3 Cry of the Wild

The NFB and the 1960s

To understand the evolution of environmental narratives in NFB cinema, it is important that we take a step back and explore the larger historical context in which they were produced. Two major factors influenced NFB filmmakers’ progressive representations of nature in the 1960s and 1970s. The first factor was a shift in the NFB’s philosophy on documentary filmmaking. In the 1940s and 1950s, documentaries were seen as objective—accurate and unbiased depictions of reality. How filmmakers presented that reality, or “truth,” was relatively consistent. A voice-of-God narrator made sense of what was happening onscreen. The narrator, usually with a sonorous and authoritative voice, declared that what appeared onscreen was factual. Sometimes the images were filmed to fit the narrator’s claims; at other times, the filmmaker used preexisting stock footage and cobbled it together to support the thesis of the film. In both instances, the content of the film (images, facts, figures, expert testimonies, etc.) provided a clear picture of the world as it really was.

At the beginning of the 1950s, however, belief in the supposed objectivity of documentary cinema began to erode. Filmmakers increasingly acknowledged and even embraced the idea that nonfictional cinema was actually subjective. The NFB released several innovative and well-regarded documentaries in this period of upheaval, such as Neighbours (1952), Corral (1953), Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway Switchman (1953), and Les raquetteuers (1958). In its own way, each film subverted the notion that there was a single truth about the world that could be expressed through the lens of the camera.

NFB directors continued to push the envelope of documentary filmmaking practices. Jean Rouch, a French filmmaker and one of the founders of cinéma-vérité in France, identified Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault’s Pour la suite du monde (1963) in the influential publication Cahiers du cinéma as an important moment in nonfictional moviemaking. He remarked in an interview with Éric Rohmer and Louis Marcorelles about direct cinema that the NFB documentary was especially noteworthy because it provided a glimpse of this fragmented and sometimes contradictory world.7

The most radical NFB films in this period were produced by the much-celebrated Unit B. As a whole, they were some of the first documentaries in the history of cinema to interrogate the relationship between image and reality. Unit B sought to make high-quality and aesthetically engaging films that did not adhere to one viewpoint or official discourse on Canada or the world. Under executive producer Tom Daly, the unit produced groundbreaking works by Norman McLaren, Colin Low, Wolf Koenig, Don Owen, Roman Kroitor, and Arthur Lipsett. Influenced by the candid work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Unit B filmmakers challenged authority and expertise by making films about everyday people and ordinary life. They followed their subjects around their environments, thus providing audiences the chance to see the world through their eyes. To aid their mobility on set, the crew developed lightweight equipment and synchronous sound so that the director could shoot the subject from a variety of angles and in spaces hitherto inaccessible.8

Over time, Unit B filmmakers developed a cinematic technique that they called “candid eye.” Unlike the expository documentaries of the 1940s, candid eye films did not have a preexisting argument or script. The filmmaker seemingly just followed a story wherever it led them. The spontaneity of the candid eye process made it difficult to organize the narrative structure of the film. Editing helped with the storytelling, certainly, but filmmakers were comfortable with loose structures; they were more concerned with letting subjects speak for themselves. If their work bordered on incoherence, well, that was just a reflection of the messy world in which we live.

Unit B filmmakers famously resisted certain documentary techniques. They opposed voice-of-God narration, believing it to be passé and politically oppressive. Subjects should speak for themselves, they argued. Rather than using the booming voice of a narrator to impose an external order on the people or events onscreen, Unit B directors encouraged their subjects to narrate their own thoughts, even if they challenged the filmmakers’ own beliefs. Sometimes there was no commentary at all. Finally, Unit B filmmakers avoided tidy endings in their documentaries. Film scholar Peter Harcourt argues that Unit B films were characterized by a “quality of suspended judgment, of something left open at the end, of something left undecided.”9

The importance of candid eye filmmaking, as scholars Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski observe, “lies less in the specific techniques” than in their critique of “some of the basic assumptions of documentary film theory and practice.”10 Candid eye and cinéma-vérité techniques raised questions about authorship and subjectivity, issues that the filmic dogma of John Grierson could not or would not answer. Unmoored from the restraints of old technologies and antiquated ideas about truth, authority, and cinema, NFB filmmakers were even comfortable including themselves in their films. They acknowledged the influence of their authorship on the films, including how a subject interacts with the camera.

As an institution, the NFB acknowledged the importance of making more complicated films, even if they defied the status quo. In the Annual Report for 1965–66, the NFB conceded that Canadians had come to expect a more complex type of film. “Audiences were becoming increasingly sophisticated, knowledgeable and organized,” interested in the “intensive study of specific subjects, rather than in general information,” the report noted.11 Canadian viewers wanted films that “challenged and stimulated” rather than those that “didactically informed.”12

These new currents in film theory had a tremendous impact on how nature was represented in NFB cinema. Although sponsored works were still prolific in the 1960s, filmmakers such as Larry Gosnell, David Bairstow, and Graham Parker went off script, investigating the root causes of environmental destruction without the blessing of government departments. They showed that the planet was a complicated place and that the meanings (and utilities) of nature were different depending on the individual or the community. Sometimes their films directly condemned the notion of state discipline and authority. From a technical standpoint, interviews about the effects of pollution were filmed on the fly, and cinematographers equipped with lightweight gear could record instances of ecological destruction at a moment’s notice. In some cases, the camera mimicked the perspective of wildlife. Environmental cinema still had a long way to go, but NFB filmmakers helped develop a more sophisticated and journalistic way of representing nature.

The second factor that influenced NFB representations of nature in the 1960s was the advent of environmentalism as a popular social movement. Environmentalism developed out of two nineteenth-century intellectual trends: conservationism and the wilderness preservation movement. Conservationists argued that land practices should be guided by the principles of “wise use.” This strategy ensured the sustainable exploitation of valuable natural resources in perpetuity.

Preservationists had different, more quixotic ideas about the protection of nature. Unlike conservationists, they advocated the safeguarding of large tracts of wilderness areas to be maintained in their supposed original states. John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that wild spaces needed to be protected from industrialization—that way people who travelled into the wild could experience the salubrious properties of nature and reinvigorate their spiritual and physical health.

Twentieth-century environmentalism was influenced by these two movements, but it also diverged from them in important ways. Conservationists, writes Samuel P. Hays, praised the “efforts of managerial and technical leaders to use physical resources more efficiently.”13 It was a practical movement devoted to the rational management of natural resources. Wilderness preservation was noninstrumentalist in that it was committed to protecting nature for its own sake. Nature was believed to be in its ideal form when it was undisturbed by humans. In contrast, environmentalism concentrated on humans and their surroundings. It sought to improve the quality of air, water, and land through both individual and collective activism.14

Environmentalism was particularly concerned about the effects of radioactive fallout and chemical poisoning on human and nonhuman environments. At the end of the 1950s, a cadre of young, educated citizens concerned about toxic substances and other Cold War–era dangers demanded greater transparency from private corporations and government bodies.15 Activists also insisted on having a role in decision-making processes alongside scientists and policy-makers.16 Indeed, it was not enough to warn the public; industry needed to be restricted from dumping wastes or emitting toxic fumes through regulation.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was one of the first books to warn the public about the dangers of environmental carelessness. Her book, writes historian Mark Dowie, engendered “a brand-new constituency of middle-class activists.”17 By the 1960s, it became nearly impossible for citizens to ignore the effects of industrial growth on the natural environment or on human health. The emergence of ecology as a scientific discipline in this period further confirmed the notion that postwar economic growth had an identifiable impact on ecosystems and human bodies. Over time, the public became more conscious of humanity’s interconnectedness with the natural world.

Silent Spring was a major catalyst for the environmental movement in Canada, but it was not the only one. Modern environmentalism in New Brunswick was sparked by protests against the province’s controversial spruce budworm spraying program in the 1950s. Sportsmen and scientists decried New Brunswick’s war against the budworm, claiming that DDT was killing salmon and harming other game species.18 In an attempt to save the province’s forests, public protests challenged the government’s use of pesticides.

Environmental attitudes in Ontario shifted in the mid-1960s when government institutions failed to curb the dumping of phosphate-based detergents into local watercourses.19 Grassroots organizations responded to this public health problem by demanding changes in government regulations. They used the press and television to hold the polluters accountable and to mobilize public support for the banning of phosphate-based detergents. Pollution Probe was partially responsible for inspiring the environmental movement in Ontario. Inspired by Larry Gosnell’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) documentary The Air of Death (1967), students from the University of Toronto formed the organization to generate support for their environmental cause.20 Pollution Probe quickly grew, and by the end of the 1960s, the group had successfully campaigned against the institutions responsible for polluting the Great Lakes and other environmentally destructive projects.

