Conclusion

It is an “inescapable truth,” write Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, that cinema contributes to the “imagining and definition” of the natural world.1 Through moving pictures, we experience and learn to negotiate the physical environment around us.2 In examining the documentary cinema of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), we see the different ways that ideologies, institutions, and individuals shape how viewers think about nature.

This book has tracked the various representations of nature in NFB documentaries from early wartime films that depicted the exploitation of the country’s natural resources to “environmental” documentaries of the 1970s, which challenged the notion that nature exists for the benefit of humans. My intention when I sat down to write this book was to investigate how the government co-opted the art of cinema to broadcast political views about the meaning and value of nature. Although this investigation certainly focused on that element, it became clear that filmmakers, even those sponsored by the state, oftentimes used nonfictional cinema as a stage from which to reimagine nature in alternative and sometimes radical ways.

How did the NFB represent nature? At first, it saw nature as a convenient symbol with which it could unite Canadians under a specific kind of national identity. Visualizing nature in this way was not new, of course. Geography has long been a part of the country’s nationalist rhetoric, for it embodies the ideals central to Anglo-Canadian nationalism: ruggedness, industriousness, adventurousness, and so forth. Politicians and other nationalists frequently described the land as a force that shaped the history and national character of the country. The NFB was no different. Filmmakers continued to mythologize the view that nature was the defining feature of Canada.3 Films from Canadian Landscape (1941) to Canada: The Land (1971) suggested that modern Canada was chiselled out of raw nature and that its people were moulded by the weathered contours of the landscape. NFB films such as Song of the Mountains (1947), The Enduring Wilderness (1963), and Epilogue (1971) likewise transported viewers to primordial wilderness spaces. Here, in these depictions of raw wilderness, spectators were reminded of their past lives as voyageurs in the impenetrable bush, forging a national destiny one beaver pelt at a time. Even filmmakers who contested official discourses on the exploitation of natural resources and industrialization advocated for a national identity that was defined by Canadians’ closeness to the natural world. Bill Mason and Christopher Chapman argued in their own ways that to protect the wild was to preserve an icon of the country’s heritage in its most robust and virginal state.

This popular depiction of nature had ideological baggage, of course. Although it was a convenient way of nation building, NFB representations of nature frequently excluded marginalized peoples from their framings of the environment. Natural spaces as visualized in films such as The Enduring Wilderness were uninhabited, a realm independent of human culture. In reality, however, a spectacularly diverse population of Indigenous peoples once inhabited these environs. Where were they, then, in NFB films about the natural environment? In some cases, Indigenous peoples were sketched into the landscape by NFB filmmakers to create a primitive mise en scène. More commonly, their presence was completely ignored. Not only did this presentation of wilderness spaces reaffirm an Anglo and emphatically white definition of nature, but also it suppressed Indigenous narratives about the meaning and value of the environment.

Nature was envisioned in other ways that supported the nation-building goals of the state. Depictions of an ordered and well-managed landscape framed nature as a national resource that united citizens from coast to coast to coast. Every Canadian could have a hand in unleashing this natural wealth through hard work and state-managed strategies. Nature transformed was a potent (and timely) symbol of national progress and postwar economic development.

NFB filmmakers relied on a consistent aesthetic and ideological schema to convey government discourses about the utility of the natural world in the 1940s and 1950s. Documentaries such as Timber Front (1940) and Windbreaks on the Prairies (1943) implied that the true worth of nature is in boards per feet and grain tonnage. Wartime films encouraged Canadians to exploit resources widely because they were needed to help the country win the war. Postwar agricultural films produced by Evelyn Cherry for the Agricultural Production Unit likewise encouraged Canadians to take advantage of the natural plenitude of the country.

Government-sponsored films about natural resources were clearly informed by the objectives of the welfare state. NFB agricultural documentaries taught farmers how to modernize their farms through science and technology. If agrarians did not approach the soil with knowledge and expertise, then they would risk ecological and economic devastation. As the narrator of Canadian Wheat Story (1944) explains, the modern farmer not only must “consider the effects of soil and weather conditions” when he plants his crops but also needs to consult the agricultural specialists working at the government-established plant-breeding program. Only then can the farmer be confident that his wheat harvest will meet Canada’s “high export standards.”4

