Introduction

Established in 1939 by the federal government to be the “eyes of the country,” the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has become one of the most recognizable and decorated contributors to Canadian cinema.1 Since its founding, the NFB has produced more than thirteen thousand documentaries, animated shorts, and feature films and won over five thousand awards, including several Academy Awards. Although its output has waned in recent years because of budgetary cutbacks and the rise of commercial filmmaking, the NFB remains a cherished cultural institution in Canada.

One of the most popular genres for the NFB has been the nature documentary. Viewers have loved these works for their educational value and meditative, almost wistful, style. For many Canadians who grew up in the twentieth century, NFB nature documentaries were an antidote to the grotesque commercialism of American cinema. When asked about the NFB’s Hinterland Who’s Who television spots that aired in the 1960s, wildlife painter Robert Bateman remarked that “this kind of programming [was] extremely important, especially for youth, because there [was] a dreadful trend towards ‘being cool.’” NFB pictures, in contrast, were “uncool” in that they did not celebrate “consumerism, wastefulness, and destructiveness.” Their real worth was that they helped “rekindle an interest in nature,” Bateman observed.2 Indeed, it was this unironic and elegiac aesthetic that appealed to domestic audiences. NFB nature documentaries quietly revealed a hidden world of beauty and complexity.

Screening Nature and Nation tells the story of how the NFB represented nature and how its depictions interacted with Canadian ideas about the environment in the twentieth century. The films discussed in this book span from 1939 to 1974 and represent a range of interpretations of nature. Nature films are investigated as they relate to the Canadian government’s nation-building project. Beginning in 1939 and ending in the mid-1960s, NFB works classified nature in ways that aligned with government values concerning national identity, progress, and the exploitation of natural resources. There are striking continuities in these early films, but their discourses on the environment also changed slightly over time, reflecting the shifting institutional, political, and cultural contexts in which they were produced.

The 1960s was a pivotal decade for the NFB, as it was for most cultural institutions. Even though NFB filmmakers were employed by the government, many of them endeavoured to use their cameras to engage with broader social concerns rather than merely propagate government views. Screening Nature and Nation zooms in on cases of ideological conflict in which NFB documentarians explored alternative visions of nature. A closer inspection of the environmental films produced in the 1960s and 1970s reveals that NFB representations of nature were sometimes radical texts that contradicted the state-centred themes of the 1940s and 1950s.

Many young people growing up in Canada watched NFB pictures about ecology, biology, conservation, natural resources, and geography as part of their schooling.3 General audiences, young and old, also gathered to watch NFB documentaries about nature in movie theatres, town halls, and other local community venues. Sometimes they were shown before the feature presentations; other times they were the feature presentations. Canadian ambassadors even exhibited NFB documentaries about the environment in other countries. Diplomats believed that the evocative images and straightforward narration of these moving pictures effectively advertised the natural bounty of Canada to foreigners looking for a place to put down roots.

It is easy to see why people regard NFB filmmaking as an artistic venture that pushed the boundaries of national cinema. Norman McLaren’s vivid animated shorts, Alanis Obomsawin’s stirring documentaries, and Zacharias Kunuk’s sensational Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner are often cited by proud Canadians and movie critics as shining examples of the country’s vibrant film culture. Nature films too are celebrated as extraordinary works of nonfiction cinema. Bill Mason’s Paddle to the Sea (1966) and Peter Lynch’s Project Grizzly (1996) are among the best and most thought-provoking films about nature ever produced in Canada.