Around this time, NFB filmmakers also began to investigate the relationship between humans and their local ecosystems. In fact, NFB documentarians were some of the first Canadians to sound the alarm on the unseen threats of pollution and their impacts on the natural world, inhabited by human and nonhuman organisms. In the process, they helped change public attitudes toward the environment and its meaning. Significantly, NFB films about biodiversity, ecological ruin, and pollution predated protests against nonsoluble detergents in Ontario’s waterways or even Carson’s Silent Spring. This suggests that there was an important link between NFB filmmaking and the birth of environmentalism in Canada.

The Problem with Pesticides

One of the first NFB documentaries to examine the harm to nature caused by industrial society was Larry Gosnell’s Poison, Pests, and People (1960). The film explores the widespread use of pesticides in contemporary agriculture. DDT and other chemical compounds are key components of modern farming. Despite their apparent utility, however, there is a significant downside. Viewed by many as a modern panacea against blight and pests, pesticides in fact distress local ecosystems and cause illness in people.

Poison, Pests, and People stands as one of the NFB’s most intriguing environmental documentaries. For one thing, it clearly diverged from the typical NFB representation of Canadian agriculture by advocating a more complex view of nature and by criticizing certain modern agricultural practices, which had been lauded as essential to farming. In the 1940s and 1950s, filmmakers such as Evelyn Cherry encouraged farmers to improve the land with science and technology. No matter the physical context, nature could be made to serve the needs of the farmer. Gosnell himself celebrated government strategies to transform the agricultural landscape into a more productive and homogeneous space in documentaries such as The World at Your Feet and Chemical Conquest. In Poison, Pests, and People, however, the filmmaker renounced his position and condemned society’s constant tinkering with nature. Gosnell asserted that the modern agricultural impulse to modify the natural world (monocrops, new strains of grain, etc.) and then to control that hybrid space with pesticides created unanticipated ecological problems, including wildlife destruction and human sickness. Unlike most of his peers at the NFB and in the agricultural sector, Gosnell recognized that humans were inexorably part of the land beneath their feet. The things that people introduced into their environments in the name of profit and productivity had significant impacts.

It is easy to view Gosnell’s work in Poison, Pests, and People in isolation, as a bold shift in environmental filmmaking. His documentaries about nature developed gradually, however. As a student at the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph University, Gosnell learned that technology and science—organic chemistry and biology—were tools that allowed agriculturalists to transform the natural world. After he graduated in 1949, Gosnell began to make short documentaries about the heroic exploits of laboratory scientists who helped Canadian farmers protect their crops from ravenous pests by developing state-of-the-art pesticides and new, resilient strains of produce.

The filmmaker continued to applaud scientists’ contributions to farming when he was hired by the NFB in 1951. Both The World at Your Feet (1953) and Chemical Conquest (1956) argue that agricultural science solves issues of productivity. Chemicals can make the soil more fertile. Pesticides also reduced the harms caused by insects and other pests, thereby allowing crops to flourish unmolested. During the production of Chemical Conquest, however, Gosnell encountered startling information about the country’s dependence on pesticides to solve the problem of pests.

Gosnell began questioning whether insecticides were as helpful as they initially appeared. While he was conducting research for another film about agriculture and pesticides, he discovered that insects were becoming resistant to even the most potent chemicals on the market. This growing immunity forced the chemical industry to create even deadlier poisons to exterminate these “super pests.”21 But what did people know about these new toxins? What impacts might they have on other organisms?

The history of parathion, one of the most lethal insecticides in Canadian history, was a perfect example of the lengths to which agriculturalists were willing to go (and the risks that they were willing to take) to destroy pests. The pesticide was used by growers primarily to kill red mites, which feasted on apples. At first, the toxin was quite effective in exterminating the pesky bugs. Over time, however, the insects developed resistance to the substance. The tenacious adaptability of the mites inspired the chemical industry to introduce “400 or so new organic pesticides . . . that were just as lethal, if not more so, to the natural enemies of a given pest as to the pest itself.”22

Good for science, perhaps, but this chemical arms race was not sustainable, Gosnell realized. Poisons more harmful than parathion threatened the health of other organisms, mammals even. Gosnell suggested that in its effort to destroy all pests, the agricultural industry had inadvertently compromised local ecosystems. The chemical compounds obliterated the pernicious bugs, but they also killed other organisms in the process. Gosnell concluded that once people use pesticides, “nature ceases to be on their side.”23 It is a kind of Pandora’s box: this supposed cure-all gets away from them and wreaks havoc on the rich web of life thriving in the soil.

The agricultural industry’s chemical war on insects troubled the young filmmaker. If birds and mammals were dying from insecticide poisoning, what did that mean for humans? After all, people were the ones who ate the produce sprayed with pesticides. A report from a Food and Drug Directorate lab in Ottawa told a sobering story. Gosnell learned that every person whom the lab had tested had traces of DDT in her or his body tissues and that the authorities were “very concerned about this situation.”24 They suspected that pesticides used in crop farming were to blame for a host of human illnesses, including cancer.

Despite the apprehensions, the Food and Drug lab could not do anything about the problem: it did not have the funds to conduct further research, and the scientists were skeptical that they could challenge the hegemony of the agricultural sector, which had a vested interest in the use of pesticides.25 “Why do we use these chemicals so extensively if they are known to be dangerous to human life?” Gosnell mused after he read the report from the Food and Drug lab.26 He hypothesized that society was unable to stop using them because the food industry “depends on them so exclusively that if we were to suddenly stop . . . there would be no crops.”27 In other words, pesticides were too ingrained in Canadian farming practices. Poisonous as they were, they were extremely effective in protecting crops from pests. And a crop sprayed with toxic chemicals was more likely to have a high yield. To cease using them was no longer an option. A pamphlet published by the technical staff at Cyanamid of Canada summarized the technological determinism that Gosnell was up against: “Insects and weeds are man’s biggest competition for food. Millions of dollars’ worth of food production are lost annually by infestations.” The pamphlet claimed that if Canadians were to reap the benefits of “healthier livestock and more profitable crops,” then pesticides were essential.28

Disturbed by the profligate use of dangerous chemicals in Canadian society and angered by the agricultural industry’s indifference to their dangerous effects, Gosnell decided to expose the hidden dangers of this technology in his next film, Poison, Pests, and People (1960). The NFB was mostly on board with the project, but because of Gosnell’s provocative claims, the agency closely monitored its production.29 Don Mulholland, one of the producers on the documentary, cautioned the filmmaker that his “editorial viewpoint” was “highly partial.” Mulholland explained that the film’s premise that “we are all being murdered in our beds” was sure to rankle a few industry heads and potentially sour the relationship between the NFB and key government sponsors such as the Department of Agriculture (DOA). “If we’re going to take that point of view, we have to be able to prove we’re right—and we’ll have to prove it in court,” Mulholland advised.30 Gosnell agreed that his claims were contentious. That was the point. “This is a very controversial subject,” he wrote in a letter to Mulholland. “We will no doubt be vilified by chemical companies and pest control experts. Just the same, I think we should do it.”31

Gosnell took the counsel of Mulholland seriously. He sent letters to a number of experts asking them if he could interview them about why pesticide residues were showing up on produce in grocery stores across the country. As he canvassed health-care professionals and agricultural experts, Gosnell came across a damning story about pesticide use, in which a “dangerous situation resulted from a lack of information.” When the filmmaker visited several fruit and vegetable growers who supplied the big Campbell and Heinz plants in the Leamington district of southern Ontario, he was told by a farmer that he sprayed his crop with DDT very close to harvest and well after the legal time limit of twenty-five days. Gosnell asked a manager at Heinz about this, but the manager assured the filmmaker that it was not a problem because the chemicals “only concentrated in the skin of the crop.”32 The manager also promised Gosnell that canning factories tested their produce and would not can any food that had any residue. A representative from the canning facility in Leamington, which supplied 85 percent of the baby food consumed in Canada, confirmed “that they made a careful check of representative samples of baby food cans.”33 Gosnell sent a letter to the DOA for reassurance that this was the case. An official in the department replied two weeks later that Heinz did not have any facilities or procedures for carrying out these checks. Gosnell was flummoxed. Why would Heinz lie about this? The answer, of course, was money. Food producers believed that there were sufficient checks and balances within the agricultural industry to keep poisoned fruits and vegetables from appearing in grocery stores. There was no reason to cause alarm and certainly no need to recall any products.

The problem of pesticide use extended to other areas of the industry, Gosnell discovered. Farm owners represented a stable market for chemical producers, which advertised their pesticides to farmers as “miracles of modern science,” Gosnell wrote. They showed a “single-minded dedication to the business of selling more chemicals, more powerful chemicals, to an ever-widening agricultural market.”34 Pesticide manufacturers benefited enormously from farmers’ reliance on their products. If it was shown that these products were harmful to people and that their traces were ending up in grocery stores, then the companies would be ruined financially.