The technocratic language of controlling or fixing nature was closely associated with another important state-centred theme in NFB films. They were characterized by their high modernism and its belief that “a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life” can “improve the human condition.”5 Images of modern farming technology, gleaming airstrips in the North, or crops dowsed in chemical pesticides paralleled the state’s logic that nature should be rendered passive and then transformed. To quote the narrator of Roman Kroitor’s The Great Plains (1950), “By applying his work and ingenuity to [it], the land at first thought barren has been put to man’s use.”6

Documentary filmmaking itself was a key technology in the ongoing project of the government to rationalize the environmental and social spaces of Canada. The camera collected valuable information about the geological and biological features of the landscape, visual data that tacitly justified the development and exploitation of the environment. Filmmaking assisted the government in two ways: by abridging the complexity of the natural world and by naturalizing state authority over the environment. As NFB film crews travelled through these places with their all-seeing technology, they claimed intellectual and physical authority for the federal government.

Representations of nature in NFB cinema were not monolithic, however. As Philip Rosen writes, “The concept of national cinema is always implicated in a dialectic of nation and anti-nation.”7 Although there was a strong current of state discipline in NFB discourses on nature, there were surprising moments of ideological conflict between filmmakers and their government sponsors. Filmmakers began countering state-authorized perspectives on the symbolic and economic value of the environment. The work of Larry Gosnell epitomized this new wave of environmental filmmaking. Despite political pressure from the Department of Agriculture, Gosnell made a film that challenged society’s reliance on technocratic solutions to improve nature. In Poison, Pests, and People (1960), he argued that humans’ efforts to reshape the landscape through the use of pesticides were both myopic and destructive. People’s exertions to stimulate agricultural productivity and transform the land resulted in unintended consequences—namely, the poisoning of local ecosystems and human bodies.

Bill Mason’s Death of a Legend (1971) and Cry of the Wild (1972) similarly castigated the management practices of state institutions. According to Mason, the conservation goals of the Canadian Wildlife Service embodied a blind faith in the technocratic and the modern. Its efforts to control nature were flawed because they were based on the view that humans are superior to nature. Mason pleaded for a more ecologically conscious understanding of human and nonhuman relationships, one characterized by humility and an appreciation of the freedom of the wild.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, NFB filmmakers used programs such as Challenge for Change (CFC) to ask more provocative questions about the relationship between humans and nature. Society’s desire for industrial growth and technological solutions to problems related to environmental contamination and resource scarcity was problematic and harmful. The most significant documentary to make this claim was Cree Hunters of Mistassini (1974). Unlike earlier films about Indigenous peoples and nature, the documentary privileged their environmental cosmology. In the film, the Cree demonstrate that wilderness is more than an economic resource or a beautiful place where people are only visitors; it is a home where human and nonhuman beings live together in harmony. The James Bay landscape provided the Cree and all other living things with physical strength and spiritual purpose. This representation of nature was further noteworthy because it directly countered Québec’s high modern assessment of the land. Under Robert Bourassa, Québec envisioned a modern and productive landscape in which massive dams would generate millions of watts in hydroelectric power. This scheme, however, had terrible consequences for the James Bay Cree, who called this wilderness home. Cree Hunters of Mistassini, more than any other film up to that point, protested the state’s vision of nature.

We must be careful, however, not to label all NFB environmental films post-1960s as radical departures from earlier works about nature. Government discourses were still present in NFB documentaries throughout this period. State influence persisted through the 1970s and into the 1980s in the form of sponsored films. Conservation films such as This Is an Emergency (1979), Protection for Our Renewable Resources (1979), and The Future Is Now (1979) were all prompted by the federal government during the energy crisis. The state was also instrumental in the creation of Studio E, a short-lived film unit devoted to making environmental pictures. Studio E produced a series of environmental advocacy films, including the antinuclear film No Act of God (1978) and Martin DeFalco’s Class Project: The Garbage Movie (1980). In spite of its seemingly radical aesthetic, the films of Studio E were fairly benign and supported state efforts to intervene in environmental education. Along with the feminist production unit Studio D, Studio E films were an important aspect of the NFB’s efforts to “reflect the cultural maturity” of Canada in the 1980s while maintaining the view that the state was ultimately a benevolent institution.8 In the case of Studio E, the state was still the main arbiter of human-ecological relationships.

