One Man’s Documentary: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Film Board 0887556795, 9780887553516

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ONE MAN'S DOCUMENTARY

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ONE MAN'S DOCUMENTARY

A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Film Board

Graham Mclnnes Edited and with an Introduction by Gene Walz

UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS

© The estate of Graham Mclnnes, 2004 Introduction © Gene Walz, 2004 University of Manitoba Press Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2M5 Canada www.umanitoba.ca/uofmpress Printed in Canada Printed on recyled, acid-free paper. °° All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYPJGHT (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6. Design: Doowah Design Cover photo: Movieola operator, National Film Board, 1944. National Archives of Canada PA-169536. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mclnnes, Graham, 1912-1970. One man's documentary : a memoir of the early years of the National Film Board / Graham Mclnnes ; Eugene Walz, editor. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88755-679-5 1. Mclnnes, Graham, 1912-1970. 2. National Film Board of Canada—Officials and employees—Biography. I. Walz, Eugene P. II. Title. PN1998.3.M318A3 2004

791.43'092

C2004-905174-1

The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP); the Canada Council for the Arts; the Manitoba Arts Council; and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism.

CONTENTS

Preface Introduction: Days of High Excitement Author's Note Fade -In

vii ix 3 7

REEL ONE

Phoney Arms and the Man Takeover Bid Successful British Poets and Pundits

11 35 53

American Professionals Friends: Allies: Refugees

87 109

Canadian Proselytes

73

CHANGE REELS

Fire Alarm

123

REEL TWO

35mm: Theatrical lungle The Women's Touch Wizards and Pied Pipers

133 145 159

Mulberry Mission

193

16mm: Non-Theatrical Worthies

END OF REEL

175

Fade-Out

207

Notes A Graham Mclnnes Filmography Selected Bibliography

213 227 231

Preface

Graham Mclnnes wrote One Man's Documentary in the mid-1960s, just as the four published memoirs of his youth were gaining international attention. He died in 1970 before he could find a publisher for the manuscript. Four years later his widow Joan deposited it with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) archives, where it has languished ever since, known to only a handful of NFB insiders, some enterprising academics, and a few lucky researchers. The existence of the manuscript was revealed to me by Gudrun Bjerring Parker (who appears in it) as I was questioning her about Margaret Ann Bjornson (who also appears in it) and other Winnipeggers who worked at the Board in the 1940s. Once I found and read it, I was immediately impressed, feeling that it was not only a valuable document, providing important historical details that need to be widely circulated, but also that it was a great story, vividly recounted by a writer at the top of his form. The manuscript was not in its final form when Mclnnes died. He was still in the process of making some final revisions. On many pages of the typed manuscript, words were pencilled in above the lines or in the margins. In several cases extra paragraphs were added in inserts between the original pages. Elsewhere, paragraphs and even entire pages were crossed out. In 1975, Tom Daly, a long-time producer at the Board and an early colleague of Mclnnes, read the manuscript and commented on it in a

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manner similar to the way he made notes on many NFB films. His three pages of typed questions, corrections, and annotations were also in the NFB archives. Using the avuncular Daly as my guide, I have made the necessary corrections—and some additional ones. Where Mclnnes inserted changes, I made those changes. I have also deleted the paragraphs, sentences, or words that he wished to excise—but not entirely. Most of these deletions were made by Mclnnes because they interfered with the flow of the story. In a couple of cases people disappeared who, from the vantage point of 2004, I felt should be returned to the narrative. In the Notes section at the end of the manuscript, I have provided information about some of the people and films Mclnnes mentions. I have also modernized some spelling and punctuation quirks. I hope Graham Mclnnes would approve of my editing decisions. I have also taken the liberty of including a long, mock-heroic poem titled "The Grete Film Borde Fyre" just before the prose account in the "Fire Alarm" chapter. This poem was discovered in the NFB archives (with the help of Bernard Lutz) separate from the manuscript for One Man's Documentary. Although it appeared as a broadsheet with Olde Englishe calligraphy, a fancy margin, and several photographic illustrations of the fire, it was unsigned. A note from Tom Daly indicates that "The Grete Film Borde Fyre" was written by Graham Mclnnes. I would like to thank Bernard Lutz at the NFB archives for his graciousness and invaluable assistance, Veronique da Silva of the NFB photo archives for her resourcefulness in providing photos, Gudrun Bjerring Parker for her comments, Simon Mclnnes for his support and additional family information, Grant Munro for his storytelling gifts, Pat Sanders for her patience and editorial help, Jo-Ann Kubin and Bonnie Buhr for retyping the entire manuscript, and my wife Kathryn Walz for her forbearance. Gene Walz Winnipeg, 2004

INTRODUCTION

Graham Mclnnes is one of a large number of talented young people who worked at the National Film Board of Canada during the heady days of World War II. Virtually unknown even to the most conscientious film academics and trivia-saturated film buffs, he is the author of the accompanying reminiscence, One Man's Documentary, which he has called "an eyewitness memoir of days of high excitement." It is an insider's look at the people and practices of the NFB from 1939 to 1945, a vivid "origin" story about Canada's emerging world-class film studio, providing the NFB with the kind of fall-bodied vitality usually associated with Paramount, MGM, or Warner Bros. Sydney Newman, former head of drama for BBC-TV and CBC-TV, and National Film Board commissioner from 1970 to 1975, calls it "a fascinating and valuable chronicle of those wartime years in Canada, and of the somewhat exotic characters whom Grierson brought together to make wartime propaganda films." Mclnnes was working as a CBC radio broadcaster, art critic, extension lecturer, and freelance writer, with regular contributions to Canadian Forum, Saturday Night, and Queen's Quarterly, when he began writing scripts for newly appointed Film Commissioner John Grierson in the fall of 1939. He was one of the first freelance scriptwriters hired. Three of the

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initial six documentary films commissioned by Grierson (Home Front, Front of Steel, and Wings of Youth) for the "Canada Carries On" series were written by him; his experience as a writer of radio documentaries and commentaries for CBC likely recommended him. Hired as a full-time employee in the first expansion of the NFB's rolls in January 1942, Mclnnes was primarily a producer and a screenwriter (see his filmography), but he was also a director, a narrator, and, for a brief period, Coordinator of Graphics. His contributions to the NFB have been almost entirely overlooked—even for such classic films as Coal Face, Canada and Heroes of the Atlantic, and the outstanding "Canadian Artists" series, which was largely his project and his main cinematic legacy, as it is still in wide circulation. He is unmentioned in Peter Morris's The Film Companion and in the more recent and comprehensive Essential Guide to Films and Filmmaking in Canada by Wyndham Wise. Mclnnes is not alone in his virtual anonymity. With the exception of John Grierson, Canada's first film commissioner and the guiding spirit of the wartime NFB, plus maybe a dozen other filmmakers (Stuart Legg, Raymond Spottiswoode, Basil Wright, Tom Daly, James Beveridge, Joris Ivens, Evelyn Cherry, Norman McLaren, Guy Glover, Budge Crawley), practically everyone else who was employed by the Board has remained disappointingly absent from accounts. Gary Evans refers fleetingly to the filmmakers mentioned above, as well as a few others, in his book John Grierson and the National Film Board, but he is mainly interested in policies and productions, not the personalities who toiled at the infamous exlumber mill on John Street in Ottawa that served as NFB headquarters. Likewise, James Beveridge in John Grierson: Film Master and Forsyth Hardy in Grierson on Documentary give the impression that the NFB was almost a one-man show, paying scant attention to anyone other than the master and his British ex-pat inner circle. Even writers about individual films or filmmakers during this period do little to provide any sense of who worked for the Board and what they did there. In many ways, Graham Mclnnes was the ideal man to chronicle the early days of the NFB. Not only was he there from the beginning, participating in every possible way; he had already published four acclaimed memoirs, two well-received novels, and two books of art criticism when he began One Man's Documentary in the mid-1960s.

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Born into an artistic and well-connected family (his great-grandfather was the noted Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones; he was also related to Rudyard Kipling and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), Graham Mclnnes was trained early to develop a sensitivity to literature and the cultural life. As a youth and throughout his life, art and artists were all around him. His father, James Campbell Mclnnes, was a professional singer who delivered the Edwardian standards with syrupy passion. His mother (nee Angela Mackail, the daughter of a classics professor) was striking enough to pose as an artist's model (her portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent). During World War I, Angela divorced her husband and married a younger Australian flyer, George Thirkell. After the war, she took her two sons, Graham aged six and Colin aged four, to their stepfather's homeland, insisting that they take his name. There she continued the mandatory after-dinner readings of Dickens and other Victorian novelists. After less than a dozen years she moved back to England, where she began a thirty-year career as a novelist. As Angela Thirkell she published thirty-six novels, comedies of manners that were engaging enough to develop loyal fans in "Thirkell Circles" throughout England and North America. Her brother, Dennis Mackail, was also a popular novelist. Graham stayed behind in Australia to complete his undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne, then set out in search of his birth father and a career as a jazz composer. When he found his father in Toronto, it was by the simple expedient of looking his name up in the phone book. He immediately changed his name back to Mclnnes; a year later his brother chose a slight variation: Colin Maclnnes. It was as Graham Mclnnes that he began his career as a writer. In 1939 he wrote A Short History of Canadian Art, one of the earliest books of its kind; he revised this in 1950. His first novel, Lost Island, published in 1954, was a fantasy romance that was compared favourably by critics to Lost Horizon, though Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe also spring to mind. A second novel, Sushila, set in India and featuring a strong-willed, beautiful woman, followed in 1957. It too was received with considerable enthusiasm. For the next several years he proceeded to write four memoirs, focussed mainly on his adventures as a young man: The Road to Gundagai (1965), Humping My Bluey (1966), Finding a Father (1967), and Goodbye Melbourne Town (1968), all published in Britain.

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Reviewers were enthusiastic in praising the memoirs. Robert Hughes (in the Sunday Times) said: "Mclnnes . . . has almost total recall of smell, colour, shape, place and conversation. . . . Uncannily accurate"; Mordecai Richler (in the Observer) notes their "Charm" and "gusto," adding, "Mclnnes emerges as a most charming and likeable man"; and the Times Literary Supplement calls them simply "a work of literary art." In the meantime, his brother Colin Maclnnes had also turned to writing. Beginning with To the Victor, the Spoils (1950) and continuing through a series of London youth novels in a gritty realistic style—City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), and Mr. Love and Justice (1960)—he achieved a kind of notoriety because of the subjects of his novels, and because of his alcoholism, outspokenness, sexual adventurism, and scrapes with the law, problems that continued to the end of his writing career in the 1970s. His books are still taught in university courses around the world and have resulted in the following description of Graham's Sushila: "a compelling novel of India from Colin Maclnnes's less celebrated brother." Even less celebrated was Lance Thirkell, Graham's and Colin's half-brother, who also tried his hand as a novelist. With such a pedigree, it is easy to see why Mclnnes was such a gifted writer, but it may sound odd to hear him refer to himself and his fellow filmmakers as "we Canadians." In fact, because of his maturity, his name, and his accent, some of the younger "born-Canadians" considered him to be "one of Grierson's boys," i.e., one of the experienced Scots and Brits whom John Grierson imported from his English film units. But Mclnnes chose as his own the adopted country of his father over the native lands of his stepfather and even his mother's and brother's. And he knew more about Canada than many natives, having travelled by car from Halifax to Victoria in 1937 (before there was a Trans-Canada Highway), making contacts across the land, and broadcasting a series of fifteen weekly radio documentaries for CBC. In his dedication to Canada, he brought "the zeal of the converted" to his filmmaking and post-filmmaking careers.

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THE GRIERSON CIRCUS

When Mclnnes arrived in Canada, not many people were engaged in making Canadian films. Fewer than two dozen feature films were produced in the 1930s, and most of those were "Quota Quickies," low-budget films made by registered Canadian companies just to satisfy a British law requiring that a certain quota of films screened in Britain be made there or elsewhere in the Commonwealth. Hollywood movies dominated the nation's theatres, and Hollywood stars would often venture to Victoria, BC, to appear in Quota Quickies. More legitimate Canadian filmmakers were restricted to short films. Individual entrepreneurial filmmakers, like Dick Bird in Saskatchewan and Frank Holmes in Manitoba, were spread across the country, scrambling to make a living, one small project at a time. Only three companies employed more than one or two people: General Films of Regina, Audio Pictures Ltd. of Toronto, and Associated Screen News of Montreal. For the latter two, filmmaking was a secondary pursuit; they were mainly labs that provided Hollywood movie prints for the Canadian market. The federal government had set up an Exhibits and Publicity Bureau in 1917 to make films. In 1923 the name was changed to the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau (CGMPB); it became a clearing house for all government filmmaking, with short films about tourism, agriculture, trade, and industry being staples. During the Depression, production suffered. There was enough money for salaries, not enough for films. Meanwhile, in England, that government's filmmaking activities were in the capable hands of John Grierson, a charismatic Scot who had invented the term "documentary" and studied the effects of media with Walter Lippman at the University of Chicago in the mid-192Os. Returning to England, Grierson found a receptive audience for his ideas, and was appointed a joint Films Officer at the Empire Marketing Board (EMB). He immediately put his ideas into practice with a stunning silent documentary about the importance of herring fishing to the fortunes of the country. Drifters (1939) combined the editing sophistication of Russian cinema with the energy of Hollywood and Grierson's own social-minded intimacy. It was the only film Grierson ever directed, but it set the standard for the committed, propaganda documentaries he would champion for the rest of his career.

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Grierson's forte was as an organizer and encourager. He soon assembled a cadre of young, like-minded disciples: Basil Wright, Stuart Legg, Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, Norman McLaren, Alberto Cavalcanti from Italy, and Evelyn Spice from Canada, among the more notable. Their films quickly captured the attention of the world. When EMB got out of the filmmaking business, Grierson and his operation moved to the General Post Office (GPO), setting up an outstanding Film Unit there. Among the GPO Film Unit's admirers were the members of the National Film Society of Canada, a group of educators and civicminded businessmen interested in alternatives to Hollywood cinema and film as art. When the Liberals returned to power in 1935 under Mackenzie King, the society exerted its influence through Ross McLean, the youthful private secretary to the Canadian High Commissioner to England, Vincent Massey. Disappointed with the meagre output of the CGMPB and the lack of interest in Canadian films in the British marketplace (and perhaps influenced by the ominous war-thumpings on the continent), McLean wrote a report encouraging the Canadian government to hire John Grierson to study the state of the art. Grierson's own report led to an Act of Parliament, the National Film Act, in May 1939, which set up an eight-member National Film Board to oversee all government film production under a Film Commissioner. When war was declared and the first person offered the job (a member of the National Film Society) rejected it, Grierson was convinced to become Canada's first Film Commissioner. Despite his energy and experience, Grierson's job was not an easy one. Government filmmaking was a bifurcated proposition. Grierson was the overseer, but Frank Badgley remained in charge of production at CGMPB. Grierson imported some of his British colleagues (Legg, Wright, Spice, among others), commissioned some films, and hired eager freelancers. Legg, working out of CGMPB, set up a monthly series called "Canada Carries On" (cco), short compilation films, cleverly edited from existing footage, to show Canada to Canadians and Canadians to the rest of the world, to quote an often used phrase. Chafing under this fractured filmmaking system, Grierson used his superior political savvy to gain overall control. He threatened to resign as Film Commissioner, and succeeded in getting the government to ease

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Frank Badgley out of CGMPB and consolidated his own power in the summer of 1941. Always adept at garnering funds from government departments and agencies, Grierson had Legg institute a second series, the "World in Action" (WIA), devoted to broader international issues of war and peace. He also substantially expanded the employee rolls, moving from only a handful to over 200 in 1942. At its peak in 1945, the NFB employed over 600 people in Ottawa, expanding rapidly year by eventful year. Graham Mclnnes was hired "full-time" in one of the first big waves in January 1942, though he had unofficially been collecting a regular salary for almost two years.

UNCOMMON QUALITIES

As the accompanying account indicates, film training at the NFB was not a very formal or extensive process; "You want to take images that will straighten their shoulders, brighten their eyes, put spine into them" was about the extent of Grierson's screenwriting advice. But Mclnnes soon cottoned onto the required voice-over style that carried NFB films at the time: rhythmic, dramatic, and urgent, almost bombastic, especially in the rousing and hortatory conclusions. This, for instance, is how Mclnnes ends his script for Wings of Youth (1940): "The battle for individual rights is fought with individual skills. Wings above New Zealand, above Sydney, you who are young we salute you. For never was so much owed to so many by so few." The final words of his script for Ottawa on the River (1941) are his most Grierson-esque: "Lights burn late, often all through the night. In wartime Ottawa they have set themselves to prove that the will of the people can be carried out just as swiftly and effectively as the edicts of dictators." By later that year, Mclnnes had found a better idiom; Heroes of the Atlantic (1941) contains these more sober nuggets: —"barrels of oil and barrels of rum which men need at sea" —"boys are with their first girls and boys are with their last" (about sailors on leave at a dancehall) —"Here the professor of the tattoo. Here a game of billiards. Here the prolonged rattle, the strike, the spare, the blow of the bowling alley." Mclnnes had quickly learned the crude poetry of documentary voice-

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over narration: the repetitions and cadences, the distinctive slang of ordinary voices, the sharp expressions of war rather than the puffy encouragements. The voice-overs, however, were only part of a screenwriter's job. The advice that Mclnnes, the producer, gave to Stanley Jackson, his scriptwriter on Great Guns (1942), indicates the scope of both jobs. In addition to thorough research, he expected "the prose treatment giving a broad shape of the film with suggested visuals in the left margin." But he also requested "a director's dope sheet, giving factories, human [resources], visual[s], and contact info useful to the director and cameraman." Wartime filmmaking at NFB was a collaborative effort, with individual contributions not regularly listed, but it's clear that it was primarily a producer's medium—like its Hollywood cousins. For instance, for one of his films, Mclnnes wrote a five-page, single-spaced memo on legal-sized paper to his scriptwriter Bob Edmonds; it contained additional ideas and notes for changes to the draft script submitted. For Wings Parade (1942), Mclnnes used different crew members for footage shot in Montreal, Kingston, Brantford, Belleville, Merritton, Edmonton, Halifax, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Leaside, and Toronto—all on a budget of $10,000. The producer clearly had to be an idea person and personnel director, an accountant, logistics expert, tactician, and diplomat. Nonetheless, despite his extensive experience and successes as a producer, director, and writer, Mclnnes was sanguine about his filmmaking talents. At the end of this memoir, he muses about his career at the NFB: Grierson had early decided that I was not a real filmmaker. I was a good writer, certainly; and also an able administrator and an efficient PRO [Public Relations Officer] — My best work had been done as an idea man, as a scriptwriter, a cutler, a producer and a PRO. My worst as a director. Since this is the core and marrow of film it must be there that Grierson had unerringly perceived that I should fail— It was for this reason that Mclnnes looked for an opportunity for a graceful exit when Grierson resigned in 1945 and the downsizing began. In 1948 he moved to the External Affairs department. Beginning in 1951 he filled a series of consular positions in postings to India, New Zealand, England, Jamaica, and Paris. He became Canada's Permanent Delegate to UNESCO in 1965, before that post was coverted to Ambassador in 1967, after which he was elected to UNESCO's board of governors. He died in office there in 1970.

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ONE MAN'S DOCUMENTARY

Blessed with a photographic memory, a gifted mimic's ear for dialogue, and an artist's eye for telling details, Mclnnes writes with an easy grace that is completely different from his mother's and his brother's styles. He can limm characters with strings of apt adjectives and describe action succinctly and forcefully. As his friend, Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, said in his introduction to the second Canadian edition of The Road to Gundagai, his prose is "supple and evocative" and he possesses "qualities of perception and selectivity that are uncommon in autobiography." The selectivity is evident in his descriptions of the major (but not, thankfully, all) projects he worked on and the portraits of three score (again, thankfully, not all) of the workers at NFB, from Grierson on down; musicians, editors, lab technicians, distributors, secretaries, other directors, producers, and writers are the subjects of his vivid portraits. His perception is as much a function of Paris in the 1960s as it is of Ottawa in the 1940s. Perhaps influenced by the new wave in filmmaking (Truffaut, Godard, et al.) and Cahiers du cinema's promotion of the auteur theory, he overvalues directors at NFB (at least in his final evaluation) and undervalues his own contributions. More importantly, it is both nostalgic and romantic (eminently 1960s attitudes), a look back at an heroic era from a point in time when the NFB was still in its ascendancy and Canada was bullish on itself in the glow of Expo 67. Much has happened since then. The glory days of the NFB, which this memoir evokes both directly and indirectly, are long since gone. Revisionist historians have not been as kind to John Grierson as Mclnnes is. Grierson left Canada under a dark cloud, the so-called Gouzenko Affair. Gouzenko, a defecting Russian, identified one of Grierson's minor secretaries as a spy. Mclnnes does not provide even a hint of this, ever the disciple and diplomat. He would have been unaware of the challenges to Grierson's ideology and methodology that have emphasized the master's clay feet. And Norman McLaren's reputation as a lone genius, promoted here, has been trimmed back somewhat over the years as the contributions of Evelyn Lambart have come to the fore. Nonetheless, the significance of this memoir cannot be denied. Had it

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been published when it was written, One Man's Documentary would have been unique and ground-breaking, certainly influential. The books on Grierson and/or the NFB by Forsyth Hardy, James Beveridge, and Gary Evans were at least a decade in the future. Its only competition at the time was Marjorie McKay's slight, in-house History of the National Film Board of Canada; a mimeographed pamphlet by a fellow employee, it has had very limited circulation among outsiders then and now. Mclnnes's book published in the early 1970s would have set the stage and established a lively, personal, inclusive tone for subsequent studies. Even now One Man's Documentary is invaluable. The NFB was a colourful, dedicated, unique community, and these qualities have not yet been captured and communicated. It is important that people realize, Canadians especially, that the NFB was not the stereotype many people believe it to be: a grey, earnest, propaganda-spouting, money-wasting institution run by a cranky and forceful if benevolent ideologue. Mclnnes's account shows what a lively, social place the old lumber mill was, how committed and talented most of the people were, how conscientious they were in their research (sometimes overly or misguidedly so), and what the times were like that framed their cinematic activities. These were civil servants who kept scandalously uncivil-servant hours, civil servants who were convinced they were artists learning from scratch and shaping an essential, nation-building and perhaps world-saving medium. Many of them went on to bigger and better things but are now at best merely names, at worst anonymous or long forgotten. More importantly, many of the films of this era are still in circulation. This book provides a crucial link to these films and to that important stage in Canada's history.