Gosnell’s research on the agricultural industry formed the basis of Poison, Pests, and People. The film takes a journalistic approach. Gosnell interviews experts and visits labs across the continent to ascertain the threat of pesticide use to human health. The film begins innocuously enough. A quick survey of how pesticides are used in contemporary society introduces the viewer to the world of modern-day farming. Toxic chemicals such as DDT are sprayed around the world, the film informs the viewer. The substance protects monocrops from mites and fungi and stops outbreaks of malaria in India.

Despite all the good that pesticides have done for society in the twentieth century, there is clearly a hidden cost to their use, the film argues. DDT and other pesticides have disrupted wildlife and even entire ecosystems. Fish, birds, and mammals have been “poisoned in the destructive war man wages against pests,” the narrator states ominously.35 The film cuts to a close-up of a dying salmon. It has been unwittingly poisoned by DDT, the narrator reports. The chemical compound is breaking down the nervous system of the fish, and it can no longer take in oxygen through its gills.

Yet the problem of pesticides does not end with dead fish. The film argues that these poisons destroy local ecosystems and thus inevitably enter human bodies. Dr. W. C. Martin, a specialist in geriatrics in New York, and Dr. L. W. Hazelton, the president of Hazelton Laboratories in Falls Church, Virginia, confirm that pesticide use presents “a serious risk” to human health because of the process known as bioaccumulation. Martin explains that toxins amass up the food chain until they enter humans’ digestive tracts. Dr. R. A. Chapman of the Food and Drug Division of the Department of National Health and Welfare suggests that people are also being poisoned from foods still wet with the toxic compounds. Pesticides discovered on fruits and vegetables at local grocery stores “can cause serious harm,” Chapman says. Sometimes these toxins enter the body without people ever setting foot in a grocery store. In another interview, Dr. Malcolm Hargraves, a blood specialist at the Mayo Clinic, recounts with dispassionate authority several instances of people dying from chemical exposure merely because they lived close to crops sprayed with pesticides. When it rains, the chemicals filter into local reservoirs. People drink the water and are thus poisoned.36

The documentary’s explanation of how pesticides invade and then poison human bodies was significant. Mirroring the work of contemporary ecologists, Poison, Pests, and People was one of the first NFB films to argue that people are connected to the larger environment and that even the smallest disturbance in the ecosystem has consequences for the whole web. Perhaps the clearest example in the film of the biological link between people and their surrounding environments is in a scene shot but deleted from the final cut.37 It is a wide shot of a small park in some nondescript suburban neighbourhood. (Again, we see the use of typification as a filmmaking strategy in NFB films to communicate the universality of the message.) The camera then tilts down to a group of children playing in a pool. A passing truck sprays a thick fog of DDT along the quiet boulevard as the kids splash around. The billowing cloud obscures the children as it floats past the camera.

The documentary then cuts to a nearby forest, where the same poisonous cloud seen in the previous frame descends lightly on the trees. Pushing through the branches, the camera finally settles on a small stream where a fish killed by DDT bobs up and down in an eddy. The motif of water connects the image of the poisoned fish to that of the children swimming in the pool. The message is clear: people are unknowingly breathing in the same deadly fumes that kill smaller organisms.

Just as Mulholland predicted, the caustic Poison, Pests, and People infuriated a number of people within the agricultural industry. When a shorter version of the documentary, called Deadly Dilemma, was shown at the Resources for Tomorrow conference in Montréal, representatives from the Canadian agricultural sector criticized it. One member barked that the documentary “over-stressed the deadly effect of chemical sprays on wildlife.”38 Other viewers balked at the filmmaker’s claim that DDT sprayed on the forests of New Brunswick to kill spruce budworms inadvertently destroyed the salmon population in the Miramichi River—even though the government’s own scientists had been monitoring the issue since the mid-1950s.

Scientists employed by federal and provincial pest control programs also chastised Gosnell for his work. Dr. Beverley Smallman, director of entomology and plant pathology for the DOA, for example, complained that the filmmaker had “pulled the rug out from under them.”39 Smallman had expected a film about the “degree of control and highly developed sense of responsibility of the government” in monitoring toxic levels, not “fear mongering.”40 Unhappy with the depiction of the government, and in particular his department, Smallman demanded that the NFB pull the film from distribution, which it eventually did.

Larry Gosnell left the NFB shortly after Deadly Dilemma was blacklisted from distribution. He continued to make radical environmental films. Six years after Poison, Pests, and People was released, he directed one of his most famous and incisive documentaries, The Air of Death (1967). The film, made for the CBC, examined cancer and respiratory diseases related to air pollution. According to a CBC study, 1.5 million Canadians tuned in to the television broadcast, an astounding number for an in-house production. The film was a watershed moment in the history of Canadian environmentalism.41 Gosnell’s assertions that the Electric Reduction Company in Dunnville, Ontario, was responsible for illness in residents made a lasting impression on audiences who, until that point, had little knowledge of the relationship among pollution, air quality, and human health. Upon seeing the movie, concerned citizens urged the Ontario government to investigate the matter of air pollution more closely.

Like Poison, Pests, and People, the television program sparked a firestorm of controversy. A government report in 1968 confirmed Gosnell’s suspicions that industrial pollution affected animal and plant health, but it also stated that people were not in danger.42 The investigation committee concluded its report by reprimanding the CBC for airing an “irresponsible and alarmist” piece of journalism.43 The CBC subsequently appeared in 1969 before the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, which held public hearings on whether the national broadcaster should make political documentaries. Despite the backlash, Gosnell’s films continued to inspire environmental activism in Ontario. Indeed, The Air of Death was a catalyst for Pollution Probe, the environmental organization founded by students and faculty from the University of Toronto.

Gosnell’s environmental films are an important chapter in the story of NFB cinema. Poison, Pests, and People was one of the first NFB documentaries to argue that efforts to control nature (in this case, maximizing agricultural productivity by introducing inorganic compounds) affect the health of ecosystems and therefore the lives of Canadians. As the promotional piece for the film’s premiere on the CBC’s Documentary 60 program noted, people were “part-losers in the battle of extermination.”44 In this sense, Gosnell introduced a necessary reclassification of the human/nonhuman divide asserted by twentieth-century conservationists and preservationists. Unlike his contemporaries, he based his understanding of the environment on the emerging ecological idea that people are part of a natural continuum and therefore susceptible to changes within it.

The visual motifs and environmental themes that Gosnell cultivated at the NFB leached into other arenas, including the CBC and then Pollution Probe. More broadly, the ideas that he wrestled with were early examples of popular environmentalism in Canada. His polemic against chemical insecticides in Poison, Pests, and People even predated Carson’s seminal critique of pesticides, Silent Spring, by two years. Carson claimed that human efforts to manipulate nature were “conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature existed for the convenience of mankind.”45 Gosnell likewise castigated the belief that people could modify the environment without consequence. The impulse to control nature without an awareness of the delicacy of local environments had devastating consequences for both nonhuman and human ecologies. This new perspective marked an important transition in both popular and NFB discourses on nature. Whereas state-sponsored films denounced the wasteful destruction of the environment because it threatened a valuable economic resource, Gosnell denounced postwar society’s dependence on science and technology to improve the natural world because it destabilized an interconnected but fragile web of life.

A Serious Matter

The same year that Poison, Pests, and People premiered, the NFB began developing another film about pollution called River with a Problem (1961). The documentary, written and produced by veteran NFB filmmaker David Bairstow and directed by Graham Parker, investigated water contamination, a “problem of growing concern.”46 Bairstow had just completed Morning on the Lièvre (1961), a visual paean to Québec’s Lièvre River and photographed to the accompaniment of a narrator reading Archibald Lampman’s eponymous poem. The contemplative film is an elegy to the “crystal deep” of the sublime river.47 But Bairstow recognized that not all rivers are as splendid as the Lièvre. Other waterways in Canada carry ugly secrets deep beneath their placid surfaces. Bairstow thus elected to focus his next documentary on the Ottawa River, a “river with a burden,” bringing with it “the choking refuse of civilization and industry.”48

The pollution of the Ottawa River was a matter of public record and a source of embarrassment. In an address to Parliament in the summer of 1955, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent called the polluted Ottawa “a serious matter” that required an “immediate solution.”49 Six years later, Walter Gray, a reporter for the Globe and Mail, pointed out that the waterway had become “the shame of the nation.” “The scum floating on its surface casts a repulsive effluvium over its channel as it swirls downstream,” Gray wrote.50

In River with a Problem, Bairstow similarly shows how effluent from industrial activities upstream obliterates the “balance of nature.” “When man dumps waste into the river,” the narrator intones, a “revolution occurs in the underwater kingdom.”51 In an animated sequence, the film reveals how this “revolution” transpires. The microscopic flora in the water thrive on the excreta of creatures. When new substances are introduced into the water, the flora become preoccupied with breaking them down. The microscopic organisms feast on the dross of civilization, using up large quantities of oxygen to digest the new materials. As a result, larger entities such as fish and aquatic plants begin to suffocate. Eventually, the whole tributary perishes from a lack of oxygen. The consequences for people are severe as well. Drinking water becomes tainted. Fishing industries dry up. Marinas go bankrupt. Like the sunfish or the water lily depicted in the cartoon, the cities that rely on the river for sustenance slowly asphyxiate.

