2 Visions of the North

Idea(s) of the North

The word North in the Canadian lexicon is a complicated one. It denotes different things to different people. Its definition also seems to change constantly. Although geographers and government surveyors have staked their professional reputations on where this region begins and ends, the North is best understood as a landscape of “shifting boundaries”—that is, fluid and evolving.3 In physical terms, the word North has been used to describe the backcountry directly above Georgian Bay as well as the territory that stretches from sixty degrees latitude all the way to the Arctic Circle. But the idea of the North is also located deep inside the national imagination. As humorist Stephen Leacock mused in 1936, the “vast unknown country of the North, reaching . . . to the polar seas, supplies a peculiar mental background” for Canadians.4 The North is therefore more than a point on a map; it is also a place of dreams, myths, and desires.

Leacock’s description of a landscape of the mind anticipates the theories of geographers and historians who argue that place is historically and socially contingent.5 Landscapes are imaginative environments as much as they are physical objects. (The term landscape was first employed in the seventeenth century by painters to describe what they were painting, not actual environments but their facsimiles.) Thus, Louis-Edmond Hamelin asserts that “mental structures . . . constitute the most powerful determinants of the North.” People’s expectations of what the region should look like “surpass that of the most easily identifiable physical realities such as freezing.”6 The Inuit and the Dene, for example, regard the broad sweeps of the North as their homeland, whereas Canadian artists and storytellers from the South figure the North as a mythological place of death, despair, or enlightenment. Some Canadians even see this geography as the source of the nation’s vitality. Despite the variety of interpretations and renderings of the North, a number of scholars have noted that the dominant view of the North is based on a southern perspective. As an institution created by the federal government, the NFB contributed to the social production of northern landscapes from a southern perspective.

The various “mental structures” that Canadians from the South have used to conceptualize the North are complex indeed. Pierre Berton, the popular Canadian historian, once observed that this region is as “elusive as the wolf howling just beyond the rim of the hills.”7 It shifts and plays tricks on the mind. Nonetheless, there are a few enduring ideas about this piece of geography relevant to the NFB’s presentation of it. One of the most popular southern beliefs about the landscape featured in NFB documentaries is that the North is a forbidding and primeval wilderness, “majestic in its grandeur,” to quote Shelagh Grant.8

The first people to imagine the North as terra incognita were seventeenth-century European explorers. When these bold travellers first anchored in the cold waters off present-day Ellesmere Island, they imported, among other things, a puritanical fear of the unknown. For the sailors, ice shelves, broken and splintered by wind and wave, were proof positive that the northern wilderness was indeed Hell on Earth. Who knew what demons lurked in the melancholy shadows of a midnight sun? Ideas about a wild and malevolent North endured through the nineteenth century. The mysterious fate of John Franklin’s expedition (1845–48) and rumours of cannibalism, insanity, and icebergs that reduced mighty bulkheads to mere splinters excited the Victorian imagination about the Arctic.9

Whereas newspapermen and penny dreadful writers regaled their audiences with frightening tales of shipwrecks and hypothermia, a group of nineteenth-century artists proffered a slightly different outlook. Painters Frederick William Beechey, Caspar David Friedrich, and Edwin Landseer saw the Arctic as a kind of wilderness sublime, beautiful, rapturous, and spiritually transcendent. The emptiness of the North and its unfathomably large glaciers were heady reminders of the eternality of raw nature and the transitoriness of humans.

Images of an Arctic sublime became a central feature of Canadian culture.10 In 1930, Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris boarded the SS Beothic and headed north on a government-sponsored expedition. During his two-month tour of the Arctic, he encountered the same haunting landscape that arrested the imaginations of Victorian painters. Harris was moved by this resplendent world of ice and snow. The anemic shorelines and isolated peaks stirred in him a kind of spiritual and patriotic ecstasy. “No man can roam . . . the Canadian North without it affecting him,” Harris mused. The “coolness” and “clarity” of the landscape, the “feel of the soil,” and the “rhythms of its hills” melt a man’s “personal barriers,” intensify “his awareness,” and project “his vision through appearances to an underlying hidden reality.”11

Harris and his colleagues in the Group of Seven were captivated by the Arctic as well as the austere landscape of the near North, which extended across northern Ontario and Québec. With broad strokes and rich colours, the painters created a kind of mythological geography that reduced northern spaces to abstract depictions of ice, snow, pines, and splintered topography. Over time, their paintings of the North helped establish “a new aesthetic” in Canadian art that “grew and flowered from the land.”12 Middle-class consumers and tastemakers loved these representations because in their view, they expressed the “spirituality and essential Canadian-ness of untouched northern landscapes.”13 The North was Canada, and Canada was the North.

The NFB and the Northern Wilderness

The construction of the North as a wilderness bereft of civilization was one of the most popular tropes in NFB cinema. Documentarians working in the 1940s and 1950s frequently depicted the North as a rugged and vacant landscape of Precambrian rock and crystal-clear water. Like the Group of Seven, NFB filmmakers consciously and unconsciously filled this wild void with nationalist sentiment about its intrinsic Canadianness.

The first film to frame the North as an antimodern wilderness was Radford Crawley’s Canadian Landscape (1941). The documentary follows Group of Seven painter A. Y. Jackson as he traverses the wilds of northern Québec looking for a subject to paint. The film describes the Canadian Shield country that Jackson travels into as a “vast and unsentimental land” marked by “harsh ribs of rock,” “jagged spruce,” and “spongy muskeg.”14 Crawley’s camera foregrounds the ruggedness of the environment by panning over knotted bushes and twisted brambles clinging to the sides of ancient moss-covered rock faces. This wild landscape is the same unforgiving country that frontiersmen had to contend with in the early years of settlement, the film reports. Whereas other areas of Canada have been tamed by the plow and axe, the northern wilderness remains an uncultivated and therefore pure space.

As a documentary, the film makes an implicit claim about the truthfulness of what is shown. But we must remember that “cinema is never pure vision; it is a coproduction between material practices and human imagination.”15 What appears onscreen (the North as a wild and empty landscape) has been carefully constructed. In the film, Crawley consciously avoids revealing aspects of human culture, preferring to linger on the uninhabited forests of the region. This representational strategy is common throughout Canadian Landscape. In the same way that Jackson “clears away the bric-a-brac” to get at “nature’s basic design,” Crawley employs filmmaking techniques to remove the ecological and cultural “bric-a-brac” to create a mythological portrait of the North. The edge of the camera lens and the scissors of the film editor deliberately cut out images of civilization. This filmic prestidigitation is evident in a sequence near the beginning of the documentary. Crawley sets his camera on the ledge of a cliff. Instead of framing the shot to include Jackson and his easel, Crawley films over the shoulder of the artist. As a result, the subject of the film is not present in the frame—just the wilderness. By excluding Jackson from the screen, Crawley provides spectators with an unobstructed view of the immense and seemingly vacant North. The perspective encourages the viewer to contemplate what geographer Bruce Braun refers to as the “yawning gap between culture and nature, city and country, modernity and its pre-modern antecedents.”16 If Jackson were foregrounded, then the viewer might be distracted from his version of the North and be reminded that humans travel through this geography and sometimes even stop to paint it.

Crawley’s representation of the North as a wild frontier was intended to be an imitation of the works of Jackson. According to his biographer, Barbara Wade Rose, Crawley used protracted shots of rocks, trees, and rivers to emulate the sombre aesthetic of the Group of Seven. His style was “unhurried and at home,” notes Rose, “much in the way a painting by the Group of Seven might dwell on the Canadian Shield.”17 In Canadian Landscape, Crawley wanted the cinematography to emulate the style of Jackson’s paintings so that audiences could appreciate the vitality of his work on a whole new level. As a result, Crawley made the documentary in 16 mm Kodachrome (expensive at the time) and used mostly wide-angle lenses to parrot the landscape perspective of Jackson’s images.

Rendering the landscape as an uninhabited space meant, however, that certain ecological and social realities were ignored. Romantic depictions of “wilderness” are often characterized by their “amnesia and erasure,” explains W. J. T. Mitchell. In the case of Canadian Landscape, the film’s iconography, though visually arresting, ignores the past and trades history for natural beauty.18 Crawley’s depiction of an unoccupied wilderness censors from the historical record acts of violence, colonization, and environmental destruction. The film’s setting of northern Québec and Ontario is home to local Indigenous populations, including the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples forcibly removed from their homelands in the eighteenth century by French and English settlers and then again in the nineteenth century by the lumber industry. Crawley’s documentary also ignores the anthropocentric changes that transpired (and continue to transpire) there. Pulp industries, mining companies, dam operators, and eventually cottagers have altered the landscape in profound and permanent ways.