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aUTHOR'S nOTE

This is a personal and unofficial account of the pioneer days of a great documentary film enterprise as seen by a participant. Hence, while I have tried to be accurate as to facts, my judgements (few) and impressions (many) remain unavoidably subjective. To the extent that the story concerns John Grierson—as much of it does—I have relied, where I could not trust my memory, on his own words. These are to be found in the collection Grierson on Documentary, edited and compiled by Forsyth Hardy (Faber and Faber). Though my own narrative makes no attempt at an analysis of Grierson's philosophy, but is rather an eyewitness memoir of days of high excitement, anyone who writes of Grierson and documentary owes a debt to Forsyth Hardy which it is impossible to discharge but which I happily acknowledge. Except where I obviously recollect personal conversations, quotations are from Hardy's book. Many people have contributed to the research for this book, chief among them Stanley Hawes, Stan Helleur (Editor of the Canadian Film and TV Weekly), Marjorie McKay, Gerald Graham and Ray Payne of the National Film Board of Canada, Sir Arthur Elton, Bt., Mary Butterill (Secretary of Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada, Ltd.), David Rhydwen of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Captain F. Greatrex, and Lt. Col. C.W. Glover.

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To Lady Elton (Margaret Ann Elton) I owe a special debt. An original member of the Grierson circus in the old lumber mill on the Ottawa and an associate and friend over the years, her assistance, by virtue of her own encyclopaedic knowledge and alert intelligence, has been invaluable. She has enabled me to avoid undue emphases and omissions, to sharpen many impressions and to recall many half-forgotten incidents. Nevertheless, as in all works of this kind, responsibility for any errors of fact or of interpretation remains mine. Graham Mclnnes

4

To

John Grierson and Stanley Hawes

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fADE out

One paralyzingly cold day in January 1957,1 went down to the edge of the Ottawa River with a No. 1 Box Brownie camera. It was so cold that the great river was steaming through cracks in its own ice and creating a dense mist of fog crystals which obscured the sun, a low scudding orange disc. In front of me stood the mangled skeleton of an old brick and concrete building, its reinforcing rods spilled out like the entrails of a slaughtered animal. Beside the remains of the building were two large wrecking cranes: from each dangled a massive steel ball weighing about 500 pounds. I had on a fur cap and earmuffs, but even so I shivered and banged my ears against frostbite as I stumbled around in the snow, snapping pictures before the shutter of the little camera should freeze. Passersby in their speeding cars—almost no one walks in Ottawa in winter—gazed at me through their frosted windows as I staggered about in the ice. They must have thought I was mad, standing around at twenty below zero taking pictures of the wrecking of an old lumber mill. But the place had for me and perhaps two or three hundred other old film hands imperishable memories; and when the spool was developed I sent prints of the wreckage to all parts of Canada, to Britain, to the USA and even to faroff Australia. Today nothing is left there. Nothing to mark the place where once

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stood the National Film Board of Canada. Absolutely nothing. From the look of this stretch of the Ottawa riverbank [on Sussex where the Rideau River plunges into the Ottawa River] NFB might never have existed. There is, at this particular point in place and time, not a vestige left of that great venture. The Gatineau Hills still lift enigmatic scarps and nodules to the North; the big cathedral across the river still tilts backward to the sky and sends out its harsh discordant peal. But NFB here is totally obliterated. It is as if it had never been. Yet for almost six years of my life, what is now bland lawn, and what was on that winter day the skeleton of a wrecked building, contained an industrious ant heap of between three and four hundred men and women working at a frenzied pace in perhaps the finest—certainly the most exciting—disciplined and cooperative creative venture in the recent history of the free world. It was because of this that I went down to the river that blisteringly cold day to take snaps for some of the veterans who'd worked there. It is because of this that I have now attempted to set down an entirely personal account of the astonishing and purposeful activity that went on in that vanished building, and of the man who made it possible— John Grierson. To him, as to my old comrade-in-arms Stanley Hawes, I dedicate this book.

8

rEEL ONE

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pHONEY ARMS AND THE MAN

If it is increasingly difficult now to think back to the heroic epoch of the Second World War, then to think back to its unheroic epoch, the so-called "Phoney War," is next to impossible. Yet it was into the midst of this guiltridden apprehensive pause that John Grierson exploded. Not only into my life, but into those of several scores of young Canadians, Americans and Britons. In doing so he permanently altered their concept of how to justify the ways of God to man. So the effort must be made. Canada in the first autumn of the Second World War was a drear, selfdoubting place. We had demonstrated our independence by declaring war on Hitler one whole week after Britain had done so. Our Prime Minister [Mackenzie King] had always replied with a Delphic smile, in response to opposition requests, "Parliament will decide." But all Parliament had really decided was that (a week later) we would follow Britain. Our American cousins across the border—the famous "three"-thousand-mile undefended frontier of many a Rotary exordium—regarded us, from the depths of their determined isolationism, with tolerant incomprehension. They supposed we knew what we were doing. But though there was a declaration of war there were no declaratory statements. The nation was uneasy, sick at heart, still a shade incredulous and filled with foreboding. It was, after all, barely a year since Munich, of

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which Canadians, 3000 miles from the Channel, had not at all approved. Quebec, in the tough paternalistic grip of Premier Maurice Duplessis, remained enigmatically noncommittal. France was threatened—possibly. But it was France of the Revolution, the Commune and Jean Jaures, rather than the France of the Ancien Regime. At first it did indeed look like all-out war. The sirens wailed over London in the silvery golden September light. The Athenia was torpedoed with a number of Canadians on board including a nationally known radio producer. We gasped in amazement and started the slow burn which with Canadians so often takes the place of anger. But then everything stopped, slowed, stalled. Someone in New York said in mid-October, "Why, it's nothing but a phoney war." The phrase stuck. By God, it looks like it, we agreed unhappily. What to do? Was it business as usual? The New York Times, Sunday bible of the impecunious Toronto intellectual, among whom we counted ourselves, weighed, with its 140 pages, as much as ever. The CNR and CPR were running excursion trains. The Defence of Canada regulations had been promulgated, of course. The Army had opened its doors to voluntary recruitment and at the local armouries one could see long queues of lightly bearded, ill-dressed men. "Sure gets the unemployed off the streets," murmured certain people in rich Rosedale and flossy Forest Hill Village. But others in the same area, honourary colonels of ancient and noble Canadian regiments, bent a severe brow on such "disloyalty" as they buttoned themselves into their old belly-tight uniforms and drove in their big Buicks and Chryslers to local parade grounds. An atrocious comic-strip-type security poster appeared in the post offices and in the government liquor stores. "The husband told the wife (all about the troop train). The wife told the delivery boy ... the delivery boy told the spy (complete with turned down George Raft hat brim, turned up coat collar and furtive expression)... the spy told the agent... who blew up the troop train." We hooted with angry derision. Not only were there, we were sure, no spies in Canada (even though the dateline "An eastern Canadian port" had appeared as a thin disguise for Halifax), but what an insult to all our intelligences that even the artwork wasn't well done! Was amateurish, crude. Butcher's lettering. Someone should write to Ottawa and complain. Someone should do something about it. Yes, but how did you start? Where did you go? Whom did you write to?

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Obviously going straight into the Army would get you nowhere. I was working [as a radio broadcaster] for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was told to script and produce a recruiting program. I went out to Brampton with a sound van on a gorgeous golden October Sunday afternoon. It was one of those days when, after the first frost, the air is utterly still and fairly warm. Smoke rising from white frame farmhouses hung straight as a sword in a dreamy grey-blue sky. The air was full of the faintly acrid smell of burning leaves. The great maples, turned into flaming red and yellow torches by the chill night frosts, burst in unbelievable splendour along the edges of the ragged green pasture. Brampton itself was then a sleepy Ontario town of wide main streets, red brick storefronts and comfortable frame houses snoozing in big wooded lots fringed with Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod. It hadn't yet been engulfed, as it was thirty years later, in the roaring rapacious megalopolis of Greater Toronto. The Lome Scots, under the keen eye of Lt. Col. Louis Keene, a "Saturday colonel," were going through their paces in a green field of baseball diamonds almost in the middle of the autumn country. Even the roofs and chimneys of Brampton were hidden in the golden haze. It seemed extraordinarily peaceful and extremely amateur. The men were still largely in civvies and some of them carried brooms and spades instead of guns. It needed a knowledge of Canadian history, and the vision in the mind's eye of William Lyon Mackenzie's irregulars from Upper Canada, drilling with pitchforks at the time of the 1837 Rebellion, to instill a sense of purpose into the desultory and lackadaisical marching and countermarching in the soft warm sunlight. Lt. Col. Keene surveyed his men with pride. He pointed out that they were now right up to date. "Why, in the old days we formed fours. These lads form threes. As you'll notice. Makes all the difference. This is modern warfare. Hope you'll make a note of that in your script." But when I got back to Toronto it seemed not only amateurish and peaceful, but irrelevant as well. How could one possibly help "the war effort"—whatever that was in the golden October of 1939—by joining up? The Lome Scots. Even the name, honourable though it was, sounded vaguely risible or at the least extremely unwarlike. Back at the CBC I ran into Donald Buchanan. In a land all too apt to

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reach for the compromise and the easy way around the problem, Donald stood out as the upholder of absolutes, the incompressible nut, the stone which stuck in the gizzard of many an artistic administrator and many a committee. He was at this time Director of Talks for CBC. He greeted me at the top of the fretted steel ship's engine-room ladder which led up to the offices, still housed then in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of central Toronto. His face split in a quizzical grin as he said, "Grierson's in Ottawa. You ought to see him." "Who's Grierson?" "EMB. GPO. Documentary." "I don't want to appear ignorant, but—?" He scratched the side of his neck. "Remember Night Mail"?" Indeed I remembered Night Mail. We had screened it at the Toronto Branch of the National Film Society. It was a short film (a 'two-reeler' as I later learned, that is to say twenty minutes long) about what happened on the night mail train that left Euston every evening on the 400-mile run to Glasgow. It had struck me as a new sort of film, one in which the happenings of everyday life, filmed on the streets and not in the studio, and then selectively edited and emphasized, seemed to sum up experience and 'reality' in a way that, by contrast, made the Hollywood productions of the thirties seem intolerably elephantine. But I also remembered that what had most impressed me was less the film than the commentary, which had been written by W.H. Auden, master poet—and idol—of all the young at the time. I remembered particularly a sequence in which the train, panting heavily by Beattock summit in the Cheviots, with a grey spindrift dawn breaking over the moors, suddenly had as companion on the soundtrack an unexpected and dramatic recitative, in time with the pounding of the exhaust: "This is the Night Mail crossing the Border Bringing the cheque and the postal order—" This selective and basically anti-visual memory was later to get me into trouble with Grierson who, having produced Night Mail, hated that it should be remembered solely for a bit of commentary "dubbed in at the last minute" rather than for the photography and the direction and the basic concept. I defended myself to Grierson as best I could by pointing out that, when I saw the film, I had had no direct experience of filmmaking. I was in

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fact a writer whose images and remembrances were inevitably literary and not visual. But Grierson wouldn't accept this, and would fame and rumble like a quiescent volcano. However, on this occasion I repeated to Donald, "I remember Night Mail:' "Well, Grierson made it and lots of films like it." "What's he doing in Ottawa?" "He's over here trying to set up some kind of government film centre." "You mean to make films?" "Yes." "Sounds interesting." Donald barley-sugared an arm through one of the steel stanchions holding up the iron steps. "Just what I say. He's looking for writers." "Scriptwriters, you mean?" "Any sort of writer, really. You should go and see him. Send him a letter anyway." "Well, thanks, Donald. I might do that. Ought I to enclose samples of my work—radio scripts and stuff like that?" He shrugged. "Why not?" "What's his address?" "He's in the West Block in Ottawa. Guess you could write to him care of the Department of Trade and Commerce." "Why there?" "It's just the set-up. They control the Motion Picture Bureau, you see." "I see." I didn't really, though. "John Grierson, is it?" "That's right." "Thanks." I clattered down the iron stairway and Donald went on up into the gloomy cubicles of the CBC with their fibreboard partitions to protect the girls' legs from executive ogling, and the glass ones to permit executive surveillance of young writers and producers. I got home to our upper duplex near the university and went up onto the little zinc-floored balustraded balcony above the front porch. The elms and maples shadowed it in the summer and pushed right into the upper windows of the tiny apartment. But now it was the end of October: the unexpectedly prolonged lees of an Indian summer, but no leaves.

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I glanced at the Toronto Daily Star. They were still rowing in the British Cabinet as to who had been responsible for the sinking of the Royal Oak by a German submarine right inside Scapa Flow. They were still worried about and worrying over the magnetic mine. Our own Prime Minister had said that Canada would have a division in England by Christmas. There was an invitation from some friends to spend the holiday in Boston. I didn't know what seemed the more unreal. The war news; the prospect of Canadians (belligerents) crossing the border into the USA (a non-belligerent) for a holiday; or the marching and counter-marching of the Lome Scots on the Brampton baseball diamond in the soporific October sunshine. I sat down and composed a careful letter to Grierson, enclosed some of my radio scripts and articles and mailed it off. Two days later—pretty quick for the civil service, I caught myself thinking—back came a reply. Eagerly I tore open the stiff vellum envelope with its embossed blue Canadian coat of arms. Alas, it was a three-line acknowledgement from a Miss Janet Scellen. Mr. Grierson was Out West; she would show him my scripts upon his return; she was mine sincerely. Oh well. I filed the letter thoughtfully and got on with my CBC script but with a sense of increasing futility. Surely something had to happen? Surely the Nazis and the French weren't going to face each other across the Maginot Line forever? Surely we would all be engulfed? Surely at least Canada would "do something"? But what? October slid into chill November. November oozed darkly into December. Snow flurries eddied around the little zinc-lined balcony. Suddenly everything seemed to happen at once. Russia invaded Finland and gave us confused Canadians something emotional, even if emotionally a bit worm-eaten, to latch on to. Graf Spee blew herself up in Montevideo rather than face Ajax, Exeter, and Achilles, and gave the Rosedale Colonels at the York Club something with which to beat Mackenzie King over the head. And an 'immediate' telegram came from Grierson. "Urgently need your services script First War Loan film [Call to a Nation] be in Ottawa tomorrow morning expenses paid Grierson Government Film Commissioner." I borrowed from the housekeeping money and in a turmoil boarded the night train for Ottawa. On the way I read one of Grierson's recent speeches.

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... the documentary idea was not basically a film idea at all, and the film treatment it inspired, only an incidental aspect of it. The medium happened to be the most convenient and most exciting available to us. The idea itself, on the other hand, was a new idea for public education; its underlying concept that the world was in a phase of drastic change affecting every manner of thought and practice, and the public comprehension of the nature of that change vital. There it is, exploratory, experimental and stumbling, in the films themselves: from the dramatization of the workman and his daily work to the dramatization of modern organization and the new corporate elements in society to the dramatization of social problems: each a step in the attempt to understand the stubborn raw material of our modern citizenship and wake the heart and the will to their mastery.

H'mm.

Ottawa in 1939 was a quiet little tree-embowered capital of about 120,000 inhabitants. Chosen by Queen Victoria (on the advice of her responsible ministers) to break a haughty deadlock between Montreal and Toronto, it sprawled round a high bluff at the confluence of the Ottawa and the Rideau rivers, and was also the northern terminal of the Rideau Canal. Beneath the bluff the Ottawa flowed grey and noble to join the St. Lawrence at Montreal, a hundred miles to the east. A mile below the bluff the Rideau, flowing sluggishly north from lakes in the stony hinterland, poured in a silvery curtain down to the Ottawa. It was because of this that the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain had named the river Le Rideau upon its discovery in 1608 when he ascended the Ottawa by canoe. Above the bluff the Ottawa fell boiling from Lac Deschenes through a narrow gorge. Champlain had called it La Chaudiere on this same voyage and, though some 300 years later the great fall was blocked and obliterated by lumber mills and hydroelectric power plants, the shroud of foam still hung above them, turning in winter to ice and snow which draped all the buildings with a frosty coverlet. To the casual visitor the Rideau Canal was perhaps the more interesting. It ascended the bluff from the Ottawa River to the Rideau by a series of gigantic steps up a narrow brush-choked ravine. Standing on the bridge which spanned the canal and led from Lower Town to Upper Town, one

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could see no less than eight massive wooden locks and beyond them the Gatineau Hills—sharp scraped, ice-blue scarps—cut by the thin stack of a large cement plant from which smoke swirled furiously in the northwesterlies that whooshed down from the arctic, or else rose straight up like a rope hung from the sky. And one inhaled the sickly sweet smell of watered pulpwood and sulphur coming from the enormous pile of logs—higher than a ten-storey building—constantly replenished from the river by an endless conveyor belt and as constantly chewed into matches, cardboard and newsprint, those indispensable prerequisites of Champlain's and Murray's descendants. Here too was the basic fact of Canada, the conjunction of Frenchspeaking Catholic Quebec and English-speaking Protestant Ontario: separated by the grey and noble Ottawa, joined by an awkward mixed cantilever-truss bridge. And here, also, one was conscious of a vast melancholy and loneliness, an awesome sense of shaggy Siberian infinities. The wilderness, banished from the cold grey canyons of Montreal and Toronto, here seemed ready at any moment to engulf the importunate little city. The sky was an immense, cool, silvery-blue dome, the horizon as sharp as the blade of an axe. One sensed a land carved in the grand manner yet created on a scale so huge that man's very presence was unbelievably audacious. Beyond those scraped ice-blue scarps was very nearly nothing in 2000 miles to the Pole. And yet there at your feet, to belie the emptiness and the loneliness, was the Rideau Canal. The canal effectively divided the little city in half. Though many efforts had been made to close the gap between Upper Town (basically English-speaking) and Lower Town (basically French-speaking), first by bridges and then by buildings and monuments, the two parts of Ottawa, including two quite separate commercial sections, remained rigidly apart. In the middle of the enormous grass and cement no-man's-land separating the two towns had recently been erected a memorial to the Canadian fallen of the First World War. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had unveiled it in June 1939—just three months before the outbreak of the Second World War. Here now was this monstrous stone and bronze irony stuck stark in the middle of the basic channel of communication between the two halves of the city. Ugly in itself, it also produced ugly traffic jams and helped to turn

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Confederation Square into what was locally known as Confusion Square. But looming above the monument, created by the Marsh Brothers, English sculptors known to irreverent locals as the Marx Brothers, rose Parliament Hill: perhaps the most perfect, certainly the most thrillingly romantic ensemble of High Victorian Bravura still in existence. Crocketted dormers, steep gables and slender spires, asymmetrical towers and roofs with nightmare slopes, the whole garnished with a lush profusion of iron filigree work falling like wisteria or Virginia creeper from every contorted turret. All this made of the tout ensemble a wildly fretted skyline before which St. Pancras paled into insignificance. Bang in the middle of all this High Victorian Bravura sat John Grierson, the iconoclastic and indomitable Scot who had just become Canadian Government Film Commissioner. The secretary—this same Miss Janet Scellen—a severely pleasant girl with rimless glasses and a high colour on her cheekbones, ushered me through an improbable red baize door. I found myself face to face with the man who was going to rule all our young destinies for the next six years. "Sit down, sit down!" he barked. "So you got here all right? Good! Now I want you just to try to understand what we're endeavouring to do. You have to see the perspectives, the growing points behind what's going on up here on The Hill. A nation at war; but still bemused. Still half asleep. You have to search, to analyze, to articulate the potential of Canada and to make it so compelling that people will want to plunge their hands into their own pockets. Their own pockets. You understand?" I wasn't quite sure I did. The barked torrent of words flowed on over me: a cataract of verbiage with unknown phrases sticking up like sharp rocks to confound the frail barque of my self-confidence and perhaps overwhelm it. He had a habit of jabbing a hole in the air as he spoke; of running his finger round quickly inside his collar; of jerking his head impatiently; of scratching his scalp; above all of hoisting his feet up onto the desk—not in a lazy man's way, but with knees bent, poised like a coiled spring, either, you thought, to push his own chair back and send it skidding the length of the room, or else to leap right on top of the desk to harangue some imaginary mob. He was wound up tighter than a watch and gave a tremendous sense of controlled strength, of bounding energy and bursting vitality barely held in check by the diminutive body. He appeared to be driven by a tremendous force, yet when he stood up

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to say farewell, after bruising me verbally for half an hour, I was astonished to see that I was a good head taller. Sitting behind a desk, he gave the impression of being very large, or at any rate of being larger than life, a man of sizzling vigour. An alert, acrobatic, allusive converse bombarded you like a hail of birdshot and at the same time questioned enough of your accepted myths, prejudices or teachings to make you want to protest at every fifth word. Protesting but also fascinated. Numbed by the coruscating flow of ideas, but filled also with a heady sense of freedom and devilmay-care abandon. Because if he—perhaps your prospective employer and certainly at forty-two, which he then was, a man half a generation older than yourself—if he was so iconoclastic, could not you be so too? Could not you too sway along behind his chariot, thumbing your nose at the mighty, even perhaps letting off a loud idealistic belch or an intellectual whistle in their direction? As he rose, I rose. "Sit down, sit down," he growled, for he hated—or pretended to hate—big men to overtop him, even in the more physical matter of height, which of course none of us can help. He started to pace the room with a swift jerky lope, a cross between Groucho Marx and what, in my imagination, I had always imagined as the walk of Edward Hyde. He shot words, phrases, sentences over his shoulder like a stream of smoke and sparks from a turn-of-the-century locomotive breasting the Rockies. "You can script in something about closer living, up here. Across the Line it's all still pie and ice cream and mazuma. They haven't really grasped the fact that it's their war; for all that, Roosevelt's a greater man than most. And here they're searching for leadership, scratching around in the dark looking for matches. You want to take images that will straighten their shoulders, brighten their eyes, put spine into them. It's here, but they don't know it. Things seem unreal to them. Pull out the images that they know— street-corner hockey rinks, sap flowing in the sugar bush, the hard clear line of the Laurentians, men and clattery combines on the Prairies. You know the kind of thing! You may not know much about visuals yet, but do us an outline. Write a script to time for nine minutes, and put in your visuals on the margin, a guide to the director. All right, you got that?" He stopped his sudden pacing and jerked me back to earth. I didn't like to reply "Got what?" but I very nearly did. For the tirade had been so rapid, so like the Sten gun that could cut a man in two at twenty paces,

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that my numbed attention had wandered to the architecture and the decor. The ceiling was enormously high with elaborate plasterwork round the remains of a non-existent chandelier, and an opulent floral dado. The windows, recessed and fitted with shutters, were enormously tall and hung with sedate and slightly moth-eaten green plush curtains. Through them I could see the snow-piled desolation of Parliament Hill with the romantic towers and pinnacles of the East Block and the main Parliament buildings biting into the crisp blue winter sky. High up and near at hand a deep bell sonorously tolled the hour. I caught myself thinking: the view of St. Basil's in the Kremlin must be not too unlike this. I wonder if it looks as peaceful, as unreal? Are we at war? Or in a dream? The Kremlin; Moscow; the Nazi-Soviet Pact; the rape of Poland; the crushing of Finland. Yes, we were at war, all right. "You got that?" "Yes. Yes, I've got it, sir." "For Christ's sake cut out that public school stuff here. My name's Grierson." "Yes, Mr. Grierson." "Grierson!" "Yes—ah—Grierson." "All right now, Mclnnes. I haven't any more time for you today. Get the script written as soon as you can and mail it up to us. Miss Scellen will give you a cheque for expenses on your way out. Miss Scellen!" She came bursting through the red baize door slightly flustered. She'd been recruited from the regular civil service to be a secretary to this highly unorthodox dynamo, and she was still a shade shocked at the raw energetic way in which things were done. Summoning secretaries, for example. "Yes, Mr. Grierson?" "Get Mr. Mclnnes a cheque, there's a good girl." He put out a sudden hand from a frayed buttoned shirt cuff and a shiny suit sleeve. I noticed the hand was unexpectedly neat and fine, but that the square nails were slightly serrated. He held open the door and I smiled gratefully down at him. His eyes were a piercing blue. Above thin lips, which curled with a curious mixture of irony and amusement, was a smear of close-clipped brown moustache matching sandy hair on a tough, slightly balding head.