River with a Problem resembles Poison, Pests, and People. Like Gosnell, Bairstow identified industrial pollution as a major problem in modern society, one that would not be fixed easily. As people alter the environment, whole ecosystems suffer in unanticipated ways. Progress has a price. Yet there are important differences between the two films regarding pollution. Stylistically, Gosnell’s documentary is polemical, even caustic. The agricultural industry needed to be held accountable for its irresponsible activities, Gosnell declared. Bairstow was less inflammatory. He did not take the government to task for its lax regulations, nor did he criticize the pulp industry’s deplorable operational standards. In fact, Bairstow was so lukewarm in his account of who was responsible for the contamination of the Ottawa River that the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, arguably the single biggest polluter of the waterway, praised the documentary for its even-handedness. “All have agreed that you have done a most effective job of presenting a controversial subject in a fair and impartial manner,” Douglas Jones, a manager at the association, remarked.52 In the documentary, the narrator ambiguously explains that pollution is just an unfortunate side effect of modernity. “The timeless pattern of . . . self-purification in a natural river” is disrupted by the “by-products of urban growth,” the narrator says over an animated sequence of industrial expansion.53 The film also does not mention the possibility of limiting industrial waste or penalizing the perpetrators for dumping effluent into the river.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the two films is their belief (or lack thereof) in scientific expertise and technology to restore nature. Gosnell believed that such an unwavering belief had actually led to polluted environments, whereas Bairstow believed that scientific technology was the solution to the problem. Instead of carping industry for polluting local water supplies, Bairstow optimistically focused on how Ottawa was fixing the issue of contamination. Graham Parker, the director of the film, interviews engineers, health experts, and civic officials, including the mayor of Ottawa, Charlotte Whitton, and John Pratt, a silver-haired MP for the Liberal Party, well versed in the art of folksy idioms. Each interviewee boasts about modern solutions to this environmental issue. “We have got to change our methods of thinking [and] spend a great deal more money on working with nature and not against it,” Pratt explains in the film. “When this happens, the river will revert back to its natural state.” The concept of “working with nature” is not entirely accurate. The individuals in the documentary prefer fixing nature than working alongside it. Nature is presented as static. Equilibrium can be restored if people add or delete the right elements. Bairstow fixates on technological solutions, such as a state-of-the-art interceptor sewer, to the issue of waste. Although the cost is high ($32 million) and the engineering complex, installing an interceptor sewer that runs two and a half miles is “worth it to restore our mighty river.”54

Bairstow also glorifies the civil servants who use science to determine safety levels in drinking water. The Water Purification Board, which is tasked with assessing the effects of radioactive materials on fish, mussels, and other organisms, “determines the maximum quantity we can accept in our waters without any danger.” According to the film, the board is a key factor in the Ottawa River’s rehabilitation and, more importantly, in maintaining the health of citizens.55

River with a Problem reflected a larger reformist attitude toward environmental management prevalent in the 1960s. City planners in the middle of the twentieth century generally believed that they could stimulate municipal growth and create healthy living spaces through a combination of science, technology, and urban planning.56 The policies of J. R. Menzie, chief of the Public Health Engineering Division of the Department of National Health and Welfare, embodied such technocratic thinking. Menzie was confident that his staff could “fix the Ottawa River” and thereby improve the quality of life for the residents of the nation’s capital. With the aid of modern sewage systems and sophisticated water treatment technologies, city engineers could initiate “effective remedial action.”57 Menzie, who appears in River with a Problem, believed that the biggest challenge in cleaning a river of this magnitude was not philosophical (everyone agreed that there was a pollution problem) but financial: the city needed to find enough money to build an entirely new sewer system. The federal government was willing to provide low-interest loans to the city for remediation, but most of the costs would have to be paid by Ottawa. Thus, if remediation was to proceed, then the public had to be convinced that cleaning up the river was necessary and that their tax dollars were essential to that effort.

It was within this larger context that River with a Problem was produced. Indeed, the documentary seems to be more like a political leaflet than journalistic filmmaking. It certainly was perceived that way by Ottawa politicians, who saw in the documentary an opportunity to stimulate audience support for the project. In a letter to Parker, Mayor Whitton explained that the film could also be used to garner support for the cleanup of the city’s “great waterways.” She was confident that “everyone who saw this film” would have a “better understanding of this tremendous problem.”58 MP Pratt likewise explained to Bairstow that he was going to use the documentary to spread “the cause of anti-pollution among the communities of [his] riding.” The MP did have one major criticism of the film, however. He and other MPs who saw it were “puzzled” that there was no mention of legislation that passed in 1960 that lent municipalities two-thirds of the cost of sewage disposal plants at “a very low rate of interest for a period of up to 50 years.”59 “The feeling on Parliament Hill,” wrote Pratt, “is that . . . some mention might have been made of the fact that the government has made money available to any municipality wishing to eradicate this unpleasant problem.”60 No doubt his complaint was related to the concern that the public might dismiss remediation as too expensive. Despite this quibble, the film carefully tempers its environmental critiques and endorses government solutions to problems in nature.

The Enduring Wilderness

One of the most popular subjects in this period of environmental filmmaking at the NFB was wilderness. Echoing the passionate voices of nineteenth-century wilderness advocates such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, a small number of NFB filmmakers exclaimed that contemporary society must protect its wild spaces from the “expanding patterns of mankind.”61 The first film to celebrate wild nature as an alternative to the polluted modern world was The Enduring Wilderness (1963). Directed by Ernest Reid and shot by the award-winning photographer Christopher Chapman, the documentary reflected a growing anxiety about environmental issues in Canada, including public apprehensions about the preservation of wild spaces and people’s alienation from the natural world. Released a year before the Wilderness Preservation Act in the United States, The Enduring Wilderness (originally titled The Meaning of Wilderness) argued that the value of nature cannot be measured in boards per feet or cubic volumes. Nature’s true worth, the filmmakers asserted, was found in its breathtaking and sublime beauty. When people leave the city and experience nature in its primeval state, they become physically and spiritually rejuvenated.

Although the film promotes a nonutilitarian land ethic, it was sponsored by the federal government, not especially known for a radical interpretation of nature. In the spring of 1962, the National Parks Branch contacted NFB liaison Graham Crabtree and requested that the NFB produce a documentary that encouraged people to visit the country’s national parks.62 The branch saw an opportunity to boost park revenue and to support the “important work” that it was doing to protect Canada’s natural heritage.63 The NFB agreed to make the documentary and then handed the reins over to Reid and Chapman. After several preliminary discussions with the branch, the two filmmakers outlined a nonfictional film that expressed the branch’s “philosophy behind the preservation and establishment of National Park areas.”64

The filmmakers proposed a contemplative, poetic documentary, however—a style that diverged from most NFB sponsored films. (The CWS would follow a similar approach with its popular Hinterland Who’s Who series released the same year.) The Enduring Wilderness employed stunning cinematography and sparse narration, displaying to viewers that wild nature was a “public good” and that wilderness spaces such as those preserved by the National Parks Branch satisfied people’s “spiritual longing to contend against wind and cold, and storm and tide.”65

The film was perhaps the first of its kind in NFB cinema, but it engaged with a much longer history of wilderness aesthetics. Most North Americans in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries believed that the wilderness was a savage world, antithetical to progress and an obstacle to overcome. A vocal minority in the nineteenth century opposed this war with the natural world. To quote Roderick Nash, these individuals momentarily “lowered [their] axe and gazed westward from a hardwood ridge at the wild country.” What they beheld left them awestruck.66 In these rapturous moments, they determined that society’s enmity with nature was harmful, in both physical and spiritual senses. Romantics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir believed that wilderness “uncorrupted by man’s artificial constructions” was ideal for intellectual and moral growth and a place for “perceiving and worshipping God.”67

Canada’s own conversion to the gospel of wilderness came a bit later. In Canada, early twentieth-century writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Grey Owl, and Farley Mowat similarly preached that wild nature was a place for spiritual restoration. Their musings inspired a generation of Canadians who likewise yearned to get back to nature. Vacationing in the great outdoors became so ingrained in postwar culture that historian W. L. Morton described wilderness outings as “the basic rhythm of Canadian life.” Everyone went camping. “The typical Canadian,” wrote Morton, “spends most of his holiday among the lakes of the Shield or the peaks of the Rockies.”68

Most alfresco activities were based in Canada’s provincial and national parks. The natural amenities of parks, advertised in glossy pamphlets and newspaper ads, were perfect for middle-class urbanites seeking a wilderness retreat. Furthermore, most parks were geographically accessible, yet they still afforded tourists a chance to breathe fresh air and experience solitude.69 As they pitched their tents beside a lake and listened to the cry of a loon, visitors could imagine what the land was like before modern civilization complicated everything. As a National Parks Branch brochure published in 1957 boasted, wilderness parks introduced visitors to a world where nature “flourished in its original state.” Tourists escaping the city could immerse themselves in “outstanding natural landscapes . . . as they appeared before man arrived.”70

The expectation that national parks contained nature in its original (and therefore unspoiled) state was a product of historical and cultural factors. As historian Alan MacEachern observes, Canada’s national parks were in fact established and maintained for a variety of purposes. In some cases, their raison d’être was to protect natural resources such as timber and game from subsistence hunters, rural populations, and Indigenous people. Certain parks permitted hunting within their boundaries as long as the hunter had a licence, whereas other parks provided resource industries with special access so that they could harvest valuable raw materials. Parks also functioned as ecological preserves and prohibited any kind of resource extraction within their precincts.