These excellent movies, however, tended to be outliers. Most NFB documentaries, including those about the environment, were works of public information that supported the principles and political ambitions of the state. When the federal government established the NFB in 1939, it did so with the civic-minded aim of producing films in the “national interest” and “interpret[ing] Canada to Canadians and other nations.”4 The word interpret had a narrow meaning for the government, at least early on. Filmmaking was imagined by the state as a tool for national planning and instruction.5 Burdened with the task of uniting a multicultural population stretched across a continent, the government hoped that the NFB would “bring coherence to a divided polity” by defining the parameters of citizenship and national identity.6 Shifts in documentary filmmaking practices in the 1950s and institutional changes in the 1960s ushered in new and bolder forms of cinematic expression. Even so, the paternal voice of the government endured in NFB cinema. Regional viewpoints, oppositional voices, and avant-garde forms of moviemaking were incorporated into nation-building discourses on ideal citizenship and the establishment of the welfare state.7

As a government institution tasked with producing and distributing both entertaining and educational cinema, the NFB offers a fascinating look into state “interpretations” of nature. The documentaries reveal an official attempt to represent nature and govern Canadians’ relationship with the land. NFB filmmakers can thus be seen as cinematic ambassadors of the state, encouraging audiences to “look here,” “pay attention to this story,” or “think about nature in this way.”8

What did official representations of nature look like? What purposes did they serve? In general, NFB films cultivated a sense of belonging through cinematic images of nature. Canadians, the NFB proclaimed, were a people whose history and political culture were defined by their relationship with the country’s vast geography. Whether it was a government-sponsored documentary about forestry or an ethnographic film on cod fishing in Gaspé, an NFB movie repeatedly proclaimed that nature was a dominant force in Canadian history and culture.

Journalist Bruce Hutchinson summarizes this vision in the introduction to the NFB’s 1967 centennial book, Canada: A Year of the Land. If one is to “learn the meaning of the nation, all its hopes and fears,” he writes, then that person must “look to the land and its secret cargo.”9 It is the land, “not the statute books and legal contracts,” that binds the nation together.10 Hutchinson reasserts a popular argument about Canadian national identity, one that has been championed by politicians, artists, writers, and nationalists since Confederation. To understand what it was to be Canadian, to know what Canada was really like, one had to acknowledge the role that northern nature played in its formation. The proposition that Canada was defined in relation to its geography was valuable for both the NFB and the state because it created what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities.”11 Images and stories of nature contributed to a cohesive definition of the nation as a strong and resilient people forged by the refining fire of geography. This brand of Canadian identity was preeminently Anglo and white and excluded alternative ways of thinking about nature, place, and homeland.

NFB cinema supported state attitudes toward nature in other ways too. On a practical level, the NFB instructed audiences about the utilities and constraints of nature and taught them how to exploit the natural world so that the nation could prosper.12 According to the NFB, nature was an important public commodity, in fact the key to progress. It therefore needed to be safeguarded so that every citizen could enjoy its bounty. For this to happen, the government had to take an active role in managing its protection and development.13 Canadians thus had to adhere to state instruction if the country was to flourish.

This government vision of nature was most evident in movies produced in the 1940s and 1950s. NFB documentaries in this period strongly endorsed the wise-use ethos of the government, conflating national progress and survival with the industrial exploitation of natural resources. In the early 1940s, for example, NFB pictures argued that timber, ore, wheat, and other raw materials were essential to winning the Second World War. Thus, it was necessary that the country (and its resource industries) embrace modern conservation methods established by the government to ensure the safekeeping of those vital resources.

In the postwar period, NFB films about nature were similarly utilitarian, extolling the virtues of the nation’s natural abundance while encouraging its development. Documentaries about agriculture reasoned that for the country to emerge from the Second World War strong and healthy, farmers had to adopt state-authorized measures in their land practices. Doing so, NFB films claimed, would create a more efficient way of farming and increase yields.

Lurking beneath the surface of these state-sponsored documentaries in the 1940s and 1950s were strong undercurrents of high modernism, which James C. Scott defines as “a strong . . . muscle bound version of self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of humans’ needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.”14 Scott argues that states employ a high modern way of seeing that reduces complexity in favour of comprehensibility and utility. Thus, technocratic scientific expertise is privileged, whereas vernacular knowledge is excluded.