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Though his face was ten inches below mine his gaze made me feel about four feet high and still a freshman at university. Perhaps that's what you are meant to feel before born teachers. "Oh, by the bye," he said, withdrawing his hand. "You'd better see Legg before you go. You'll find him down at the Bureau. Good day." He let the red baize door puff to on its pneumatic stop and I found myself alone in the anteroom with Miss Scellen busying herself with papers at a drop-leaf desk. "Excuse me," I said, "but who is Legg?" "Stuart Legg," she said, flashing her rimless glasses at me. "He's the new film director come over from Britain." "Is he director of this Bureau then? Mr. Grierson said I'd find him down at the Bureau." "Oh yes. No, Mr. Grierson means the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. That's down in Sussex Street. Take an 'R' streetcar. No, Captain Badgley's the director of the Bureau." 'Captain' sounded a bit odd. "A naval captain?" "No, a military captain." "Then what does Mr. Legg do?" She went on fussing with the papers, but obviously welcomed the chance to explain. She put her elbows on the desk and folded her hands beneath her chin—rather a fetching position even when you do wear rimless glasses. "Mr. Legg," she explained, "is a film director. He works at the Bureau, but he doesn't belong to the Bureau. He belongs to us: the National Film Board. But the Board is really just Mr. Grierson and his two assistants, Mr. McLean—he's English language—and Mr. Cote—he's French language— and me." "Here, in this building?" "Oh yes, just in two offices." "Well, why isn't Legg here?" "Because the administration and the politics—I mean civil service politics, of course," she gave a ghost of a smile, "not the real thing—they're all up here. But the actual business of making films, that's down at the Bureau. So that's why Mr. Legg works there and not here. See?" She added brightly, "Here's your expense cheque." She waved it in the air.

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"And by the way, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but there'll also be a fee of $100 for the script, even if Mr. Legg doesn't use it." "Well, that's very princely! But it's really he, is it, rather than Mr. Grierson I mean, who decides?" She looked judicious and cocked her head a bit on one side. "Yes and no. They work as a team. Mr. Grierson usually has the first ideas and Mr. Legg develops them—puts them into effect." "With this Captain Badgley?" "Oh no. He just runs the Bureau." "You mean the Film Board and the Bureau are entirely separate?" "Yes, at least not exactly; but look here, I mustn't talk policy." "You have a Film Board that doesn't make films, and a place called a Bureau that does, is that it?" "Motion Picture Bureau," she corrected. "They're supposed to be getting together, but it's a long process—the civil service, you know—even when there's a war on." I picked up my rabbit-fur cap with the earmuffs. That was about all I could afford; it should have been sealskin or caracul. "You mean," I said, "Legg is a sort of Fifth Column for Grierson in the Bureau?" Miss Scellen stood up abruptly, looking both excited and scandalized. The colour on her cheekbones heightened and the rimless glasses flashed —or something behind them did. "Don't say things like that!" she breathed. I grinned. "Anyway, I'll go down to the Bureau and see for myself." She shook her head in a mistrustful sort of way and handed me the cheque. I folded it reverently and placed it in my inside breast pocket. I bade goodbye to Miss Scellen and marched through endless miles of gloomy lino-covered Victorian corridors and out of the warm fug into a blast of marrow-freezing winter air. I clattered down the sanded wooden planks they put over the stone steps in winter, to stop people taking a header, and after a bone-chilling wait in Confederation Square, knifed by a dry, freezing wind, an 'R' came clanking along and I boarded it, gratefully. The temperature inside was about thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, but after eight degrees below zero and a wind it seemed like the tropics.

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We rocketed down Sussex Street in the clanking old streetcar, catching occasional glimpses through the frosted-up windows of the Basilica, the Royal Mint, acres of frozen wasteland, a spur line loaded with freight cars from warmer climes—New York Central, Seaboard, Union Pacific—and eventually a ragged row of tip-tilted frame houses across a snow-shrouded river. As I hunched down into myself to try to keep warm, I thought over my interview with Grierson. Already it was starting to develop an air of unreality. I didn't doubt for a moment that I'd been given an assignment. What did seem preposterous to me, though, was that this extraordinary man, bouncing about in an atmosphere of High Victorian gloom and civil service paperwork, should be able to produce documentary films. From what little I knew of the industry, it was just that: an industry. It was concerned with machines and chemicals and electricity, and processing, as well as with ideas. The fusty atmosphere of the West Block seemed the last place to find these. The car jerked to a stop. I descended to the snow-covered sidewalk and a blast of crippling cold. At my back was a row of nondescript yellow brick buildings like abandoned stores. They were flanked by a wooden fire hall with an asymmetrical wooden tower—a caricature of Parliament Hill. Opposite was a handsome low-roofed limestone building set well back in a large garden deep in snow. At the corner nearest to me a bronze caravel of the sixteenth century floated at ease, pennons streaming, in a bed of ice. This must be the new French Embassy I'd heard so much about, the caravel being presumably a model of that in which Jacques Carrier of St. Malo had discovered the St. Lawrence in 1534. Along the flank of this snow-filled garden ran a long, ugly, twostoreyed building of red brick and naked cement beams. It had a flat roof and from one corner protruded a very large red brick chimney stack. I began to wonder vaguely where the Bureau was. A man with a cigarette had alighted with me from the streetcar, and I decided to ask him. "Excuse me, can you tell me where I would find the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau?" He laughed, revealing smoker's teeth, and said in the flat accent of the Midlands, "I was just going to ask you that." He had on a battered grey trilby and a belted trench coat and grey pouches below the eyes. He looked like a hero of the Irish Resistance who'd been on the run in the Wicklow Hills.

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"Let's ask in this building then, shall we? The name's Mclnnes," I said. "Hawes," he said, without removing the cigarette from his mouth, "I've just come from England." "To the Bureau?" "To the National Film Board." We trudged along the sidewalk on snow, battered dirty and faceless by thousands of feet and then refrozen into icy ridges by the ferocious cold and wind. "It seems they're the same. Or soon will be." "That's what I'm here to find out," he said laconically. "Do you know a fellow called Legg?" "Yes. Are you looking for him?" "He's supposed to be in this Bureau." "Let's go in here then." By now we'd reached a door and fumbled it open with chill hands. From it came a blast of welcome warm air but also a foul and horrible smell, a mixture of rotten meat and anaesthetic, a cross between a pauper's hospital ward and a butcher's shop. "My God, does film smell like this?" Hawes shook with silent laughter, the cigarette still pasted immovably to his lower lip. A man in a white coat with a document clip on his arm approached us. "This is the laboratory of the Department of Health," he said disapprovingly. "Are you roasting entrails?" "Indeed we are not. We are performing experiments." "On rabbits?" "On frogs. What was it you wanted?" "The Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau." "Next door," he said unsmilingly and whipped down the corridor. We trotted briskly out into the stupefying cold and back through another door into a bare lino-covered hall off which wide stairs climbed up past an open door. Through the hinge crack I could see and hear the spitting of a mercury vapour arc in a big 35mm projector. There was a faint thin chemical smell which I later learned to identify as carbon tetrachloride. From the projection room came the sound of distant gunfire, endlessly repeated. A

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badly lettered sign pointed upwards: Director. Hawes and I ascended into a labyrinth of lean corridors and partitioned box-like offices. The door of one was open and through it we saw a large florid-faced handsome fellow in his fifties with a military moustache and a head of film star's white hair. We paused; he looked up enquiringly. Hawes said, "Are you Captain Badgley?" "That's right. Come on in." We introduced ourselves. "Aha, a couple of Grierson's boys," he said and his tone didn't sound all that friendly. He pointed at Hawes' cigarette. "You should know better than to smoke around nitrate stock," he said with a thin smile. Hawes stubbed out his cigarette. In an ashtray, I noticed, on Badgley's desk. "Sorry," Hawes said. "But maybe you should use acetate stock." They looked at each other for a moment and then Badgley broke out into a rich guffaw that shook his ample flesh and great vest-covered belly like a sail in the wind. "Hell," he said, "just having you on. How are things on the Euston Road?" "Still the same." "Boy, the pints Grierson and me knocked back my last visit." "I see you haven't been wasting your time here, either," said Hawes, looking at Badgley's pot. He turned to me, "A truly Homeric drinker." Badgley waved him away with a fleshy paw. "Great kidders, you British. Well, I guess you want to see Legg, eh?" We nodded. Badgley leaned back in his swivel chair and clasped his hands behind his head. "He's in the theatre right now. I don't suppose he can be disturbed. He's kind of a law to himself, you know. I can't understand him. Oh, he knows the technique all right. Had Ernie Wilson's rushes off the Renown edited down to eighty or ninety feet of usable material in no time at all, and intercut it very beautifully too with the stock shots they sent us from the Ministry of Information library in Britain and the stuff he shot himself in factories." Hawes said, "Where was he shooting?" "Mostly in the John Inglis Bren gun plant in Toronto. He certainly knows how to use a camera—or have a cameraman use it. Scott was on location with him."

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Hawes said, "Legg is good. I've worked with him in England." "Yeah. All you Englishmen." Badgley undid his hands to scratch his scalp. I noticed that the windows were high up above his head; even when you stood up you couldn't see out of them. It was as if the building had originally been intended for quite other uses. It gave an impression of claustrophobia, which, in a subcontinent of such gigantic space as Canada, seemed odd. "Legg's fiddling around now with gunfire, on a loop," Badgley said. "Doing some rerecording. He has some crazy notion of mixing the commentator's voice in live while he's running his sound and music tracks double-headed. Says it'll save time and money. 'Listen, son,' I said, 'if your commentator fluffs just once,' I said, 'just once, you're going to have to rerecord a whole reel—a thousand feet of raw stock! How's that going to help you with your costs?' I said. 'You leave yourself no room to manoeuvre. Why not play it safe and record the commentator separately, and then rerecord in a final mix?'" Badgley gave a sardonic laugh. "Hell, I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. 'There won't be any fluffs,' he said (you know his highfalutin' voice), 'because we'll rehearse till we have it perfect.' Bah!" Badgley tilted his chair forward and brought his palms down with a smack on the desk. "Ah well, another of Grierson's ideas, I suppose." He gave a windy sigh. Hawes said, "Am I to work with him or on a separate series?" Badgley shrugged his ample shoulders. "Ask Grierson," he said sourly. "Seems to me I heard somewhere that Legg was to do theatrical, that's the 'Canada Carries On' series—brother, what a title!—and you're to do the non-theatrical. But don't ask me. I only run the Motion Picture Bureau. Ask Grierson." "Ask Grierson what, Frank?" uttered someone in a low, deceptively mild, voice. We turned. Framed in the door was a tall man with a slight stoop, a big nose and a high-domed forehead. He was dressed in baggy pants, sandals, a V-neck sweater and an open-necked blue woollen shirt. It was Stuart Legg. I put him at about thirty-two. He hesitated in the doorway, an arresting mixture of shyness and arrogance. Badgley said, "Ask him how you and Hawes divide up the production work."

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"Ah," said Legg. He moved about two inches into the room. "Hullo Hawes," he said, and a smile of welcome irradiated his big severe face. "Hullo Legg," said Hawes. I sensed myself momentarily in the caste society of England and greatly resented that it should be burgeoning here on the banks of the Ottawa River. All right, it seemed, to be Canadian and familiar with Captain Frank C. Badgley, still flaunting in 1940 the Veterans' cameraderie of 1918. But not with a fellow-Englishman. Or perhaps it was that Legg and Hawes had come from differing strata in England and were forced by some strange compulsion to adhere to its formulae even in easygoing Canada? Certainly I could detect Oxbridge in Legg's accent and not in Hawes', but still.... "And I don't think I know... ?" Out of his woollen shirt, Legg poked his hand forward a bit at me, like the giant secretary bird. "Mclnnes," I said. "Ah! Of course. We've been expecting you. Will you join me for luncheon?" The ludicrously stiff politeness of his invitation hit my funny bone. And where would one have 'luncheon' in Ottawa? Dowle's? Murray's? The Honey Dew? Zeller's basement? But I was fascinated by him and also remembered Grierson's injunction that it was important that I see him. So I suited my own action to his words and simply said, "Thank you. I'd be delighted." "Well, aren't we the cat's whiskers," said Badgley, to whom those manoeuvres clearly seemed pompous and affected. Paying no heed to Badgley, Legg said to Hawes, "The Women at War film—it's the working title and I think it's lousy. Anyway, the workprint's set up on the movieola in cutting room number three. I'd like you to take a look at it if you would." Hawes nodded. "It needs tightening up in the middle, I think, and there are one or two sequences that don't mean much in terms of audience reaction theatrically. There's plenty of outs in the racks and bins that you might want to use." "A splicer and a rewind?" "Oh yes. All the trimmings." Legg permitted himself a faint smile. "Even a four-way; but we're not up to the stage of cutting music tracks or doing any recording just yet. It's a very tight one-reeler at 984 feet, but it can't be any longer. Will you see if you can wring a little water out of it?"

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Hawes nodded again. Badgley, who had been listening to this thrillingly recondite conversation with an air of mingled boredom and suspicion, hauled himself to his feet. "Time for a quick one before you go?" "Better not just now, thanks. Maybe this evening?" "Okay, you know best," said Badgley good-naturedly. Legg inclined his head infinitesimally toward me. "Shall we go? I have a car outside." We all said goodbye to Badgley. Hawes ambled off down the corridor to a cutting room, and Legg and I clattered down the stairs past the projection booth and out the doors into the crippling cold. His car was an English one. I didn't suppose he'd brought it over with him, for this would have been prohibitively costly. But in the desert of big bland North American autos at the used car dealers, he must have found this neat little Crossley, dear to the English heart, and felt suddenly at home amid the alien corn. Though clearly underpowered for the Canadian winter, it had a mahogany veneer fascia and a blue marble knob atop the gearshift. We got in and Legg stepped on the starter button. There was a low feeble growl and then silence. He did it again. This time there was a faint hiccough and a click, and then silence. Legg sat like an Egyptian statue in the driver's seat for a moment or two, his ears and most of his forehead covered by an incongruous woollen tuque. "Damn," he said, very slow and emphatic in a loud clear voice. "Damn." I remained silent. A gloved fist banged on the frosted car window, Legg hauled it down about an inch and Badgley's breath entered the car in great clouds. "Want a push?" "Thanks." "Trouble with these English cars!" He chuckled. In a few moments we felt the impact of Bagdley's Chev, but it took some time to get the Crossley going because of the ice, and instead of having a fall set of chains Badgley only had clip-ons. So there was always the danger of his digging himself into an icy grave. But in the end we got moving, lowered the glass to wave thanks and chugged off in the hard-packed dirty snow. Badgley did a fast turn to the left, signalling his intention simply by opening and then closing his car door rather than bother to wind down

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the window and stick out his arm. He vanished, the exhaust as white, dense and swirly as a squirrel's tail in the cold. Legg drove with extreme caution to the Chateau Laurier where we descended to the basement grill room. The Chateau Laurier was the leading, in fact the only, hotel of distinction in the capital. Like most of the large railway hotels it was of vaguely chateau-esque lineaments; that is to say, it was essentially a ten-storey skyscraper with Loire-like fenestration and the appropriate steep-pitched, heavily gabled roofs from which poked regular nests of dormers, more suitable to the sixteenth than the twentieth century. But it was a handsome building and of course inside the plumbing, electricity, elevators and general appointments were thoroughly and efficiently North American. So was the heat: warm, satisfying blasts of hot scented air to engulf us after our chill ride from the Bureau. After we'd ordered, Legg turned to me with great deliberation, raised his eyebrows, flared the nostrils of his long impressive nose, and was clearly about to embark on the gospel according to Grierson. At this precise moment the luncheon ensemble known as Len Hopkins and His Orch gave out with a shattering brassy "chord on" in preparation for some staid, middle-aged ballroom dancing. Legg's reaction was memorable. He turned very slowly in the direction of the orchestra, gave them a long, almost audibly furious look and then slowly pivoted back to me in mock commiseration, as if to say, Do you mind waiting till they've finished? I do apologize for these barbarians. Much later he was to call them The Ottawese. Poor Len Hopkins and Orch. They had incurred Legg's severe displeasure, had they but known it. Presently however, in bland ignorance of his scowling disapproval, they played a "chord off," grounded their instruments, and disappeared behind the rig-a-ma-jig for a quick one. "What I want you to understand, Mclnnes," said Legg in his tense, deliberate, richly "English" voice, "is that what we're looking for now are perspectives." He gazed at me long and earnestly. I didn't have a notion of what he was driving at, but his almost palpable intensity fascinated me, scared me just a little too. I nodded eagerly. "This country hasn't woken up yet. Nor has mine for that matter really, but when they do," he pulled down the corners of his mouth, "not only will there be a most almighty awakening, but your country will reveal

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sources of almighty strength." He leaned forward and suddenly his great stone face was irradiated by a smile of extraordinary sweetness. "Ever been to Schumacher?" he asked, mentioning a small mining community in the extreme north of Ontario. I shook my head. "I spent a week there shooting a film on ice hockey—on hockey. It was just a few ranging shots, as it were, to bracket the target. I think the film itself will be done by a very bright young director from New York—Irving Jacoby. We've got a good title: Hot Ice" "That is good," I said admiringly. "But why a us director for a Canadian film?" He gave a shrug so gigantic that his neck went halfway down inside his shoulders. "Where are they?" he asked. "Where are they? Find them for me and Grierson will put them to work. I can tell you that once this war begins to heat up—which it will—we shall be overwhelmed by a desperate need for directors, cameramen, cutters, musicians, writers—like yourself, for example." "Oh, thank you." "But apart from you, who have we found that's a writer?" "How far have you looked?" "Well, perhaps you've got something there. But," he hoicked his body forward, "apart from two youngsters I'm training down at the Bureau and who are going to be real image makers—young men with a conscience and a head of steam—a rare combination—and of course Donald Buchanan who, though God knows he's inarticulate, is honest through and through," he shrugged again, "who is there?" "Morley Callaghan? Hugh MacLennan? Guy Provost? Jean-Charles Harvey?" He nodded moodily. "Perhaps I've been too close to things and can't see the wood for the trees. But of course I ought to have mentioned Gordon Sparling—he's the director down at Associated Screen News in Montreal. A genuine film man. Very, very competent. And very, very predictable. You know: mix from a close-up of wheel on speeding train to a close-up of a champagne glass full of bubbles—Ernst Lubitsch/Jeanette Macdonald stuff a million years old, but very professional. Oh yes, we'll need him all right." He nodded slowly to himself.