Many national parks served all these purposes at different points in their histories, but the most common role for a national park in the middle of the twentieth century was as a wilderness sanctuary and natural preserve. This particular use emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first national parks were established. Riding the crest of wilderness sentiment in Canada and the United States, park founders declared that certain spaces owned by the federal government would remain unaltered and henceforth be protected for the benefit of Canadians. Although restaurants, lodges, and other amenities were constructed within the parks, they were still marketed to Canadians as pristine and untrammelled.

It is on this form of land use that The Enduring Wilderness focuses. The filmmakers promote national parks as wilderness preserves where Canadians can experience what the country was like before Europeans arrived. They go on to say that parks are vital to the health of the nation, since they allow people to appreciate the wild splendour of the country. This kind of experience was especially important in the modern world. People needed “the tonic of wildness,” the narrator explains in the documentary. Upon entering Canada’s beautiful parks, visitors are immediately “refreshed by the sight of [nature’s] inexhaustible vigour.” There are no loud automobiles. No smoke belching from a steel mill. Just the sound of a pileated woodpecker and the smell of pine. These places contain a “secret meaning . . . that can be found only in the heart of the wilderness.”71

Chapman uses elaborate compositions and long takes to accentuate the splendour of virginal wilderness. The documentary begins with a slow dissolve from a black screen to a panoramic shot of the Pacific coast. Dark waves heave themselves onto a rocky shore and then slide back into the ocean. Chapman lingers on the image of the elemental battle between water and earth for several beats. The rhythm of the tide is mesmerizing. The waves move back and forth, drawing the viewer into the frame. For Chapman, such displays of primal forces invite the viewer to consider nature’s raw strength and eternality. “We should feel that taming the wilderness is an impossible task,” he scrawled in the margin of his script.72

Evocative cinematography was key to communicating the awe of wilderness. During production, Chapman suggested to his director that the film should let the Canadian landscape “speak for itself.” “Visuals” were far better suited than narration or voice-over to conveying “the feeling of actually being in wilderness.” Excessive nondiegetic sound distracted audiences from the splendour of nature, he argued.73 Audiences should feel like they are visiting a national park. In the end, viewers were captivated by Chapman’s camerawork. His depiction of nature was “superlative,” exclaimed one viewer.74 “[Chapman] captures the feeling of solitude and grandeur that is the spirit of the wilderness,” remarked another audience member.75

It was important to Chapman that he communicate the majesty of the wilderness to viewers because it was something that was quickly disappearing, at least outside national parks. After the opening scene, the documentary proceeds to narrate the history of civilization. Its story can be summed up thus: human avarice and industrial progress have destroyed many wild spaces. “Our history is short,” the narrator says after several minutes of silence. “Only four hundred years ago the first settlers came through the surf and up the shore, seeking a home in the brooding forests of the new land.” After a few shots of wilderness scenery, the camera cuts to a wide shot of a small cabin huddled against the foot of a mountain. Dark forest envelops it on every other side. The narrator continues that “for the pioneer, the fight against the wilderness was lonely and long. At first, their work made little impression on the vast stretches of mountain, forest, and plain.” When “civilization spread,” the narrator continues, “the pattern of nature eventually gave way to the pattern of man.” The camera tilts down a mountainside to a train slicing through the landscape like a scalpel. Then the film cuts to an iron bridge hanging perilously over a once-pristine shoreline. The film jumps forward again, this time to a series of well-manicured farms, the wilderness pushed back. The history of progress flashes before our eyes. Every image contains less wilderness than the image before it. The film continues as the camera pans over a pulp mill, belching smokestacks, and finally an entanglement of highways. Settlers eliminated much of the wilderness and, in its place, created a world more conducive to a life of convenience and capitalism.76

Exchanging wild nature for a world of concrete was a devil’s bargain, though. The synthetic cityscapes are dull and have “little variety.” They “tend to look alike,” the narrator bemoans.77 Chapman’s crowded and angular depictions of industrial society convey a sense of artificiality and imprisonment. Shots of polluted environs, colossal skyscrapers, and an endless stream of automobiles flicker across the screen to the tune of blaring horns and jumbo jets. Slabs of cement and iron scaffolding crowd the edges of the frame. The whole sequence depicts the Canadian metropolis as a claustrophobic nightmare.

Chapman’s portrayal of urban life paralleled the forewarnings of midcentury cultural critics who argued that postwar culture was conformist and, worse, stifling. In the 1950s, American intellectuals such as C. Wright Mills and William Whyte warned that mass-produced goods, standardized workspaces, and suburban environments eroded the human soul and its desire for freedom of movement and individuality.78 Modern society was characterized by routine and tedium. Most middle-class North Americans “left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life,” Whyte laments in The Organization Man.79 In Canada, postwar residents similarly fell prey to what geographer Richard Harris calls “creeping conformity”—a world of sameness and banality.80

The Enduring Wilderness suggests that the only way to escape from the dreariness of this modern world is to visit wild spaces. Paralleling the contemporary discourses of the Sierra Club and the writings of Wallace Stegner in the United States, Reid and Chapman articulated a growing desire to escape from technology and conformity and to find personal rejuvenation and therapeutic relief in the wilderness. A “return to wilderness is tranquility regained,” Chapman mused during the production of the documentary.81 In contrast to the mundane and repetitive cityscapes of twentieth-century society, wilderness is presented as diverse and abundant, a “temple that is infinitely complex.” The narrator goes on to explain that every part of this system “is interwoven with another.” “From the prowling predators to the enzymes in the soil, the ecological relationships are subtle and deep yet so carefully balanced,” he reports.82

The elegance (and mysteriousness) of this ecological web is visualized throughout the documentary. Chapman photographs herds of bison as they move across the plains and then zooms in on a bee as it pollinates a flower. Each shot is linked through colour and movement, indicating that all of nature (at least nature in its wild state) is connected in some subtle but discernible and powerful way.

Humans are not a part of this web, at least not according to the film. Most of the documentary shows national parks as free of people. There is no impression that people—not even Indigenous peoples—ever lived on the lands. People are only visitors, and nature trails are described in the film only as paths that allow people to “visit” this “natural museum” temporarily.83 But this description of national parks as a place of untouched wilderness is illusory. National parks were not immune to the grasp of civilization. As tourists pushed into untrammelled lands to find real nature, inevitably they brought with them the types of development that they sought to escape. W. Phillip Keller, an agrologist and a famous nature writer, lamented in 1961 that the construction of highways was destroying the country’s “finest park scenery.” It was not just roads that ran through national parks, for more and more tourists were visiting them. According to Keller, park traffic had increased a whopping 1,000 percent in just ten years. The Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources explained in its annual report for 1957–58 that 3.5 million people had visited parks in the previous year, 2 million more visitors than three years before. The department anticipated 7 million visitors by 1975.84 Keller was concerned about the mounting trash that these visitors were leaving behind. More people meant more garbage and more pollution. Nevertheless, the film perpetuates the idea that parks are uncorrupted and that the world outside the confines of these spaces is somehow tainted and less natural.

The Enduring Wilderness celebrates national parks as places fundamentally distinct from human culture and therefore pure.85 But nature is never separate from human culture—not in parks, not anywhere.86 There is no such thing as pristine nature, as environmental historians are quick to point out. Nonhuman nature is inextricably connected to the human world. In a wilderness park, for example, people shape this protected landscape in meaningful ways just by choosing to “leave it alone.” Ironically, decisions to privilege the “natural” over the “unnatural” are value judgments and cause considerable physical manipulation of the environment.87 In the case of parks, managers and government officers preserve historical sightlines, directing the gaze of a visitor away from the manufactured landscapes of modern civilization and toward a wilderness “wed to a particular point in time”—a time when voyageurs paddled the vast stretches of rivers in their birchbark canoes.88 Wilderness was thus constructed as anticivilization, a place of solitude, ruggedness, and other virtues that conveniently matched popular conceptions of Canadian identity.