Many scholars have applied Scott’s theory to understand the history of economic, industrial, and social development in Canada.15 Planners and civil engineers abridged the environmental and social complexities of local landscapes to make it easier to reshape the natural world to serve the economic imperatives of the country and to draw rural environs into the political mainstream of the country.16 NFB films about the environment embodied this high modernism by suggesting that the rational and scientifically guided exploitation of nature could unify and ultimately advance Canadian society. NFB documentaries depicted nature as passive and pliable—something that could be easily modified anywhere in the country to accommodate the development of sophisticated communication networks, the construction of large-scale industrialization projects, and the expansion of transportation infrastructure.17

Works about timber, agriculture, and mining were especially enthusiastic in their celebration of the state’s ability to comprehend and then alter the environment into an economically productive landscape. Men equipped with modern technology were repeatedly lionized in NFB films for drawing “undeveloped” regions of Canada such as the North and the West into a broader national economy and for improving the lives of Canadian citizens around the country.

Depictions of agricultural modernization likewise supported attempts by the state to improve the natural world according to the laws of science. By applying modern agricultural principles to Canadian soil, farmers could better organize their farms and produce healthier and more predictable yields. Similarly, government-sponsored films about wildlife frequently asserted that state experts equipped with the latest field equipment and university degrees could understand and therefore control nature. Wildlife conservation, NFB films argued, required a rigorous and technologically advanced way of tracking animal populations. To protect this resource, government officers first had to take samples, gather data, and study wildlife behaviour. Once wildlife information was aggregated, the state could manage wildlife populations accordingly.

Taken as a whole, films about the environment promoted an instrumentalist view of nature. The natural world could be made to serve the needs of society through rational planning, scientific expertise, and technological improvement. Small-scale farming, subsistence hunting, and Indigenous ways of living, in contrast, were usually dismissed by filmmakers as antiquated and even antithetical to the progress of Canada as a modern liberal nation.

NFB visual strategies in the 1940s and 1950s also tended to mimic state ways of seeing the environment. To represent Canadian nature as a resource cornucopia, filmmakers recorded Canadian geography from a synoptic perspective—an omniscient gaze that absorbed wide swathes of geography within its frame.18 Deploying an assortment of cinematic techniques—such as slow pans, wide-angle lenses, aerial footage, and disembodied narration—documentarians imposed visual order onto the sprawling and unruly Canadian landscape and reordered it into discrete resource sites. The camera panned across, zoomed in on, and rapidly tracked through a range of distant environs, providing a summative view of the physical and potentially lucrative qualities of Canadian nature. This objective (or, more accurately, objectifying) gaze mirrored the government’s functional assessment of the environment as a space primed for development and progress as well as its propensity to ignore social and ecological complexities.19

State discourses about nature were most salient in NFB cinematic landscapes. In the case of the Canadian North—perhaps the most featured setting in NFB nonfiction cinema—filmmakers constructed the landscape to match the dominant values of the state and, more broadly, Canadian society. Films that framed the North as an empty and sublime wilderness reaffirmed the white Anglo belief that Canadian identity was somehow rooted in northern nature. Correspondingly, NFB films that presented the North as an exotic landscape inhabited by the “primitive Eskimo” promoted a colonial vision of northern spaces. Specifically, ethnographic documentaries about the Inuit validated the government’s efforts to modernize and develop the region as a part of mainstream Canada. Finally, depictions of a modern North epitomized state conceptions of the land as a source of scientific knowledge, national wealth, and material progress. Imagining Canadian landscapes as either modern or Indigenous reflected the government’s view of faraway geographies. Paralleling the vision of state planners and engineers, NFB cinematography framed social and ecological spaces as static and fixed objects rather than fluid and historically contingent places.

NFB films did not always represent nature from a state perspective, however. The NFB also existed as a platform on which ideas about the definition and meaning of nature were negotiated between the government and the public. Indeed, alternative notions of the environment were intertwined with NFB documentaries produced in the 1960s and 1970s. The NFB’s official mandate—“to interpret Canada to Canadians and other nations”—can therefore be historicized in a completely different way. Interpretation connotes complexity and subjectivity. Although the state influenced NFB productions, the NFB was more than just a mouthpiece for government values or ideas. In fact, the NFB was a site for dissent and opposition.