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"You were going to tell me something about Schumacher?" He raised hooded eyes, gazed ruminatively at the middle distance, as if I hadn't spoken. I began to wish I hadn't. "Of course there's Scott," he said softly half to himself, nodding in measured emphasis and pulling down the corners of his mouth. "Scott?" "J.B. Scott. Extraordinary fellow really. He made a film called Heritage— about the Depression and the drought on the prairies. It's never been officially screened. Nothing wrong with it, except that the production called for a two-reeler, about twenty minutes—and Scott ended up with eleven reels. Eleven reels. Almost two hours! Fantastic." He shook his great head and leaned toward me as if to impart some massive confidence. "It was a one-man show, Mclnnes. Scott conceived the idea, wrote the script, was his own director-cameraman—that is, directed his own shooting—a dangerous thing to do, by the way. Edited it. Cut it. Wrote the commentary. Recorded the music. An extraordinary performance. But," he furrowed his high forehead and let his hands fall abjectly on the table, "useless to us. He's a lone wolf. Doesn't work well with other people. Doesn't like supervision or even direction. So.... Oh yes, about Schumacher. I was only going to say that when I lived up there shooting, in this raw but very vital frontier town, I came across the depths and the strengths of the true Canada." He looked at me with extreme earnestness. "You people have absolutely no idea at all of how good you are. You're so modest and decent and self-effacing and unassuming that sometimes one just longs to say, 'Look here, old boy, just be a bit of a bastard, will you? For once?'" He smiled and so did I. "Remember that, Mclnnes. Remember, in your search for the just image, the right perspective, the growing point—remember to be a bit of a bastard. And as for this war-loan film. Pile on the images, but don't overwrite or over-suggest. Pluck out the key factor. You know the way Jerry van Voorhees—he's the voice in 'The March of Time'—can say, over a shot of a can fall of garbage, 'And so today, there are those who believe. ...' Doesn't matter what they believe, or if they believe anything, but that voice fills the screen with menace and tension and significance. Why? Because the previous shot has been of a starving Indian and the next one will be of Hitler. Get it?"

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"I think so." "Good; well, we look forward to your script on Monday. It's Wednesday now. So that gives you five days. And remember, our job is to persuade a country, only half convinced, that the time crunch is now and they must dig into their pockets." I rode back to Toronto by the night train in an upper berth, the prey to conflicting emotions. I was tremendously bucked at the job, anxious to prove I could do it, but confused by the new jargon and the lack of specific instruction. But a fierce desire to work with Grierson and Legg and Hawes and men like them spurred me on to my best efforts. And this despite the rather pompous and portentous things that had been said— about perspectives and images and growing points and so on. Of one thing I was quite certain, though in a curiously detached way, separate from any success or failure which might attend my script. Canadian documentary film wouldn't even get off the ground until the Film Board in the fusty West Block and the Bureau in the old lumber mill had been fused into one entity. It seemed to me it would take a sudden, perhaps a staggering shock to achieve this.

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tAKEOVER BID SUSSESFUL

And then, just when we thought the phoney war was never going to end: Bang, bang, bang. Three trip-hammer blows: the invasion of Norway; a sudden Canadian election in which movies played a small but unexpected part; then, shockingly and catastrophically, the Fall of France. Those of us who gathered white-faced and tongue-tied in Grierson's office that memorable day in May 1940 were scarcely aware of what had hit us, comprehending only dimly the magnitude of the crisis and of the issues at stake. We were also unaware that the sprightly man who stormed up and down the incongruous burgundy carpet, flailing us for our lack of ideas, scourging us with his ironic whiplash tongue, inspiring us to go out and lift Canada's morale up off the floor, would fight and win his own particular battle. He would gain control of the Bureau with its entire filmmaking facilities and all that this implied for the future of a centralized drive in the mass media. Even more important, he, the shocker, the inspirer, the perpetual gadfly and disrupter and disturber, would gain the confidence of the astute and judicious statesman who was our Prime Minister. We watched Grierson pacing back and forth and rubbing his sparse, sandy hair, the very picture of sulphurously creative disruption, and we heard and we wondered: Legg with his long intelligent face; Hawes with his interminable cigarette; Ross McLean, Grierson's deputy, with his

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ready smile and quick nervous gestures; Phileas Cote, the stocky, moustachioed, shrewd French Canadian; and I. Grierson stormed up and down. He didn't give you the impression of being slight because his presence was so towering, his cataract of blazing energy so overwhelming. And he hardly once stopped talking. "Well, these are the terrors and tragedies of our times, eh? The Decline of the West. Do you believe that? If you do, you're wasting your time here, because we've work to do. We have to take Canadians by the throat and convince them that they're a great people. We have to body forth their prides, and they'd better be astringent prides because we've no time for glossy living now. The British have had to tighten their belts. What we have to do is to suck in. And how are we going to do that, eh? By film? Answer me that one, eh?" We looked dumb and panic-stricken. He sailed on again in his wonderfully ghastly Glasgow accent (though he used to tell us proudly that he was born in Deanston near Stirling) which mangled 'value' into 'vollue,' 'truth' into 'trith,' and 'I want you' into 'I wan' ye.' "There's no use pretending we're not in a terrible mess. The Gairmans have knifed right through our collective individualisms, precisely because they were individual. And there'll be rough times ahead for the Brits. We must oppose discipline to discipline. Ours to theirs. But you discipline a democracy by creating the collective will from within, not by imposing it from without. This is what we have to do. All of us. And in the next few months. For the British it'll be weeks, because they've only the Channel. We have the Atlantic. Don't let's cherish the vain illusion we can squat behind it. Otherwise all it'll turn out to be will be a bigger and wetter Maginot Line. "Now let's see you all get going, with a conscience and a head of steam; analyze, project, get at the truth. And don't forget it's a many-headed monster and you may have at times to make people believe what they ought to believe rather than what they want to believe. Especially now. All right, off you go." Pretty heady stuff for young men in an uncertain world with as yet uncertain guidance. And perhaps not altogether good for you, when you felt you ought to be enlisting, or offering your services to a Sten gun factory, or doing volunteer work in canteens. But it was no use everyone

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going in for square bashing, even if you did form threes. Canada, we were beginning to be told—unexciting, prosaic, careful, quiet Canada—had a role to play: The Arsenal of Democracy; western end of the Atlantic lifeline; a new young country which (with the USA not a belligerent) could play a vital part, etc., etc. And with Grierson's magic touch even the cliches sounded dynamic and exciting. It was something in staid, safe Canada, 3000 miles from any fighting, to feel that you were wanted, that your own particular skill was valid and needed, that you could make a contribution. On that deceptively quiet and sunny day in a crisp cool Canadian May we were only the first of many such groups who surged out of Grierson's office with a spring in their step, their chests thrown out and their heads just a little higher. Even if the dangerous concept of an intellectual or managerial elite lurked just around the corner, and even if the Scots injunction to "hae a good conceit o' yoursel"' was perilously close to being conceited and hence arrogant, yet the talks inspired us at our desks, behind our cameras, in our cutting rooms, to work fast and tirelessly, to probe deep and to think big and wide. How had Grierson done it? "By the mere acceptance of democracy," he had written, we have taken upon ourselves the privilege and the duty of individual citizenship and we must organize all communications which will serve to maintain it. If propaganda shows a way by which we can strengthen our conviction and affirm it more aggressively against the threat of an inferior concept of life, we must use it to the full, or we shall be robbing the forces of democracy of a vital weapon for its own security and survival. This is not just an idea: it is a practical issue of modern scientific warfare ...

But it is perhaps best to deal first with how he gained the confidence of our Prime Minister and in this four people were involved: Louis de Rochemont, American Producer of the cine-magazine item "The March of Time"; Mitchell Hepburn, the bouncy and unruly Premier of Ontario; Walter Turnbull, the PM's shrewd, grey, principal private secretary; and Grierson himself. Those of us who were even on the periphery of this particular piece of in-fighting received a lesson in toughness we were not likely to forget. It began when no less a person than the great Henry R. Luce himself

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suggested that—as a news item—the Great Republic ought to interest itself in the fact that its good neighbour Canada was—at war! The USA was at peace, but here right on its very doorstep, across a paper-thin 3000-mile frontier, shared by thirteen of its northern states, men were in uniform, troop trains thundered to the coast, aircraft made Atlantic sorties, factories roared and blazed, office lights burned far into the night... "And so today...!" He proposed a film for "The March of Time" series. He undertook production costs, would guarantee distribution to theatrical audiences in a sizable clutch of the 17,000-odd us theatres and throughout the world (except Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union). All that would be required of Canada would be the cutting of governmental red tape, help with on-site location shooting, and, oh yes, while they would of course assume final responsibility for the commentary, they would welcome Canadian "guidance" in its preparation. Walter Turnbull put it to the PM with a strong recommendation. The shrewd old man wanted to know what Grierson thought of it. Turnbull was able to inform the PM that Grierson thought highly of "The March of Time" proposal; and that furthermore it would give Canada the opportunity of announcing the scope of its war effort, in succinct and dramatic terms, to the widest possible world audience. And all this would cost Canada not a penny. The PM listened, cogitated, and in due time, took his decision. Yes, Mr. Luce and Mr. de Rochemont would be welcome to make their film on the Canadian war effort. The Canadian government would afford them every facility. Mr. Grierson would be at their entire disposition. As the shooting of the film progressed, rumours began to creep through the public-relations network of government and industry, via the advertising agencies and the account executives, into the clubs and homes of the anti-King forces. It appeared that a US commercial movie firm was being (had been?) bribed to make a film praising the war effort of the government. This gross and indecent partnership was an affront to every red-blooded (or blue-blooded; one could rarely be quite sure) Canadian. Something should be done about it! Someone was prepared to do something about it. Mitchell Hepburn, an onion farmer from St. Thomas, had become Premier of Ontario in 1934. Though a staunch Liberal (Ontario brand),

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he very soon found himself in fierce opposition to liberalism (federal brand), which to him appeared in the guise of the classic federal invasion of provincial rights. The onion farmer, who was also a shrewd, effective and ruthless politician, put on his armour. No grain was too small to make grist for his mill, and when he heard of "The March of Time," he at once denounced it in ringing terms. It was disgraceful that Canadian public servants should be collaborating with American big business in this lickspittle attempt to bolster the collapsing image of a feeble and decadent government. He would not allow the people of Ontario to be corrupted by viewing this film. He had a weapon to hand. Film censorship was exclusively a provincial matter. The Provincial Film Censor would not allow the film to be exhibited. That was that. This particular issue of "The March of Time" would not be shown in any movie theatre in Ontario. A serious threat, one might suppose, at any rate to the producers of "The March of Time." They'd spent a lot of money on the film and it was a well-known fact in the trade that while, in general, you covered your production costs in the US home market, you depended for the gravy on foreign (including for this purpose Canadian) bookings. The prospect of having at least a third of this potentially lucrative and above all committed market snatched from their grasp caused the "Time" men much anguish. Grierson was powerless, for it was a political decision, but Turnbull could hold a press conference and he did. As a result there appeared one of the more remarkable headlines of Canadian newspaper history: FILM CAN BE SEEN ANYWHERE BUT GERMANY, RUSSIA, ONTARIO. A few days later, the PM blandly announced that, as certain persons did not appear to think well of his government's conduct of the war effort, it was only fair that the people should be given a chance to express their views. He had asked the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir, to dissolve Parliament and there would be an immediate election—subject to the sixty-day period between the issuance of writs and going to the polls prescribed under the Canada Election Act. Howls of anguish arose but in a quiet April election King and his liberals were returned with an increased majority (and continued in office for another seventeen years). It would be wrong to attribute this success to "Mitch" Hepburn and his behaviour over "The March of Time"—though parenthetically Hepburn

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shortly after this resigned as Premier, returned to his onion farm near St. Thomas, to "listen to the grass grow" as he rather winningly put it. But certainly the incident was not without weight; and equally certainly the PM did not forget Grierson's advice. So that when the inevitable struggle for control of the Bureau by the Film Board came to a head, he was more than ready to see Grierson's point of view. The battle was appallingly unequal. Grierson had on his side his own dynamism, the tacit support of the Prime Minister, and above all the urgencies of the hour. Badgley, dear old "Cap'n Frank," as his loyal staff called him, had only the appeal to "a fair go"—the fact that he'd always been there. Badgley was quickly transferred to the Ministry of Pensions and National Health, as it was then called, in charge of their film program. Seated in a hot fibreboard cubicle in one of the innumerable "temporary" buildings created by the exigencies of war, he vented his futile rancour on enthusiastic young filmmakers who came to call on him in his new character of sponsor. "Never give the sponsor an even break" was one of Grierson's more Machiavellian apothegms—with a curt nod in the direction of W.C. Fields. Certainly "Cap'n Frank'" never got one. He was as truly a war casualty as anyone, and yet it was inevitable that he should go. And into the old lumber mill, darting around the ageing but priceless machinery, elbowing aside the resentful old-timers, poured Grierson's young men and women. The Boss or JG or Johnny G, as he was variously known, installed himself in the big room where rubber-booted lab technicians had formerly mixed the chemicals. Public Works, under his direction, lowered the window to give an austere but exhilarating view across the Ottawa River and up to the low scarp of the Gatineau Hills. Beyond those hills lay half a continent from which to draw inspiration: a land whose uncompromising granite might recall the rigours of Scotland, but a land which could engulf Scotland itself in one of its own enormous lakes. A land of jet-age distances in a pre-jet age: Montreal nearer to Glasgow than to Vancouver; Newfoundland closer to Ireland than to Manitoba. A CPR train in those days took four days and five nights to travel from St. Lawrence tidewater to the Pacific coast. It crossed rivers wider than the English Channel, endless shaggy prairies so flat that a distant grain elevator becomes an Eiffel Tower, multiple ranges of mountains

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600 miles thick—the Rockies, Selkirks, Monashees, Purcells, Coast Range. Yet in all that continent of a country were not much more than ten million people. The challenge implicit in that view across the Ottawa to the razor edge of the Gatineau Hills lifting against the crisp Canadian sky was to Grierson enormously exhilarating. And now he had the weapons to meet the challenge. No longer was the Film Board a red-carpeted office in the fusty old West Block. It was an integral part of perhaps a quarter of a million dollars' worth of expensive and essential machinery: a self-contained unit capable of performing every single process in filmmaking, from the tentative outline script to the final theatrical release print. Grierson was sitting on top of a gold mine of propaganda, and he knew it. Within less than a year the old lumber mill would begin to attract filmmakers from all over the western world.

To understand the magnitude of the coup Grierson had effected and the astonishingly versatile and powerful instrument now in the hands of the Canadian government, it is necessary to look briefly at the process of making a film. Essentially it is the marriage of extremely fluid and tenuous creative ideas to the procrustean demands of (a) machines made of steel which move at rigid and unchangeable speeds and (b) chemical and electronic processes of the most exacting accuracy and refinement. The marriage of extreme brilliance of ideas and techniques with extreme accuracy of machines is what produces films. The director who would make a success must beware, on the one hand, of becoming a slave to the demands of the machines, and on the other, of ignoring them. In the first case he will produce a technically competent and 'correct' film: negative beautifully exposed, sound faultlessly recorded, optical effects strategically placed. But a film without an idea in its head: a monstrous desert of screen boredom. In the opposite case, the director's basic ideas and story will fail to come through because he has ignored the machines: he has his camera wrongly focussed, or his soundtrack 'out of sync' with his visual, or his negative overexposed or his recording muddy, or violent or full of 'wows.' If he ever forgets that his film is a series of

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images each smaller than a postage stamp, tearing through the gate of the projector at ninety feet a minute, twenty-four frames to the second, he will make a bad film. On the other hand, if he allows himself to be dominated by these highly exigent figures, equally he will make a bad film. These criteria apply even to the production of a one-reel, ten-minute documentary. And in the making of such documentaries, both ideas—good ideas, and machines—good machines, must be employed. Grierson had all this potential under his control and direction in the old lumber mill and it must have exhilarated him beyond all measure. Back in Britain when he had been running the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, or the General Post Office Film Unit, it had been an incredible hand-to-mouth existence. Those were genuine shoestring operations. Production and minimal administration in a few dingy offices, studio space rented from friendly rivals; processing of film at a separate commercial lab; sound recording at a separate commercial studio; cameras and lights hired or rented; even four-ways, reels, pins, splices, and rewinds, rented or bought second or third hand; perhaps a single movieola available between three or four editors; worst of all, no preview screen of one's own on which to project the day's rushes, the interminably recut workprint, or even the final showprint for the sponsor to see. By contrast in the National Film Board, which now included the physical plant of the Bureau, Grierson had everything. The old lumber mill was divided into two floors. Downstairs was the projection theatre, which doubled as a sound-recording studio, "just a jumbo-sized movieola," said Legg; the negative cutting room with its corps of white-smocked, white-cotton-gloved girls who, under the eye of their "matron," protected "the sacred negativ," as a visiting French cameraman once called it. Beyond the negative cutting room and separated from it by the men's lavatory was the lab entrance, to which rushes and opticals were delivered and from which fresh workprints were received. Beyond that lay the mechanical developers, the printers and timers, the chemicals mixing rooms, the machine shop. Next came the 16mm developer for making direct 16mm negatives and the reduction printer for reducing to 16mm from 35mm—16mm being, broadly speaking, non-theatrical, and 35mm, theatrical. In annexes made of cinder blocks were the film library, the negative library, the stock-shot library, shipping, delivery and stores.

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Upstairs were the administrative offices, the optical cameras for the standard special effects of fade-in, fade-out, wipe and dissolve on which the sense of cinematic time lapse or place change so often depends; a small animation studio and art room; all the cutting and editing rooms; the music and sound effects libraries and cutting rooms; one or two offices for Grierson, Legg, McLean and the accountants and treasury people; and finally an enormous room crammed with desks known as "the manning pool." It was a great barn of a place with a cement floor, fibreboard partitions and windows only at the extreme river end. Over the clatter of movieolas and the whirr and whine of rewinds, the sudden metallic surges and snatches of unidentifiable sound effects and truncated music, hung a dangerous pall of cigarette smoke, in a building stored at all times with at least half a million feet of highly inflammable nitrate stock. Into this enormous room the bewildered acolyte was hurled, to sink or swim in the dogeat-dog rat race of making wartime documentaries. To those of us so hurled or thrust, it was, of course, all we had ever known of the film business. We accepted the noise and the clatter and the filth and the poor light because of the excitement of the ideas and the hectic pace and sense of urgency. We accepted also the incredible congestion of people and of machines and the spillikins pile of ramshackly temporariness in which we worked. Thinking it normal, we learned to cut soundtracks for two different films in the same room, enduring the ear-splitting cacophony without protest; we accepted the really frightful fire hazard; we welcomed the old, beat-up, bleacher-style seats in the rerecording room, the wooden carpenter's horses doing duty as cutting benches, the tables used as desks, the desks used for storing film, the rewind mounted on a jiggly piece of three-ply; and finally we even enjoyed the composition of deathless prose in the atmosphere of a boiler factory. We flowed like treacle into every nook and cranny of the rotten old building and possessed it utterly. In our youth and enthusiasm we were but vaguely aware of the upheaval we were causing among the original denizens of the lumber mill, most of them middle-aged or elderly civil servants accustomed to leisurely pedestrian nine-to-five days with plenty of time to go home to lunch or to go fishing in the long summer evenings. That they resented us goes without saying; but equally they couldn't resist our youthful enthusiasm and

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our avid thirst for their knowledge. For a brief time—and fortunately it was the time of most upheaval—they were our Solomons and Platos imparting knowledge from their private Olympias to our new and cheeky little nation-state on the banks of the Ottawa. But it was not always easy for them, or for us. Take Nick Carter, the head of the lab for fifteen years. This chunky, balding Canadian fisherman, now in his mid-fifties, had learned to mix chemicals and regulate machine speeds in the tough New York newsreel labs of the twenties. As he was fond of telling us, this was long before the days of sound, "and you didn't have no lousy single-system shooting where you got to choose between sound and picture; and you know right off that if you develop for a good picture the track'll be too dense, and if you develop for a good track the picture'll be all washed out—and whatever you do the cameraman ain't gonna like it." But despite graduating in this antediluvian atmosphere, he was competent and swift and engagingly folksy and imprecise in a world of precision. "Always time your negative by a good north light" was one of his more beguiling Canadianisms. He was also quite unruffled, provided that he was expected to process no more than 2000 feet a day between a leisurely breakfast and a quiet departure (from the side door) in his little Ford convertible to see how the bass were biting on Leamy Lake. But now suddenly he was being asked to process 10,000 to 15,000 feet a day, on the same old equipment, a lot of it shot by enthusiastic amateurs on hand-held Eyemos with only the vaguest notions as to exposure, depth of focus or size of aperture. And on top of that a lot of equally amateurish enthusiasts were forever parking their rear ends in his neat little office and badgering him about "quality control" and haloids. Nick Carter was an eventempered philosophical sort of guy. He stood it with great good nature for about a year and then he asked to be retired at sixty, received the customary gold watch and went off to let others worry about quality control and breakdown. More adaptable was "Scotty Lovat," the senior cameraman, a jock from the First World War who'd emigrated to Canada in 1919. The trenches and the Estaminets had schooled him, or perhaps perfected him, in the wiles of the artful dodger, and his shrewd liquid brown eyes beneath his thatch of prematurely white hair slid round like lead shot on a tray while

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he calculated what you best wanted to hear. Being a truly professional cameraman, veteran of a thousand newsreels and perhaps a hundred remote locations without benefit of a director, for such Bureau epics as From Gold Ore to Bullion (in ten reels) or With Rod and Gun in Duckland (four reels), Lovat was supremely self-reliant. As soon as war broke out he wangled himself a trip across to Britain on a warship, visited boyhood haunts in Camberwell, wasted money boozing in pubs, but returned nonetheless with footage so dramatic (he had been in a force eight gale in mid-Atlantic) that it was used as stock-shot material for years afterwards. Despite these skills Lovat would never permit himself the luxury of being billed as a Director-Cameraman. He was always just the plain cameraman, ever ready to blame the director if things went wrong, though never, as did one of his less earthy colleagues, placing a card before the lens bearing the inscription "Shot under protest." He was equally ready to take the credit for the good shots, or, when he was alone, to blame the bad shots on the absence of a director. Wily, cantankerous, agile and knowing, Scotty Lovat was a tower of strength to the new young unit and location managers and assistant cameramen who came pouring into the lumber mill. He held unofficial bull sessions in the camera room in among the equipment, often fuelled with beer which he procured by illicit means from a nearby Quartermaster store located in an old fire hall. He was also an expert at what he called "getting value" out of an expense account on location. And many was the wrinkle unknown to Treasury Board which you picked up from talking to him. It was no use assuming, said Lovat, that an expense advance was for expenses. That way you would be permanently and totally in the hole. What you should do was not only travel off, but live off your expense advance, including cigarettes and liquor. "Of course, if there's the smell of a cork to it, Treasury's gonna kill it stone dead. So you got to use a little artistry, see?" This was done by overcharging for meals or taxis, continual weighing of equipment, the insertion of ingenious and unduplicatable items designed to make the honest Treasury clerk scratch his head. "Transport of self and sensitive camera gear (140 Ibs weight) by hired taxi (in absence of alternative transport) from Shoe Lake to Levesque Mine (21.6 miles) in order to make a night train connection so as to be on job 200 miles west by next morning—