The problematic depiction of wilderness as a place devoid of human culture in The Enduring Wilderness does not, however, negate its significance as an environmental film. Its release marked an important moment in NFB discourses on nature, which previously framed the environment merely as a site of resource exploitation.89 The film advocates a noninstrumentalist way of thinking about land use in postwar society. National parks were vital to Canadian society because they offered a different kind of vision of the world, one in which beauty, diversity, and solitude thrived. As the narrator concludes, national parks “are museums that we visit to gain knowledge about ourselves, to weigh the value of our civilization against the ageless splendour of the wilderness.”90

The Enduring Wilderness is a complicated film. On the one hand, the documentary supports a state vision of the nonhuman world. Ernest Reid and Christopher Chapman argue that it is the responsibility of the federal government to manage wilderness spaces through legislation and scientific foresight. “How can we use the parks without spoiling them? To preserve them unchanged for a growing population requires expert planning and management,” the narrator reminds the audience. Education and expertise are also key to the preservation of natural landmarks. According to the film, park naturalists (hired by the government) are essential in teaching visitors “the meaning of wilderness.”91 On the other hand, there is a sense in which the documentary exceeds the pedagogical intent and ideological aim of the National Parks Branch. The melancholic soundtrack, the ambient noises of wildlife, and the interludes of prolonged silence in the sparse narration all invite viewers to contemplate the majesty of the wild. In many ways, then, The Enduring Wilderness is a deeply alluring and profound work that encourages Canadians to rethink the meaning of wilderness. Its message for a world that celebrates wildness still resonates today. Although it was sponsored by the state, the documentary exemplified the shifting sensibilities in NFB works about nature in the 1960s. The elegiac tone and the rich environmental texture of the film anticipated the works of Bill Mason and William Pettigrew. In short, The Enduring Wilderness was a testament to a group of NFB filmmakers who advocated an alternative vision of nature.

Bill Mason and Wildlife Preservation

NFB documentarians continued to produce films about wilderness and the role of the government in its protection. The Enduring Wilderness suggested that the state could help preserve wild spaces and rehabilitate society’s frayed relationship with nature through legislation and scientific management. By the end of the 1960s, filmmakers began to challenge this optimistic, state-centred philosophy about wilderness preservation.

Environmentalist filmmaker Bill Mason was the most notable figure to argue that scientific management only exacerbated the problem. A closer look at his wildlife documentaries reveals a new thread in NFB films about the environment, one that countered normative ideas about the meaning of nature and people’s connection to it. Mason reoriented audience perspectives by arguing that nature has a right to exist unmolested, even by the well-intentioned schemes of the state. If people respected the autonomy of the wild and let it flourish on its own, then they would discover secrets about the mysteriousness and beauty of the world and recapture within themselves the call of the wild.

Mason was a powerful advocate of wilderness in Canada. He wrote, directed, and produced twenty-six nature documentaries, seventeen of which were made for the NFB. His documentaries about canoeing and wildlife were a catalyst for the environmental movement in the 1970s. Paddle to the Sea (1966), arguably Mason’s most famous work, an adaptation of the book by Holling C. Holling, is a beautiful film about a boy’s exploration of a world outdoors. Mason’s films about wolves were particularly important in the articulation of popular environmentalism in Canada. Death of a Legend (1971) tells the story of the wolf, which “fell afoul of predatory man and his technology,” and its sequel, Cry of the Wild (1972), a feature-length film about the filmmaker’s personal bond with wolves, argues that people must not interfere with the “rhythms and patterns” of nature.92 Instead, they should learn to appreciate it from afar. A noninterventionist approach to wildlife preservation is the only real way to protect and honour the freedom of the wild.

Mason’s conviction that wildlife should be left alone was a radical position in the mid-twentieth century even for conservationists. Historically, animals were considered resources that had to be managed by the state. For decades, the federal government defined fur-bearing animals such as deer, caribou, and beaver as public commodities like timber or uranium.93 Predators, which did not have much economic value, were not protected by the state. In fact, carnivores were considered anathema to wildlife conservation because they destroyed more useful animals whose qualities were highly valued. Wolves, for instance, were hated by rural people and conservationists alike. Wolves hunted wild game indiscriminately and therefore killed animals with economic value. Soon wolves were “managed” in a more vicious way.

Before the state decided to intervene, residents were responsible for keeping lupine populations in check. Farmers and ranchers in the nineteenth century killed wolves because they believed that the animal was a bloodthirsty monster that feasted on easy targets such as livestock. To protect their livelihoods, they declared war against the wolves. The bounty system, established by the federal government at the beginning of the twentieth century to support farmers and ranchers, was a particularly effective way of ensuring that wolves did not kill their herds or flocks. Bounty hunters looking to earn a few extra dollars hunted and killed the animals with extreme prejudice, trading their ears and paws for financial gains.

The state began to manage these predators more actively in the 1930s and 1940s. Killing wolves, at least in national parks, was eventually outlawed in 1940 by James Harkin, the first commissioner of the Dominion Parks Branch, who claimed that “predatory animals are of great scientific, educational, recreational and economic value to society.”94 The prohibition on hunting predators in national parks and the cessation of the wolf bounty in the late 1940s were motivated by modern scientific ideas concerning the balance of ecosystems.

This ban on hunting wolves did not mean that they were free to roam as they pleased, however. Despite their importance to local ecosystems, wolves were still targeted in Canada throughout the middle part of the twentieth century. Government officers argued that though wolves needed to be protected, it was sometimes necessary to cull their numbers to maintain a harmonious balance between predator and prey. Such an ecologically sensitive task could not be entrusted to those who did not have any training in biology or wildlife management. CWS biologist Douglas Pimlott justified in Canadian Audubon the selective killing of wolves by the government as necessary because rural people were indiscriminate in their war against the wolf.95

Although the language of predator control suggested that the federal government was finally thinking along ecological lines, its schemes were more practical than biological. Wildlife conservation still had a human face. Indeed, the extermination of wolves and other predators was part of a larger state-directed plan for economic development in rural communities that relied on subsistence activities and farming. Progressive-era beliefs viewed wastefulness as an unpardonable sin. For the same reason that foresters were penalized for haphazardly cutting down timber reserves, wolves were punished for their voracious appetites. According to institutions such as the CWS, tasked with protecting wildlife, the wolf left a trail of destruction, often killing animals without eating them.

Governments in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario thus poisoned wolves with strychnine pellets and cyanide cartridges. The CWS also slaughtered wolves en masse.96 In the 1950s, CWS officers slaughtered an estimated 17,500 wolves in a foolish attempt to remedy the caribou crisis plaguing the Northwest Territories.97 (It did not occur to the CWS that decreases in caribou were the result of environmental change or human predation.) In addition to trying to protect caribou populations, state biologists killed wolves to obtain biological data. A dead wolf was valuable to scientists because it contained a wealth of information about its diet, biology, and health.

The first half of the twentieth century was not kind to wolves. First, they were ruthlessly targeted for their pelts and purported mean disposition; then government men exterminated the predators because they needed to balance nature and because wolves allegedly threatened an economic resource. However, as the century marched forward, Canadians’ antipathy toward the wolf began to change. In fact, by the 1960s, it had become a popular symbol of wilderness preservation. For advocates of wilderness, the extermination of wolves by the state perfectly illustrated people’s estrangement from nature. Wolves were wild and noble creatures maligned for their cruelty. Their destruction was a tragedy, for it not only slashed the population of one of Canada’s most beautiful animals but also symbolized society’s crumbling relationship with the natural order of things.

One of the biggest advocates for the wolf was writer-naturalist Farley Mowat. In his famous book Never Cry Wolf, he claimed that Canadians had typecast the animal as a murderous beast. According to Mowat, the Canadian government was responsible for this depiction, probably because it was looking for someone or something to blame for dwindling caribou populations. Mowat criticized the state and its hackneyed approach to wolf management, which relied on antiquated ideas about the cruelty of the animal. He took aim at the CWS, for which he had worked in the North. He considered the whole lot to be reprehensible, ham-fisted fools.98 Although it claimed to act in a scientific and rational manner, the CWS killed wolves based on shaky testimony and hysterical tales about their ravenous appetite for flesh. This was tragic indeed, Mowat explained, for wolves were in fact magnificent creatures that displayed traits such as loyalty, intelligence, and even love.