Crawley’s depiction of the North was not historical, then, but a product of the NFB’s nation-building agenda, which sought to use iconic Canadian landscapes as symbols of nationhood. In Canadian Landscape, the narrator states that the North is representative of “the spirit of Canada” and “the essence of the nation.” Later he describes the “silent barren that lies beyond the fringe of settled Canada” as the “birthplace” of Canada.19 To operate on this figurative level, it was imperative that the image of the North remain abstract, almost mythological, in its adaptation. In presenting the North as a near-allegorical wilderness symbolic of national identity, the filmmaker tapped into a rich visual and rhetorical tradition in Canadian culture. Since Confederation, political ideologues have used images of the wilderness North to promote a certain brand of national identity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, boosters, statesmen, and writers likewise suggested that the North was expressive of Canadian personality. The people of Canada are a resilient lot because presumably they had to overcome the obstacles of the hostile North in order to survive. In an address to the Montréal Literary Club in March 1869, lawyer and nationalist R. G. Haliburton argued that Canada was defined by its harsh climate and challenging topography. One only needed to “glance at a map of the continent” to understand that this was “a northern country inhabited by a northern race,” he pronounced.20 The nineteenth-century Canadian imperialist and educator George R. Parkin similarly argues in his widely distributed book Imperial Federalism: The Problem of National Unity that Canada’s national identity was specially formed in a northern atmosphere. The chilled environment invigorated Anglo-Saxon institutions, encouraging progress and a mighty and resilient form of civilization.21

Canadian Landscape expresses a theme central to NFB cinema: geography matters. Several years later, film commissioner Arthur Irwin declared in an article written for Maclean’s magazine that Canadians were “molded by a stern and difficult land.”22 In the introduction to the NFB’s 1967 centennial book, Canada: A Year of the Land, journalist Bruce Hutchinson similarly opined that, if one is to “learn the meaning of the nation, all its hopes and fears,” that person must “look to the land and its secret cargo.”23 His words neatly captured the sentiments of many photographers and filmmakers working at the NFB in the middle part of the century. The myriad NFB films and photographs proclaimed that northern wilderness was the quintessential feature of the nation and contained within its imagery the secret to understanding what it meant to be Canadian.

The assertion that both the character and the political economy of the country have been shaped by nature is not new to Canadian historiography. In the 1930s, Harold Innis and Donald Creighton famously posited that “staple commodities” and terrestrial superhighways such as the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes supported the growth of a burgeoning empire.24 Canada was indeed abundant with natural resources, but its unruly topography also constrained settlement patterns and commercial expansion. One could not simply plow a field in the middle of the Canadian Shield. Even the most daring of entrepreneurs had to take what the land gave them. Whether they liked it or not, the North dictated the development of the nation. The thesis that northern nature moulded Canada’s unique cultural, political, and economic identity persisted well into the 1970s.

The geographic determinism of Innis and Creighton is further evident in the works of literary critic Northrop Frye. In his evocatively titled The Bush Garden, Frye declared that Canadian culture was characterized by a “garrison mentality.” The “huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting” in which Canadians find themselves inspires an existential dread, a “deep terror.”25 Although the North in Canadian Landscape does not conjure up “terror,” its unfathomable size and density certainly leave an indelible mark on the imagination. Crawley claims in the film that the North dominates our imagination and has a specific bearing both on how Canada has developed and on how its people have evolved.

As a young organization tasked with defining the nation for Canadian viewers, the NFB, not surprisingly, represented the North in this way. Canadian Landscape supported its nation-building mandate to unite the country by visualizing iconic landmarks such as the North. Claire Campbell writes that a sense of belonging “requires visual and intellectual engagement with a place that we can see or imagine, and a story that we associate with it.”26 For Canadians, that place was the wild country found (or, as Campbell argues, constructed) in national parks, abstracted in Group of Seven paintings, and depicted in NFB documentaries. The NFB declared that Canada was a wilderness nation characterized by a sublime northern geography.

John Grierson was conscious of the importance that landscapes play in fostering what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities.”27 The commissioner specifically hired the film’s director, Radford Crawley, because of his experience promoting Canada to international audiences and recent immigrants. In the 1930s, Crawley had produced a series of short promotional films for Canadian Pacific Railway that marketed the natural splendour of the country to tourists and immigrants heading west. In Grierson’s mind, there was no one better suited than Crawley to create a positive and marketable vision of nationhood.28 The filmmaker’s skill in commodifying landscapes through cinematography meshed perfectly with the NFB’s mission to define and then project a certain brand of Canadianness.

Crawley’s construction of the North as an idealized wilderness illustrates how NFB filmmakers produced (and projected) landscapes of national significance. To imagine the North as a marker of Canadian identity is an imposition of the mind. A jack pine does not literally contain within its bark an invisible force that binds Canadians to their homeland. Neither is there anything intrinsically “Canuck” about snow or ice, as Crawley’s film suggests. It is only through a complex system of signification and reproduction that limestone rocks or icebergs floating aimlessly in the Arctic Ocean symbolize the nation. Culture and all its racialized assumptions about nationhood are at the forefront of these depictions, guiding the artist’s brush strokes, the writer’s keystrokes, and in the case of Crawley, the filmmaker’s eye.

Ethnographic Films and the Exotic North

Not all NFB documentaries visualized the North as an empty wilderness. In fact, between 1944 and 1970, the NFB produced over thirty ethnographic films about the people who lived in the North, including films about Inuit art, traditional hunting and fishing practices, and community development. “There was a kind of cult of photographing the Eskimos,” remarked Lorraine Monk, an executive producer with the NFB’s Still Photography Division.29 Filmmakers, photographers, and other visual artists working for the NFB were inspired by Inuit people’s creativity and their ability to live off the land without the help of modern technology. For these NFB employees, northern people represented a world wholly alien and therefore fascinating. Although these works challenged the notion that the North was physically “empty,” their depiction of Inuit culture as “simple” and “primitive” nevertheless reinforced a colonial vision of the region as antimodern, temporally and spatially distinct from the rest of Canada. Ethnographic documentaries fixated on the exotic features of the North and revelled in its otherness. Like Canadian Landscape, documentaries about Indigenous people in the North satisfied the desires of middle-class audiences who yearned for glimpses of the atavistic and wild.30

Laura Boulton, an amateur musicologist and documentary filmmaker from Ohio, was one of the first to represent the North as a primitive wilderness inhabited by strange peoples in NFB cinema. In 1943, Grierson contacted Boulton to see if she wanted to contribute to the NFB’s Peoples of Canada series. Boulton accepted the invitation, boarded the RMS Nascopie in Montréal, and sailed to Baffin Island with cinematographer Ross McLean. After she landed on Baffin, Boulton hired an “Eskimo schooner” and travelled throughout the neighbouring islands, recording walrus hunts and other Inuit activities for six weeks.31 The footage that she captured was eventually used to create two films, Arctic Hunters (1944) and Eskimo Arts and Crafts (1943).

Although Boulton’s assignment was to “capture an accurate record” of the life of the Inuit, her films reduced their culture to “an endless struggle for existence.”32 In both Arctic Hunters and Eskimo Arts and Crafts, Boulton presents the Inuit as a primeval group living among wild animals and extreme weather. Her preoccupation with their ostensibly bizarre rites and customs and their crude technology exemplifies what E. Ann Kaplan describes as an “imperial gaze,” a way of seeing geographic otherness by emphasizing Indigenous people’s closeness to nature.33 In Boulton’s films, the Inuit are practically indistinguishable from their environment. “Like the animals, the Eskimo survives by following the seasons,” the narrator in Eskimo Arts and Crafts explains.34 The North is an alien wilderness where even its inhabitants live like beasts, Boulton’s documentaries appear to say.