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$27.96." Supporting voucher: receipt from taxi driver, procured after a beer or two at the local beverage room. This was a typical item. On one occasion for a bet he entered the item "To weighing myself and gear—O.ltf" just to see if it would pass Treasury's eagle eye, which it did. Needless to say Grierson knew nothing of these sly peculations. He had the most exacting standards, based on his own Scots integrity and his long apprenticeship with Whitehall. He was always drumming into us a respect for the Treasury, and allowed no latitude. If this petty till-robbing had ever come to Grierson's notice, Lovat would have been out on his ear. Unfortunately for Scotty Lovat he became known as such a character that he was allowed to play the all-licensed fool, and this in the end went to his head with the result that after a while he was pulled in from the field (and his chance of making a fortune out of the Canadian government) and, to his great disgust, placed in charge of the camera room. Though this was financially a promotion and though at the age of close to sixty it could be argued that he had earned the right to come off the road, Lovat pulled a very long face and never accepted the situation with any but an ill grace. However, the new men still flocked to hear his homely technical wisdom and in the early years he regarded the invasion of brash and ignorant youngsters with a good-natured tolerance. Not so Stan Hollebone, head of 16mm developing and printing. He was a fusspot with unruly grey hair and thick-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles, who worked in a lint gown and a perpetual atmosphere of clucking disapproval at every misplaced pencil or dirty cup or film can without a lid. Frankly he detested us, for we drove him frantic. We had him in a constant tizzy, with our demands for rush print jobs, and our importunate inquiries about when they would be ready and why they were taking so long. "Hey, Holly, how about my two reels on the blood donor film?" "Well, how about them? Yes indeed, how about them? Will you tell me how I can make a printer travel at more than 400 feet a minute? Tell me that!" "Maybe you could put the reel in earlier." "Oh yes! Put it in earlier, so that's it, is it? And me with only a boy as a helper, and you young fellows with your reels piled up on the zinc sets here and filed on the floor—just look at them—and cans not properly

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taped or labelled even. Look at this! 'J.C. Cook rushes 23/iv/42.' What's that supposed to mean? Who's J.C. Cook? What's the working title of the film and the production number? And where's the indent for the work to be done? 'Oh sure, yes, Holly,' he says, 'take it for me as a favour, will you. I'll bring the work order—yes and the dope sheet along later—I promise you I will,' says he, and where is he now? Out on location. And look at all the mess I'm in! Oh well, run away now and leave me alone. I'll do me best, that's all I can say." And off he'd fuss in his belted lint gown into the depths of the reduction printer or to bawl out the gormless young Hippolyte Lagace, a myopic lad in a grey coverall who was supposed to be helping him. Holly of course suffered from the basic inferiority complex of all who dealt in non-theatrical. While, especially for documentalists, 'non-t' was supposed to embody all the passionate educational zeal for which the medium was famous, it lacked glamour. 'Theatrical' connoted garish publicity, blazing theatre marquees, massed audiences of thousands streaming blear-eyed into the cold streets after three hours in the world of makebelieve and fug. 'Non-theatrical' meant audiences sitting rapt at their lathes and presses, or in schoolrooms and church basements, or in hospitals and laboratories and museums; this was somehow, while worthy, a lot less exciting. Non-t audiences could and did run into the millions, but it was millions made up of countless small groups of fifty to a hundred watching in a darkened hospital ward the 16mm Bell and Howell projector twitch and flutter, and listening to the shattering distortions which always seemed to be inseparable from 16mm sound. There might be the odour of an earnest and even exciting search after truth, but there was little sense of commitment. And in the end you were always totally and unnervingly dependent on the projectionist, often an eager amateur to whom you were grateful but who could ruin your film by misframing, misthreading, poor focussing, turning up the sound too loud, or forgetting to turn it up, or going out for a smoke in mid-reel while skeins of undulating film from a broken splice slowly gathered about the ankles of the faithful. 'Theatrical' lapped you in soft Lydian airs in a plush seat with a closeup ten feet in diameter. It was seductive, unmanning, false and thrilling. The villain of the industry. With non-t, realism always obtruded: the dim

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corner of the school desk; the imperfectly masked window letting in the daylight; the not-too-distant flush of a school toilet; the aroma of the bubbling coffee urn ready, once the lights were turned up, to lubricate the question period with the expert who normally came with the film. Though Grierson was himself a born teacher and evangelist, and though it was an article of faith with him that film, documentary film, was the great teaching and information medium of the future, he could never get us really excited over non-t. Since, in the nature of things, Canadian movie theatres, even in wartime, were reserved for the Hollywood product and its own brand of immensely skilled, though usually too contrived, "short" (their name for documentary and perhaps a better one), the bulk of the NFB output was non-t. And the bulk of the producers were engaged on it. But rare was the director who would shoot on "direct 16," though it was probably better for sound and certainly better for picture. Because if he did so, then no matter how good his film was, it would never "go theatrical," never achieve the marquee lights and the half-page ads reserved for NFB's two theatrical series: "Canada Carries On" (cco) and later "World in Action" (WIA). Why? Because although you could reduce from 35mm to 16mm, you couldn't blow up—at least not for a whole reel and without grave impairment to clarity—from 16mm to 35mm. So all the non-t boys (except those dealing in Kodachrome) shot on 35mm, cut on 35mm, and made a reduction print for the showing—secretly hoping that if, one day, Legg or Grierson were to give the word they could "go theatrical," they would not be found wanting. This in turn produced or increased the depressing failure of quality, in both sound and picture, which was then and even today is still to some extent the hallmark of 16mm non-t production. Another reason for Holly's testiness. Not only was he handling a product for an inferior audience, but it was an inferior product. "String," the 35mm producers called it. Admittedly it wasn't as awful as the 8mm used by the genuine amateur cameraman: that was plain vermicelli. Still the jibe stuck. Nor did Grierson's famous aside to a producer of 16mm Kodachrome farm films, "My God, this stuff makes even the pigs look glamorous," prove of any avail. The 16mm non-t boys—and I was one of them, saddled with an endless series of "industrial incentive" films for the Ministry of Munitions and Supply—just went plodding grimly on, firm in their puritan faith that if

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it's duller it's better; and that what you enjoy can't possibly be good for you. We achieved successes and medals and awards, but never from Hollywood, or Elstree or even from Rank or Columbia or Famous Players. We would be cited in the annual report of the Adult Education Department, Oberlin University, Ohio, or by Museums Association of the Argentine. Never mind, it was fan, and part of the fun was Holly. His testiness, as time went by, turned to a sort of commiserating tolerance. We could somehow never quite get through our heads the physical measurements and criteria of 16mm, and thus we used to label our workprints wrong for the negative cutter or make ludicrous misjudgements when recording. Then Holly was in his element. "All you young fellows are the same. You shoot and record in 35 and you keep on giving me the wrong sets of figures! A foot of 16 does not contain sixteen frames, it contains forty; it does not go through the optical printer at ninety feet a minute; it goes through at thirty-six feet a minute. And how you expect me to keep track of all these cans when you mark 'em up like that I'll never know." And at this point, as like as not, you'd look up and see a couple of middle-aged faces—one lean and lined, one round and perky—nodding slowly in approbation of old Holly as much as to say, "Ah there, we told you so; what can you expect of these newfangled Grierson fellows?" They were the sound recording team, Bill Lane and Charlie Quick—known to us as "The Quick and the Lane." Their recording studio was next to Holly's little office and lab, but it was for us that they reserved their most devastating sarcasms. Bill Lane, lean, lantern-jawed and sixtyish, regulated the recording sessions from the control booth in the sound studio. Charlie Quick, a tubby, hot-tempered Yorkshireman, ran the recording cameras on "interlock" in the projection booth, where the workprint was run onto the screen. They communicated by telephone. It was Bill Lane whom the producer or sound editor of the film saw most of, for he had to sit beside him in the recording booth and, theoretically at any rate, give him the directions, by means of poetically flexed hands, for fading up, fading down or crossfading. In practice, Bill, who had a sardonic contempt for most of us, either anticipated the flowery wave of the producer's hand, or else faded up or down when the mood took him. Since his judgement after aeons of

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recordings was, in a mechanistic sense, not all that bad, the producer, too scared of Bill's massive disapproval to expostulate, usually was satisfied. But if he was, like Legg, an absolute stickler for sound punctilio, then severe battles of will were joined. If Legg detected, over the playback in the soundproofed control booth, a fade he didn't like and which he knew could not be corrected, he would cut the recording session at once, even at the expense of wasting two or three hundred feet of raw film. The following dialogue would then ensue. Quick: (emerging from the recording room as the interlocked recorders and projectors slowly whined to a stop) "What the hell's wrong this time, Bill? Splice gone in the workprint?" Bill: (slow solemn shake of the head) Quick: "Then what is it? You've cost me 200 feet of film, an' now I don't know if there's enough left in the camera to handle a reel. I may have to reload." Bill: (shrugging) "Ask Mr. Legg." Legg: "How much film have you left in the recording camera, Charlie?" Quick: "Oh, I dunno, I put in a thousand feet, but you never—" Legg: "Have you checked the footage counter?" Quick: "Well, it says 212." Legg: (with immense patience) "Is it accurate?" Quick: (grudgingly) "Well, yes. I guess so. As accurate as anything around this damn joint." Legg: (calculating out loud with maddening deliberation) "Two hundred and twelve from 1000 leaves 788. This reel is 740 feet. It's a short one. That should fix it?" Quick: "Well, yes, all right. But you've got to give me run-up time to get speed. Count ten feet for that. Well, as long as we don't have any more false starts." Legg: (blandly) "You'll have to ask Bill about that." Quick: "Bill?" Bill: (drily) "Ask Stuart Legg." Legg: "No. I've asked him to ask you, Bill." Bill: (turning his leathery old jaw and his immensely deep-socketed mournful eyes towards Legg) "You really want me to tell him." Legg: "It's up to you."

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Bill: (heaving a dark brown sigh so enormous that it hoists his whole body up out of the seat) "Well, you see, Charlie, we had a disagreement about a cross-fade and seeing as how Stuart here prefers to save money by feeding in his commentator live, we can't correct the track afterwards in the cutting room, can we?" Quick: (sceptical silence) Legg: "That's very fair, Bill. Shall we say I had the edge on the accounts boys up until now, because I didn't have to pay the sound department for recording a separate track?" Bill: (looking at distant horizons) "You could say that, yes, if you wanted to." Legg: "Well then, with 212 feet of film wasted and (looking at his watch) twenty minutes of recording time at $400 an hour, I'm just about back to first base, aren't I, Bill?" Bill: "Yes, you could say that." Legg: (softly) "So, we mustn't have any more mistakes, Bill, must we?" Bill: (at last breaking into the grey ghost of a grin that slices his face up one side) "Okay. Agreed. Charlie, get ready to roll 'em again, will you?" Legg: "Thank you so much, Bill." So the projector with the workprint and the pre-recorded soundtracks for music and effects, all rolled in sequence and interlocked with the sound camera, start up again. The commentator, coat and tie off and collar open, hunches once more over the script in his sweaty little booth— and we're off. But this particular day, it appears, is doomed to mishap. Less than two minutes later there is a great tear of disintegration on the film image and we're all left facing a blank screen glittering in the light of the naked arc. The arc dims; the interlocked cameras whine down to zero; the house lights come up; Charlie Quick appears at the door of his rabbit hutch. "Well, for Christ's sake, what is it this time?" Legg: (speaking to the projectionist on the intercom, very loud so that both Quick and Lane can hear him) "Bob? A splice? Thought so, will you please get Miss Lilly on the phone. Daphne? Yes dear. You are undone again. The workprint. Yes, will you fix it please? A hot splice I think; put in a piece of white leader if the picture's too chewed up. Thanks dear. Hurry please. Well, Bill, how about a smoke?"

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Bill: (with heartfelt relief) "Jesus, Stuart, I could do with one." And slowly he deflates himself with a wheezing groan and drags the smoke down to the soles of his shoes. "You fellas!" is all he permits himself on such occasions with an immensely weary shake of his big head. Charlie Quick darts in again. "It's ruined, like I told you. I haven't enough footage now. Got to thread up another reel." Bill: (turning on him, with sudden pent-up savagery) "Well okay then, for Jesus sake, thread it, or put a sock in it or something." Legg: (with his own brand of heartfelt fervour and relief) "Thanks, Bill." And so in the days immediately after the fall of France and Dunkirk and the uneasy waiting, we flowed all round and over the old-timers, pouring hogsheads of new wine in an endless cataract into bottles so old that they had lost the capacity to give. Yet give they did. On April 1 there had been twenty-nine employees in the old lumber mill and they'd processed monthly to release print 8000 feet of film. Within two years there were 293 people crammed into the mill and the monthly release print footage had grown to 26,0000: "Canada Carries On," recruiting films, shorts about industrial production and clip after clip for the newsreels. We had a blood donor's clip, an anti-waste clip, innumerable Victory Bond clips, even an income tax clip entitled inevitably Now That April's Here. Grierson heard that Ned Sparks, the famous deadpan comedian born in St. Thomas, Ontario, was in Toronto on private affairs. Would he consent to appear—free—for the war effort? I interviewed the glacial Mr. Sparks in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel in Toronto. Like other and more famous personalities, he was "not amused" at the suggestion. Rarely can his reputation for the fishy eye and the straight face have been better sustained. Though the shake of the head was barely perceptible, it was as final as the fall of a guillotine blade. Or if you like, as final as the last rays of the Canadian sun, draining in chill but cheery splendour through air that cuts like a knife, while subarctic night repossesses the barrens. Perhaps that is a more Canadian simile: worthier perhaps of a country of which a later poet was to sing: "Mon pays, ce n'est pas un pays; c'est 1'hiver."

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Though NFB remained fundamentally a Canadian, or Scots-Canadian, enterprise, yet in charting its extraordinary—and effective—expansion, one has to turn first to the English. Grierson was the Scots dominie who organized, drove and inspired us. We Canadians were the learners, unaware of our own strength and capabilities, full of unguessed or hidden talents, but like our own "boundless" natural resources, waiting to be developed before we could become a coherent body of filmmakers. It was part of Grierson's genius as a teacher that he saw these values there waiting to be developed; but to train them and lead them out he needed teachers, philosophers, poets and craftsmen. And for these he turned to the English. He persuaded those who had worked under him in Britain to come to Canada to make films in a crash program of production and to train and inspire Canadians on the job. Stuart Legg, who had been a director at both the EMB and GPO film units, was the political scientist. Stanley Hawes, who had been a director at Strand Films, was the poet. The teacher was Raymond Spottiswoode, who had worked for Grierson in the GPO Film Unit, and who was then working in Hollywood. The craftsman was J.D. Davidson, who had done jobs for Grierson in almost every conceivable mechanical discipline of the film business for the past ten years.

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These four men between them very largely set the guidelines and established the working methods of the early Film Board and trained the Canadians to take over from them. An examination of their personalities and working methods is really the best way to discover how it was that NFB became so good so fast. Legg created the theatrical series; Hawes set the basic patterns for nontheatrical; Spottiswoode organized and taught and draughted the plans for the instrument that NFB eventually became; Davidson imparted the relevant and essential skills and crafts. To all of them, and to all of us, Grierson provided the overall direction, coordination and inspiration; but theirs were the day-to-day skills and talents. And as Grierson was also a consummate politician, he insured against any local resentments over the seniority of Englishmen in a Canadian enterprise by appointing as his deputy Film Commissioner and right-hand man Ross McLean, the Manitoba Rhodes Scholar and former private secretary to Vincent Massey, who had first persuaded Grierson that there was a job to be done in Canada and that he was the man to do it. To us Canadians these Englishmen appeared as exotic emissaries from a storm-girt fortress. Their precise enunciation contrasted with our own prolixity and glottal consonants; their laconic brevity with our contrived and sometimes heavy-handed humour. Beyond and above that they stood for the heroic image which in those days of the Blitz existed in the hearts of her friends. What we couldn't see, lacking their frame of reference, was how bitter the Canadian exile often seemed to them as they learned, through fragmentary wartime gossip, of bombed pubs they'd known, blasted monuments they'd revered, razed houses they'd loved and lived in, the annihilation of friends and relatives. Sometimes in their hearts they hated Canada—hated its distance from the firing line, its naivete, its insensitivity, its robust humour. And this made them cantankerous, standoffish and irritable. In our innocence, we forgave them—for the wrong reasons. In their sophistication they sighed, picked up once again Christian's burden and led us onward with them into the world of professional documentary. Stuart Legg was basically a cutter, or editor, and an extremely skilled and versatile exponent of the art. He had learned from studying the early films of Dovzhenko, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein, particularly the latter, and though he could also direct most sensitively and write beautiful and

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sinewy commentaries, his great skill was to impose on a mass of incoherent and often unrelated footage, including everything from stock shots to the day's rushes, a pattern and a purpose. He saw very clearly, long before he started a film, what it was that he wanted to say. After studying the theme—and the facts, for to documentalists the facts, the raw material of life, as opposed to the studio recreation of it, were sacred—he would plan his script, send out his camera crews and start collecting his footage. But his unique skills appeared first in the cutting room where he organized and edited and juxtaposed perhaps as many as 250 shots per reel into a coherent, telling, film; and secondly, when he addressed himself to the task of writing a commentary that should point up, complement and throw into relief the visuals he had chosen. To a certain extent this method was forced on Legg by circumstances. Grierson had decided that for the commercial movie theatres we needed one-reel, ten-minute, actuality-political films. Shooting on location (except for newsreel items) was expensive and skills were rare. But the stock-shot library was inexhaustible. Some of Legg's finest films in the "Canada Carries On" and the "World in Action" series—such as Everywhere in the World, Churchill's Island or War Clouds in the Pacific—were composed almost entirely of stock shots. On the other hand, some of his most lyrical films and, to Canadians, more moving because of a personal involvement, were very largely original shooting—films such as Wings of Youth and Heroes of the Atlantic. The method was also forced on him by his timetable which was extremely exigent. "Canada Carries On" involved a monthly schedule of a single reel and later a two-reel film; when "World in Action" was added, this meant another eight to twelve one- to two-reel films a year. So that with a unit that never at any time consisted of more than five people he was turning out an average of eighteen or twenty-four shorts a year—one every three weeks—and as the war deepened and public interest with it, the demand for a one-reeler to become a two-reeler grew apace. But though the method may have been forced on Legg, there's no doubt that it was congenial to him, and that through it he best expressed his personality, at once passionate and contemplative. He understood the cutter's art to perfection. He knew all about rhythm and pacing and crosscutting and the counterpoint of visual with word or music. He knew all

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that; and he could do it on his ear. But he also knew that joining shot A to shot B produces not A+B but A+B+X—a third and sometimes unpredictable or even unsuspected shot that isn't there, but which results from the juxtaposition in sequence of two other shots. There were times when he did this to secure deliberate propaganda effect—legitimate or otherwise, depending on your point of view. There were also occasions when, because a certain shot was too short, or too dull, it was necessary to cut away to something else, and justify it ex post facto. There were still other times when the result emerged unpredictably from the cutting room. Of a thousand examples let two suffice: 1. a hangman adjusts a black mask on an Auschwitz victim / a seagull volplanes over sea and sky / a corpse dangles on a gibbet [one of Tom Daly's sequences]; 2. a Hungarian shepherd wraps himself up in a blanket / a goat scratches its backside with its broken horn / pan over the facade of the fin de siecle bridge over the Danube at Budapest— the whole, coupled with the commentator's statement "a regime gazing irritably backward into the past." Legg was also a stickler for the commentary that complemented rather than duplicated the visual. Since you had to hit an audience in less than ten minutes, and between features, there was often a necessary element of bludgeoning and oversimplification to get the quick or "gut reaction." But on the other hand the search for the mot juste did produce some immensely justes mots and taught us all never to take the lazy, unthinking way out. It was Legg who made the periscope of a submarine into the unforgettable "his eye sweeps the empty sullen sea looking for something like a thin vertical broomstick." Though the phrase was exotic to Canadian ears, which connect broomsticks with witches and think of a normal domestic variety as a broom handle, yet it had just the right suggestion of innocent menace to send a frisson down the back of a Canadian audience—and hence to make its point. It was Legg also who, many years before it became popular, showed us the beauty of the word "commonwealth" as compared with the brassy grandeur of "empire." It was Legg, when we were doing a film on the British Commonwealth

