1 Filming like a State

Wartime and Films about Natural Resources

The association between NFB production priorities and the government was forged from the beginning. Acting on the recommendations of Scottish documentarian John Grierson, the federal government established the NFB to function as an information service to “help Canadians everywhere understand the problems and way of life of Canadians in other parts of the country.”6 Under Grierson, the NFB operated as the voice of the government, teaching, encouraging, and persuading Canadians to comply with its wishes. Documentary filmmaking was a “hammer” that “mold[ed] and pattern[ed] men’s actions,” explained the film commissioner in an interview during his tenure.7

Government influence on NFB filmmaking was the most salient during the Second World War. In 1940, the infant organization was recruited by the MNW to support the war effort. The NFB’s commitment to Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s total mobilization strategy was further entrenched in October 1941 when an order-in-council designated the minister of national war services as the overseer of the NFB. Over the next five years, the NFB dutifully churned out propaganda films and newsreels series, such as Canada Carries On and World in Action, each work commanding members of the public to do their part in helping the Allies win the war. Nonmilitary documentaries about food, health, and labour were also drafted into service for their country. Domestic life—how a person cooked, farmed, or saved money—was linked to the overall war effort. To support the individuals fighting overseas, it was vital that all Canadians be mindful about how they lived.8

Stylistically, NFB wartime films, in the words of one critic, were “direct to the point of vulgarity.”9 Grierson did not argue the point. In fact, he liked to brag to his colleagues back in England that NFB documentaries were not encumbered by the indignant moralism or rank patriotism that characterized UK movies.10 NFB films were straightforward, stripped of any cinematic splendour.11 And that was the point. The films might have been “vulgar,” but their simplicity made them perfect vehicles for conveying government ideas and values. NFB films spoke clearly and definitively for the state, telling Canadians what they “needed to know” and how to “do their best by Canada and themselves.”12

John Grierson’s belief that the NFB should broadcast government values shaped how it represented the environment. In wartime documentaries, nature was depicted primarily as an asset to be expropriated and used against the enemy.13 Coal Face Canada (1944) is a perfect example of how the NFB linked the exploitation of the country’s natural resources to the success of the war effort.14 In the film, director Robert Edmonds shows the importance of coal (and the combustible energy it provides) through the eyes of Bruce Adams, an army veteran who has returned home after being honourably discharged from military service. Like his father before him, Adams finds work in a coal mine. “Once a miner, always a miner,” he says glumly as he chips away in a dark tunnel.15 At first, Adams is unhappy with the work. The subterranean environment is stifling, and mining seems to be trivial compared with soldiering on the European battlefield. Over the course of the documentary, however, Adams learns to appreciate the strategic importance of his vocation. Although coal mining is not glamorous, it is nonetheless essential to the military success of the Allies. Adams and others harvest resources used to develop important weapons, such as highly explosive bombs and medical supplies. In this sense, coal miners were presented as indispensable “combatants.”

Coal Face Canada’s description of the environment as a resource vital to the needs of the nation (domestically and abroad) is typical of NFB films during this period.16 The Strategy of Metals (1941) and Battle for Oil (1942) similarly demonstrate how the exploitation of raw materials helps Canada fight overseas. In Food—Weapons of Conquest (1941), narrator Lorne Greene bellows that the western prairies are a vast resource that meets the “real food needs of fellow men.”17 Grain nourishes both the Canadian military and its allies, many of whom are experiencing food shortages. Hands for the Harvest (1943), a documentary produced for the APU, similarly contends that agrarian resources are crucial to winning the war. The film describes how farmers “of all ages persevere” during wartime. Despite wartime austerity measures, they plow their fields and harvest their crops without complaint because they know that the fruits of their labour will provide Canadian forces with the “energy” to keep fighting.18

Although the NFB supported the exploitation of the environment as part of the government’s total war strategy, it also recognized that valuable commodities were finite. Indeed, conservation was a central theme in wartime documentaries about resource extraction. Echoing the government’s new liberal mandate to actively manage social and environmental spaces, the NFB argued that state-led conservation tactics were essential to maintain a healthy surplus of the country’s timber, ore, wildlife, and grain. Conservation films produced during the Second World War typically followed a specific narrative formula. At the start of the documentary, the narrator addresses a problem (a resource shortage). Then the film briefly describes the origin of the issue (either human mismanagement or natural catastrophe). Finally, it concludes with a solution (government intervention, conservation measures, and the application of scientific principles).

Timber Front (1940), one of the first conservation documentaries produced by the NFB, exemplifies this approach. Sponsored by the Lands, Parks and Forests Branch, the film explains that timber resources were “vital” in the “struggle against the enemy” and that managing this commodity was “critical to the war effort.”19 The film beseeches lumber companies to protect the country’s forests by adhering to state conservation measures.

Timber Front begins with a folksy chronicle of logging in Canada. “So into the woods plunged the logger, the real North American pioneer, with a capacity for hard work . . . unsurpassed in history,” the narrator remarks as men in woolen plaid shirts march across the screen. Logging was not a job for the faint of heart, but it was honest work. With their axes, these brave men “helped build a nation.” But the days of the solitary bark skin are long gone, reports the narrator. New technologies and large-scale operations transformed the logging industry in substantial ways. Timber extraction in the middle of the twentieth century was easier and far more efficient than it had been in the nineteenth century. Loggers could clear massive strips of land in an astonishingly short period of time. In the past, the comparatively slower pace of timber extraction meant that the forest could still protect itself from harm. Young saplings were allowed to grow, and certain species were left alone. In this new era of logging, however, forests were cleared en masse. As a result, adjacent forests were more vulnerable to disease, fire, and abuse. By the 1940s, timber resources were rapidly disappearing. Although Canadians were the “owners of 800 million acres of forest land (one-third of the country’s geography),” that number was rapidly declining, the film states ominously.20

Technology made it easier to cut down trees, but the real culprit behind the depletion of forestry resources was the individual operating the machinery. Timber Front declares that human negligence was ultimately to blame for Canada’s exhausted timber stands. In a greedy attempt to maximize their yields, industrial logging operations “stripped” Canada’s “virgin forests bare.” The gendered language was intentional no doubt. Not only did it mirror the wartime propaganda of the government, but also it highlighted the so-called purity and vulnerability of feminine nature. This was rape on a national scale. On cue, the camera cuts to a hellish landscape of gnarled stumps and mud. The ravished countryside is reminiscent of the bombed-out front line in Central Europe. Timber men have left “a trail of scars—deserted mills, and houses, wasted logs, and stumps.” In the wake of this “slash and . . . waste,” devastating forest fires can erupt, destroying the remaining trees. “Over 46 million dollars are lost” in Porcupine, Ontario, alone, the narrator laments.21

The tone of Timber Front is melodramatic (and thus tonally consistent with most wartime pictures), but it accurately documents the problem of deforestation in early twentieth-century Canada. Advanced machinery, increased manpower, and a cut and get-out mentality in the forestry industry ravaged the country’s woodlands. The situation was serious enough in the 1920s that provincial governments across the country introduced new restrictions on logging activities. Despite nationwide attempts to regulate the resource extraction, loggers continued to mow down Canadian forests at an alarming rate. Anxiety about the health of the country’s timber resources peaked in the 1930s. The federal government tried to step in, but timber companies continued to chop down everything in sight.22 Legislators were helpless in stopping big companies from taking what they wanted. A series of devastating forest fires in the late 1930s did not help the already grim situation. According to a report by the Lands, Parks and Forests Branch published in 1939, tree loss was “considerably above the average of the last ten years.”23 Timber shortage remained a major concern for Canada in the early 1940s. Not only did unrestrained logging activities threaten the health of the country’s export economy, but also they imperilled its ability to support the growing needs of the military, which relied on the resource to build shelters, temporary bases, and other wartime infrastructure.

