Documenting Canada: The National Film Board

·42 min·3 clips

How did a Canadian wartime propaganda film become the first ever Oscar-winning documentary?

The year is 1941. Craig Baird opens with the National Film Board in wartime, then follows the political trouble gathering around it. The episode keeps its cool, even when the story gets tense. MacLean sits at the center for much of it, with his time as commissioner tangled up in accusations that the organization had Communist sympathies. The pressure does not stay contained. The People Between alarms officials who believe it favors the Chinese Communist Party. Quebec reacts sharply. Premier Maurice Duplessis treats Communism as a serious threat, and Quebec's government orders NFB films out of the province's schools. MacLean is forced out. In 1949, he is told his contract will not be renewed, even as staff threaten to resign for him. He tells them not to, because he thinks a staff revolt would hurt the NFB more than it would help him. Then William Irwin steps in. He comes from MacLean's magazine, not the film world, and his job is to fix the NFB's public image. Staff are wary at first. Irwin soon casts himself as a defender of the board and the people inside it. He changes the structure too. The transcript says he rewrites the National Film Act, gives the NFB more distance from government control, and moves headquarters to Montreal. The RCMP keeps pushing. Irwin refuses mass firings without proof, though he later accepts a narrower demand involving three suspected employees. Then television enters the picture. In 1953, the NFB reaches TV with Window on Canada, made with the CBC, though the partnership sounds uneasy from the jump.

As heard by us

A clear look at how the NFB became a fight over image, loyalty, and independence.

Craig Baird treats the National Film Board as a case study in how a country can end up arguing with itself over images, loyalty, and control. The episode moves from wartime anxiety into postwar pressure, and then into the quieter but still revealing question of whether a public…

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Canada's film board becomes a story about wartime nerves, politics, and public image.

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