The presentation of the North as an exotic landscape inhabited by “primitive Eskimos” was later repeated in the documentary films of Doug Wilkinson. His films were more popular than Boulton’s and helped establish a template for northern iconography in the mid-twentieth century. His career at the NFB began in the spring of 1945 after Wilkinson was discharged from the Canadian Army. His first NFB project was a short documentary about “Operation Muskox,” an ostentatious display of sovereignty in the North in which a cavalcade of Bombardier snowmobiles and Canadian soldiers marched across the Eastern Arctic. The film shoot was difficult, but it also proved to be transformative for the filmmaker, who worked on set as a camera operator alongside cinematographer and veteran of northern filmmaking Roger Racine. Wilkinson fondly recalled those bone-chilling days in the “very bleak, very barren, and very stormy North.”35 For him, they sparked an artistic curiosity that burned for the rest of his career. It was the extremity of the North and its inhospitable climes that inspired the filmmaker to go back. In an interview with the Whig Standard many years later, he elaborated that “I hated the land, but I wanted to find out how the Eskimo came to live there.”36

After Wilkinson finished working on Exercise Muskox (1946), he convinced the NFB to send him back to the North so that he could make his own film about the Inuit. With the blessing and financial backing of the NFB, he took a train to Churchill, Manitoba, in the winter of 1948 and made the now famous documentary How to Build an Igloo (1949), a short film that celebrates the architectural ingenuity of the Inuit. The following year, Wilkinson returned to the Arctic, this time with his wife, Vivian Wilkinson, who worked as a location manager, and Jean Roy, an eighteen-year-old cinematographer. For the next fifteen months, Wilkinson and his small crew lived with the Tununermiut at Pond Inlet. They filmed Angotee: Story of an Eskimo Boy (1953), a fictional account of a young Inuk growing up in the High Arctic, and Land of the Long Day (1952), a documentary about Inuk hunter Joseph Idlout. The latter film became one of the most popular works in the history of the NFB. Critics and audiences from around the globe praised Land of the Long Day for its “remarkable beauty” and “absorbing exposition of Eskimo life.” The film even won the prestigious Golden Reel Award in 1953 as the most outstanding documentary released that year.37

Shot on location in the northern part of Baffin Island, Land of the Long Day presents the Arctic landscape as an ominous and otherworldly space, cold and dark. Roy keeps the frame wide and uncluttered to accentuate the enormity of this alien environment. His arrangement of polar landscapes recalls the paintings of Edwin Landseer and Lawren Harris. The camera pans slowly over the peaks and valleys, creating extended moments of gothic excess in which viewers are confronted with their own frailty and limitation. The visual power of this wild landscape is further enhanced through the use of light and dark. Abstract shadows slash through the blank environment, making the North in Land of the Long Day appear supernatural and expressionistic. Intercut throughout the film are telephoto shots of wildlife and close-ups of Inuit peering from their anoraks. These powerful images declare to the viewer that this is a place that time forgot.

Wilkinson establishes the North as a prehistoric landscape in the opening scene of the film, a wide shot of three igloos clustered against a purple horizon. As the camera tilts down to the camp, John Drainie, a radio actor impersonating the Inuk hunter Joseph Idlout in what one Toronto film critic panned as a “mawkish and infantile voiceover,” describes life in the Arctic.38 “All winter long it is night in my land,” he says. “In winter only the moon shines over my land. Between November and February, the sun has gone away. We live out our winter lives hunting and trapping by the light of our winter friend, the moon.”39 The chorus of howling wind and baying huskies punctuates the dramatic narration with mystical affect, confirming that this is a strange world indeed.

Although the cinematography is central to Wilkinson’s presentation of the North, the lives of the Inuit people are the most important feature in this tableau of racial and geographic otherness. In Land of the Long Day, Wilkinson focuses on details of Inuit life vastly different from those of people who dwell in the urban South. According to the film, Idlout and his family abide on the thin edge between survival and annihilation, relying on innovative ways to capture, clean, and preserve their food. The climate dominates their livelihood in ways that most viewers cannot fathom. The Inuit must build their homes out of the raw elements. Despite the crude materials, they develop an intricate system of cutting out blocks of ice that fit together to keep the heat inside.

The last scene of Land of the Long Day further illustrates how Wilkinson uses the Inuit’s closeness to nature to amplify the exoticness of the North. The sequence begins when Idlout’s father, the family patriarch, spots a pod of migrating narwhals in the bay. They have returned to the shallows to breed and are therefore vulnerable. Idlout and his friend Kadloo set out for the mammals in their sealskin kayaks. Across the dark sea, the men paddle their crafts—like two needles stitching across woolen fabric. The cetaceans notice the hunters and try to escape, but Idlout and Kadloo are veterans. They corner the frantic whales in the shoals. Idlout grabs his harpoon and hurls it at one of the narwhals, aiming just behind the blowhole. His aim is true. A cauldron of blood and sea foam gurgles around the kayak. Before the leviathan sinks, the men drag it ashore. The scene is filled with blood and gore. But Wilkinson plays it straight, suggesting to the viewer that this violent struggle is a natural part of Inuit life in the extreme North. The ferocious acts of the two hunters mean that their families can eat enough muktuk (narwhal blubber) to last the long and dark winter months.

The narwhal hunt is a perfect example of how Wilkinson fabricated moments in Land of the Long Day to create a portrait of antimodernism. The thrashing flippers of the whale, the steely concentration of Idlout, and the unsteadiness of Wilkinson’s camera all contribute to the film’s verisimilitude. Nevertheless, a deeper look into the production of the film reveals that this record of primitiveness was not as genuine as Wilkinson leads viewers to believe. Certain scenes were created for emotional affects. The filmmaker explained in his production notes that the bloody spectacle of the whale hunt was specifically designed to provoke shock in the audience. In a letter to his cowriter, Leslie McFarlane (author of the famous Hardy Boys series), Wilkinson professed that he needed the climactic moment of the documentary to feel “primitive and elemental.”40 To achieve this feeling, he had McFarlane rewrite the scene so that Idlout hunted with his harpoon instead of his rifle. This amendment would make the film “appear more authentic,” he explained to his cowriter.41 As minor as this change might seem, it had larger implications for the Inuit in particular and the North in general. By using racial stereotypes of the Inuit as primitives, Wilkinson actively contributed to a larger twentieth-century cultural discourse that imagined the North as a wild frontier inhabited by the other.42

As the narwhal hunt reveals, Wilkinson used formal, stylistic, and narrative elements specific to ethnographic cinema to recreate an ahistorical (but popular) image of the North. It is easy to criticize him now for his deeply flawed representation of the North and the people who lived there. Yet Land of the Long Day was also one of the first NFB documentaries to exhibit a liberal sensitivity toward Indigenous peoples. In private, the filmmaker considered Idlout a “dear friend,” and he repeatedly commended the Inuk for his ability to thrive in the inhospitable environment, which Wilkinson admitted that he was unable to do himself.43 His admiration for Idlout and the Inuit in general is plain in both the film version and the book version of Land of the Long Day. In his account of his time on Baffin Island, Wilkinson characterizes the Inuit as a discerning, patient, and self-reliant people—masters of their own destinies. Likewise, in the documentary, he clearly venerates Idlout and his ability to navigate the tempestuous Arctic Ocean in a handmade kayak to hunt a 940 kg animal with nothing but a harpoon. During production of the film, Wilkinson also commented on how witty the Inuk hunter was. Idlout liked to make fun of Wilkinson and laughed at the absurdity of having a blundering white man follow him around on packs of ice. But Idlout was also a gracious host and took time to teach the filmmaker how to live off the land, Wilkinson was quick to point out in interviews. Over time, the two developed a deep bond. Wilkinson became well versed in Inuit culture, and Idlout developed a keen passion for photography.

Still, it must be acknowledged that Wilkinson’s representation of Idlout in Land of the Long Day was refracted through a colonial prism, which presented people who lived close to nature as primitive and therefore inferior. Ironically, it was also this proximity to the natural environment that Western culture tended to celebrate and mythologize. According to scholar Shari Huhndorf, twentieth-century North American culture was fascinated with “Eskimos” because they represented the “most intense Darwinian struggle.”44 With the rise of social Darwinism as a way to explain racial superiority and the evolution of culture, the Inuit represented two very different things to white people from the South. On the one hand, their crude habits and tools exhibited their lowly place on the social ladder (and, as we will see, the need for modernization). On the other, their ability to survive in extreme environments despite these limitations reflected the human ideal of being completely self-sufficient. The Inuit were products of a world where only the strongest and cleverest survived. In Land of the Long Day, Wilkinson focuses on Idlout’s strength and his exceptional hunting acumen, honed—according to the narrator—over years of living close to and respecting the rhythms of nature.