The situation is dire, Timber Front declares, but there is a way out of the mess. If Canadian forests are managed wisely, then they will recover. The narrator implores contemporary loggers to embrace a new land ethic of conservation and management and to adopt the sustainable logging methods prescribed by the Canadian government. Although this mindset might limit short-term profits, it will ensure the long-term viability of this national resource. The forests of Canada can be “an immense asset to the future” if they are harvested “scientifically and in a far-sighted manner,” Donald Roy Cameron, chief of the Dominion Forest Service, tells a class of young foresters. If the timber industry heeds these words, then the log drive will no longer represent “a slaughter but a carefully managed harvest.” There will be no more “scarred and desolate hillsides,” just “reserves of beauty, a shelter for wildlife, and a great reservoir of timber sufficient for the needs of the entire world.”24

Timber Front’s proclamation that wise-use management is a panacea for resource exhaustion and environmental ruin is emphatically high modern. The documentary fixates on the conservation strategies and technological and scientific remedies endorsed by the government. Armed with state-of-the-art instruments, experts from the government reduce forests to a ledger of measurements and equations based on their carrying capacity and overall health. The language used in the documentary is telling. “Planes equipped with automatic cameras” record every timber stand within their lines of sight, the film brags. “Propeller[s] and cameras click” as the planes survey the land in a “fraction of time.” It takes only a few minutes to capture and then simplify this vast and complex wilderness in black-and-white photographs. These images contain all the information that the foresters need. In the past, loggers and forestry men had to enter into the woods themselves to measure the girth and height of a tree. Not anymore. The photographs captured by the airplane are used to estimate board feet and dollars and cents. The narrator in Timber Front goes on to praise the “modern forester.” This college-educated individual is a “mathematician in an office,” and a pencil is his axe, the film informs viewers. Using trigonometry, he measures the “height of the tree’s shadow” in the photograph. With this information, he tells loggers which trees yield the highest economic value and which still need to grow.25

The NFB produced many other films about the war effort and the interdependence of natural resources, government conservation strategies, and industry after Timber Front was released. Subsequent documentaries focused on the issue of stabilizing economic and natural resources during the war. According to Grierson, it was paramount that the NFB continue to make films that “stimulated greater public effort towards stabilization.” In a letter to Donald Gordon, head of the Wartime Information Board (WIB), Grierson explained that the NFB would produce films that tackled the obstacles undermining government stabilization measures—namely, “the lack of cooperation from industry.” The problem was not that “control programs were inadequate,” Grierson explained. Quite the contrary—they were essential in ensuring that the country did not collapse economically or starve from resource shortages. But Grierson believed that industry compliance was key if economic and resource stabilization was to be achieved. Resource industries needed to observe government conservation measures and operate prudently with the well-being of the country in mind. The main purpose of such documentaries was to point out that “stabilization is the people’s program” and that “without their full understanding and cooperation it cannot achieve its maximum.”26

The most common NFB stabilization films were about agriculture and manufacturing. For many farmers trying to make a living in the 1940s, the Second World War created a number of challenges. The two most pressing problems that they faced during the war were labour shortages and equipment deficiencies. Young farmhands and able-bodied sons were shipped off to Europe to fight for the Allies. Help was not easy to find back on the farm. Hampered by a depleted workforce, farmers could ill afford to have their equipment break down. They needed their machines to replace the labour that they lost when their sons and hired hands left for the European battlefields. But breakdowns did occur. Unfortunately, manufacturers were preoccupied with supplying the military with weapons and other wartime equipment; they did not have the time or the resources to help local farmers fix their equipment. This was obviously bad news for the individual farmers and, more broadly, the entire agricultural industry. To make ends meet, farmers had to increase the price of their products. If prices continued to spike, however, many Canadians would be unable to afford goods like grain, beef, poultry, and dairy.

The Liberal government decided to step in to help alleviate some of the pressure and, more importantly, ward off inflation. Permitted to make unilateral decisions under the War Measures Act, the government began to institute wage-control measures, including controls that regulated the prices of certain agricultural products, such as grain and beef, as well as the costs of manufactured parts. The general idea was that these measures would grease the wheels of agricultural production and simultaneously limit inflation so Canadians could afford the price of food. For obvious reasons, price controls were not popular among rural folks. Most farmers needed top dollar for their goods if they were to survive the lean years of war.

Looking for an effective way to explain its price-control schemes, the federal government requested that the NFB create a series of educational films about how these measures functioned. The messages of the films were generally the same: although wage and price controls meant that farmers had to tighten their belts, the restrictions would stabilize Canadian agriculture and the economy in the long term. Farmers were therefore encouraged to do their part to help their country by sacrificing their immediate needs.

According to Need (1944) is a perfect example of the agricultural films that the NFB made during wartime. Sponsored by the WIB and the Wartime Prices and Trade Board (WPTB), the documentary introduces (and attempts to justify) the government’s price-control policy.27 The film begins by explaining that Canadian farmers rely on dependable equipment to harvest their crops on time. The problem is that war makes farming difficult. Farm machinery is expensive and time-consuming to fix or replace. Before the war, farmers could expect to have their equipment fixed or replaced in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost; this is not the case during wartime. Manufacturing plants are devoted to fashioning munitions and other military goods and thus unable to fulfill the demands of desperate farmers. According to the narrator, the WPTB has resolved this dilemma by establishing wage and price controls on the market.

To persuade farmers of the necessity of price controls, According to Need uses dramatic reenactments with stage actors. In the documentary’s most notable sequence, a middle-aged farmer complains to an employee of a manufacturing plant that he is unable to cultivate his fields because something on his tractor is broken. He sent the damaged part to the plant “months ago” but still has not received a replacement part. The farmer is perturbed—he needs the tractor to function so that he can continue to provide “food for the Allied armies, . . . food for the liberated people of Europe, . . . food for civilians here at home who are working harder and eating more than ever before.” A nationwide food shortage might well occur if that “part can’t be replaced by morning,” the farmer warns. The employee only shrugs his shoulders, irritating the farmer further. “That’s a lot to expect. That’s a moulded part, . . . practically made by hand, . . . [and] foundry help is scarce too. And many of those parts would require many such men,” the worker says. “Unfortunately,” he continues, the “men, materials, and machines needed for that part are also needed for war. . . . Don’t count too much on getting your part this morning. War production comes first.” The two men dig in their heels. “But food production is war production,” the farmer rebuts. “Isn’t anyone making sure of the machinery that makes food production possible?”28

Before the quarrel escalates, a government man from the Selective Service Committee saunters in. He is cool and confident, as in most NFB depictions of government officials in the 1940s and 1950s. Turning to the disgruntled farmer, he says calmly, “This year the production of farm implements and parts is going to be limited to exactly what farmers need and no more, and by needs the government means exactly the equipment they can’t possibly get along without.” In this new system, he explains, a farmer is required to give an inventory to the WPTB, which assesses his needs. Before the farmer can protest, the man explains that the government is committed to examining “every last pound of metal and man hour to see what it would take to meet [a] farmer’s needs.” The clarification seems to soothe the peeved farmer.29