The scientific community was not happy with Mowat’s representation of the CWS. In the press, they disparaged Never Cry Wolf as a “semi-fictional” work of “fantasy.”99 They questioned his motives (Mowat was looking for publicity), his methodology (it was ill formed and unsubstantiated), and his integrity (he was flat-out dishonest). Whether Mowat was truthful or not did not much matter in the end, however. The reputation of the CWS had been tarnished. After reading Never Cry Wolf, concerned citizens mailed hundreds of letters to the service. They demanded that the CWS stop killing wolves. As historian Karen Jones notes, the book quickly transformed the public perception of the wolf as a “beast of waste and desolation . . . to a conservationist cause celebre.”100

To rehabilitate its public image as a benevolent steward of the country’s wildlife, the CWS turned to the NFB (after initial discussions with Disney fell through).101 The CWS had a good relationship with the NFB. The same year that the NFB released The Enduring Wilderness, it also began airing a series of four minute-long commercials for the CWS entitled Hinterland Who’s Who. The premise was simple: each segment described the natural habitat and behaviour of four different—but very much Canadian—animals: beaver, moose, gannet, and loon. In sixty seconds, the commercial provided key facts about the titular species through voice-over narration, courtesy of John Livingston, the executive director of the Audubon Society of Canada.

In December 1966, David Munro, director of the CWS, sent a letter to the NFB requesting that it make a documentary about the service’s “commitment” to “research and management,” “vital to wildlife’s survival.”102 Two months later, he sent another letter specifying that the film needed to touch on three related themes: “that Canada has a wildlife heritage; that wildlife, as well as having a recreational, economic, and aesthetic value, has an important survival value to some of our peoples today; and that research and management [are] vital if the wildlife resource is to be preserved.” Munro stated that he wanted the documentary to highlight the service’s devotion to “properly conducted studies of wildlife” and “intelligent solutions.”103 Although the film should promote the work of the CWS, he did not want it to be overtly didactic. The documentary should be “compelling and entertaining” and “somewhat provocative,” Munro explained to the NFB.104 “It should not preach,” but it should make “audiences feel something of a worry about animal preservation, perhaps have a better feeling for animals’ importance.”105

Darrell Eagles, head of the Editorial and Information Branch of the CWS, sent another letter to the NFB explaining that the documentary should be about wolves. A film about this predator would help audiences understand “the whole rationale of wise use of our renewable resources.”106 It should emphasize “without a doubt” that the survival of the wolf was due in large part to the “recent work of Wildlife Service biologists in studying this predator and communicating this information to the public.” A film of this kind would “generate public support for conservation and legislation . . . [more] than any other single article or endeavor.”107

A year later, the NFB hired Bill Mason to make the documentary for the CWS. Mason, in many ways, was the perfect man for the job. He had just finished the beloved Paddle to the Sea (1966), Blake (1969), and Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes (1968), and he had become known as “the unofficial in-house wilderness filmmaker at the NFB.”108 It seemed like a perfect match.

Mason, however, was not interested in making a film about CWS efforts to control nature even in the name of conservation. As a devout evangelical Christian, Mason believed that people were intent on destroying God’s creation.109 Every time they stepped in and interfered with the environment, they ruined it. In Canoescapes, a meditation on canoeing in the wilderness, Mason mused that “in so many of [their] activities . . . humans have to destroy something in order to create something else.” “It all boils down to stupidity and greed,” he declared. Civilization is a “grinding war that all of us are waging against wild things.”110

Death of a Legend, Mason’s documentary for the CWS, deviated sharply from the views of his sponsor. He did not trust that science and technology would save nature or, for that matter, humanity’s soul. In fact, he claimed that human designs to manage wildlife only drove a bigger wedge between people and the natural world. Monitoring growth rates and snaring wolves for scientific research and biological data, although well intentioned, were forms of control and thus reinforced the deeply lodged belief that humans were superior to nature. The CWS approach to wildlife management was woefully short-sighted and even immoral. Animals such as the wolf should be left to roam free and undisturbed. Only then could people fully appreciate the splendour of the wild and recapture a bit of wildness in themselves.111

The competing perspectives of Mason and the CWS are apparent throughout Death of a Legend. Instead of making a film about the heroic exploits of the CWS, he made a “film that is on the side of the wolf.”112 Long-time collaborator Ken Buck exclaimed that Mason transformed a potentially “Disneyesque” film about conservation into an “iconoclastic revelation of colossal mismanagement of wilderness and the environment.”113 Specifically, the documentary argues that the “wanton killer” myth of the wolf is so deeply ingrained in Western lore that it has created a dogged cultural and legislative bias against the predator.114 Although Mason does not mention the CWS by name, he implies that the government branch (the film’s sponsor) was complicit in the persecution of the wolf and thus symptomatic of society’s enmity with nature.

Death of a Legend begins by pinpointing the arrival of Europeans in North America as a pivotal moment in the history of humanity’s separation from nature. “Before man came into the picture,” the continent was a “community of creatures maintained by tensions and change,” the narrator states. In the documentary, Mason dismisses the presence of “Indians” as having had any major ecological impact on the landscape. For him, the land was a biological Eden where wildlife flourished in beautiful harmony with one another. But then the European settlers arrived. Equipped with iron tools, a Protestant work ethic, and a religious mandate to subdue nature, New World immigrants ran roughshod over this dynamic “web.” “Ecosystems did not account for the arrival of man,” the narrator says as the film cuts to a montage of environmental ruin.115 The appearance of Europeans was especially hazardous for predators such as the wolf. The film cuts to a gruesome sequence of a CWS agent shooting a wolf in the head. The animal shudders and then stiffens. A pool of blood expands under the wolf.

For Mason, humans’ deep-rooted antagonism toward nature needed to change if wildlife was to thrive and humanity’s soul was to be restored. In the documentary, he proposes that people can live alongside these animals, but to do so, they must first learn to appreciate them as magnificent creatures. There are three ways in which Mason depicts the wolf. First, he points out that wolves are not driven by an insatiable lust for blood but complex and noble mammals that embody the freedom of the wild. In one of the more poetic moments in the documentary, the camera lingers on a pack of wolves as they push across the backcountry, over a pack of ice, drifting from snowbank to snowbank, unhurried but purposeful. The ambient sound of the winterscape rings out as the peripatetic animals lope across the screen. Wolves kill when necessary, the narrator claims after moments of silence, but their appetites are well regulated, and they do not kill indiscriminately, as many have suggested.

Second, Mason shows that wolves are complicated social creatures that exhibit human traits such as loyalty, compassion, and generosity. In one sequence, Mason photographs wolves running through a snow-covered forest in a pack. Individual standing within the pack is carefully explained, as are their complex mating habits. Eating is even described as “a ritual as formal as a state banquet.”116 Later in the documentary, Mason focuses on the maternal instinct of the female wolf. Her gentle attention to her cub is framed in sympathetic close-ups. The cub howls as its mother licks its fur tenderly, cleaning it.

Third, Mason argues that wolves are essential to the health of ecosystems. Although many hunters claim that wolves kill game indiscriminately, the predator in fact is a valuable member of its ecological niche. It kills and consumes animals that are sick or weak, and it keeps ungulate irruptions in check. Echoing the work of American conservationist Aldo Leopold, Mason shows that the wolf is “essential to the natural scheme of things.”117 “The presence of wolves represents a healthy living wilderness, in ecological balance, and our lives are the richer for it,” the filmmaker wrote in his outline of the project.118

By showing audiences the wolf’s admirable traits and by explaining its importance to ecosystems, Mason invites the viewer to appreciate the beauty of the wilderness. In his memoirs, he reflects that the wolf is the perfect animal to “bridge the gap between ourselves and things natural.”119 Wolves are powerful and vibrant animals whose prodigious hunting ability and peripatetic lifestyle exemplify what it means to be truly free. “The wolf is a symbol of wilderness,” Mason explains. “To capture [it] on film was to capture the spirit of the wild for all to share.”120

How can humans protect something supposed to be wild and free? the film then asks. It is a question worth considering more deeply. Protection means intervention, does it not? Mason’s answer to this conundrum was fundamentally different from the solutions of the CWS. The CWS believed that statistics, scientific research, and modern technologies could protect wildlife from extinction, whereas Mason argued that wildlife should be left completely alone. Only then would it truly be free. Take the wolf as an example. In Death of a Legend, Mason reminds audiences that the wolf can take care of itself, extraordinarily so. The predator is highly intelligent and equipped with social skills that allow it to survive in seemingly inhospitable environments without the aid of biologists or park wardens.

Despite Mason’s belief that nature should be left alone, his documentaries about wolves do not always support this view. A deeper analysis of his work shows that the technocratic ideologies of the CWS are still present despite his environmentalist philosophy. During production of Death of a Legend, the CWS demanded that Mason include more sequences of its biologists doing fieldwork.121 Since the CWS was financing the film, the director had little choice but to add scenes that showed government agents operating in the field.