Our journey began in 1939 and ended in 1974 with the production of the CFC film Cree Hunters of Mistassini. Boyce Richardson’s documentary struck me as a good place to finish because it articulates so many of the themes discussed in the book. First, it reveals that NFB films were negotiated texts that competed with and sometimes confounded the official attitude and policy of the government. Despite the ongoing presence of the state in the process of production, filmmakers were able to use their cameras to depict the contradictions of local social and ecological environments. Traditional Cree hunting culture was fundamentally different from the colonial experiences of the state, which saw nature as a frontier to be subdued and transformed.

Second, Cree Hunters of Mistassini illustrates the different ways in which filmmakers used the technology and grammar of cinema to construct a certain kind of picture of nature. The cinéma-vérité aesthetic of Tony Ianzelo and Boyce Richardson effectively places the viewer within the cultural and ecological reality of Cree life. Contrast this aesthetic with the works of Christopher Chapman, who used a combination of contrast lighting and wide frames to represent the sublimity of Canadian wilderness spaces, or Evelyn Cherry, who relied on expository filmmaking to teach Canadian farmers how to modernize their farms. In each case, the form of the film—its aesthetics and narrative devices—supported its content.

Third, Cree Hunters of Mistassini demonstrates the political impact of NFB films on the extrafilmic world. For Cree audiences, the film was one of the catalysts in their confrontation with Québec. The film reminded many Cree of their traditional homeland and their spiritual relationship with the James Bay environment. The documentary inspired many Cree hunters to unite and return to the bush despite the looming threat of the hydroelectric project.

Where my project ends, hopefully new investigations will begin. There is still an interesting story to be told about the environmental documentaries produced by the NFB in the 1980s and 1990s. The construction of nature in this period was influenced in remarkable ways by developments in media technologies and the emergence of new funding sources and distribution channels. By the early 1980s, private film and television industries had exceeded the production output of the NFB. Moreover, the creation of Telefilm (1984) and smaller programs such as the Ontario Development Film Corporation helped finance the projects of young, independent filmmakers. These new avenues provided directors with creative licence and radical filmmaking opportunities previously unavailable to them. Film scholar Peter Stevens observed in 1993 that this independent documentary cinema opposed mainstream media and “differ[ed] entirely from the prescriptive plans to develop better informed citizens, as set out by John Grierson at the National Film Board.”9 Inspired by the rise of identity politics, documentarians began exploring new ways to express subjectivity and difference. For some independent filmmakers, the NFB represented everything that was wrong with the mainstream. Still, a number of indie filmmakers saw the NFB as a platform from which to contest the status quo from within. In the 1980s and 1990s, the NFB increasingly promoted a style of nonfictional cinema that was individualistic and autobiographical.10 The NFB mandate to improve diversity and representation emboldened women and Indigenous filmmakers to make documentaries about their real-life experiences in ways that many spectators had never witnessed. This kind of subjectivity prompts interesting questions about the nature of cinema and, indeed, the cinema of nature. An ecocritical/historical investigation of this period of nonfictional filmmaking can reveal new perspectives on the complex ways that cinema, nature, and government institutions intersect.

In 2012, the governing Conservative Party slashed the NFB’s funding by $6.7 million and eliminated seventy-three jobs.11 The cuts crippled the ability of the institution to maintain its extensive archive, which contains films, photographs, and thousands of pages of production notes. Thanks to the outstanding work of André D’Ulisse, head archivist at the NFB, I was able to dig through piles of film material and related documents without too much difficulty. But there were still gaps. Despite the best efforts of the NFB to preserve its past, production notes and other historical clues were sometimes missing or misfiled. It occurred to me while I was sifting through boxes of film scripts and shot lists that it is crucial to preserve these filmic records. The production notes, memos, scripts, and budget sheets contain important details about the filmmaking process; they shed light on how filmmakers thought about and interacted with their subjects.

Generally, the films of the NFB, most of which are available online now, reveal much about Canada’s past, including how the country narrated its history. Screening Nature and Nation is just one example of the stories that we can tell using NFB historical documents. I have used them in three different ways: to provide a new historical perspective on Canadian environmental history by showing how the state was an active participant in the cultural construction of nature, to posit a new way of thinking about the NFB by demonstrating the extent to which nature and environmental issues were parts of its cinema, and to give historical context to emerging environmental attitudes in Canada by suggesting that NFB representations helped precipitate and simultaneously reflect ideas about the environment. There are a number of other ways that NFB films can be used within scholarly and popular contexts. For new stories about the NFB to be told, it is essential that we protect our archives and cultural institutions.