The man from the Selective Service Committee then turns to the manufacturer and explains that the government has also implemented price ceilings on his machinery. Consequently, he cannot charge a farmer more for labour just because he requires a part right away. The worker responds gruffly, “I have heard damn near enough about these ceilings. Seems to me it’s just another way of you guys keeping the wages down.” The official reprimands the worker for his self-centredness: “Now look here. If we give you more money, through subsidies, to compensate for the ceiling, then we will have to give it to everyone else. Then our costs will go up, and we will have to charge the farmer more,” he admonishes. The worker does not understand why this is an issue. “Okay. Okay. You’ve got to charge him more. What’s the problem with that?” Patiently, the officer lectures the worker that without ceilings, “everybody else will be raising wages and prices.” In other words, the farmer will have to charge the manufacturer and all other Canadians more for his products. At that moment, both the farmer and the worker nod. They understand that they need to make sacrifices to help each other and, more importantly, to help the entire country remain productive during the lean years of war. “The need of one is recognized as the problem of all, and local affairs that have been transformed by the urgency of war into national matters are being dealt with on a national scale,” the narrator concludes.30

Fictional scenes like the one in According to Need were relatively unconventional for the NFB, which typically produced films that used stock footage, voice-of-God narration, and interviews with real subjects. The WIB was looking for a different way to reach its audience, however, and asked director Dallas Jones to use dramatic sequences to communicate its policies.31 The WIB believed that these kinds of scenes were effective in demonstrating the necessity of government measures as well as the benevolence of state institutions.32 The fictionalized moments in According to Need are hardly Oscarworthy, but they do succeed in presenting the government as both pleasant and discerning. From an educational standpoint, the reenactments also make the abstract concepts of scarcity, stabilization, and price controls intelligible to lay people. The logic of price controls and other wartime measures is plainly explained in these scenes—wage and price austerity in agriculture was necessary to stave off inflation and keep the war effort going.

The WIB was pleased with how According to Need turned out. In a memo to the NFB, the WIB requested that Jones use similar theatrical interludes in Mrs. Consumer Goes Shopping (1944) and Money on the Farm (1945). Grierson evidently saw some merit in letting his filmmakers use some creative licence to get the WIB’s message across. For Grierson, form mattered only if it prohibited filmmakers from speaking on behalf of the state. Fictionalized sequences, if used properly, could actually help amplify government messages about the exploitation and conservation of natural resources.

Despite its unique style, According to Need was not that different thematically from other NFB wartime pictures about the environment. In the film, Jones promotes an instrumentalist view of nature. Indirectly, he frames the agrarian landscape of the prairies as a valuable resource that serves the immediate needs of Canada during the war. Furthermore, According to Need upholds a government vision of the management of human and natural resources. Much like in Timber Front, Jones declares that Canadians must submit to state policies and accept government intervention in their lives. Although the policies established by the state require personal sacrifice, they are necessary for the overall health of the nation. In Timber Front, Frank Badgley and Stanley Hawes contend that government conservation programs are essential to safeguard the material needs of the country during wartime. According to Need is less obviously tied to resource management, but it also typifies the NFB’s loyalty to state-sponsored messages concerning the role of the government in regulating nature and society during wartime. In the latter documentary, state officials instruct farmers to comply with price controls and to maximize their agricultural productivity despite nationwide cutbacks.

“New Land of Promise!”

As the cinematic voice of the government, the NFB declared to viewers that conservation and economic stabilization were vital to the well-being of Canada’s resource economy. The upshot of submitting to the state’s resource management schemes was that Canada and its allies would survive the demanding Second World War without exhausting the natural reserves of the country. There was another benefit too. If Canadians adopted a wise-use approach to resource extraction, then nature would continue to be a wellspring of raw materials and commodities during peacetime. This cornucopia all but ensured that the nation would prosper in the postwar period.

Representations of Canada as a place of great natural wealth and therefore economic potential were evident in a number of NFB documentaries produced throughout the 1940s. Films about resource fecundity were still part of the NFB propaganda machine, yet their style was more ebullient than didactic. They did not dwell on issues of scarcity or price controls. Instead, they celebrated the nation’s abundant geography and its latent possibilities. Sanguine depictions of a country brimming with mighty rivers, dense forests, and vast prairies were meant to rouse in viewers a sense of national pride and to provide hope for the future. “It would be a poor information service . . . which kept harping on war to the exclusion of everything else,” John Grierson clarified in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As the commissioner noted, the NFB also produced works “about the everyday things of life, the values, the ideals which make life worth living.”33

Representations of natural abundance and national prosperity are particularly striking in Dallas Jones’s New Home in the West (1943), a historical documentary about the first Ukrainian settlers in Canada. According to the narrator of the film, the nineteenth-century pioneers were attracted to the “unsettled, bush-covered land of the Canadian West” precisely because of its potential as rich farmland. The “wilderness,” with all its natural advantages, provided the brave immigrants with a unique economic “opportunity” and a “new freedom,” the film proudly boasts.34

The lavishness of nature is a central motif in New Home in the West. Cinematographers R. Putnam and Brother Constantine photograph the western frontier with wide lenses and slow pans. The grasslands unfurl for miles into the horizon. The land is seemingly infinite. Megafauna, in contrast, are filmed in close-ups. Bison and elk lope across the screen, plump and seething with life. The lush cinematography in New Home in the West affirms that the land that the Ukrainian pioneers have selected as their home is a Garden of Eden.35

Although the NFB advertised New Home in the West as a historical film, its nation-building message was clearly aimed at contemporary audiences, especially new immigrants looking to establish themselves in a new country. The documentary asserted that Canadian nature gives settlers and newcomers a chance at the good life. Canada is a land of opportunity, the documentary unsubtly proclaims. Anyone willing to put in the work will be rewarded, for the land is replete with natural wealth. As the film testified, Ukrainian pioneers’ success in creating a permanent home on the prairies was made possible because of the country’s fecundity.

Canadian Wheat Story (1944) similarly presents Canada as a land of natural splendour and thus limitless possibilities. An introduction to wheat farming for high school students, the film describes Canada as a place “endowed by nature” and the prairies as “the world’s greatest wheat-producing area.” With the help of an animated map, the documentary depicts the geography of the western plains as a “gigantic bowl” of arable land stretching from central Manitoba to the foothills of Alberta and covering an area of 190,000 square miles. Millions of years of favourable environmental conditions have made Western Canada “one of the most productive regions in the world,” the narrator explains.36 Once again, the country’s natural resources are framed as a kind of national birthright. Its bountiful natural features have bequeathed to Canada an economic opportunity that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

The dual themes of labour and progress in early NFB films were closely tied to depictions of natural abundance. New Home in the West, for example, highlights the industry of the Ukrainian settlers and their ability to alter this teeming landscape. Although their task is difficult (taming the vast prairie wilderness is tough going), the pioneers slowly convert raw nature into productive space. Their persistence is admirable. Farmland needs to be cleared before winter arrives, so they work tirelessly morning to evening chopping down trees and clearing bushland. The assiduousness of the Ukrainians is eventually rewarded, and their crops flourish in the mineral-rich soil. With their fields in order, the immigrants are able to establish a permanent settlement on the prairies—“a new home in the West.”37