The film’s idealized representation of the Inuit thus promotes what Shepard Krech III describes as the myth of “the ecological Indian,”45 which asserts that Indigenous peoples embodied a romanticized lifestyle founded on a harmonious relationship with nature. As philosopher and ecocritic Neil Evernden explains, “Anyone seeking . . . the eternal standards by which humans ought to live . . . would have to inquire which standards are given by nature. Hence, the widespread interest in primitives, who are often presumed to be living by those primitive standards.”46 In the NFB documentary, Idlout and his family are presented as caretakers of the land, never taking more from it than their needs require. They are innocent, uncorrupted by greed or lust. For Wilkinson, the Inuit were not just artifacts of a dim and ancient world but also icons of ecological bliss and moral purity.

Wilkinson’s motivations for documenting the North and its people were complex. The filmmaker was clearly fascinated by the intense northern environment and the alluring charisma of his subject. But he also firmly believed that documentary filmmaking was a social tool that helped bridge the gap between the urban South and the remote North, a world that he believed was on the verge of disappearing. In an article written for the Canadian magazine The Beaver, Wilkinson lamented that “the Eskimo was on his way out” and that southerners were “slated to be the interested spectators of his demise.”47 His films, he argued, preserved an image of a noble people about whom most Canadians knew very little. If documentarians did not undertake the challenging task of heading north to document its people, then the public would not have any “knowledge of the Eskimo . . . and his daily life on the land.”48

For Wilkinson, such ignorance was a tragedy. Southerners had much to learn from individuals such as Idlout. The filmmaker viewed Canada as a multicultural mosaic; to understand the nation in the middle of the twentieth century, one had to acknowledge the country’s diversity and Indigenous past. Wilkinson, and the NFB more generally, used documentaries as a way to record Indigenous culture before it disappeared or was assimilated into mainstream Canada’s historical record. And yet this humanist impulse to document cultural difference justified his use of certain filmmaking liberties, such as eliminating the use of the rifle during the narwhal hunt. The irony was that this commitment to cultural preservation was a colonial project of southerners. Such depictions were mostly nostalgic and therefore ahistorical.

Wilkinson’s melancholic representation of the Inuit can be seen as a cinematic form of salvage ethnography, a paradigm for observing and recording Indigenous cultures. As a documentary filmmaker, Wilkinson tried to apprehend the reality and history of the Inuit on celluloid as a way to archive their culture. In the early twentieth century, anthropologist Franz Boas similarly implored others in his field to photograph Indigenous peoples and their communities before they evaporated from human history. Boas argued that these visual accounts created an archive of distant cultures, preserving their rites and passages for the rest of time. Through the act of photography, contemporary viewers could understand, even inhabit, the worlds of these primeval peoples in ways that writing could never fully capture.

As numerous scholars have pointed out, salvage ethnography is deeply flawed and steeped in colonial notions of the other. Specifically, it renders Indigenous peoples as icons of the past and confines them to fixed spatial and temporal environments. Film scholar Adrian Ivakhiv likens salvage ethnography to the wilderness preservation movement that emerged in the 1960s, which endeavoured to preserve a romantic image of prelapsarian nature. Wilderness and the Indigenous person were wholly blameless entities, living in an Edenic world of ecological and social harmony—until the modern world corrupted it. Like the idea of wilderness, salvage ethnography placed Indigenous peoples within a stable landscape, a “static diorama” that can be “scrutinized through the colonial eye of science, power, and romantic nostalgia.”49 “The point in both cases is to re-create something presumed to be authentic, whole, and essentially static in nature, the product of evolutionary processes perhaps, but no longer evolving,” writes Ivakhiv.50

Wilkinson’s ethnographic work with the NFB reaffirmed the popular view that the North was an antimodern wilderness landscape, motionless in time. Wilkinson never explored the contemporary effects of modernism on Inuit culture or acknowledged their agency in adopting or resisting government initiatives, despite working as a field officer for the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Instead, he used a pastiche of exotic locales, dramatic narration, and images of supposedly primitive peoples to suggest that the real Arctic was temporally and spatially distinct from modern Canada.

Consequently, Wilkinson’s films concealed the historical reality of the landscape, which in fact was undergoing radical changes. Most Eastern Arctic communities in the twentieth century were not isolated from the rest of Canadian society, as films such as Land of the Long Day suggested; they were adapting to external forces that brought with them new economic and social conditions. In the early part of the century, political visionaries exclaimed that the North was “Canada’s last frontier.” By the end of the 1930s, the federal government had asserted its sovereignty in the Arctic in the form of military exercises and scientific expeditions. At first, federal authority in the North was characterized by a policy of benign neglect. Although the state was legally responsible for the welfare of the Inuit as per Re Eskimo (1939), the details of northern administration were vague and often contradictory.51

This era of inattention, however, was eventually replaced by a more active and interventionist period of administration after the Second World War. In the 1950s, when Land of the Long Day was filmed, the social programs of the welfare state ballooned. One of the state’s objectives for northern peoples was to integrate them into mainstream society. Government officials argued that the Inuit were suffering from a host of issues, including starvation, disease, and alcoholism. According to federal employees, these challenges were a consequence of living in extreme isolation in a harsh environment.

The solution was simple for the state: northern communities needed to embrace the core values and securities of the modern world. To help the Inuit and the Dene achieve this stability, the government provided them with low-rent housing and increased social services. The state also tried to overcome the perceived environmental handicaps of living in the Far North by integrating remote communities into the wage economy and the political process.52 In more isolated regions, the government forced communities to relocate to more agreeable environments.

But the development strategy of the state faltered in unanticipated ways. The permanent settlements established by the federal government conflicted with the old authority patterns and kin-based sharing relationships characteristic of Inuit culture. Furthermore, the Inuit who had to move to communities far away from their traditional hunting and trapping grounds felt confused and displaced.

Despite this complicated history of northern peoples, NFB filmmakers such as Laura Boulton and Doug Wilkinson persisted in depicting the North as a primeval wilderness—exotic and dangerous but ultimately quaint. This benign representation obfuscated the tremendous effects of the modernization schemes of the state on Inuit people. It also overlooked the agency of northern peoples struggling to reclaim their dignity and traditional cultures in this period of transition.53 It could be hypothesized that Wilkinson’s nostalgic records satisfied southern unease about their role in colonial domination and the forced absorption of Indigenous peoples into the Canadian political system.

The NFB’s depiction of northern communities changed in the 1960s to more directly reflect the values of the welfare state, which sought to draw the Inuit into mainstream society. To address the current plight of the Inuit, several NFB filmmakers went to the North to investigate the subject of northern development. In these films, the Arctic was still framed as a hostile environment. Unlike the sentimental films of Wilkinson, however, these pictures argued that the Inuit were miserable living there and that they needed to accept government assistance in order to overcome this difficult geography.

The film that embodied this welfare state vision of the North the most was The Annanacks (1964). Directed by René Bonnière and written by Don Snowden, an information officer for the Department of Northern Affairs tasked with solving poverty and unemployment in the North, the film documents the relationship between government officers and the George River Inuit. According to the narrator, the Annanack family and other members of the village are on the “verge of starvation because of the decline in the herds of Caribou.”54

Desperate to survive, the Inuit travel to Fort Chimo to seek help from the federal government, representatives of which are camped there. After they arrive, the George River residents are advised by a sympathetic Snowden to trade their ample supplies of timber (a rarity in the Arctic) for food. With the “guidance and assistance of the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources,” the narrator exclaims, the residents form “the first Eskimo cooperative.” Later in the film, Bonnière shows how the federal government has helped the rural community by teaching its members the “democratic process of elections.” Under the mentorship of the state, the newly elected president, George Annanack, begins integrating the George River settlement into a regional economy by establishing fishing and logging operations.55

The portrayal of the Inuit as a backward people in need of financial and educational help from the government was a product of the progressive, social democratic values of the welfare state in the 1960s.56 The film stereotypes the Inuit as a people besieged by a barren environment. State officers, in contrast, are presented as compassionate experts who can help the Inuit escape their difficult situation. (This depiction of the Inuit diverges from Wilkinson’s representation, which frames the Inuk hunter as self-reliant, resourceful, and happy.) In The Annanacks, the federal government is actively involved in helping the Inuit resolve issues “of distance, climate, lack of communication, and lack of technical training and business techniques.” After being taught how to transition from a hunting economy to a modern wage economy, they can “maximize their use of natural resources.” In doing so, the state helps facilitate a “measure of security.”57

Despite their different agendas, documentaries about social and environmental reform in the North, such as The Annanacks, were thematically consistent with Boulton’s and Wilkinson’s representations. Both types of film constructed cinematic landscapes defined by their extremity. Furthermore, they visualized the North as an object of southern desire, conveniently sewn into the mythological and political fabric of the nation.

