board’s documentary emphasis has left<br />
an indelible influence on feature filmmaking in Canada.<br />
In the absence <strong>of</strong> a commercial film industry, the NFB<br />
has allowed many filmmakers who would later become<br />
the country’s most important directors to hone their craft<br />
on government-sponsored films. The two films that are<br />
generally acknowledged as marking the beginning <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Canadian feature film industry, Nobody Waved Good-bye<br />
(1964) by Don Owen and La vie heureuse de Léopold Z<br />
(The Merry World <strong>of</strong> Leopold Z [1965]) by Gilles Carle<br />
(b. 1929), in English Canada and Quebec respectively,<br />
began as NFB documentaries. Carle’s film, about a<br />
Montreal snowplow driver working on Christmas Eve,<br />
began as a documentary about snow removal in<br />
Montreal. Similarly, Nobody Waved Good-bye was initially<br />
intended to be a half-hour docudrama about juvenile<br />
delinquency in Toronto, but the director Owen, who<br />
earlier in his career had worked as a cameraman on some<br />
<strong>of</strong> the NFB’s direct cinema films, improvised most <strong>of</strong> the<br />
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 209