Canadian Wheat Story likewise claims that natural abundance is only part of the equation of national progress. The bounty of the land has to be developed if it is to reach its potential. Indeed, the central conceit of the documentary is that the fertile prairies must be continuously exploited in order to keep up with the demands of a hungry (and growing) nation. Director J. Stanley Moore spends most of the documentary focusing on mechanized wheat-farming operations in the West and scientists working in labs to create new and better strains of wheat. The film also investigates modern innovations in grading and inspection practices. According to the narrator, these activities “ensure the maintenance of high export standards.”38

The thesis that labour and technology are the keys to unlocking the nation’s potential is also evident in the wartime picture Battle of the Harvests (1942). The documentary, written, directed, and produced by NFB veteran Stanley Jackson, explains that western farmers help establish “new standards of health for the future.” Taking advantage of the land’s rich topography, the farmers lay “the foundation of a nation permanently strong of body and will.” Because of their hard work, Canada is a place “where the blessings of food, health, and space are the right of every man.”39

Documentaries that represented Canada as a place of natural plenitude and untapped economic potential proffered a mechanistic view of the environment. Nature was portrayed as a passive object that could be controlled or overcome. (The language of ecology and dynamic ecosystems had not yet entered the vocabulary of NFB cinema.) Battle of the Harvests and other works emphasized the pliability of nature and the ability of Canadian industry to transform wild environments into resource landscapes. The films typically begin with a series of shots of untouched wilderness: forests, mountains, rivers, or prairies. Then they shift their attention to the people and institutions that wrestle with and inevitably conquer them. In Look to the North (1944), images of oil refineries, bulldozers, and airplanes are accompanied by jubilant commentary on the taming of raw nature. Even in the remotest parts of the Canadian North, nature has been dominated; its oil, minerals, and timber flow freely throughout the country because of the technological ingenuity of Canadian engineers, the film declares.40

The tropes of natural abundance, industrial exploitation, and national progress were also evident in NFB works produced after the Second World War. Documentaries such as Red Runs the Fraser (1949), Land in Trust (1949), Look to the Forest (1950), Trees Are a Crop (1950), and Water for Prairies (1950) continued to promote the government’s belief that the development of Canada’s frontier spaces was integral to propelling the nation to new economic and social heights. Representations of schools of salmon, golden wheat fields, and bustling timber yards declared to viewers that Canada, to quote a line from the 1949 documentary Land in Trust, was a “new land of promise!”41

These films, most of which were sponsored by government departments, reflect the optimism of the postwar age. Humans are depicted as powerful agents of change, first occupying and then modifying the natural world to suit their needs. Through state-sponsored science, technology, and expert knowledge, subjects in NFB documentaries reshape nature so that it can produce ample yields. Red Runs the Fraser, an exciting film about the salmon run in British Columbia, epitomizes NFB enthusiasm about resource development. In the film, the Fraser River is described as a “highway” that continuously supplies the country with protein-rich salmon. The fish are “quickly brought in, scaled, and cleaned (one every second), put in cans, sealed, and then sent to distributors,” the narrator exclaims.42 (It takes about two minutes to package the fish.) The Fraser River and the canning facilities dotting its shores exist as one continuous assembly line—nature and technology work together to feed Canadians.

Red Runs the Fraser goes on to show how industrial efficiency and innovative technology ensure that this productive relationship is maintained. The salmon run is fraught with danger, the film informs viewers. The desperate, gasping sockeye have a difficult time making it back to their spawning grounds and are therefore not able to reproduce at a sustainable rate. They head upstream, dodging anglers, predators, and Hell’s Gate, a formidable gorge in the heart of the Fraser River. To protect the salmon from this deadly gauntlet, scientists and fishery experts from British Columbia and Washington investigate ways to make the passage through Hell’s Gate easier. According to the narrator, the scientists develop “comprehensive plans,” “tagging methods,” and “experimental hatcheries” to solve the problem. After all the data has been compiled, engineers design a “state-of-the-art” system that will shield the sockeye from the jagged rocks and rushing water. They create fish ladders and elevators to lift the breeding salmon safely across the raging torrent of Hell’s Gate. The engineering feat, the film declares, saves the salmon and, by extension, the lucrative fishing industry.43

Representations of Canada as a place of natural abundance “unleashed through Euro-Canadian technological expertise,” to quote historian Carol Payne, are closely related to another theme of early NFB filmmaking: the celebration of territorial expansion.44 NFB documentaries about natural resources repeatedly suggest that frontier geographies are ready to be exploited. They celebrate the institutions that colonize remote environs and reshape them in ways that support the development of Canada as a whole. Territorial expansion was a key element of nation-building efforts, and those who participated in this endeavour embodied what it meant to be truly Canadian.

The discourses of territorial expansion and natural resource exploitation in Canada’s frontiers usually suggest that anyone who resisted these projects were quaint, obsolete, or even primitive. Indeed, Indigenous peoples were depicted in early NFB documentaries as an incarnation of the wild and lusty frontier. Their presence, though fascinating in a kind of exotic way, reaffirmed to viewers that the Canadian interior was an unruly space. Ironically, the presence of Indigenous peoples in NFB films was also used to support the claim that much of the resource hinterland was empty and untapped. First Nations groups were represented as being parts of nature, and as a result, their existence did not dispute the declaration that the land in the North and the West were available for exploitation. This flawed depiction of Indigenous peoples was rooted in racist discourses about the social and political inferiority of nonwhites and obfuscated the reality that Indigenous peoples had used and sustained the resources of the lands that NFB filmmakers claimed were vacant. This portrayal was not necessarily intentional, for NFB documentarians were products of their times and the cultural narratives that informed their worldviews. Nevertheless, they were complicit in reproducing a colonizing discourse about white, Anglo-Canadian power. By misrepresenting the lives of Indigenous peoples as primeval and unsophisticated, the NFB brushed away the bloody history of colonization and created a sanitized depiction of national identity founded upon natural fecundity, technological prowess, and Anglo superiority.

Agricultural Documentaries, the Welfare State, and the Remaking of Nature

During the Second World War, the NFB had three main objectives: to galvanize public support for the war, to boost Canadian morale during a period of economic retrenchment, and to provide audiences with timely information on both global and domestic events. Toward the end of the war, the NFB’s usefulness as a government agency was less clear. What purpose did this propaganda machine serve during peacetime? What did films “in the national interest” mean for a country not under duress? For certain members of Parliament, the NFB’s utility in postwar Canada was ambiguous. Some even went so far as to suggest that the NFB was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars.

It appeared that the NFB was on the verge of collapse. Before matters could get worse, the indefatigable John Grierson came to the defence of the NFB by reestablishing its role as the voice of the Canadian government. The commissioner outlined his vision for the NFB after the war. According to Grierson, the NFB would transition from producing wartime propaganda to “providing [the country with] a supplementary system of national education.”45 Reaction to his proposal was mixed at first. Disapproval from the Conservative Party and budget cuts dampened the Liberal Party’s enthusiasm for the postwar success of the NFB. Although opposition to it persisted through the early 1950s, Grierson’s concept gained traction within the government. The commissioner’s mission to support government educational initiatives conveniently aligned with the aims of the emerging welfare state. In the mid-1940s, the Liberal government had introduced a range of social policy measures related to Indigenous affairs, housing, personal hygiene, and unemployment. What better way to support (and in some cases expand) these initiatives than through a government-operated cinema? Under the governance of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Supply (and later the Ministry of Natural Resources), the NFB redirected its filmmaking to promote government programs and social policies in the postwar period.