Landscapes of Discovery

NFB filmmakers projected their own visions of the North onto the physical environment and in the process defined the meaning of the landscape for Canadian viewers. Radford Crawley imagined the North as an empty wilderness emblematic of national identity. Doug Wilkinson and Laura Boulton represented the North as a pristine world that titillated southern audiences with images of the exotic and the primeval. In the more progressive documentary The Annanacks, Bonnière claimed that the Arctic was inimical to the well-being of the people who lived there on account of its extremity and inhospitable weather. For Bonnière, the North was a landscape in desperate need of modernization and state governance.

Whether the landscape was conceptualized as a platonic ideal that existed somewhere outside time or a space requiring government intervention, the North was ultimately framed as something that served the interests of those in the South. This was also true of NFB documentaries about Arctic exploration, which promoted the intellectual and physical colonization of northern spaces. Films such as Across Arctic Ungava (1949), The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson (1964), Alexander Mackenzie: Lord of the North (1964), and Stefansson: The Arctic Prophet (1965) documented the “opening up” of the North to the political and economic interests of the South. In these rousing tales of northern adventure, the landscape was reconfigured as an object of imperial desire—somewhere to plant a flag, a region brimming with resource potential.

This representation of the North is most conspicuous in Across Arctic Ungava.58 The documentary fits neatly into the history of northern exploration in Canada: both the circumstances of its production and the film itself are rooted in a larger discourse about the allure of the North, the landscape’s suitability for displays of courage and masculinity, and more generally southern mastery over northern nature. The film documents francophone botanist Jacques Rousseau as he travels to “the unmapped wilderness” of the Ungava Peninsula.59 He is joined by geologist Edgar de Aubert de la Rue, geographer Pierre Gadbois of the Geographical Bureau of the Department of Mines and Resources, and Jean Michéa, an ethnologist and amateur filmmaker who recorded the expedition with his stout 16 mm camera.60

Rousseau’s expedition, financed by the Arctic Institute and the National Museum, never intended that the footage captured be made into a documentary. The images of Ungava were an appendix to the scientific notes and charts of “the least known regions in the Eastern Arctic.”61 After some of the footage was shown to the voyage’s patrons, however, it took on a life of its own. Michael Spencer, executive producer of the NFB’s Arctic Notebook series, was one of the first to see the footage. He was astounded by Michéa’s camerawork, which contained the most “fantastic and thrilling images of northern life” that he had ever seen.62 Spencer requested that P. J. Alcock, head curator of the National Museum, send the material to the NFB immediately.63 Alcock agreed, and Spencer began working on a documentary about Rousseau’s expedition and the “keen excitement of . . . Canadian exploration.”64 To get the project off the ground, Spencer turned to Doug Wilkinson for help. After Wilkinson watched the reels himself, he began to stitch the hours of footage into an exciting, albeit abbreviated, yarn about northern exploration and, as I argue, southern mastery over northern spaces.

The mise en scène of Across Arctic Ungava is vital to the film’s ideological position, for it is where the theme of terrestrial conquest eventually unfolds. Using Michéa’s panoramic images of the Ungava landscape, Wilkinson presents the North as a desolate wilderness that tests the limits of modernity. The baroque soundtrack, composed by Louis Applebaum, blares over wide shots of spongy tundra, which “stretches for thousands of treeless miles.”65 The landscape dominates the frame. For Rousseau and the rest of the team, the environment is both a primary shaper of destiny and a formidable foe.

The landscape is perhaps best understood as a character in the film; it serves as a foil to the protagonists who labour to travel through it in order to gain valuable insight into the region’s economic potential. To dramatize this conflict between humans and northern nature, Wilkinson portrays Rousseau and the other men as blundering novices in the art of frontiersmanship. It appears that most of their lives have been spent in sterile laboratories or comfortable university classrooms. The inexperience of Rousseau’s team and their feebleness in this vast wilderness are depicted early in the film when two of the explorers battle the turbulent Kogaluk River. The men paddle vigorously in their canoes, but the water is too powerful, and they yield to its powerful current, drifting downstream. Sisyphus in the North.

If the first half of the film establishes the landscape as a source of conflict—an impediment to rationality and order—and the men as feeble southerners, the second half shows how the expedition members eventually subdue the unruly environment and turn it into a place of knowledge, familiarity, and passivity. By the middle of the documentary, the North takes on a far less menacing quality as the explorers adapt to the northern environment. The scientists haul Arctic char into their canoes with ease. They paddle effortlessly in the same tributaries that overwhelmed them earlier in their journey. They march over the jagged terrain with confident determination. In the documentary’s most iconic moment, they portage up a rocky slope with the nimble expertise of veteran outdoorsmen. After they arrive at the summit, the men pause dramatically, like wool-clad conquistadors, and survey the vast Arctic terrain. The latter image is clearly staged for the camera. Shot from a low angle, the frame visually establishes that Rousseau and company have finally mastered the mysterious Ungava landscape and that everything before them is theirs for the taking. Significantly, their mental and physical energies can now be devoted to searching the terrain for geological and biological data. As the scientists noted in their findings and in their logbooks, the North shrank in size and lost some of its mystery.66 It no longer held the same power that it did at the beginning of their voyage.

Interestingly, Across Arctic Ungava’s jubilant record of southern superiority over (and conquest of) northern nature diverges from Michéa’s written account of the journey. In the film, the expedition is narrated as a series of triumphs, each discovery greater than the previous one. Michéa’s observations, recorded in a journal, were less celebratory of and more ambivalent about conquering Ungava than Wilkinson’s film or Rousseau’s personal account of the mission. Comparing the two different accounts of the expedition, we can understand more fully how NFB filmmakers constructed a view of the North that aligned with dominant and specifically state ways of seeing the Arctic environment (as virgin territory, a place where masculinity is performed, a wild landscape brought to heel by southern daring).

According to Michéa, a Canso “flying boat” dropped the party off at Povungnituk, a small trading post on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. The men headed inland on the Kogaluk River, paddling for three days with their Montagnais guides until they landed at Tassiat Lake. Michéa wrote in his journal that though the explorers were actually experienced outdoorsmen, the first leg of the trip left them “nearly dead” from fatigue.67 But they pushed on. The next morning, they packed their belongings and began a twenty-mile portage across the countryside, a journey, he notes, that would have been impossible without the help of the four Montagnais (a significant fact mostly ignored in the documentary, likely because it distracted from the romance of men from the South wrestling with nature in the North).

On 2 August 1949, the explorers arrived at their supplies cache on the pebbled shores of Payne Lake, worn out and aching from their portage. After spending the night on the beach, the party lurched on, crossing Payne Lake at dawn. From the shorelines of Payne, they headed east into the uncharted territories of Nunavik, Québec, “the first white men to go there.” But “we were not in paradise,” Michéa observed bleakly in his journal. The landscape was “nothing but rocks,” and there was “nothing worthwhile, even for [the] geologist or botanist.” Worse, the explorers discovered that they were lost. The men wandered aimlessly in the rocky wilderness, disoriented by the monotonous horizon and dejected by the rough terrain that continued to unfurl before them. As Michéa wrote, “In such a land, there is no definite boundary between the west part of Ungava peninsula (water flowing to Hudson Bay) and the east part (water flowing to Ungava Bay).” Even the “native guides did not know the easiest route.” The befuddled party had to watch “when one small lake was emptying in[to] another” to see if they were still heading in the right direction.68 Finally, on 12 August, the explorers passed into more familiar country and reached their destination: a small trading post overlooking the immense Ungava Bay. They spent a week at the post collecting samples of Arctic flora and rocks, charting fluctuations in the weather, gauging soil readings, and battling a plague of mosquitoes and blackflies.69

The difference between Michéa’s chronicle of the Ungava expedition and the euphoric tale of northern exploration (and conquest) narrated in Across Arctic Ungava is revealing. On the one hand, Michéa wrote dismally about how the explorers were overwhelmed by nature. And though they learned a little about the resource potential of the region, they could not get out of there fast enough. (Rousseau, it should be noted, was far more enthusiastic about the territory, in particular its potential for the introduction of reindeer herds and as “an important reservoir of game for an extensive native population.”70) On the other hand, Wilkinson reinterpreted “actuality,” creating an exultant record of their journey to promote a more celebratory and patriotic vision of northern exploration and development.71 In Across Arctic Ungava, nature is rendered as a dangerous obstacle that eventually is vanquished. As the men travel through the land, the North becomes understandable. By the end of the film, the region is represented as a “friendly” place overflowing with economic potential. When the narrator boasts about the vast resources beneath the surface of the tundra, the audience cannot help but speculate about a future in Ungava that includes bulldozers, airstrips, oil rigs, and maybe even hotels.