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Air Training Plan, who rejected working titles such as Wings over Canada and Wings of Empire and gave us instead Wings of Youth. It was he, too, who hit on the wonderfully poetic device of having the trainer planes fly in formation high over a watery landscape (and Canada has more fresh water than any other country in the world) while the commentator intoned the names—themselves so lovely—of the great Canadian rivers over which they were flying: the Miramachi, the St. Maurice, the Margaree, the Ottawa, the Saskatchewan, the Athabasca. How much better than a saluting cadet or a passing-out parade, or a propeller starting up. In his imagery Legg was helped by one remarkable Canadian who needs placing in this poetic yet pamphleteering role, if only because today he is identified in the public mind exclusively with a cowboy TV serial. Lome Greene, now the middle-aged, white-haired uncle and father in Bonanza, was then an announcer in the CBC with a voice of singular resonance, power and authority. We used to think of him in fact as the Canadian answer of Jerry van Voorhees of "The March of Time," and he was certainly as good. Like all really fine commentators he projected himself, acted out himself in key with Egg's hard-hitting, intense and quite uncompromisingly intellectual commentaries. His voice, with its note of authority—and, where necessary, of doom or of fiery exhortation—was a great asset to both CCO and WIA, which he 'voiced' over a period of almost five years. But when all is said and done, it was Legg who produced and directed Lome Greene and it was more to Legg than to any other single man that the NFB theatrical wartime shorts series owed their popularity and their influence. If Legg was the coldly passionate philosopher, then Stanley Hawes turned out to be that less likely but perhaps equally inevitable product of industrial Britain, the proletarian poet. Legg was middle-class London, public school and Cambridge; Hawes was middle-class Birmingham, public school and further educated by the Depression. Both were as English as Stilton or as fish and chips; but they were very different, not only in their Englishness but in their personalities. To Canadians it seemed that Stanley Hawes was "more like us"—a revealing (of Canadians) and accurate judgement. We regarded Legg with great respect and some awe as the High Priest of documentary. Hawes we regarded with equal respect, and also with affection. Legg uttered pronouncements of universal and shattering

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implication. Even his obiter dicta were cherished by us. Hawes, in contrast, was entirely undramatic, but so painstaking, so quietly capable, so professionally competent and, when you least expected it, so poetic that your respect for him was tempered with love, whereas your respect for Legg was tempered with fear. Each good in his own way, and each had a contribution to make. It was fairly soon made clear to Hawes by Grierson that the glamour jobs—the theatricals—were not for him; and I don't think he really would have wanted them anyway. His work methods were too deliberate to fit the hectic theatrical pace. Furthermore he was an extremely honest filmmaker and would not make a propaganda point or take a visual or commentary shortcut or sharp skid if he didn't believe in it. I spent much of my early film apprenticeship with Stanley Hawes and got to know him and his methods very well. In the winter of 1940-41 we all went down to Halifax to make a film about the Royal Canadian Navy. This thinly disguised "Eastern Canadian Port" received, when the CNR Ocean Limited steamed in, an unlikely quartet: Hawes was producer, I was scriptwriter and unit manager. The other two members were Americans. Roger Barlow, lean, rangy, hook-nosed and delicate-fingered, was a superb cameraman who had served on aircraft carriers in the us Navy, drove a Cord convertible and was resourceful and ingenious, a one-man unit. His equipment, which was all his own, was cared for and crooned over as if it were sentient. His personal Eyemo travelled with him along with the exposure meter, quilted lens box, changebag and small container of chemicals for developing strips of his own negative, "just to check up on the labs back in Ottawa." His personal Bell and Howell tripod and a few key photofloods rode in the baggage car. When he wasn't filming, he was talking film, reading articles on film or keeping his equipment in shape. Most of the twenty-seven-hour journey down to Halifax he spent with his lean Levi-clad legs up on the opposite seat, polishing lenses or making entries in his dope sheets. Somewhere, back in Ohio, there was a wife, but it was to film that he was wedded. The other American bore the name of Richard Joe Cunningham. He was curly blond, tough-looking, taciturn, and had been preceded by a reputation as a director. Cunningham listened morosely to the technical film conversation on the way down. To me it was very exciting: learning all the

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jargon—the beloved professional "in" jargon—on the job, and also having my views occasionally deferred to as an "idea man." To Barlow's crisp professional phrases Cunningham was prepared to listen, but when Hawes and I got into film philosophy he observed sourly: "Such erudition astonishes me," and sank back into his copy of Esquire. Hawes observed him narrowly, yet said nothing. But by the end of the following day, when it had become clear during a visit to the big shore batteries sited off McNab Head that Cunningham's interest both in film and the Navy was marginal, Hawes mumbled to me through his usual cloud of cigarette smoke: "I think perhaps you and I are going to have to put our roots down in the hotel and get a shooting script." First we attended a briefing at a convoy conference and heard the Commodore give the friendly, curt, unhurried orders that he would expect the Masters under his charge to carry out. Richard Joe came to life and made copious notes—a fact not lost on the gimlet eye of the Lieutenant Commander in charge. The following day we all went out about 100 miles into the Atlantic in a destroyer for target practice. This time it was I who made the notes, for I needed to grasp the visuals, and being at this stage still a writer rather than a filmwriter, I had difficulty in plotting things in visual terms. When we came back ashore, marrow-cold, half deaf and dejected, a SubLieutenant waited at the hotel with a note. The convoy we had heard discussed was assembling and would sail from another "Eastern Canadian Port" and no doubt we would like to see it. The port turned out to be Sydney, Cape Breton, about 200 miles east of Halifax. At a unit meeting Hawes decided that Barlow and Cunningham should go to Sydney and shoot the assembly and dispatch of the convoy. He and I would ensconce ourselves in the hotel room and try to knock into shape, in the three days they would be away, a shooting script for a twenty-minute film, provisionally titled Heroes of the Atlantic, which would please the Navy, the audience—and Grierson. Having put the two Americans on the train for Sydney, the Briton and the Canadian then sat down over endless cups of coffee to this essentially thankless task. During those three days (and nights) I shared a room with Hawes and shared also the habits of his working mind. He was the most prolific smoker I ever saw. Though I myself was at that time a twenty-five-a-day

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man, Stanley Hawes must have been up to fifty or sixty. He was the only man I've ever known who started the day in bed, at the 7:30 a.m. call from the switchboard, with a cigarette, who could smoke under the shower, and who could go to sleep while smoking. But it had no effect on his brain. He was a slow worker but very thorough. He taught me how to avoid the "lecturer's pointer" approach; how to slide round an awkward transition with a generalized phrase; above all to be scrupulously honest with the raw material, to avoid contrived situations, however attractive they might appear dramatically or theatrically. "Anything you need you'll find," he used to say, "but you must sense the need of it, you mustn't invent it." That was why research, on the spot, was so important. You might decide in advance what you wanted to say in a given film, but you must be ready at once to jettison any preconceived notions if they didn't fit in with the facts, as imaginatively abridged by you (well and good) but not distorted by you. This was in many ways the opposite of Legg's approach, which was to decide on a theme, a point of view, adopt a position and then select and cut his material to underscore it. It had its own honesty, but of a different sort, and the reality to which it paid tribute was a politicoscientific rather than a human reality. The documentary truth was to Hawes very sacred and he searched for the single shot or sometimes the single phrase, culled from close observation and research into the raw material, which would illumine this truth. For example, a visual image of great power which he pulled out of the convoy conference was the five seconds of complete silence but total awareness the room possessed immediately after the departure of all concerned. And much later in a magnificent and compelling film he did in wartime Britain for the Canadian Department of Labour, on collective bargaining, he pulled the identical trick with a close shot of a stubborn old union hand who kept repeating at intervals in a strong North Country accent, "We moost observe the coostom. The coostom." The placing of this shot, as the old, stonewalling figure was painfully persuaded by his mates to yield a point, was both telling and true. Hawes didn't mind if you shortened life. "A fighter pilot's day," he used to say, "consists of immense stretches of boredom and a few brief moments of intense action. It's all right for us, in making documentary, to cut out the boredom"—with a sideways grin.

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By the end of three days, we had the script whipped into some sort of shape and looked forward to hearing the professional opinion of Barlow and Cunningham, who were coming in from Sydney next morning. Having spent the previous night at an Inter-service hockey game, we had broken training to the extent of each secreting a mickey of rye in our overcoats against the searing cold. We were therefore in a contrite mood to receive our colleagues. Cunningham read the great work with cursory lack of interest, and threw it down on the bed. "I don't think we have a film there," he opined. I was just wise enough to let Hawes carry the ball. "Oh? How so?" he asked through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Barlow looked shrewd and noncommittal. "Well," said Richard Joe, stretching and yawning, "there's no real drama in it. Not like at that convoy conference we attended. No real"—he snapped his fingers—"moxy. That's it; no moxy." "How would you suggest we improve it?" asked Hawes. Richard Joe picked up my sacred script off the bed, glanced at it and threw it down again. "Oh, I might have an idea or two if I could get a clear run at it. But basically the trouble is there's no film in it—if you see what I mean—no movie. It's too refined and thin. And on top of that, the stuff we saw at Sydney wouldn't make a film either!" Hawes raised his eyebrow at Barlow, who said, "It's a bit on the thin side, but I think we could make something of it." "Those are our instructions," said Hawes. "They may be your instructions," said Richard Joe truculently, "but I don't see where they're mine. I was sent here to direct a dramatic war film on the Canadian Navy...." "Royal Canadian Navy." "All right, and there's no drama, only grey skies and old ships and a few overage destroyers. It's too thin, too static. I'm sorry but there it is." There was a rather long silence. Eventually Hawes said, "You mean you'd rather not go on with the job?" "Well, I was going to tell you. If it was more like that convoy conference, I'd like to, maybe, just to show a friendly spirit." He gave us a bright, tight smile from beneath the shock of curly yellow hair. "But, fact is," he pulled a telegram out of his pocket, "they want me back in Hollywood, see."

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"To make a real war film," said Barlow, deadpan. This was almost a year before Pearl Harbor, and, from a fellow American, was hitting below the belt. Richard Joe Cunningham reddened. Hawes said slowly, but almost at once: "Okay then, I'll telephone Grierson in Ottawa and tell him of your decision." "That'd be just fine," snapped Cunningham, and the meeting broke up. I was astonished at Hawes' coolness, having expected him to fly into a tantrum. I obviously didn't know him, or the frustrations of filmmaking nearly as well as I later came to do. He was entirely unperturbed. "Johnny G is a great one for dumping a lot of awkward elements together into one bucket, and hoping that by some chemical reaction it'll turn out all right. Well, this is one time it hasn't. So we'll see. Oh, miss! (this most un-Canadian locution for the switchboard operator). Get me long distance, will you. Ottawa 28211 Local 5416." Of course he was quite right. Miss Scellen clucked and Grierson blustered a bit at the other end, but had to agree that in the circumstances the film was best called off for the time being. The following morning we all entrained for Ottawa. I thought it was monstrous that four people with a lot of equipment should have worked for nearly three weeks and produced nothing, but Hawes was philosophical. "If you're not working against the clock, nothing you do in the film business is ever wasted. And even if you are, it often isn't," he added inconsequentially. This turned out to be true, in the long run; there was, however, a more immediate and unexpected short-run result. Two months later, Grierson sent me out to Winnipeg to script a film, Call for Volunteers, about the women's war effort. The train, the endless overheated Canadian train riding the high iron north of Lake Superior in the dry, crushing cold of mid-February, stopped at Fort William. I staggered to the newsstand and when I returned to the welcome fug of my Pullman, opened Liberty magazine. The lead article: "Atlantic Convoy Conference" by Richard Joe Cunningham. Sure enough, it was all there. Richard Joe had even secured the blessing of censorship and the Navy Public Relations Officers (PROS); and the Minister for Naval Affairs, in a brief endorsement, was delighted that, through the wider readership of this enterprising USA periodical, our Good

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Neighbour to the South should learn something of the extent of Canada's war effort. Hawes the poet was also Hawes the teacher, but the teacher and organizer par excellence was Raymond Spottiswoode. He was one of the most didactic fellows I have ever met, but also one of the most clear-headed in exposition. And he had some right to be didactic, for he knew his subject cold, professionally, while most of us were woefully ignorant amateurs. Unfortunately, his knowledgeable didacticism suffered not only from the fact that people hate to be told what, but from the serious disadvantage, in Canadian terms, of an extremely precise English accent. Spottiswoode was entirely ignorant of this. His accent had never aroused any remark in England and he simply wished, through his remarkable expository gifts, to tell us where we were wrong and where, not he, but the documentary movement and methodology, were right. But his voice and his manner grated on Canadian ears and lots of people just simply couldn't stand him. Also, and unfairly, they resented that Spottiswoode should be pronounced Spotswood; or, if you like, that Spotswood should be spelled Spottiswoode. For these reasons Grierson wisely never put him in a position of authority but made of him, despite his immensely superior knowledge and his meticulous intelligence, a colleague. In point of fact, Spottiswoode, never humble about his calling, was humble in himself and this eventually came through, despite accent and know-it-all air. He also had a sweetness of disposition which helped him over the rough patches; he remained nevertheless a tiresome though effective teacher, and a mine of fantastically varied and accurate information. He had first attracted the attention of Grierson and his young men by very daringly publishing, shortly after he came down from Oxford, a book provocatively entitled A Grammar of the Film. Since it was all theory and Spottiswoode had at that time never been near a cutting room or squinted through a viewfinder, the young documentalists in their magazines and reviews had a lot of fan with him. A Grammarian, eh? "Let us begin and carry up this corpse, singing together...." The book is still in print after over thirty years, and is still quoted. It was this kind of expertise which enabled Spottiswoode to plan the administration of film production at NFB, to design the basic forms and procedures for film costing, and when called in, as he often was, at an "awkward" stage in the production of a film, to demonstrate what had gone wrong and suggest

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ways in which to correct it. This is not a popular function for a man to perform, and Spottiswoode was not popular. But he was the indispensable man. Lacking Legg's passionate rhetorical sweep, or the poetic craftsmanship of Hawes, he had extraordinary gifts of perception as a critic, of clear exposition as a teacher, and of simplicity as an administrator. Of course it hadn't all come at once. The brash young author of A Grammar of the Film first had to serve his apprenticeship in the medium he affected to know so well in theory, and to learn the tricks of the trade the hard way. Grierson took him into the GPO film unit as office boy-cumprojectionist. Here he threaded up films back to front, stripped the sprockets off movieolas, turned up the sound too loud at tense moments, got his soundtrack out of sync with his picture, even burned part of a film; in a word, committed most of the egregious, predictable but helpful errors common to studio acolytes. He learned fast and accurately, and also kept his critical mind alive; and by 1939 he was out in Hollywood working in a tiny box of a legal office and holidaying with his bride in Yosemite National Park. When Grierson moved into Canada and started to round up his young professionals, he pulled Spottiswoode in, not to NFB, which at that time didn't exist as a production unit, nor to the Bureau where there wasn't any vacancy, but to a commercial firm in Toronto known as Audio Pictures Ltd. Audio was the personal fief of a very tough and able character named Arthur Gottlieb, who was beholden to no company but his own and was in fact one of the large school of entrepreneurs who boss the labs and newsreels of New York. New York was a city with which Arthur Gottlieb had many connections, and indeed he was almost a caricature of Manhattan show business, a Runyonesque character who habitually wore a large brown fedora hat in the office, smoked White Owl cigars incessantly, and talked daily to New York long distance: to his friends, to his business associates, to his rivals, above all to the Warwick Hotel (pronounced WarWick) where a suite was kept in readiness for him and where the closets were reputed to contain dozens of gents' natty suitings. One associated Gottlieb with smoke-filled hotel rooms, hard men riding five to a big limousine and endless telephone conversations. The conjunction of the tough middle-aged Jewish showman and the

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young Oxford-educated film theoretician was of course one that Grierson relished richly; and while he expected great things of it (he had agreed to farm out one or two CCO to Gottlieb as well as contracts for lab processing), he also expected an explosion. He was not long disappointed. Spottiswoode at work in Audio with his swift movements, thick-lensed, rimless spectacles, and precise, articulate utterance, was regarded with suspicion by Gottlieb (as was I, NFB liaison man on contract for a specific film) and with open-mouthed disbelief by his Canadian employees. Gottlieb's office was so sited that through glass partitions he could see whether the production staff were keeping up to scratch. Frequently when one looked up at hazard from a script or movieola or a four-way, one encountered his baleful, heavy-jowled, lizard's stare. What we had perhaps not also realized was that the partitions were paper thin. Gottlieb didn't mind one bit if his mental processes were interrupted by the clatter of movieolas and the whine and roar of soundtracks being cut, provided it enabled him to keep a strict eye on his employees. It was silence that bothered him. One day he had been particularly trying, rejecting script amendments out of hand, bullying Spottiswoode and his associates (one of whom happened to be me) when we wanted extra funds, or extra time, and showing a total incomprehension of what we were driving at in our current film. "He should be called Teufelslieb," said Spottiswoode to me. "Eh? What's that?" I called over the chatter of the movieola. "I said," roared Spottiswoode, at the top of his voice, "Gottlieb should be really called Teufelslieb!" I cut the machine and the speaker. There was a heavy silence. We looked up to see the bejowled, baleful face. "I heard that, Mister Spott-is-wood," he said. Some weeks later Spottiswoode with his wife and infant daughter made the 267-mile journey from Toronto to Ottawa loaded down with all their moveables, some strapped to the roof of their 1935 Oldsmobile like Okies on their way to California. Grierson gave us both a terrific dressing down when news reached NFB. Not a word of sympathy for our plight at Audio; not a word about Spottiswoode's wife and the baby in the midsummer heat. Instead he snarled at us for fouling up NFB's precious relations with Audio, and annoying Gottlieb who, though a tough character, had a great

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contribution to make to the common war effort. He shouted us out of his room and gave us to understand that we were lucky to have a job at all. Of course the next day, having beaten us into a quite unnecessarily contrite mood, Grierson took it all back, installed Spottiswoode in an adequate office and told him to go ahead organizing NFB's production services. It was like swinging down to the dry breezy uplands after weeks in the high peaks; to the rest of us it meant the brooding over our work henceforth of a firstclass intelligence and a thoroughly knowledgeable pro. Pro too, every inch of it in his own way, was J.D. Davidson, the fourth of the quadrumvirate of Englishmen on whom the early NFB rested. He was spry, bright-eyed and fussy; he smoked a continual pipe—was even known to smoke it in that holy of holies, the negative cutting room, while working over a four-way. The spectacle of this pipe richly burning under the fluorescent light at two in the morning, long after the white-coated girls had gone home and we had gained illicit entry to do a rush job in their absence, was absolutely hair-raising. One felt that at any moment a red-hot dottle might fall onto the "sacred (and absolutely irreplaceable) negativ" which would disappear in a puff of smoke, to say nothing of the fire hazard. But Davidson moved with firm delicate hands and sure skill, muttering to himself the while, to get the film into the theatre in time for the guaranteed release date. And those of us who knew he was breaking all the rules respected him so much for his professionalism that we entered into the conspiracy. Davidson was not an idea man. He could no more write a script than he could fly. He was a very pedestrian director and much preferred to be a cameraman under direction. But at anything at all to do with the multifarious and basically complex machines of film, he was enormously skilled. He could not only shoot accurately and well, but he could repair his own camera or for that matter any camera in NFB: Akeley, Debrie, Michell, Bell and Howell, Newman-Sinclair, de Vry, Eyemo, Cinespecial—the lot. He was far better at operating the optical camera than the optical cameraman himself, to whom he frequently gave hints, and at whose request he conducted seminars for young assistants. He was, under general direction, a skilled editor and (as we have seen) negative cutter. He knew his way around the inside of a lab—the neg, the dupe neg, the fine-grain print, the workprint, the reverse print, the scratch print, timing, developing, the mixing of chemicals: again, the lot.

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Davidson was, on the surface, the most indestructibly cheerful fellow in the entire NFB—"an appallingly bright character," Grierson once described him. The eternal Englishman on the loose in Canada, conforming not in the slightest gesture to our folkways or habits or speech patterns: seated alone in the men's beverage room brightly insisting that the gassy glasses of Canadian lager were really the flat pint pots of his English local; summing up complex grey Canadian problems in a cheerful, crushingly dismissive cockney locution; puffing away at his pipe; throwing out of his eye his wonderfully unwhitened, middle-aged locks, as he argued crisply on a technical point. His favourite phrases were "I couldn't care less" and "That's just about the lowest edge." Then, tucking the enormous wedge of the Citizen or the Journal under his arm—wishing it were the thin Daily Express or Daily Mirror—stalking off to a lonely supper and a single room in a down-at-heel midtown hotel. For despite his cheerfulness and, on technical matters, his communicative nature, JD was essentially a lonely man, though typically one whom you didn't recognize as lonely until you knew him very well, for he had his defenses well built and what you saw was not the secret man. It turned out that the one time he went on location very nearly cost JD his life. He was down in Halifax shooting, along with his assistant Donald Fraser, a corvette coming alongside a destroyer. It was a dark, snowstreaked January afternoon in Halifax harbour and the sea was rough with a blizzard coming up. Shooting from the deck rail, JD lost his footing and fell sixty feet into the water—duffle coat, hand-held Eyemo, exposure meter and all. Fraser saw the sides of the two ships come together in a bump, winced and averted his eyes as he heard in his mind's ear JD's skull being crushed to pulp. But JD was extraordinarily lucky. Weighed down with equipment he sank, and the iron ships' sides kissed above his head while he was protected by the curve of the ribs. By the time the air-filled duffle coat bore him to the surface again, the ships had warped apart and there he was struggling and gasping in the narrow lake between them. They got him out in twenty minutes, but in shock with a broken hand, and in real danger of pneumonia. A month in the Halifax general hospital cured him, but though he sought fresh location assignments, Grierson pulled him back to Ottawa and made him director of technical services. "You're far too valuable to keep behind a

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camera," he said. Thereafter, in common with his other fellow Englishmen, JD spent most of his time in the labs, workrooms and studios of NFB.