NFB films about the environment were part of this larger strategy. Like other sponsored works produced during this period, documentaries about the natural world supported the government’s vision to reform social and environmental spaces through education and legislation. Agricultural films in particular documented the state’s efforts to support local farmers and help them make the land more productive. According to these films, social and agricultural spaces would improve considerably if farmers accepted the wisdom of state expertise. They would no longer be exposed to the vagaries of climate, markets, or bad luck. A boost in efficiency and economic productivity would not only benefit individual farmers but also strengthen the nation.

The filmmaker most responsible for this representation of Canadian agriculture was Evelyn Cherry, head of the APU and one of the first female filmmakers in NFB history. Throughout her career, Cherry urged farmers to revolutionize how they managed the land. According to the young director, a vibrant agricultural industry could be achieved only if farmers transitioned from their old methods of farming to new, state-authorized techniques and conservation schemes.

Cherry was the perfect ambassador in many ways for the government’s welfare state initiatives on farming. Born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in 1906, she grew up in the heart of farm country. Most of the townsfolk in Yorkton were immigrant farmers who had settled in the area in the 1880s. As a child, she watched her neighbours slog it out trying to make a living on the prairies. In the spring of 1929, Cherry graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism. She returned to Saskatchewan to work as a journalist for the Regina Leader-Post just before the stock market crashed. The farmers whom she knew as a child were still labouring against weeds and hungry pests. But now they were also up against a devastating recession and one of the worst droughts in Canadian history.46 Some persevered, but many did not. The Great Depression and subsequent “dust bowl” hit the prairies hard and left a mark on Cherry, influencing both her filmmaking interests and her belief in the necessity of environmental and social reforms.

In the spring of 1931, Cherry left the prairies and went to England to work as a documentary filmmaker with John Grierson at the General Post Office (GPO). She quickly learned nonfictional filmmaking and, as one colleague noted admiringly, could dismantle and repair movie cameras “as well as any mechanic.”47 Before the Second World War broke out, Cherry quit the GPO and headed back to Saskatchewan to work as an independent filmmaker. Evelyn and her husband, Lawrence Cherry, established a small production company in the province, mostly making films about life on the prairies. In 1940, she produced two short documentaries for the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool: By Their Own Strength, which traces the history of wheat farming in the West, and New Horizons, a silent film that documents immigrant farmers and their struggles to make a living on the prairies. The films were seen by only a handful of individuals, farmers mostly, but they were remarkable works of nonfictional cinema. Without relying on narration, New Horizons presented the vivid story of environmental change in the Canadian West. Using simple but evocative cinematography, Cherry showed how nature shaped human settlement. She also demonstrated to viewers how centralized organizations such as the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool helped farmers overcome ecological problems such as drought.

In 1941, the young filmmaker accepted an invitation from Grierson to work for the NFB. Her first year at the NFB was busy. Cherry wrote, directed, and produced several films about the relationship between ordinary citizens and geography. As she immersed herself in the work, she began to think more about the social role of documentary filmmaking. Influenced by her mentor, Grierson, Cherry saw her documentaries as a way to make Canada a better place to live. “I have only seen cinema for what it can do to cause more excitement in education . . . [and] to inspire people to greater efforts to make the country a better place,” she explained in an interview in 1975.48 Her faith in the social potential of cinema meshed perfectly with the NFB’s larger goal to support the welfare state through the filmmaking that educated and unified the country.

After Cherry wrote and produced two films for the World in Action series, The Main Dish (1943) and Coupon Value (1943), Grierson approached her to see if she would supervise the APU. She accepted the position and immediately began developing films that “reveal[ed] the unique problems confronting farmers in the modern world.”49 With the support of the DOA, Cherry made a series of films that taught farmers how to implement government solutions into their agricultural practices. It is not hard to imagine farmers scoffing at this young, confident woman with her modern answers to their age-old problems. But Cherry slowly won her viewers over by speaking their language and by acknowledging their unique concerns. Her films eventually became some of the most loved and widely viewed works in NFB history.

Cherry’s first film with the APU was Windbreaks on the Prairies (1943). The documentary encapsulates the welfare state ethos of NFB works in this period. Vividly shot in colour, Windbreaks on the Prairies examines the problem of soil sterility, an issue especially germane to western farmers in the 1940s.50 In the film, Cherry investigates the history of drought on the prairies and provides a remedial solution to damaged landscapes and lives. The message is simple: Canadian farmers need to work alongside government experts if they want to restore the land to fertility.

Cherry chose to make a film about soil aridity because it was one of the biggest factors in the collapse of farming communities in the West. Canadian agriculturalists were still reeling from the impact of the Great Depression. Confronted with a sharp drop in commodity prices and environmental calamities such as drought and soil erosion, farmers were hit hard in the 1930s. At first, they could not sell their products. Then they were unable to grow them. Many farmers defaulted on their loans and went bankrupt. Cherry believed that agriculture on the prairies could be restored if people understood the human origins of the issue and learned about how government intervention could help them recover.

Windbreaks on the Prairies begins with an idyllic montage of farmers harvesting grain. As the images flicker by, the narrator, Thomas Tweed, waxes nostalgic about Western Canada at the turn of the century: “On wheat, the West was built; on wheat, the East flourished.”51 However, as cultivation technology improved and farmers applied more effective ways to clear the land, the rich soil of the prairies became exposed to harsh wind and relentless sunlight. The film cuts to a sequence of environmental ruin. Dust whirls across cracked earth. Wind rips through abandoned shanties. Because of their recklessness, the film declares, Canadian farmers are vulnerable to the full wrath of nature.

The investigation of soil aridity in Windbreaks on the Prairies was exceptional for its time. Most commentators claimed that soil erosion was merely the result of aberrant weather. But Cherry had a different view: desiccation of the soil had a human origin. Overzealous farmers and their steel plows laid waste to this once fertile environment.52 In their vigorous efforts to break the ground, farmers unwittingly destroyed its buffer against the strong prairie wind, and the farmland became helpless to protect itself.

The documentary does not linger on the mistakes of the past, however, but encourages farmers to adopt new practices. With some hard work and a little bit of help from the state, farmers could restore the land to its original glory. In his baritone voice, Tweed exclaims that scientists and agricultural experts employed by the federal government assist farmers by “correct[ing] some of the man-made mistakes of the past.”53 A shot of farmers digging irrigation channels alongside government employees underscores the importance of cooperation between the individual and the state. (It is a picture of national harmony that by today’s standards is overly earnest.) Together they reorder the environment and lay the foundation for a healthier agricultural industry.