One of the scenes that Mason filmed was of CWS biologist George Kolenoski attaching a radio collar to a female wolf. The sequence feels misplaced in a film that claims to be about the freedom and wildness of nature. The device represents the authority/superiority of the government over Canadian wildlife. Radio collars can “monitor wolves over great distances,” the narrator says.122 Instruments like the one shown in the film are essential for state biologists who study wolf movement and behaviour from afar. With the data provided by the collar, the CWS implements specific wildlife management strategies, including the manipulation and relocation of wolf populations. The film also documents the fieldwork of CWS biologist Douglas Pimlott, who watches the behaviour of the animal from a distance. According to the documentary, Canadians were becoming more cognizant of the diet of the wolf through his tireless observations. Ironically, Pimlott was one of the CWS biologists who justified the killing of wolves ten years before the release of the film.

The management ideology of the CWS was also evident in the material production of Death of a Legend, for Mason filmed wolves with photographic techniques used by CWS agents to survey wildlife populations, including bird’s-eye shots from planes and shots taken with high-power telephoto lenses. This viewpoint allowed viewers to see clearly how wolves hunt in the Arctic. Yet the elevated perspective also implied that humans have the superior position to observe all aspects of wolf behaviour. In the context of the film, this synoptic viewpoint mimicked the objectivizing gaze of the CWS, which used aerial technology to reduce complex animal behaviour, such as migrating and hunting, to graphs and spreadsheets.

Mason’s declaration that humans should embrace “nature’s schemes” and not interfere with wild processes was further compromised when Mason ran up against the logistics of a difficult film shoot and a stubborn subject. Ernie Kuyt, a CWS biologist and wolf expert, warned Mason that photographing wolves in their natural habitat was prohibitive: it cost too much and was tremendously onerous.123 Rather than tracking wolves in the wild, Kuyt recommended, the filmmaker should use an enclosure technique to photograph them. Ever the optimist, Mason was reluctant to give up on recording wolves in the wild. He could survive in the woods by himself just fine, and he was willing to be patient. However, after several failed attempts at documenting the animal in its natural habitat, he contacted the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests for help. The department had captured and domesticated a few wolves, and Mason wanted to film them.124 Lands and Forests agreed, and he photographed the wolves in pens just outside Algonquin Park. To get more footage of the predator in action, the filmmaker then flew the wolves to Fort Smith along with several deer, which he used as bait.

The role of a wildlife filmmaker is to photograph animals behaving in ways that exhibit their behaviour and excite the audience. As Mason discovered, this was no easy task. Wolves lying beneath a spruce tree in northern Ontario were indifferent to the whims of the director, who demanded from his subjects a bit more energy. Film and television “are about movement, action, and dynamism; nature generally is not,” writes film scholar Derek Bousé.125 To get his subjects to “perform” more dynamically for the camera, Mason took a page from the playbook of the Department of Lands and Forests: he domesticated wolves on his property near Meech Lake, Québec. Sparky, a docile female, and Big Charlie, the alpha male, were tamed as pups, and the other two wolves that he brought to his property were feral. With the wolves safely enclosed on his property, Mason photographed them from many vantage points previously inaccessible. He could also coax them to play for the camera by barking out commands or tossing them delicious morsels of meat.

Keeping wolves in a kennel also allowed Mason to capture rare events, such as the birth of seven pups. He ingeniously built a den against the back of one of the fences in which he enclosed the wolves. The back of the burrow was removable so that he could poke his camera inside the pen and film the birth without disturbing the mother. Mason reasoned to himself (and his frightened neighbours) that keeping the wolves on his property was the only way that he could effectively dispel the myth that they were bloodthirsty beasts. However, in doing so, he unwittingly made the point that wolves were tameable.

Furthermore, Mason used medium-specific techniques, such as camera movements, editing, and audio tracks, to create a dynamic portrait of wolf behaviour. He used close-ups extensively. As film scholar Béla Balazs explains, good close-ups “radiate a tender human attitude in the contemplation of hidden things, a delicate solicitude, a gentle bending over the intimacies of life-in-the-miniature, a warm sensibility.”126 The shot allowed Mason to isolate an individual wolf and, with the help of some well-written narration, anthropomorphize its habits. This technique helped audiences identify with it.

The close-up also provided Mason with a plethora of editing options, including point-of-view shots and reaction shots that could be stitched together later into an exciting sequence about fighting between pack members. Exciting, perhaps, but entirely fabricated for the camera. The wolves that appear onscreen are neither as wild nor as free as Mason claims that they ought to be. They were directed in certain ways to create a sense of wildness.

The tension between his desire to leave nature alone and his practical need to manipulate it for the camera is most explicit in Cry of the Wild. The sequel boldly comments on and critiques his own efforts (and desire) to photograph wolves. In doing so, the filmmaker observes how people’s labours to regulate nature create unintended and often deadly consequences for wildlife.

At the beginning of Cry of the Wild, Mason is frustrated that he is unable to record wolves in their natural habitat for Death of a Legend. They either run away from him or have been killed by hunters before he arrives. Mason is finally able to document Arctic wolves in their natural habitat on Baffin Island, but he does so from a considerable distance. As he watches the wolves scamper off into the tundra, he confesses that he needs to draw them closer. “I want to look into their eyes and discover the range of emotions and expressions that I know they are capable of,” he says.127 So Mason decides to raise a pack of wolves on his property near Gatineau, Québec. The experiment is mostly a success. Not only does their capture make it easy to film their behaviour; he and his family also form deep bonds with Charlie and Sparky.

The turning point of the film is profound in its own melancholic way. It dawns on Mason that domesticating wolves has led to their imprisonment and that he has become a hunter with a camera, a zookeeper with a lens. His efforts to bribe and cajole the animals for the camera are glaringly incongruous with his conviction that nature should be left alone. If he believes that nature is to be shielded from human interference, then how can he in good conscience keep wolves in a small enclosure just so that he can make a film about them?

To rectify his mistake, Mason releases Charlie and Sparky into the wild. But sadly, the wolves are unable to hunt the caribou that they require for sustenance. Their imprisonment has stripped away their ability to survive in the harsh world of fast-moving prey and savage competition. “Charlie’s greatest joy in life was having his stomach rubbed,” Mason observes sorrowfully as the wolves trot tentatively into the wild country. Fearing that they will starve, the filmmaker calls out to them. Hearing the voice of their benevolent master, the wolves return. In a bittersweet moment, he brings the two wolves back to the farm outside Gatineau, where they will live out their days in comfort. The damage has been done. At that moment, Mason understands that he has defiled nature by trying to possess it—even if his intentions were noble. And therein lies the environmental lesson of Cry of the Wild and Death of a Legend: people alienate themselves further from nature when they try to exert dominion over it. For nature to be truly protected, Mason concludes, he must be satisfied knowing that wolves “roam wild and free.”128

Cry of the Wild serves as an appropriate bookend to this chapter. What makes the documentary so significant is its painful self-awareness of the challenges that people face when they try to preserve the wild. Mason’s despair, in some ways, is a product of his fundamental belief that nature and people are separate and that, to remain free, the wild must remain unadulterated. This bifurcation, as many scholars have pointed out, is cultural. But words and ideas matter, and this way of thinking certainly has its consequences, as Cry of the Wild points out. Despite this romantic view of wild nature, Mason’s recognition that our relationship with the natural world is burdened with contradictions and competing values remains poignant.

The nature documentaries produced by the NFB in the 1960s contained a variety of representations. State-centred narratives about the meaning of nature competed with “environmental” narratives that critiqued high modernism and its conviction that nature should be controlled or managed. In Poison, Pests, and People, Larry Gosnell argued that humanity’s efforts to boost agricultural productivity created unintended consequences for local environments and human bodies. In contrast, David Bairstow believed that though industrial pollution disturbed local environments, society could correct its mistakes if it had the proper knowledge and tools. In River with a Problem, he framed contamination of the Ottawa River as a technical problem that could be solved by state expertise. Ernest Reid and Christopher Chapman likewise exhibited confidence in government knowledge. Although the two filmmakers were critical of technological civilization and its conformist culture in The Enduring Wilderness, ultimately they believed that modern government institutions could protect pristine wilderness spaces from human uses.

The wildlife films of Bill Mason offer the most complicated example of how NFB discourses on nature evolved. As a sponsored film, Death of a Legend was beholden to certain views of wildlife management. However, Mason also used the documentary as a platform from which to critique the management practices of the CWS and more broadly to condemn society’s efforts to control the natural world. For the first time in NFB history, a filmmaker advocated an environmental ethic arguing that nature should be left to its own “rhythms and patterns.” This perspective conflicted, of course, with the high modern ideology of the film’s sponsor. Agencies such as the CWS believed that it was possible, indeed essential, to manage wildlife. They argued that by tagging animals and killing pests, state experts could maintain a healthy balance in ecosystems. Despite their authority, scientists and government agents were not unchallenged in their beliefs about the value and meaning of the environment. Official voices had to share discursive space regarding the definition of nature with outspoken filmmakers and activists. Death of a Legend and Cry of the Wild were two of the first works from the NFB to demonstrate film’s capacity as a medium of protest for environmentalists.