Apart from these four there was a small group of Griersonian Englishmen who exercised a remote but effective avuncular influence. Basil Wright, director of Windmill in Barbados, Song of Ceylon and other famous pre-war documentaries, was a director of the Film Centre and producer of many films for the British Ministry of Information. But he was also a Grierson graduate and hence helpful in locating stock shots, securing combat footage and arranging clearances for Canadian cameramen. To us in the ramshackly NFB he seemed as remote and lofty as God. Not only was he one of the original legendary Grierson circus, on whose work we all modelled our journeyman efforts; he was also the representative of a country which at that time loomed through the mists of war in proportions both heroic and Homeric. Britain in those days seemed to us all the very bastion of freedom. Three thousand miles from the fighting and from Hitler's savagely contained Fortress Europe, we felt provincial and cut off. Here was a man who could speak not only with the accent of authority in film matters, but as a hero of the Blitz, one of those more than mortal Englishmen who went on unhurriedly with the daily chores in a hail of incendiaries and high explosives. This lean intellectual with the sensitive mouth and the very coolly appraising grey eyes arrived in Canada in mid-winter on a month's visit. We attended his seminars on wartime film production; we followed him around as he inspected the cluttered labyrinths of NFB; we hung on his obiter dicta and sought his approbation. He was, gratifyingly, immensely impressed not just by our films, but by the atmosphere down at "the joint" as Grierson had come to call NFB. "It has the right smell," he said of the vast clattery manning pool; and he wasn't being facetious. He was impressed too with the grey efficiency and inarticulate endless travail of Canada, and his affection even extended to the prairies in their winter blanket. I accompanied him one dreadfully cold February day on a walk from Winnipeg to St. Boniface to see the great Catholic cathedral there. It was eight below zero with a cutting wind and we had to cross and

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recross the Red River on huge openwork truss bridges before we could stand in front of the cathedral's grey and flat-chested immensity. But to Basil, buoyed upon "this Canadian thing," as Grierson, snapping his fingers, was fond of calling it, the hour-long walk might have been a promenade through Florence or Rome. Despite frost-nipped ears (he had no hat or earmuffs), a streaming nose and bluish lips, he enthused all the way back to the welcome warmth of the Fort Garry Hotel. "This," he said, "really is the true north strong and free." He returned to England in the belly of a Lancaster bomber filled with admiration for our youth, our enthusiasm and our singleness of purpose; and he left behind him with us a most unexpected and exhilarating sense of belonging to the great world outside. Arthur Elton, the brilliant film expositor of scientific and mechanical conundrums, and Edgar Anstey, the splendid anchorman of the documentary movement, also played a helpful avuncular role. Elton's masterly early films Transfer of Power and Aero Engine were studied minutely by those of us engaged in 16mm production for adult education. Anstey's assistance was more generalized, consisting principally in a long series of personal letters from London which brought with them the authentic odour of carbon tetrachloride and acetate raw stock, mingled with the sulphurous and smoky effulgence of wartime London. Both men, as a happy by-product of their association with us, ended up with Canadian wives. And finally there was Joe Golightly. J.RR. Golightly—to give him his full initials—was of age uncertain, though older than Grierson (b. 1898) because he had been an officer in the First World War and wounded. He was thin and gristly, of medium height, sported thick spectacles above the small, toothbrush moustache dear to the warriors of '14 to '18, and was crowned by a tonsure of dark brown hair skirting a bald pink cranium of the most remarkable shape: long from front to rear, narrow and with a bump in the middle. Throughout the old EMB and GPO days Golightly had been Grierson's Man Friday, and throughout the war he continued in that function in London, acting as Grierson's and increasingly NFB'S key liaison figure in wartime Britain. Golightly didn't appear to do anything in film, or to know or care very much about processes, or ideas. But he had a detailed and unrivalled personal knowledge of every facet of the film business and

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was on terms of easy personal relationship with both Wardour Street and Whitehall, Ealing and Elstree and Soho Square. Golightly knew all the ins and outs, all the production tricks and administrative shortcuts, where to lay his hand on the one person who could sort out a tangle. If you wanted to clear the commentary of a "sensitive" film, if you needed a director-cameraman in central Scotland, if you simply had to find a recording studio vacant at an hour's notice, if you were desperately short of raw stock and needed a precious 2000 feet to finish a film, if there was someone in an enemy alien camp who knew how the Nazi party cells functioned: any and all of these were not beyond the wit and ingenuity of Golightly to ascertain. He detested paperwork and could rarely be brought to write a letter. He operated as a one-man central intelligence and filing agency, fixer, contact man, and wise counsellor. A sort of Mycroft Holmes, though painfully shy and retiring and given to long bouts of melancholy introspective drinking, he was enormously valuable to NFB, and to Grierson— as his private pipeline into wartime Whitehall—absolutely indispensable. Golightly came out to Canada in the winter of '42-'43, arriving in snowbound sub-zero Ottawa in a thin blue Saville Row topcoat of immaculate cut, and a bowler hat. He very nearly froze. But he was quickly revived with liberal does of rye whisky and crammed into a rabbit-fur cap, heavy overshoes and a windcheater over which he still wore his Saville Row blue topcoat and spotted blue silk foulard scarf. He was a notable figure among the galoshes, stadium boots and babushkas of wartime Ottawa. Perhaps his greatest adventure befell him when Grierson decided to take him down to Toronto to meet the moguls of Dundas Square who were responsible for the distribution of our theatrical shorts. The pair boarded the night train at Ottawa Union in the midst of a howling blizzard, both well oiled after a reminiscential evening. During the night the blizzard turned to freezing rain, sheeting the entire city in a featureless glaze and jamming the tramcars solid in their tracks. The following morning many NFB employees skied to work; the following morning too, Grierson and Golightly awoke blear-eyed in their train drawing room after an unexpectedly deep night's sleep and pushed up the blinds to view the grey, gaping canyons of downtown Toronto. Alas, they too had been held captive by the storm and instead of being 267 miles to the southwest,

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they were neatly parked on the spur track in Ottawa Union where they had embarked the previous night. "Smoothest train ride I ever had," said Joe Golightly mildly. And though Grierson had written of the film London Can Take It that it "created enormous sympathy for England and so far so good. The question is whether creating sympathy necessarily creates confidence," Golightly slipped back to that same London on a wartime Queen to tell the embattled islanders all about the rigours of life in Canada.

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Canadian proselytes

The extreme sophistication, indeed the knowingness, of the English, was matched on the Canadian side by a truly wonderful innocence of eye. Because Canadians are basically less complex than the English, and also because we were so new to the game, we essayed many bold moves. These took away the breath of the English by their sheer audacity, but we were entirely unaware of their boldness. Of course, as we learned, we too became more sophisticated and less bold, but we never entirely lost a Canadian taste for massive simplicities. Also we never really lost a basic tendency toward dullness which is the other side of the "Quiet Canadian." Out of this dullness, which was composed of equal parts of diffidence, uncertainty and censoriousness, Grierson had continually to shake us. The key figure in this development was Sydney Newman. Newman is known today as the former director of drama at the BBC, former director of drama for ITV and one of the most skilled professionals in the field; but he got his start with Grierson. Syd had what was denied to many of his fellow Canadians at the Board: panache. With this went inevitably a certain earthiness verging at times on the corny, but held in check by good taste and a basic honesty of purpose. This endeared him to Grierson. Syd's flair is partly explicable perhaps by his Jewish background, but it was also personal. He was seen at his best—

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and his worst—in the preview theatre, screening the rough cut of a workprint. Of medium height, thickset with a sheaf of wonderfully wavy and lustrous black-brown hair, shrewd, liquid brown eyes, and full sensitive lips later garnished with a hairline moustache, he sat slouched and apparently indolent as the rough cut flickered by on the screen. But all the time he was uttering asides to his assistant or else making his own squiggled and scribbled notes on a small pad under the shaded prompt light. At the end, with an "Okay, wrap it up" and a relaxed unwound attitude to his work which masked a tremendous drive and tension, he would amble across the road to Nichols' greasy spoon (our "local") and in the course of coffee and a cigarette quickly and professionally indicate every point at which the film could be improved. He used his hands to make flowing gestures about the film, and hence was sneered at on the side, much as were the RAF "prang" artists boasting in pubs during the Battle of Britain. But he suited the word to the action. Grierson used to say of a certain low-budget producer that he could shoot "to the frame"; of Syd it was true to say that he could cut to the frame. He may not have been concerned with the eternal verities; he was not in any true sense an intellectual; he certainly had no guilt-ridden feelings about justifying the ways of God to man, though curiously he did marry a daughter of the manse and a highly successful union it proved. But he was a showman to his fingertips and he also knew the basic small-town Canadian simplicities, which can best be summed up in the inarticulate monosyllables: home, work, faith, love, truth; and which are rarely concerned with the flamboyant: passion, ardour, excitement, or cleverness. He could work these simplicities into a carefully orchestrated, deliberately contrived yet seemingly spontaneous whole which made the point—intellectual, political or propaganda—but also hit the heart. This extraordinary flair was brought home to me at first hand, for Syd and I, without each other's knowledge, were set in competition making a onereel film about the return of the Battle of Normandy veterans, entitled Welcome, Soldier! We each had the same budget; we each had a fresh musical score; we each had Lome Greene on the soundtrack. But whereas my film made all the correct points and was entirely acceptable as a document, it lacked that extra spark of showmanship that made a film "go theatrical." So in the end, Syd's Welcome Soldier! went into theatres as a CCO;

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and mine went into the shops and the factories and the schools and the adult education groups as a non-theatrical. It was a sobering lesson, but since one cannot 'change thyself (only know thyself), it really didn't help me. I was a good writer, planner, expositor and researcher, even a good cutter, but I was not a good showman, and never became one. There was a danger of course, and Syd was aware of it: the showman may become the mountebank. This he never did. He often strove for effects with his tongue in his cheek; and he'd let you know, in production, the words coming honeyed through his soft mobile lips, that he had it there; but it must never be apparent to an audience. I don't believe it ever was and the reason for this was that Syd, in addition to being a showman, had his taste and his standards. It's worth pausing here perhaps to consider the incidence of Jewish talent at the NFB and what significance, if any, is to be attached to it. If they seemed at first to be pretty thick on the ground this no more than reflected the North American film production business, of which we were a part. But closer inspection showed that they were not so much thick on the ground, as thick with talent, in positions of creative responsibility and hence conspicuous, or apt to be. This in turn reflected the high proportion of theatrical, artistic, and entrepreneurial achievement in this difficult but talented people. As far as I can remember, they never exceeded two dozen, and in a staff of 400 this is not a high figure. But because of their flair, they were conspicuous, and most of them conspicuously good. Some we shall meet later, but all, without exception, had that little extra ounce of drive-cum-schmaltz which at its worst could produce a heedless breastbeating vulgarity, but at its best a sensitiveness, a delicacy, and a raw emotive certainty that was electrifying to experience and which was never dull. Of course the distribution side was another story; here almost the entire trade was in the hands of Jewish entrepreneurs as it was in New York and to a large extent in Hollywood. This was in the immemorial tradition of the chafferer in the suq, hardened, magnified and coarsened on a crushingly enormous (because North American) scale. By the time he had become producer of the ceo series, Sydney Newman had broadened out into a very fair example of the "renaissance man" in film: a director-producer-editor-scriptwriter who could turn his hand, under pressure and with the inexorable deadline facing him, to the lightning

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mastery of raw material, seize instantly the significant element in a random pile of assorted facts and so work the material that this element emerged as the theme. One might almost quote Sherlock Holmes: "It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and those which are vital." A good example of this was the interminable working title known as "The Railway Film." Among the obvious themes for a CCO were the railways at war. Railways have of themselves an almost universal fascination, and in Canada where national union was largely forged by a transcontinental railway, and where rail transport bulks so large, they had a special appeal. The railway came late to Canada, but not so late as its people, the great period of railway construction being 1880 to 1914. In that thirty-five years railway mileage grew from 12,000 to 40,000; the first transcontinental, the nationbuilding CPR, was completed; and later, in the boom that followed the opening up on the prairies, came two more transcontinentals. By 1914, Canada with a population of less than seven millions had over 42,000 miles of track. It was the most over-railroaded nation on earth. And yet, because of its sparse population and its continental distances, this massive infrastructure, as we should now call it, was accepted by most Canadians without question, as part of the natural order of things. Because the railways came before the people—indeed they often encouraged the people to come—they took over many of the river valleys and lakeshores. But Canadians did not think it odd that fast freights should thunder between their summer cottage and the little dock where the canoe was tied up; or that the high iron, fraught with sudden death, lay between them and a mid-morning holiday swim for Mum and the kids. The twin ribbons receding to the vanishing point of the achingly lonely prairie were as much part of the national heritage as the fistful of country elevators that proclaimed, six miles away, the next hamlet in the empty void. The divisional points, stretched out every 150 miles across the continent in the days of steam, where the panting behemoths were coaled, fired and watered, were often the only centres of population in the barrens north of Lake Superior and in the Rockies. Railroads were part of the national way of life. "He's a conductor with the CN," "Suis un brakeman sur le Pacifique." So, obviously, a film about railways in Canada had enormous appeal, apart

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altogether from the tremendous load of wartime transport. Yet the film had a jinx. Grierson began by giving it to Stanley Hawes, who happened to be a passionate railroad aficionado as well as a poetic and deliberate director. He travelled the length of Canada, for it was one of the crippling things about NFB production that the sponsors always insisted that each provincial region be covered in order to assuage local jealousies. Since the coaling of locomotives or the use of signals is the same whether it takes place in Nova Scotia or Alberta, this meant endless duplication. In the course of several months Hawes shot almost 12,000 feet: locomotives, roundhouses, oiling and greasing, conductors, brakemen, freight sheds, cabooses, passenger terminals, and trains, trains, trains: climbing the Rockies, skirting the Great Lakes, highballing across the Prairies, snaking along saltwater inlets. Before he could get a chance to cut it, Hawes was sent off on another assignment and the footage returned to the library. There it languished for almost a year. This was not due to an oversight or to concern with more urgent things; it was due to the daunting mass of the raw material and to the feeling (which did them credit) of those assigned to cut it that Hawes was looking over their shoulder. No less than three producers tried their hand at "The Railway Film"; they succeeded in reducing the mass of raw footage to about 3000 feet—at least three times the length of the longest CCO—and there they stuck. One day Grierson decided to cut the Gordian knot. He called in Sydney Newman and told him to get out a one-reel (1000 feet, ten minutes) CCO on the railways and he wanted the release print ready in exactly three weeks. Grierson had chosen the right man; Sydney didn't bat an eyelid. But the task was formidable. That 3000 feet had to be reduced to 1000 feet. This was in itself a difficult but not an impossible task. But Newman knew, and knew that Grierson knew that he knew, that Grierson himself and every single one of Newman's colleagues would be waiting to make the obvious comparison with Night Mail, ready to pounce on any disparity, ready to speak slightingly of any discrepancy. And what made it tougher was this: the rhythm of a locomotive exhaust, as it labours through the mountains, cries out a contrapuntal recitative, as well as for music. Who could deny that such a device had its place in the railway

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film? Yet equally, who could deny that Night Mail had done it first, and with Auden? Even at our Canadian best we could scarce aspire to that. Newman solved the difficulty with truly theatrical brilliance. Instead of concentrating on the visual cliches of railroading, he seized on the overwhelming importance of railroad legends and myths to Canadians. By subjugating all his other images—of people, of goods, of places—to this dominating imperative, he made the railways seem larger than life and the railwaymen of heroic stature. The film racketed along at a terrific pace and reached its film climax and its Canadian climax in a freight pounding through the Rockies, themselves the culminating point in the Canadian railroad legend since it was here, at Craigellachie, that the last spike had been driven and the infant nation linked, a mare usque ad mari its motto. Here too came the poetry, very brief and more pop art than poetry, but unforgettable when heard over close-ups of pounding pistons and night shots of smoke illumined by a white-hot firebox: Rain, shine, snow, sun; Railroad's work never done. Rain, shine, snow, sun; Railroad's work never done. Of course it wasn't the film Stanley Hawes would have made. It lacked his sense of the poetic. It was "different but equal," a brief shattering assault on eye and ear that left the audience dazed, but proud of its railways and proud of itself. This, after all, was the object of the wartime CCO series. "I've no time for these goddamn navel-gazing directors," said Grierson. "The message, man, the message. Let's have it!" Or, as he put it at greater length: The penalty of realism is that it is about reality and has to bother forever not about being 'beautiful' but about being right. It means a stalwart effort these days: one has to chill the mind to so many emotional defences of the decadent and so many smooth rationalizations of the ineffective. One has even to chill the mind to what, in the vacuum of daydreams, one might normally admire. In our world it is specially necessary these days to guard against the aesthetic argument. It is plausible and apt to get under the defences of any maker in any medium. But, of course, it is the dear bright-eyed old enemy and by this time we know it very well. Documentary was from the beginning—when we first

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separated our public purpose theories from those of Flaherty—an 'anti-aesthetic' movement. We have all, I suppose, sacrificed some personal capacity in 'art' and the pleasant vanity that goes with it.

If I had taken a leaf from Syd's book, I might have been a better film man. Parallel to the railway film, I was faced with a not dissimilar problem: how to make a film about coal mining (including, inevitably, by order of the sponsors, shots in all the major Canadian coalfields: Cape Breton, Estevan, Saskatchewan, and the Crowsnest in the Rockies); and at the same time not to trespass on Coal Face, the great Griersonian documentary of the depression years in Britain. To make it worse Grierson had told me, his mouth twisting in its mischievous half-grin, below the closeclipped now greying moustache, "Ye'll call it Coal Face, Canada." Of course it can be argued that this was original shooting, whereas Newman was essentially "doing a Legg" job on Hawes' footage. Still I oughtn't to have allowed the sponsors to bulldoze me into sending out two crews, each with a director, one to Nova Scotia and the other to Blairmore, Alberta. Once out of my sight they produced two totally different films: one team did an adult education story about social security in Cape Breton; the other shot a drama, including a re-enacted mine disaster, out in the Alberta foothills. It was left to me to marry up an ersatz Kameradschaft with a WEA (Workers Education Association) instructional, and the result was patchy and uneven. Nevertheless— such is the essential drama of shiny, sweat-grimed faces and blackrimmed eyes against the coal face proper—the film, recut under Legg's supervision, did actually "go theatrical." It even had a leading article written about it in a national daily. But it remained always for me a cumbrous film, revealing all too clearly its varied paternity. Perhaps it might have looked tighter and more professional, less gangling and 'sincere,' if I'd asked Leslie Macfarlane to help me. In his own way Macfarlane was the most professional of us all, for he was a writer who could write literally anything, and who made a solid professional living out of writing—not journalism—in Canada, and only in Canada, for over forty years. Macfarlane entered NFB simply as 'a writer,' looked on much askance by those who regarded themselves as being true filmmakers. He was a short, chunky fellow in his early forties with rumpled sparse brown hair, a rumpled suit and a misleading air of insignificance. This was

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the first impression. It didn't last long because Macfarlane attracted inevitable attention by the fact that he almost never seemed to stop writing. Most writers in NFB spent a lot of time at home, or went into long periods of gestation while they gazed fixedly into the middle distance, or smoked endless cigarettes, or gossiped round the water cooler, or ran across the road to Nichols' greasy spoon for endless cups of coffee. Not so Macfarlane. Given a desk in the middle of the manning pool, he surrounded himself with a clutter of paper and a great cloud of pipe smoke, set up his personal, battered old Corona, took off his coat, loosened his tie, and clattered busily away, entirely oblivious of his surroundings. After a while this single-mindedness attracted attention and we learned the reason for Macfarlane's assiduity: he wrote not just for NFB but for himself. If NFB couldn't keep him sufficiently busy, he'd use the spare time writing for the CBC or the monthly and weekly magazines. He just couldn't stop writing. He wrote radio plays, stage plays, TV plays, film commentaries, outlines, treatments, scripts, shooting scripts, essays, reportage, short stories, articles, novellas, novels, local history, advertising copy: absolutely anything. He was a very fast writer and also a quick man with an idea and it was this that overcame the initial suspicion of those of his fellow workers who felt that he oughtn't to be making money for himself "on government time." Yet producers, directors, or scriptwriters in a jam were crowded round Les Macfarlane's desk like bees to a jam jar. My own first encounter with Macfarlane was over a complex and basically pedestrian film on the new synthetic rubber plant which the government-owned Polymer Corporation was building at Sarnia. I just could not think of a title, so I put it to Les, who looked at me with his mild blue eyes, from the middle of his shroud of smoke. "Leave it with me." Ten minutes later he strolled into the cutting room and handed me a piece of paper. On it was written: RX FOR RUBBER. Of course it became the tide. It looked intriguing on the screen and it could read "Recipe for Rubber" or "Prescription for Rubber" or simply "R for Rubber" while the old pharmacist's sign gave it a spurious authority. This sort of thing, on a dayin-day-out basis, without any ostentation or flap, was what made Leslie Macfarlane so desired and so likeable a member of our roaring rat race. At the end of the scale were the young intellectuals, the disciples of

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Legg: Tom Daly and Jim Beveridge. Tom Daly, a young, serious, blond Torontonian, with large, capable cutter's hands, became Legg's assistant and editor. He was untiring as a worker, enormously competent and consistent, with a very quick grasp of essentials. He knew, or learned (as so many of us did) under Legg's direction, every device in the trade. He could lick a two-reel WIA into shape with immense speed, care and facility; but his cautious, competent Canadianism deferred perhaps overmuch to Legg's imperious intellect. If Legg went off to New York, all would be completed with loving exactitude in accordance with instructions left behind. But it would be rare for Daly to take it any further. This was due to a praiseworthy but unnecessary humility; for Daly's intelligence and, even more, his persistence in his Canadianism were to prove invaluable to NFB. The team of Legg and Daly (with Margaret Ann Bjornson as researcher) with its brilliant improvisations and its stirring activist philosophy was a notable force, and Daly an immensely competent filmmaker and teacher. Jim Beveridge had a more wayward talent. He was not as consistent as Tom Daly; his peaks were more exhilarating and his troughs more depressing. Like Hawes he was a poet and an idea man, and the sight of his big bold nose twitching over a bin of "outs" searching for the one shot that would enliven a dead patch always made the heart sing a little. Jim's shock of thick, wiry, brown hair and his receding chin gave an impression, when combined with the probing proboscis, of extreme youth and innocence. But this was misleading. He had a mature creative mind whose synapses were extraordinarily well developed. He could arc across from one unlikely foothold to another, providing a visual or sometimes a commentary bridge which illuminated that third or unsuspected truth. Fey and perhaps at times clairvoyant, he was at once an uneasy and an indispensable companion in pulling ideas out of the air and nailing them to the ground in a pattern both soaring and believable. It was Beveridge who first made us "look to the North," that very special Canadian region which, unlike the others, has no US counterpart. There remains one other filmmaker who succeeded in generating ideas and creating of them an exciting yet believable pattern. What makes him remarkable is that he did this once—and once only. Though Dallas Jones, who came from Audio Pictures Ltd. in Toronto, directed and produced some two dozen films after he joined NFB, the film, and the only film, he is

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remembered by is A Man and His Job; he is likely to be remembered for it always. The film had a gritty and unpromising start. Its sponsor was the Ministry of Labour, and they wanted a commonplace, accurate pedestrian affair about the new Unemployment Insurance Act which had just been passed by the House of Commons and Senate and received the Governor General's assent. It was a film concerned with printed forms and procedures and paperwork, and it was designed to show the prospective applicant how he could qualify for payments. The sponsors had reckoned without Jones. Beneath his slightly bouncy bourgeois approach, his chunky body, his sandy hair and ragged ginger toothbrush moustache, lurked the soul of a preacher and one, too, who felt deeply and passionately about unemployment, because he himself had been, as a very young man, one of its victims in the soul-destroying days of the Great Depression. Jones therefore conceived a film in two parts—a "before and after" concept. The first part dealt with the shattering effects of depression and unemployment on a man's basic dignity; the second with a humane administration's attempts to ensure "never again." It would have been easy for Jones to pull out the vox humana for the first part and to let the second go by default, as a good grey mass of well-intentioned bureaucracy. But his passionate memories of the slump were accompanied by his conscientious duty to the sponsor, so that the dramatic and indeed heart-squeezing first half was matched by a bold and successful attempt in the second half to interpret the decision of the State in terms of a man's tomorrow and his hopes. The film gained immensely from the casting by Jones, in the role of "the man," a CBC professional actor and playwright who combined authority and humility in a nice proportion. Most of the shooting was done on Sundays in Toronto, and the procession of bleak alleys, blank walls, smokeless chimney stacks, rusting machinery, and paper swirling among the carcasses of automobiles on vacant lots created a powerful impression. Seen through the eyes of a healthy vigorous man searching vainly for a job—any job—and interspersed with the shaking of heads, reluctant or irritable, of those who were unable to give him a job—who feared for their own job—this long sequence was very moving. Jones was also greatly assisted by the musical director Louis Applebaum, who composed an original score of singular poignancy.