The role of the government in the lives of farmers is critical to understanding environmental films such as Windbreaks on the Prairies. The documentary was born from a larger welfare state initiative to clarify the role of the government in the lives of ordinary Canadians. Although the onus is on farmers to change their practices, the government is a central character in the restoration of the environment. The film explains that agricultural improvement is heavily financed by government initiatives such as the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act. The film also describes how the DOA’s experimental arboreal station at Indian Head, Saskatchewan, assists farmers by supplying them with thousands of trees at very little cost. According to the scientists at Indian Head, these trees create a barrier against wind and thus protect the rich topsoil from eroding. “The government station is an inspiration to many farm people,” the narrator claims.54

Although Windbreaks on the Prairies brims with iconic images and poetic landscapes, its primary aim was to educate viewers. On this ground, it was successful. Upon its release (and subsequent circulation in rural circuits and film councils), a number of people praised its presentation of how the government was working to improve the lives of farmers. Allan Beaven, an officer with the Canadian Forestry Association, for example, proclaimed in a letter to John Grierson that the documentary would “most certainly” assist farmers “trying to get back on their feet.” “At no time in the past has the need been greater for Western farm stability and improvement in farm living conditions, so the advent of such a film will indeed be timely,” he wrote. Beaven had big plans for the film. “Windbreaks will play a big part in our educational campaign, and will be shown to around 65,000 prairie people each year and as it takes us some five years to cover every point on the plains, over 300,000 people will have the opportunity of seeing it during this period on the tree planting lecture car,” he reported.55

Cherry continued to make documentaries that supported government intervention in Canadian agricultural practices through the middle part of the 1940s. In addition to promoting state-directed conservation strategies, she made sponsored films that instructed farmers on how to implement modern husbandry techniques and business strategies.56 In Five Steps to Better Farm Living (1945), for instance, Cherry convinces farmers that their fields would become more profitable if they “studied the information put out by both provincial and dominion Departments of Agriculture.”57

Five Steps was part of a larger government program to improve agricultural conditions across the country. Just before the film was released, the federal government established the Agricultural Prices Support Board and the Farm Improvement Loans Act to revive agriculture in Canada. In fact, Cherry’s documentary was an adaptation of a comprehensive government study authored by H. R. Hare, an agricultural economist working for the Dominion Department of Labour. A year before the film was released, he wrote a short pamphlet titled Little Chats on Farm Management for the Economics Division of the Dominion Department of Agriculture. Hare observed that Canadian farmers across the country made uninformed financial decisions that “resulted in the accumulation of indebtedness.”58 He argued that this “failure” occurred because farmers did not grasp basic economic principles and were “prejudiced against modern agricultural methods.”59 If agriculture was to improve, then “the old mental plan” of farm operators “must be superseded by one more carefully thought out and written,” Hare concluded.60

His technocratic solution to farming figures prominently in Cherry’s documentary. Elaborating the recommendations that Hare makes in Little Chats, Five Steps explains that Canadian farmers can avoid loan defaults and miserable crop yields if they improve their capital investments, purchase victory bonds, and replace outdated machinery. The last point was especially important. Using modern equipment and electrical technology was essential if farmers wanted to enhance their productivity and improve their quality of life. To illustrate this point, Cherry shows the benefits of owning a gas-powered tractor. The results are impressive; large acres are plowed in hours, not days.

The tractor is the central motif throughout the documentary. It not only connects farmers with the recommendations of the government but also represents a modern and productive farming life. In the margins of the script for Five Steps, Cherry wrote that the tractor was a key element of the film because it was “symbolic of freedom from drudgery, symbolic of plenty, and symbolic of a happy life.” The machine “can be used to free man instead of enslave him.”61 Cherry’s awareness of the symbolic power of the tractor was astute. Advances in mechanized farming in the 1930s and 1940s had a tremendous effect on agriculture in Canada. No other piece of technology reshaped the Canadian agricultural landscape more than the tractor. It led to increases in productivity and reduced the need for itinerant labourers. With little help, a farmer could quickly convert crops into revenues. Furthermore, the speed with which the tractor operated allowed agriculturalists to devote more time to planting and growing new crops.62 As Cherry summarizes in Five Steps, tractors save farmers time, energy, and money because of their speed advantage over horse-drawn plows. Proponents of the tractor saw this type of technology as a way to “spawn ecological harmony, economic prosperity, and freedom from nature’s constraints,” to borrow historian Joshua Nygren’s words.63 In short, technology ensured not only agricultural success but also humanity’s victory over an adverse landscape, which for Cherry had hitherto prohibited rural Canadians from experiencing the good life.

Five Steps was a departure in style and form for Cherry. Her pre-NFB documentaries about rural Canada were notable for their visual creativity and political complexity. Even Windbreaks on the Prairies is remembered for its poetic cinematography and artistic editing techniques, which abridged the history of the dust bowl in a span of seconds. Five Steps is simpler and more straightforward. It looks more like an industry training video than a documentary film for a general audience. After she completed it, Cherry admitted to her husband, Lawrence, that she was tired of the DOA’s impetus to produce “educational and not sociological films.”64

Although the cinematic possibilities of making APU documentaries such as Five Steps were limited, Cherry committed herself to using films to help farmers across the country. If that meant making dry educational works, then so be it. A retired Cherry conceded in 1975 that the NFB’s government-sponsored filmmaking program was the best way to reach far-flung populations and draw them into mainstream Canadian culture. “The work I was doing was valuable and precious in helping to strengthen unity across the land,” she explained.65 In an industry that often catered to urban elites, her films were iconoclastic—she went to the towns and villages of middle-of-nowhere Canada to help farmers participate in the larger discourse of nationhood.

While Five Steps is primarily didactic, Cherry’s proficiency as a documentary filmmaker still shines through. In the film, Cherry employs a variety of advanced narrative and aesthetic strategies to persuade audiences of the benefits of agricultural modernization. A Cherry film is instantly recognizable—each of her works contains what the filmmaker liked to call “nameless archetypes.” According to her, she used nonspecific subjects, plain in both appearance and social standing, because doing so helped audiences identify with the characters and situations. Cherry was intentional about this particular strategy. If the story rang true, then spectators were more likely to embrace the government ideas presented in the film.

Cherry went to great lengths to ensure that her subjects were ordinary (and thus relatable) in Five Steps. During production, she visited farms in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to find an “unexceptional” subject. She eventually settled on a middle-aged cultivator from rural Alberta. He is “very typical,” Cherry wrote to her cinematographer, “about 40 to 50, an intelligent man with character in his face.” “His wife,” she continued, “is a nice looking woman, tall and well-built with an attractive smile and nice eyes.” Their children were also handsome in that bland way. “The son is almost nineteen, a tall boy . . . who intends to stay on the farm and is intelligent,” and the daughter was “17 or 18, tall and pretty, and she can really cook.”66 For Cherry, they were the ideal subjects for her film. They could have been plucked from anywhere in Canada. They were wholly unremarkable and therefore perfect for projecting her ideas about the role of the individual in the larger nation.

Cherry’s use of nameless archetypes to connect audiences with the core themes of the film was effective. According to sentiments recorded in film council evaluations, audiences liked her documentaries precisely because they saw themselves in the scenarios projected onscreen. Viewers of Farm Electrification (1946), for example, lauded the director’s ability to capture “the essence of rural life in Canada.” Land in Trust (1949), a documentary about soil erosion, also “received very positive comment[s]” for its depiction of agricultural society.67 F. F. Morwick, a professor in the Soils Department at the University of Guelph, exclaimed that the film was “timely and important” and a “competent presentation of a national topic.”68 Local audiences in New Brunswick were similarly enamoured with Cherry’s realistic portrayal of a father and son struggling on the family farm.69

Partly, audiences saw themselves in the documentaries that Cherry made because of their generic backgrounds. Like the characters, the settings of her films were indistinct and thus remarkably prosaic. Her agricultural landscapes often look like matte paintings or composites of ordinary farms stitched together into a single frame. Cherry used certain compositional techniques and visual tropes favoured by contemporary agricultural photographers to create a kind of mythical Canadian homestead. The farming landscapes in Windbreaks on the Prairies, Five Steps, and Soils for Tomorrow (1945) are curiously uniform in their presentation. There are no distinguishing features or topographical landmarks within the frame to divulge the location of the scene or the figures toiling in the distance. The image is always the same: a small farm (silo, house, and barn) positioned against a flat horizon of corn, wheat, or other monocrops. If it were not for the clouds drifting across the frame, the viewer would think the image to be a photograph.