Science Films and Southern Authority in Northern Spaces

Arctic expeditions were an important part of Canadian public memory and national myth making. Stories of brave men who endured inhospitable weather and rough terrain to map the unknown were dramatic reminders of Canadians’ identity as a gritty people and their destiny in the North. Across Arctic Ungava contributed to this popular rhetoric of northern conquest, and in the process, it reimagined the North as an empty but ultimately knowable space primed for development.

Science films, a variation of the northern exploration genre, similarly configured the North as a rationalized landscape defined by its economic value and accessibility. Documentaries about Arctic biology and geology were touted as educational works that examined the North from a scientific point of view. The region was not a barren world of ice and snow, they claimed. Quite the contrary. It was alive with organisms and sparkling with valuable minerals such as iron ore, copper, zinc, and nickel. By emphasizing the region’s fecundity, however, the NFB also supported the government’s ambitions in the North, in particular the remaking of the landscape into a resource hinterland.

Dalton Muir’s High Arctic: Life on the Land (1958) is a perfect example of how science films endorsed a southern vision of the North as a site of resource development and industrialization. Its emphasis on the economically viable properties of the North announced to viewers that the region was suitable for industrialization. Even extreme environments shrouded in myth and mystery could be brought into the economic order of Canada. In this sense, Muir’s documentary paralleled the efforts of the South to transform the North into an object of knowledge and rationality in the middle of the twentieth century.

The film’s link to larger discourses on northern science and territorial colonization is not immediately evident, however, for the documentary purports to be an objective record of geography. In his statement of intent, Muir described High Arctic to the NFB as “a factual film” “in good taste.”72 Strowan Robertson, the writer of the documentary, likewise pronounced the film an “impartial” investigation of Arctic geography: “No film has reached the public which gives an accurate picture of the geological, geographical and biological conditions of this immense area.” “Consequently,” explained Robertson, “the average citizens know of the Arctic only in terms of polar bears, Eskimo[s] and extreme cold.” Through its investigation of the flora, fauna, and geological history of the Arctic, the documentary seeks to demystify “the last of the relatively unknown areas of Canada.”73

Produced by Unit B’s Science Program, High Arctic was intended to be used by schoolteachers.74 The NFB encouraged teachers to pin up reviews of the documentary “to arouse interest” and “to stimulate follow-up activities” with their students.75 Film distributors even provided educators with worksheets for learners to fill out while they watched the documentary.76 The quizzes were compatible with contemporary biology and geography textbooks and thus could be incorporated easily into the Canadian public school curriculum.

High Arctic begins by dispelling the notion that the North is an alien world, hostile and inimical to life—a common misperception. After a long shot of a seemingly barren landscape, the narrator explains that there is more to this place than meets the eye; the North is not an unfriendly world of “rocks, scars, and sterile earth” but an abundant landscape where “ecological systems thrive and work.”77 The narrator goes on to describe how organisms have adapted to this environment. The camera zooms in for a close-up of some moss clinging to rocks. A simple organic structure allows the nonvascular plant to prosper despite a lack of water and exposure to the elements, the narrator reports. Even in the most inhospitable regions of the globe, nature endures.78

For Muir, the camera was an instrument used to reveal scientific phenomena that static means of representation (maps, charts, and photographs) could not. The cinematography in the film captures Arctic ecology in “vivid detail,” supplying audiences with “exciting evidence of plant and animal life and their constant struggle for survival in the harsh environment.”79 Long, medium, and close-up shots “support the ecological thesis” of the film and create “a sequence of pictorial beauty” supported by “the most telling statistics.”80 Muir presents a macroview of the Arctic landscape with the help of high-powered lenses and aerial cinematography. Editing also helped in this regard. A time-lapse sequence of receding ice in the spring shows audiences how geology and climate work together to form the Arctic landscape.

Although High Arctic seems to be apolitical, its declaration that the North is both abundant and knowable is noteworthy. Why the emphasis on value and viability? Examined in the larger context of northern development and northern science in the twentieth century, the film evidently supports the political and economic ambitions of the state in the Arctic. As historian Stephen Bocking has shown, science was a critical component of the federal government’s postwar schemes in the Arctic.81 Funded by the state, biologists, meteorologists, and geologists in the 1940s and 1950s gathered useful bits of intelligence on northern geographies to make a case for the North as a site for development and national wealth. Muir similarly used the superficial objectivity of documentary cinema and science to remove the shroud of mystery surrounding the North and to show that this landscape is in fact a region of untapped prosperity.

High Arctic is closely linked to state ways of seeing northern landscapes in other ways too. The filming of Muir’s documentary was made possible because of the Canadian government’s presence in the High Arctic. To make production easier, the crew worked out of the Eureka weather station, a scientific research base funded by the federal government. Such outposts, however, were never purely about science. Besides its contribution to meteorology, the station was an act of occupation during the Cold War.82 Eureka and other installations like it were bastions against Soviet encroachment; their very presence declared to the outside world that Canada was there first.

Muir also collaborated with scientists who worked for the Arctic Institute (1944) and other state-financed programs, such as the Geological Survey of Canada’s Operation Franklin (1955), in making the documentary. Such relationships, to quote historian Edward Jones-Imhotep, “embodied wider struggles to bring a certain understanding of the nation into being.”83 Through their efforts to observe, collect, and test the North, scientists slowly marked the terrain as knowable. Muir’s documentary affirmed the federal government’s sovereignty in northern spaces and, through the act of filming the region, acknowledged the state’s claim to the natural resources of the Arctic.

The close relationship among the NFB, science, and state power in the North appears again in James de B. Domville’s Arctic IV (1974). The film, which follows biologist Dr. Joseph MacInnis as he explores the Arctic Ocean near Resolute Bay, suggests that scientific research and national sovereignty are inextricably linked. The documentary begins theatrically with MacInnis hovering a couple of hundred metres above the North Pole in a helicopter. In a voice-over, the scientist reports to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that his subaquatic expedition in the Arctic Ocean is about to begin. Trudeau responds by calling the scientific voyage a “great achievement for Canada.”84 The scene is emblematic of the film’s larger assertion that scientific discovery is as much about proclaiming Canadian sovereignty as it is about knowledge of the physical world.

The association between state authority and science is repeated later in the film. In an interview with the director, MacInnis explains that he is “trying to change the consciousness of the Canadian people and awaken them that almost half of their country is under water and that it needs exploration, management, and understanding.” He continues that “I do dramatic things to draw attention to the fact we need this kind of exploration, . . . and what better way to do that than pick the pinnacle of diving—that is, the North Pole?”85 This was more than just science; it was about revealing the heights and depths of Canadian boundaries. MacInnis, who showboats throughout the film, jumps into the ocean and scuttles below the surface to plant a flag under the ice. The scene surpasses the first sequence in the documentary, which visualizes how scientific discovery and state ownership are linked: the government financed research institutes and expeditions in the North, and scientists helped establish a government presence in northern spaces.

NFB filmmakers themselves helped lay the groundwork for the colonization of the North by providing visual proof of the economic potential of the landscape. As part of the filmmaking process, documentarians such as Doug Wilkinson, Dalton Muir, and James de B. Domville amassed cinematographic information on the environment. The camera surveys Arctic geography, providing viewers with a seemingly detached perspective on the North and its features. The images acquired through this kind of filmic surveillance indirectly contributed to southern knowledge of northern spaces. As Jacques Rousseau explained in his report on the Ungava expedition, cinematic images like the ones captured by his companion Jean Michéa “add materially to [Canada’s] scanty knowledge on sub-soil” and thus “contribute to the development of the mining industry.”86 In the botanist’s estimation, filmic proof clearly proved that the North was a “vital strategic area of Canada” that contained “great mineral wealth.”87

Bruno Latour’s theory of the production of scientific knowledge helps explain how NFB cinema contributed to the formation of the North as an object of imperial knowledge. In Science in Action, Latour argues that “knowledge” cannot be defined without understanding how it is gained.88 Knowledge, he explains, is an active “cycle of accumulation” in which information and material objects are discovered and then brought back to a central location to be collated. Those in the centre thus have the capacity to acquaint themselves with people, things, and events from the comfort of their labs or offices.89 With each discovery, scientific institutions amass the financial wherewithal and the political power to send out more expeditions into the dark corners of the map. These voyages supply even more information about the external world. The cycle is repeated until the last “unknown” regions are rendered known. This comprehensive knowledge then helps establish imperial or central authority over far-flung and disparate geographies.