Emboldened by the endless possibilities of cinema, filmmakers “interpreted” Canada from a multitude of angles and vantage points. They questioned, ridiculed, or reformulated government attitudes toward the meaning of nature and the state’s quest to control it. As a result, the NFB broadened the ecological imagination of Canadians and even inspired an activist environmental movement. Some documentarians asserted that nature was more than just a resource to be exploited; it was also a place of sublime beauty and intrinsic value. Other filmmakers decried the government’s reliance on rational planning and science as means of improving nature. Certain directors further claimed that nature was a dynamic and interconnected web in constant flux. There was no such thing as “improving nature.”

The first break from government discourses about the environment occurred in 1960 with the release of Larry Gosnell’s Poison, Pests, and People. Gosnell challenged the belief that Canadians should manipulate the environment just to serve the short-term needs of the agricultural industry. A few years later, NFB documentarians began advocating for a noninstrumentalist appreciation of wilderness environments. Bill Mason, Ernest Reid, and Christopher Chapman used their cameras to exhibit the grandeur of creation and to stress to viewers the importance of protecting the country’s last vestiges of wilderness from industrial exploitation.

Discourses on nature continued to evolve in the 1970s. As the NFB supported multicultural voices and diverse perspectives, new works about nature and humans’ relationship with it emerged. The most famous was Boyce Richardson’s Cree Hunters of Mistassini (1974), which recorded the hunting traditions of the James Bay Cree. The film celebrated Indigenous ways of thinking about human and nonhuman relations through Cree hunter Sam Blacksmith, who advocated an ecological way of living characterized by care and humility. Cree Hunters of Mistassini contrasted the environmental logic of the state with the dynamic and holistic worldview of the Cree. In doing so, it critiqued the environmentally ruinous James Bay hydroelectric project, a paragon of high modern achievement. The film argued that such efforts destabilized traditional patterns of existence and exposed local ecosystems and traditional cultures to catastrophic changes. More importantly, the film was one of the first works to show that racial inequity was closely tied to environmental destruction.

An investigation of NFB productions provides a new perspective on Canadian attitudes toward and ideas about the environment. Specifically, it contributes to our understanding of how the government tried to mediate Canadians’ encounters with nature. Film is a powerful medium capable of shaping our hearts and minds, including our environmental habits. “Cinema,” argues Adrian Ivakhiv, “is a machine that produces or discloses [the] world.”20 Through financial support and political clout, the government controlled both the medium and the message, expressing to Canadians in powerful, programmatic language how to engage with the land.

By examining the documentaries of the NFB, we can also glean insights into how other representations of nature were produced in twentieth-century Canada. Filmmakers used their cameras to disagree with and contest official definitions and narratives of nature, and they helped inspire an activist environmental movement. The state frequently used the NFB to define the limits and uses of nature in Canada. Environmentalists and Indigenous filmmakers, however, used the NFB as a platform on which to disparage these official policies and project alternative visions of Canadian ecological relationships.

Screening Nature and Nation takes a historical approach to understanding the relationship between filmmaking and nature.21 Using formal, stylistic, and narrative elements specific to cinema, the NFB reflected on and helped produce various ways of seeing the natural world. Screening Nature also makes a larger point about the importance of film as both a recorder and a shaper of history. Cinema is a rich and diverse archive that reflects our historical attitudes toward the natural world. Its presence in our lives also means that it has a considerable influence on our environmental practices. The films that we watch have the power to shape how we interact with the physical world.22 Moving pictures of flora, fauna, and terrestrial places contribute to our affective and cognitive relationship with nature. As the German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once observed, cinema “has a definite bearing on the era into which it is born; that it meets our inmost needs precisely by exposing—for the first time, as it were—outer reality and thus deepening, in Gabriel Marcel’s words, our relation to ‘this Earth which is our habitat.’”23