The simple and lonely arrangement of Cherry’s agricultural landscapes conveys two major ideas: first, that rural Canada is truly isolated and therefore vulnerable to the capriciousness of nature, and second, that Canada’s agricultural frontier is more or less the same across the country. Cherry limned the diversity of regionalization, subsuming local environments within an ecologically reductive “national” farming landscape. Her representation of agriculture as unexceptional also reflected a state way of seeing farming environments in midcentury Canada. By obscuring specific references to place, Cherry represented farming geographies as a detached space whose primary purpose was to produce food and generate wealth. In this sense, all agricultural landscapes were essentially the same. They are conspicuously absent of ecological diversity or social variety. Imagining Canadian farms in this way mirrors the vision of state planners, who used grids and charts to foreground the lucrative aspects of an otherwise complex and messy reality in Western Canada.

The decision to use nonspecific locales in her films served a more direct political function as well. By ignoring variations in soil quality, climate, and a farm’s distance from market, Cherry suggested that Canadian agriculture was homogeneous and therefore equally ripe for large-scale transformation. Because farms were more or less the same across the country, government solutions to agricultural problems could be administered everywhere.

Furthermore, since there were very few references to specific locations, Cherry’s documentaries could be viewed virtually anywhere in the country. Audiences did not need to stretch their imaginations. As far as the audience knew, the film could have been shot in their own town. The universal aesthetic of Cherry’s cinematography made these NFB films especially valuable to state branches that planned on showing the films across the country, such as the DOA. Distribution was essential to the government’s national educational strategy, for it helped integrate rural populations into mainstream Canada.70 Film circuits and councils provided a means by which the state could talk to citizens and teach them about the role of the government in their lives.

The NFB circulated its educational films in a variety of ways. Between 1942 and 1946, it ran citizenship film forums in rural schools, churches, community centres, and factories. Projectionists, known as field men, drove around the country with film equipment and electric generators. Along the way, they would set up shop and show the NFB film reels to the locals. After the war, the itinerant field operatives were replaced with newly formed local film councils, which showed NFB films on a more constant basis and in a variety of public spaces. These viewings were welcomed by local communities who were eager to see what was happening in the rest of the nation. Donald Buchanan, an art historian and the founder of the National Film Society of Canada, observed in a contemporary article about the significance of these film councils that audiences “turned out in crowds for the showings.” The rural circuits and film councils were “a gadfly to social discussion” and helped rural populations “feel connected” to the rest of the country.71

This “mobile cinema” practice aided the government’s nation-building efforts and welfare state goals to unite the country by disseminating its agriculturally modern message to rural parts of the country. To help stimulate audience support, government officials directly monitored public reception at local screenings and in some cases even gave talks after the films were shown. In film forums in which Cherry’s documentaries were exhibited, officials from the DOA facilitated conversations with the audiences about the importance of incorporating modern solutions to their agricultural problems. After a film concluded, the officials would stand up and talk practically about how to implement farm electrification and apply modern husbandry strategies.

Evelyn Cherry was thus a kind of proxy for state values and education. She promoted the ecological imagination of the welfare state by presenting the government as a benevolent institution that helped Canadians maximize the efficiency of nature. Ironically, Cherry left the NFB because of accusations that she was a communist and that her depiction of ordinary farmers was subversive. Her depictions of working-class Canadians apparently did not sit well with many in Parliament, and she went back to making documentaries under her own production company in the early 1950s.

Science and Agricultural Improvement

There was a striking thematic continuity in nature documentaries produced from 1939 to 1949. Timber Front, Windbreaks on the Prairies, and Five Steps represented nature from a state perspective in which the environment was figured as a passive object to be exploited, controlled, and managed by government experts. This way of seeing the environment persisted into the middle of the century. In the 1950s, NFB documentaries were similarly characterized by their high modern ideology, specifically the notion that nature could be made to serve the needs of the growing nation through technology and resource management practices. Documentaries in the 1950s, however, introduced a slightly different twist to this narrative: nature could be improved through the discipline of state-sponsored science.72 Let’s Look at Water (1947) shows scientists in lab coats purifying contaminated rivers in rural and urban communities across the country, saving lives in the process. Other documentaries—such as Trees Are a Crop (1950), Look to the Forest (1950), The World at Your Feet (1953), and Chemical Conquest (1956)—contend that laboratory research and the formulation of chemical pesticides are essential for maximizing yields and maintaining healthy and productive agricultural activities. Equipped with scientific knowledge and technologies developed by university-educated men, the Canadian farmer can expect to reorder his farm in a way that supports long-term agricultural success.

The NFB’s confidence in the miracles of agricultural science in the 1950s paralleled the Canadian government’s “blind faith in science’s ability to solve the world’s problems.”73 As Clinton Evans observes, science was conceived by the state as a powerful tool to help industry convert the postwar Canadian environment into a veritable breadbasket of staple commodities. The DOA was especially enthusiastic that scientific solutions would help farmers overcome common problems of inefficiency and waste.

One of the most vocal proponents of state-sponsored science in agriculture at the NFB was Larry Gosnell, a graduate of the Ontario Agricultural College at the University of Guelph. In his first film, The World at Your Feet, the narrator explains that “there is a world within a world in the earth at our feet, a world of living things where the surge of life wrought by nature’s silent magic brings forth the fruit that sustains our life.” In order to unlock the full potential of this “silent magic,” Canadian farmers need to learn the “intimate and sympathetic knowledge of the ways of nature.” Only then can they “reap its continuing abundance.”74

The World at Your Feet was intended for two kinds of viewers: high school students and cultivators interested in learning more about the science behind agriculture. The film shows how healthy soils maintain the “harmonious balance” of photosynthesis and germination in plants.75 Despite its educational goals, it was one of the more innovative films developed by the NFB in the 1950s. Gosnell used an assortment of cinematic techniques to present the earth as a thriving community of microscopic organisms. Using highly magnifying cameras in a process that he termed cinephotomicrography, Gosnell takes audiences below ground on “an intimate tour of the circulatory systems of root hairs and leaves, and into the mysteries of the microscopic world in the soil where millions of minute living things scurry continuously.”76 Tiny organisms flit across the screen as they decompose organic matter, thus revealing their secret purpose to audiences for the first time. According to the narrator, the process unfolding onscreen helps the soil maintain a healthy supply of calcium, magnesium, and potassium. The topsoil is now primed to support life, including the seeds planted by the farmer. To illustrate the result of this process, Gosnell uses time-lapse photography of roots shooting up through the fertile earth and growing to maturity in a matter of seconds.