The parallels between the accumulation of scientific knowledge and the role of state-sponsored films are worth noting. How is knowledge about the periphery brought back to the centre for assessment? First, Latour explains, information is rendered mobile. Second, data collected by field scientists are stabilized so that they can be transported back intact. And third, the information is aggregated and organized into practical knowledge.90 Early scientific expeditions used carracks and other vessels to transport detailed sketches, maps, and samples of flora and fauna back to scientific institutions so that they could be observed more easily. Today information is collected via newer and more adaptable communication technologies, such as the internet, GPS, and the film camera.

NFB movies were vessels that carted seemingly neutral scientific information from the North back to the centre in the South. Images of the landscape were stabilized by archiving the information onto celluloid and then made combinable through film prints and distribution services. An airborne NFB camera could glide above the landscape and record everything within the scope of its lens. Back south at the NFB headquarters in Montréal, the footage could then be edited into a coherent narrative so that the landscape could be better understood, approximated, and in the end rationalized. No matter how far away or overwhelmingly large the North was, the landscape ended up on a scale that Canadian observers could dominate by sight.91 Films provided an easily interpreted visual record of the North by reducing it to an aspect ratio of 1:66.1 and transmitting that image into theatres, classrooms, or government offices. It was what film scholar Bill Nichols describes as “an economy predicated on distance and control, centred around a single, all-seeing vantage point.”92 Although NFB documentary filmmaking’s primary intention was not to claim space for the government, its mission to be the “eyes of Canada” unwittingly supported state objectives in the North by making it visible and thus controllable.

A Developed Northern Landscape

A number of NFB documentaries explicitly presented the North as a modern landscape by depicting the region as a resource-rich environment essential to the economic development of the nation. In the 1940s, wartime films such as Northwest Frontier (1942), Highways North (1944), Northwest by Air (1944), and Land of Pioneers (1944) proclaimed the “awakening of a new land.”93 Industrial projects such as the Alaska Military Highway and the Canol pipeline are vaunted for connecting the resource-rich but remote North to the rest of Canada. “Yes, the country is wild and rough in places, but the isolation of the Canadian northwest is gone forever,” the narrator of Northwest by Air boasts as a survey plane flies over the Mackenzie River delta, its wings glinting in the sun. New transportation arteries and superior aerial technologies herald “the grandeur and the future promise of Canada’s great northwest.”94 These networks will allow for the extraction and distribution of raw materials to the rest of Canada. Northwest Frontier, a film about the pioneers who “go north,” similarly describes the landscape as a site in transition. The “old, isolated North” is being replaced by the “new, pulsing currents of modern business and social life moving in.” The documentary goes on to argue that advances in technology make the full transformation of the North into a developed hinterland all but inevitable. “The bush plane,” the narrator extols, is “drawing this huge territory into the mainstream of Canadian life.”95

The colonization of the North by the South is evocatively captured in NFB cinema through depictions of what David Nye terms the technological sublime.96 In the script for Northwest Frontier, James Beveridge describes the arrival of southern technology in the North as an ecstatic experience. “A shadow swept down the river, a new noise split the silence, the roar of aircraft down the Mackenzie, over Great Bear Lake, . . . up to the Arctic Islands,” effuses the screenwriter.97 The plane, with its sleek lines, raw power, and ability to conquer space and time, arouses a feeling of transcendence, of godlike power over geography. Like the tractor in Evelyn Cherry’s agricultural documentaries, the aircraft is a powerful motif in a number of films about northern development and progress. The plane symbolizes a nation coming into being as well as the power of technology over the environment.

The NFB continued to produce films that celebrated the North as a modern landscape, vital to the national economy. Documentaries such as Beyond the Frontier (1952), Our Northern Citizen (1956), Down North (1958), The Accessible North (1967), North (1969), and A Northern Challenge (1973) extol the abundance of natural resources concealed beneath the Arctic and sub-Arctic terrain and then commend the efforts of the individuals and institutions that transform this raw geography into useful territory. The North is “bountiful,” “raw,” and “plentiful,” the narrator of A Northern Challenge rhapsodizes.98

Many of these northern development films also called attention to the social benefits of a modernized North. In Down North, Hector Lemieux describes the Mackenzie River delta as a “fertile sub-Arctic valley” undergoing environmental as well as social transformations.99 The delta region, in Lemieux’s estimation, is a utopian landscape where Indigenous and white people work together, plundering the region’s natural wealth for the benefit of all. Through a combination of Indigenous labour and “white man’s technology,” the land supports the economy of “Canada and the world.”100

Despite their proclamations of social equality and welfare, depictions of a modern and industrial North in NFB documentaries are often distinguishable by their colonizing discourses. Aerial shots of the “virgin” landscape flash across the screen as the narrator in Down North talks about the region’s availability for “exploitation.” Later, images of fecundity are juxtaposed with industrial technologies such as excavators as they clear the once pristine land. These depictions are more than just neutral records of events in the North; they assert, with great pomp, that the white enterprise has conquered the crude northern landscape and harnessed its natural resources. Films like Down North even go so far as to suggest that southern colonization of the northern landscape benefits the “primitive” Indigenous people who live there. For the South has brought churches, missions, and new jobs to the Inuit and the Dene.

Cinematography played a crucial role in presenting the North as a modern, productive, and colonized environment. According to the production notes for The Accessible North, the documentary employed aerial cinematography to show the “limitless space” of the sub-Arctic and its “abundant resources [, which] promise . . . a secure future.”101 Panoramic shots of industrial mining and bird’s-eye perspectives on transportation infrastructure illustrate the enormous scale of northern development. “A ten-year, one hundred million–dollar program of highway construction is under way in the Yukon,” the narrator boasts as the camera pans slowly over the modernized landscape. Over nine thousand tons of “payload” can move in fifteen hours from the “sub-Arctic down through the flat farmlands of the Peace River district.”102 The denuded landscape is not intended to shock or disgust the viewer; rather, it is meant to inspire awe at the ability of humans to alter this geography. Such representations vividly illustrate the South’s total mastery over this once untamed (and therefore unproductive) wilderness.

The use of cinematography as a way to advertise the South’s control of this landscape is most apparent in North, a fifteen-minute documentary coproduced by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) and directed by Josef Reeve. The promotional poster for North emphasizes that the film’s cinematography employs evocative imagery to highlight “the vastness, the variety, and the welcome of the North.”103 The film was first conceived in 1967 when Vic Adams, chief of the Liaison Division of DIAND, sent a letter to the NFB requesting a short documentary that would encourage “tourists,” “sportsmen,” and “business entrepreneurs” to visit the “captivating” Northwest Territories.104 The NFB assigned Bill Canning, a young producer, to work on the project immediately. Canning was, in many ways, the perfect man for the job. He had just finished work on Blades and Brass (1967), a short film about the grace and beauty of hockey set to Tijuana Brass. The documentary did not contain any narration, only images of NHL players dancing around the ice. Without the help of voice-overs, Canning was able to effectively convey the poetic and simultaneously bloody spectacle that is hockey. Canning wanted to do something similar in the sponsored documentary for DIAND. Rather than “telling” audiences, he endeavoured to show them the plenitude awaiting them in the North. In a proposal for the film sent to Jon Evans, chief of the Industrial Division at DIAND, Canning explained that he was going to use “the pulling power of a film” to capture the North “as it really is.”105 For him, the North was the central character of the film. The natural lushness of the landscape, wrote the producer, “reaches down to our smog bound skies and whispers, ‘Come, come and see me, come and fish my waters, come and see my mountains, my open spaces—Come North for I am the last frontier on my continent.’”106 In an earlier meeting with Adams, Canning had suggested that the film be shot on 70 mm film stock but for financial reasons eventually settled for 35 mm. Canning stated emphatically that 16 mm “was out of the question for a film that would live or die on the scope and magic of its colour.”107 The officers at DIAND were initially reluctant to approve the original budget ($63,095) for the documentary but eventually acquiesced when Canning described how “wide panoramas” and “breathtaking aerial photography” would publicize “the vast difference in terrain” and show “that the land is virtually man free.”108