Like Cherry’s films, The World at Your Feet was produced as part of a larger government strategy to shape agricultural attitudes and, more specifically, modernize farming landscapes in Canada. Sponsored by the DOA, the documentary urges farmers to familiarize themselves with the latest trends in the science of cultivation. The DOA did not just fund the project; it also actively participated in the production and distribution of the film. Dr. P. O. Ripley, chief of the Field Husbandry Division, Experimental Farms Branch, advised Gosnell on the set of the documentary, thus ensuring that it supported the scientific opinions of the DOA. After the film was completed, the department promoted it to the Canadian public. In a memo to his staff, Deputy Minister James Gordon Taggart explained that every employee “must see and promote the film” because it “tells a story that should be told as widely as possible . . . the story of organic soil, of soil care and structure and how man by knowing and co-operating with the laws of nature, can make soil produce abundantly.”77 He also advised his employees to help distributors and theatre managers promote the film by handing out pamphlets to members of the public.

Gosnell’s next documentary, Chemical Conquest, elaborated an idea first explored in The World at Your Feet: the importance of science in improving Canadian agriculture. Like its predecessor, Chemical Conquest exhibits an unwavering confidence in high modern solutions to improve nature. As the narrator states, “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed, and to be obeyed she must be understood.” Once a farmer understands the environment, he will be able to “work closer in harmony with those natural forces which provide him with his sustenance.”78 Gosnell suggests that good farming begins not in the soil but in a laboratory. It is in these chemical labs, far away from a planter’s field, where the most important developments in horticulture occur. Scientists in laboratories such as the DOA’s Science Service Laboratory (located at the University of Western Ontario) devise newer and more effective pesticides and herbicides to help farmers combat the scourge of insects, diseases, and weeds that threaten crops across the country.

Gosnell first became interested in the subject of pesticides when he read a Fortune article entitled “Farming’s Chemical Age.” In the article, chemical engineer Eric Hodgins asserted that chemicals were more important to the “future of American agriculture than the shift from horses and mules to tractor power.”79 Hodgins argued that new technology allowed farmers to produce and harvest crops on an unprecedented scale. Yet there was a price to pay for this efficiency: adopting modern techniques and intensifying crop production created the perfect environment for pests.80 He claimed that pesticides allowed farmers to maintain monoculture crops by eradicating pests. As a result, a farmer could harvest greater yields per acre, decrease his man-hours, and cut production costs. Gosnell was intrigued by Hodgins’s thesis.

In the film, Gosnell frames insects and fungi as menaces that need to be exterminated. In a style suggestive of wartime propaganda, which frequently vilified the Germans and Japanese as subhuman “insects,” Chemical Conquest demonizes pests as “foreign invaders” bent on destroying Canadian productivity.81 The development of pesticides, Gosnell asserts, is the necessary weapon in this “war” against “intruders.” Ominous music plays as a fat worm munches on a tobacco plant in what the narrator describes as “an orgy of leaf feasting.” In a style similar to that of the Canada in Action wartime newsreels, the narrator demands that farmers “take back” their crops from these killer pests. The agricultural health of the nation is at stake. Armed with chemicals such as 2,4-D, described as weapons that “shift the balance back in the farmer’s favour,” farmers can reclaim their soil.82

Although Chemical Conquest vaunts the capacity of science and technology to improve nature, an examination of the production history of the documentary reveals that Gosnell was more ambivalent about pesticides than the film lets on. In his production notes, he admitted that the issues that farmers faced (soil erosion, pestilence, etc.) were the symptoms of a larger problem. “Nature hasn’t made any special arrangement to take the ways of man into account,” he wrote.83 Like Hodgins, Gosnell believed that the agricultural sector’s shift toward specialized monoculture crops disrupted “the inherent balance in nature.” He believed that modifying the environment to accommodate these changes was a dangerous game indeed. The filmmaker was also unconvinced that pesticides would restore the balance of nature. As he pointed out in his research, scientists had not adequately solved the problem of insect immunity. Although DDT, made available commercially in 1945, was successful at first, insects eventually developed resistance to it.84 Gosnell also suggested that pesticides such as DDT killed organisms vital to the health of local ecosystems. Science had yet to create a pesticide that left bees and butterflies unharmed, the filmmaker lamented in his notes for the film.85

Furthermore, Gosnell was troubled about the state of agricultural research and development in Canada, which he described as a “complex and expensive race.” Although he supported what he saw as the noble efforts of the chemical industry to solve the troubles of the farmer, he was skeptical of the rapidity with which it introduced new pesticides. “Little is known of the mechanism of their action,” Gosnell admitted privately. The problem for him was that chemical companies were releasing potent compounds whose “mode of actions is not fully understood,” he wrote. “As long as the federal laws with respect to toxicity, effectiveness, [and] residual character are complied with, no one will stop the distribution of a given chemical.”86

Chemical Conquest makes only passing reference to some of his misgivings about pesticide use, likely because Gosnell did not want to antagonize the sponsor of the documentary, the DOA. The narrator does warn that “with the application of pesticides to insects, soil, and plants, we are bringing some of the most powerful chemicals produced by modern technology in contact with biological forces which we do not fully understand. The results could well be disastrous.” This is the only cautious remark in an otherwise enthusiastic and positive film about agricultural science. The narrator quickly assures viewers after this statement that state-funded research is working hard to learn about the effects of pesticides.87

Although the documentary does not investigate the relationship between pesticide use and ecological collapse, Gosnell’s personal ambivalence about this scientific solution demonstrated the gap that sometimes existed between individual views and state narratives. Not every filmmaker uniformly supported the high modern views of the state or its technological solutions to agricultural problems. As we will see in chapter 3, Gosnell would challenge more directly the hegemony of high modern agricultural solutions by examining the hazards to human health arising from pesticide residues on food products.

The NFB was tasked with presenting a vision of Canada that aligned with state ideology. This mandate inflected the kinds of films that it made about nature. Canadian audiences were exposed early on in NFB cinema to a progressive narrative about humans remaking their environment. Concomitantly, nature was presented as a productive and state-managed space—an essential component of the country’s economic future. In the early 1940s, NFB wartime films claimed that natural resources were essential for Allied victory. As such, they needed to be conserved and monitored by state institutions. The documentaries produced during the Second World War were also utilitarian in their representations of nature. They suggested that Canada’s abundant resources would sustain the nation during reconstruction. Depictions of healthy crops, ripe fruit, and robust forest stands affirmed the nation-building myth that the country had plenty of raw commodities and that this plenitude would stimulate economic growth. NFB filmmakers continued to perpetuate state discourses about the environment in the postwar period. Documentarians Evelyn Cherry and Larry Gosnell focused on the role of the government in the lives of Canadian farmers. They instructed farmers to modernize their equipment, purchase chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and incorporate state-sponsored recommendations into their agricultural practices.

NFB documentaries about agriculture not only taught farmers to adopt methods prescribed by the government but also introduced audiences to a high modern way of seeing nature. Filmmakers such as Cherry presented a homogenized vision of the Canadian landscape in which the value of nature was measured in terms of carrying capacity and acreage. Narrative devices such as those that Cherry used simplified agricultural spaces into a standardized and national landscape. Other filmmakers, such as Gosnell, developed new cinematic technologies to make the landscape more comprehensible. His cinephotomicrography technique allowed the filmmaker to show audiences a more “scientific” view of the natural world. The camera went below the soil to discover a substratum of microbes and chemical reactions. The shift from iconic farming landscapes to the invisible world of soil extended in many ways Cherry’s picture of the universal farm to its logical conclusion: the Canadian environment was fundamentally the same above and below the earth. Nature was essentially malleable; it could be manipulated, reshaped, and improved.