North was released on 19 June 1969 at Hyland Theatre in Toronto in front of First Time (1969), a comedy helmed by Hollywood journeyman James Neilson and starring Jacqueline Bisset.109 For the most part, moviegoers were more impressed with Canning’s documentary. North, as one critic wrote, was “an eloquent introduction to our anticipated future activities in that part of Canada.” “The truly fine photography stirred strong sentiments about Canada’s North,” he remarked. “We never got tired of seeing it,” explained another filmgoer.110 Through its imagery, mostly mediated through slow pans and magisterial perspectives, North documents the “many-sided” views of the landscape, including both its exotic and its modern features. “The film captures the allure of it all,” a promotional poster claimed.111

NFB pictures about the transformation and exploitation of this abundant hinterland, like Down North and North, reflected a twentieth-century Canadian exuberance about industrializing northern spaces. The discovery of oil at Norman Wells in 1920, the launch of the first Eastern Arctic Patrol under the command of Captain Bernier in 1922, and the arrival of the bush plane signalled new economic possibility in the North. In his book The Friendly Arctic, famous explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson described the North as “alive,” “friendly,” and “fruitful.” It was only “the mental attitude of the Southerner that [made] the North hostile.”112 This antiquated view prevented the landscape from becoming, to quote Stefansson, “a country to be used and lived in just like the rest of the world.”113 Stefansson and others questioned the notion of an inhospitable North and argued that its difficult conditions could be overcome through technology, determination, and state sponsorship. The explorer’s knack for storytelling and his compelling argument that the Arctic was in fact neither “lifeless” nor “silent” impelled politicians such as Prime Minister Robert L. Borden to examine the economic potential in the polar region more closely.114

After the Second World War, the Canadian government spent considerable time and money developing the North into an industrial landscape. Fearing a Soviet attack in the Arctic, the government established a military presence.115 It also initiated widespread economic programs in the region to help stimulate northern development and encourage private investment. The development of the North received another boost from Lester B. Pearson in 1946. The diplomat and future prime minister wrote in an article that “Go North” had officially replaced “Go West as the call to adventure.”116 Echoing Stefansson, Pearson argued that “a whole new region has been brought out of the blurred and shadowy realm of Northern folklore and shown to be an important and accessible part of our modern world.”117 With aid from the government in the form of more capital and political labour power, the “snowy wastes of the Canadian North” would yield “many more mineral secrets.”118 A year later, in 1947, the Department of Mines and Resources produced a lengthy report entitled Canada’s New Northwest. Its authors argued that the region was vital to the health of the national economy in the postwar period. The Department of Mines and Resources’ report on the economic potential of the Arctic was an adumbration of things to come. As John Sandlos and Arn Keeling show, Cold War demands for industrial minerals such as nickel, cobalt, zinc, lead, copper, asbestos, and uranium in the early 1950s helped precipitate a concerted effort to industrialize the region.119

Government interest in the North reached its zenith in 1958 when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and the Conservatives turned their “Northern Vision” into a successful federal election platform. In his campaign, Diefenbaker proclaimed that the future of Canada lay in the North, where rich mineral deposits and untapped raw materials would usher in a new era of growth and prosperity.120 After he was elected, Diefenbaker followed through on his promise to exploit this abundant region and created the Roads to Resources program, which strengthened the nation and cultivated new avenues of commerce in the North. The development of the North did not end with Diefenbaker, of course. Under the leadership of Prime Ministers Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian state continued to reshape the North in its image.

Despite the concerns of a growing number of environmentalists and Indigenous rights activists about the exploitation of the landscape and the mistreatment of the people who live there, NFB documentaries were remarkably consistent in their appraisal of the North as an economic and political utopia through the 1970s. Films such as A Northern Challenge (1973) continued to support the industrialization of the North. Like other documentaries in the genre, it describes the Arctic barrens as, “until recently, a forgotten wasteland” but now a landscape of “oil, mineral, and gas resources.” “As our need for these resources grows, they become increasingly important to Canada’s future,” the narrator explains in a formal, baritone voice. The film highlights how industrialization and new transportation infrastructure “demolish the effects of space and time.”121 Highways, railways, and most importantly, aircraft connect the North to the mainstream economic activities of the rest of Canada.

A Northern Challenge examines the federal government’s decision to construct ten airfields in the remote Arctic. The Department of National Defence agreed to participate in the $5 million project and built six air bases with military personnel. According to the film, the airfields will “integrate a network of existing airstrips” and help “establish further links of northern communit[ies] and new resource areas.” In addition to providing important connections to the rest of Canada, the airstrips will facilitate the conveyance of fundamental goods to the Inuit, who had been relocated. The Inuit at Whale Cove shudder at the mention of returning to “the hardship and insecurities of following caribou.”122

Nonfictional filmmaking is a particularly effective way of envisioning the physical world. Audiences can view the world as the camera sees it: unmoored from the physical restraints of the human body. The camera pans, zooms, and tracks its way through a range of geographies, recording visual information about places near and far. But the camera is not as neutral or objective as it appears. There is always someone behind the camera manoeuvring its line of sight and therefore steering ours. Just as a cartographer foregrounds certain topographical features on a map and diminishes others, so too a filmmaker decides which aspects of the landscape to show and which to conceal.

Distinguishing between what is found and what is constructed in nonfictional cinema is difficult. “Documentaries,” film scholar William Guynn explains, “tend to produce an image whose power of analogy is prodigious and capable of mimicking the chronology of real events by representing the movement of persons and objects through time.”123 To discern how individual filmmakers or larger institutions such as the NFB constructed Canadian landscapes, we must pay attention to the process of filmmaking as well as the larger context in which the images were produced.

In the case of the North, one of Canada’s most enduring and potent symbols of national identity, the NFB envisioned a certain kind of landscape. Filmmakers such as Radford Crawley, Doug Wilkinson, and Dalton Muir used a combination of filmmaking techniques and narrative tropes to construct the North as a place of national significance—cultural, economic, political, scientific, et cetera. Their constructions reflected southern, and specifically federal government, sensibilities concerning the landscape. Normative representations of the primitiveness or economic potential of the region said more about the desires and expectations of the South than they did about the ecological and social realities in Resolute or Inuvik.

The NFB’s representations of the landscape legitimized and clarified the state’s ambitions in the North. Through depictions of both the exotic and the modern, NFB filmmakers reaffirmed the official vision of the landscape as a new frontier for state authority. NFB cinema stitched together a celebratory history of nation building in which the development of the North was presented as both necessary and inevitable.

In a way, filmmaking in the North was analogous to the Arctic expeditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like those intrepid explorers who built cairns and planted flags as acts of occupation, NFB documentarians claimed geographic, intellectual, and cultural spaces for the federal government in the North.124 As NFB film crews marched through the North in search of images, they marked the region as “explored” and henceforth under the jurisdiction of the state.

The NFB’s construction of the North was also inspired by its institutional mandate to integrate disparate geographies and populations into mainstream Canada. In some respects, the NFB responded to Harold Innis’s famous concern about problems of communication infrastructure in the North. For Innis, communication was necessary to conquer space and time. Unreliable radio in the North threatened “Canadian National Life,” he lamented.125 NFB cinema helped unify the North and provided a reliable network of shared Canadian stories and governance in the North. In a 1962 annual report, executives of the NFB urged its members to “improve and expand its film distribution” in the North.126 According to board members, it was paramount that the NFB work “effectively [to] bring the Canadian story to the peoples of the north” and to supply the “stories of the north to the rest of Canada and its world neighbors.”127 The NFB saw itself as a government-authorized cultural moderator tasked with linking peripheral regions to the rest of the country through a shared set of stories and cinematic images. At the official opening of the NFB head office in Montréal, Vincent Massey remarked that the agency would “play a vital part in making Canadians conscious of their country.” Canada was “vast and complex,” but through “the eyes of [NFB] cameras,” Canadians could “know every nook and cranny.” Massey lauded the “imagination” and “skill” of NFB filmmakers who brought Canada’s “people more closely together” and gave “an awareness of [the country] and [its] identity.”128 To draw the North into mainstream Canada, the NFB ignored the paradoxes and differences of the landscape, framing it simply as either exotic or modern. Consequently, the NFB participated in what geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin calls “Homogeneous Canadianization,” a discursive process in which the North is made into a region similar to all other parts of Canada.129 The image of an exotic North, or a North primed for development, was much easier to comprehend as a nationally significant space than a fragmented, complex, and even contradictory place.130