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Though it leaned a bit on schmaltzy strings and was perhaps, in the recording, luxuriated in by Jones and Applebaum, with a rather indulgent hand on the volume control, it was most effective. Grierson growled, on first seeing the showprint, "Lou Second-Coming-of-Christ Applebaum." But that was his way; and he meant it as a compliment. The second part of the film was remarkable for a sustained high-level commentary which expressed, in words comprehensible to the man in the street, the object of the Unemployment Insurance Act as a gesture of social justice. But Jones went further than the sponsors intended, or were even aware of. So deeply graven on his personality had been the impression of those grey hopeless years at the bottom of the trough—1931, '32, '33, '34— that his concern that it should never happen again and his involvement in the working man's personal problems turned him into a poet. The world promised in his film was lifted out of the good grey intentions of the framers of the Act to become a shining promise of a better life. The film was made in 1943 and it was almost as if Jones had prefigured the mood in the Britain of 1914-15 which produced the Abercrombie Plan, the Beveridge Report and the National Health Service. If some of these brave schemes later turned sour in the mouth, that was not his fault. Jones made many other films before leaving NFB. All were competent; all were workmanlike; none came near equalling the drama, the pattern and the effective social comment of A Man and His Job. The man and the theme and the talent were in happy conjunction to produce just one film—but what a film! It would be pleasant to record that the 30 per cent of Canadians of French origin were as well served by the French-language productions of NFB as were the English. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Twenty-five years ago—and twenty years in advance of the revolution tranquille in Quebec—most Englishspeaking (and most French-speaking) Canadians were content simply that there should be a number of Quebeckers on the staff of NFB and that politically, the Quebec theatre audience should be looked after by "French versions." These were usually done in a scrimped slap-happy way simply by substituting or tacking on a French-language commentary to a version of a film almost invariably conceived, scripted, directed, shot and cut in English. The villain here was certainly not Grierson. Rarely had a senior civil servant in Canada been so conscious of the "French fact." He loved Quebec and he spent a great deal of time there. He liked nothing better

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than to relax with his French-Canadian adviser Phileas Cote, in the warm family atmosphere of soupe-aux-pois and rye whiskey, or to bandy title translations with Claude Melancon of the Wartime Information Board. He knew the hopes and aspirations of Quebec, and perhaps because of vague memories on both sides of the "Auld Alliance," Quebecois cherished his friendship. But Quebec in those days was still very much a societe renfermee, and Grierson's imperatives were inexorable deadlines. Because of this, French-language production, in the hands of lesser men, tended at times to ride roughshod over French-language sensibilities. This failure to identify with the "French fact" of Canada led to some ludicrous misunderstandings. Since ideas were rarely conceived in, but simply translated into, French, the result was apt to be, if not "Franglais," at least highly anglicized. The enterprising fellow (or nitwit) who translated "Enter the Women's Army Corps!" as "Entrez vous dans le corps feminin!" was in fact rescued by a "maudit Anglais." This fellow, having weighed carefully the fun of allowing the adjuration to be seen on the nation's screens, and the unholy and humourless row that would have succeeded, reluctantly suggested that "Enrolez vous" would be preferable. His suggestion was prayerfully adopted. It was not until the tercentenary of Montreal in 1942 that NFB produced Trots siecles se sont ecoules from the ground up in French; and this was not a very distinguished film, tending toward the guidebook and catalogue. There was a "French Language Unit," but it existed almost entirely to make "French language versions." Any political difficulties with Quebec distribution, both theatrical and non-theatrical, were taken care of by Phileas Cote, who spent much of his time on the line to his cronies in Montreal. Phileas, in fact, was so political that he subsequently entered federal politics as the Member for Matapedia-Matane on the lower St. Lawrence. Thereafter it was left to his colleagues to carry the torch for La Belle Province, until a vigorous and sardonic nationalist with the haggard visage of a man eaten up with a message took control. Though this caused explosions, it did have the effect of initiating a true French-language program, and brought to NFB Jean Palardy. Palardy was a "Franco-American" born in Fitchburg, Mass. Unlike most of his fellows, he had returned to Canada in infancy. When I first met him, this bland, thickset, charming fellow was earning a precarious living as an artist in the winter in Montreal, and living during the summer

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on the smell of an oil rag, in the little country hamlet of St. Urbain in an eighteenth-century ferme-grange. Here he grew all his own fruits and vegetables, caught his own fish, brewed his own beer and paid only the traditional peppercorn rent. He had always had an interest in photography, as well as in the arts and artifacts of Quebec, and when he showed up one day at NFB with his own Cinespecial camera and his own antiquary's and artist's knowledge of the intricate folklore and artisanat of French Canada, Grierson seized on him joyfully. He was, of course, perfectly bilingual with a rich fund of anticlerical anecdotes in both languages. He was a most even-tempered, genial fellow, and he suffered, with extreme good nature, being paired as a cameraman with directors younger, more pig-headed and less knowledgeable than he. In the end he became his own director-cameraman and produced a series of lovingly shot films, in colour, on the arts and crafts of the Gaspe and the lower St. Lawrence, and the simple, shrewd and opinionated faces of the members of the societe renfermee that made them. Searching for clues as to their methods of work brought him eventually to a study of the old furniture and church decoration of Quebec, and in the end he left NFB to devote himself to what proved to be his life's work: the production of a beautifully illustrated and definitive guide and catalogue, Les meubles anciens du Canada fran^ais. But NFB had to wait until long after the period covered by this book before becoming truly bilingual and bicultural in conception and approach. And by that time the sweep of evangelical rhetoric had been exchanged for some degree of indulgence toward directors' whims and fancies. As NFB expanded its still photograph section, one more astonishing Canadian—among many worthy and useful—came upon the scene: a great, gaunt, demoniac-driven lodgepole of a man, fully six and a half feet tall with a boiling of unruly black hair. Ralph Foster was recruited from the Toronto Daily Star and he brought to the re-creation of the stills photograph section a zeal and a sense of mordant humour that contrasted sharply with the sometimes pompous and self-satisfied "dedication" of the filmmakers. These latter looked down on stills, even "production stills," though these were to be used to advertise their own wares in theatre marquees. They conceived the process to be so simple as to be beneath contempt; the carefully lit and posed still they dismissed as "arty."

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What they failed to see was that this gangling giant of a man was running a day-to-day newspaper operation with a dozen still photographers on assignments all over the country, a huge library, a lab, and an editorial research department to plan the photostory and write the innumerable captions. It may not have been exactly a film operation and the process was admittedly less complex; but it had daily instead of monthly urgencies and release dates, and its own technical problems too, as strobe light replaced flash and as the stills division expanded into a service of mattes and ebonoids all over the country. On occasions when heads of divisions met sporadically with Grierson, Foster used to irk JG merely by his immense height, even more than other six-footers, including myself. "Stop throwing out your big chest and come down among the people," Grierson would snarl, but with a twinkle. Foster's response was to sit on the floor, a sight not unlike a camel kneeling to dispose of its dragoman, or a giraffe composing itself for slumber. In the brief period towards the end of the war when Grierson took over the Wartime Information Board, Foster proved invaluable, for his tempestuous energy enabled him to expand the photo service to take care of world press requirements at such events as the Second Quebec Conference and the VE-Day riots in Halifax. To see Foster shepherding and chivvying his unruly charges, often with a telephone to each ear, was like watching an extremely large and alert kelpie with a herd of breed ewes. He also enabled Grierson to enter the Rideau Club in Ottawa or Toots Schors in New York flanked by a bodyguard of suitably impressive height whom he could order around with a suitably elfish grin. Yet Foster too shared with us the innocent eye. When all was said and done it was this that bound us together, though we were ourselves unaware of it, considering our bond—when we thought of it at all—as a common Canadianism. What we didn't perhaps realize, and what must have excited Grierson, was that this very simplicity armoured us in our own innocence and enabled us to tackle hideously complicated production problems without even being aware of them. We regarded the obstacles as a normal feature of the landscape because we knew no other. Perhaps the men who built the CPR, who spanned 3000 miles of Canadian wilderness with steel ribbons in less than five years, succeeded for the same reason, and in the same way.

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The uproar and the confusion of cheerful amateurs left the professionals nonplussed and sometimes resentful at the unexampled chaos, compounded by a continuous rush of wartime deadlines. Pride of place was reserved, in a more or less orderly manner, for CCO and later WIA, and thus some vestigial forms of priority were observed. But with the rest of NFB production amounting to over 80 per cent of annual output, and hence in volume if not in content of overwhelming importance, it was a case of devil take the hindmost. Tense and orderly operators on loan from the New York newsreel labs were amazed at the diurnal and ferocious melee outside the Dutch door leading to our own lab. Rival producers and their juniors clawed each other aside in an endeavour to buttonhole Harold Betts, the lab superintendent, and ensure that they got their rushes first, or their showprints early. Sometimes stout-hearted girls from the negative cutting room would be suborned by crafty producers to represent them at this dog-eatdog festival. No doubt the producers counted on the white cotton smocks and gloves to bring order to the seething mass of men waving requisition forms under Betts' nose. Or perhaps they fondly believed that women's restraining influence, or elementary male courtesy, would ensure that the girls got their particular batch of rushes with exemplary dispatch. In this

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they were rudely surprised, for courtesy was the last thing to be expected of the milling throng of editors, and women were pushed aside as roughly as any man. Indeed, since the lab entrance was next door to the men's lavatory, they were shouldered out possibly with even greater urgency. Betts was well-nigh overwhelmed in the flood, and as he was the administrative middleman and the one visible link between the lab and the outer world on which spleen could be vented (the technicians being craftsmen who kept in the background), he received no sympathy from anyone. The lab technicians regarded him as an air-lock between their own arcane world and the great seething outdoors. The youngsters waving requisition slips regarded him simply as a roadblock and would try to intimidate him by citing the impending wrath of senior producers. Though Betts was too old a hand to fall for this line, yet the fact that a delay of even an hour or so in a WIA could incur the extreme displeasure of Stuart Legg put just sufficient ginger into him to inspire a certain febrile nervousness. And of course such uncertainties played the devil with lab scheduling. Betts' knowledge that at any moment WIA or CCO or even the newsreel unit could drive a coach-and-horses through his carefully planned schedules didn't make his temper any more sanguine. Yet on the only occasion upon which the poor man, goaded beyond endurance, sought sympathy from Grierson, he was rudely disillusioned. Grierson, though a firm believer in the levelling influence of the deadline, was sufficient of a Scotsman to be able to exploit the English caste system even in easygoing tolerant Canada, and he therefore shouted at Betts. Chair tilted far back, his insteps on the desk, his knees flexed as though for a leap right up on top of it, Grierson curled his lip and barked, "What you have to remember is that you're running a factory down there. A lab's a factory, and you'd better learn to govern yourself accordingly. All right?" Betts, like all of us, knew the famous Griersonian conge "All right?" with a dismissive thrust of the chin, implying that the interview was over, and that if it wasn't all right you'd best get out of NFB for good. And so out he went. To us he was just another fellow who'd tried to "go up against Grierson." When you think of it, even Grierson's advice was specious, for while a lab ought to be run as a factory, the passionate amateurism of NFB—encouraged by Grierson, and this was what flummoxed the

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professionals most—made it impossible to follow his advice. You could plan work schedules till the cows came home, but if at any moment they could be shattered by an unforeseen political deadline, a WIA "must" or even a Griersonian whim—well, what was the point of making them? So frantic muddling-through remained the order of the day. Basically this was hardest on the Americans. The Canadians were there to be taught, and almost all of us accepted Grierson's role as the philosopher-boss. The English, to the extent that they weren't teachers, were familiar enough with Grierson's frame of reference not to be confused by it. They were pragmatists rather than logicians: they believed in the hint and the understatement, rather than the prise de position and the rhetorical flourishes dear to Americans. The English had a less honest, or, if you like, a subtler approach. Grierson put it crudely but effectively: "The English know my smell." When an imperturbable and laconic team of cameraman and location manager crossed the Atlantic from Britain to help out on yet another Navy film (Grierson never forgot he'd served in RNVR minesweepers as a youngster in the 1914 to 1918 war) and found amateur chaos, they simply accepted it. Their tough professionalism enabled them, as it were, to bivouac on the roadside and get on with the job, whereas the Americans needed an administrative tail, and also a way of doing things which was "the way it's gotta be done." General George C. Marshall is supposed to have advised his colleagues when wrestling over a technical puzzle of great complexity, "Don't fight the problem: solve it." This wonderfully sage comment was largely ignored by the Americans at NFB. Their professionalism was just as highly burnished as that of the English, and, if anything, more insisted upon, but they were either unwilling or unable to adapt themselves to the day-to-day exigencies of what was, after all, basically English empiricism. As a consequence they were often unhappy. And it was curious to note that though we owed to them a high degree of specialized technical knowledge, manual skill and alert intelligence, yet we Canadians tended to find ourselves speaking the same language as the English but having to translate for the Americans. This caused some surprise amongst us and, since we were at war and Britain presented a heroic image to the world, some pride. To the Americans who had always thought of Canada (to the extent

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that they thought of it at all) as a northern extension of the USA run by Nelson Eddy and served by biddable, black-eyed Metis girls, this came as something of a shock—and a rather disagreeable one. They tended to hive off among themselves, discussing our mores, why Rideau Street was not pronounced Ride-oh, and our rather unexpected Britishness. Yet they couldn't stop coming up to NFB, of course, especially on the technical and production side. The news of the establishment and burgeoning of this new film production outfit in the wilds of Canada had spread like lightning through the professional US grapevine. Until the Armed Forces Information sections were thoroughly well organized by mid-1942, there was no lack of eager candidates from south of the border. This was just as well, for though we could take or leave the production men, we needed the technicians very badly. There were thus two types of Americans, the technicians and the producers. The leading technician was Al Harburger, a curly redhead from New York, with extremely alert and penetrating brown eyes. He was a troubleshooter in the lab; the man to whom everyone came and on whom everyone relied when things went wrong; the man who, by judicious planning or rescheduling, could conjure just the extra fifteen minutes from an overloaded printer that made all the difference between a release date honoured and a missed deadline; the man who supervised the installation of a new developer without reducing a single frame of the footage daily produced; the man who could answer any technical question put to him, and with a great good humour and entire credibility; a man professional to his fingertips but utterly without side; above all the man who ran "the machine" in an atmosphere of relaxed efficiency while poor old Betts sweated it out in the front office behind his Dutch door and face to face with the seething mob. While Betts was inundated by paperwork and stacked cans, Harburger was projecting graphs in his quiet tiny office, strolling with an alert eye through the chemicals mixing room, producing from his pants pocket his little pencil flashlight with its red lamp before pushing aside the curtain that led to the developer, listening to your queries with his liquid eyes and giving you diagnosis and prognosis all in one, in his flat New York voice. He never quarrelled with exigent producers, cameramen or editors. But somehow when his eyes got a distant look and he said, with extreme good humour but with utter lack of conviction,

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"Okay, if that's the way you want it," even the most demanding editor was brought up short. Harburger early decided that the British, including the Canadians, were a strange race into whose mental processes it was useless for him to try to penetrate but who, since they were supposedly engaged in making films, were to be protected from their more egregious errors. Though he was never able to accept "striation" for "modulation" on a soundtrack, he early established in his little office an instruction board consisting of small strips of all the film stock that we used, what it looked like "before and after" and the more common faults to avoid. At one end of the board were raw stock (undeveloped), negative (developed), dupe (duplicating) negative, fine grain print, workprint, scratch print, negative-positive. At the other end were examples of what to avoid: halation; hairs in the camera gate which appeared as manila hawsers when the print was projected; over- and underexposure; "wows" and "bleeps" on the soundtrack; broken sprocket holes; badly blooped joins on the soundtrack; poor splices; graininess. Beside his board was a magnifier through which you could look at the horrible examples, and a movieola on which you could project them. He never criticized a man's or a woman's work directly, and the only matter on which he held strong views was our use of inflammable, indeed explosive, nitrate film instead of the much slower burning "safety" acetate film. There was a reason: acetate was more expensive but "one of these days; well, watch out!" Harburger spent less than a year at NFB but his influence on technical matters was profound. He protected standards and where possible raised them, and his informal "school" in the lab was attended not only by lab technicians but by editors, cameramen and sound engineers. He combined painstaking accuracy with a genially correct disposition which, however, did not admit of any impairment of standards or any entry into his private life. Though courteous and friendly he remained remote, a high priest dedicated to laboratory excellence. Harburger neither drank nor smoked, lived alone in a rooming house and never attended any of the boozy NFB production parties. Yet no one ever thought of him as aloof or stuffy. In the end he went as quietly as he had come, and it was only when slight and irregular technical impairments began to be noticed that producers raised their eyes to each other in the hurrying, scurrying corridors to say, "Did you know Al Harburger had gone?"

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If Harburger never gave the impression of being ruffled or rattled, the opposite was the case with Ralph Avseev. A stocky New Yorker with curly, light-blond hair and thick-lensed glasses, Avseev came to us as a sound cutter to try to knock sense, and a sense of standards, into the chaotic pseudo-department where sound effects and music were assembled, edited and cut. Avseev was a man who had been used to working extremely seriously and fast against the clock in New York, in cramped quarters and with all his tools immediately beneath his hand: scissors, cement, carbon tetrachloride, movieola, four-way synchronizer and above all a comprehensive, handy and well-classified library of effects and music (the latter segregated into such categories as "hurry music," "came-the-dawn," "tension," "hearts-and-flowers," "Paramount Public ending No. 63" and all with appropriate copyright clearance secured in advance). At NFB he had none of these things and at first it drove him to a mild frenzy. We of course did not know that you required all these tools of the trade. Working under instructions from Grierson to get the film out on time, "even if you have to take it down to the theatre yourself," we had practised all sorts of short cuts and crudities which to Avseev were frankly horrifying. Instead of mixing sounds and then cutting the resultant track, we would run three tracks at once and blend in with the commentator's voice at the final mix. Instead of cross-fading we would join end-to-end radically different sections of track and of "level," thus imposing impossible tasks on the control panel at the final mix, since film runs through the gate of the projector at twenty-four frames (or images) per second. We would "create" effects by dubious methods when so compelled by low-budget figures: e.g. getting talented colleagues to imitate the call of the loon or the chipmunk's chatter; slowing a disc turntable almost to zero and amplifying the resultant sound beyond all reason to produce "sinister" machinery; worst of all leaving whole stretches of film without effects or music because we couldn't afford or couldn't find an appropriate sound. To Avseev, who'd been raised in the New York newsreel tradition of sustained three-track recording with the "gain" full up—effects, music and voice— and never a moment of silence, this was heresy. Silence was really painful to him in a film. "The days of the silents are over," he'd say quite seriously. "Sound's been in now for close to twenty years. Okay! Let's use sound."

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He didn't seem to apprehend that silence could be dramatically telling, and this was in part due to his Elbert Hubbard approach to music. To Avseev music was just another and more artistic form of effects. Instead of having gunfire or blowtorches or mewing gulls, you had music. But his conception of music was entirely mechanistic: not only in terms of "hurry" or "hearts and flowers" but also in terms of feet, frames, seconds and tenths of seconds. Provided you kept him within this concept he was extraordinarily inventive and effective. If you handed Avseev a reel of film—ten minutes, almost 1000 feet—early in the morning and gave him a general idea of what you wanted, he would have the effects track cut by six o'clock, and be ready to run the two tracks and the picture on interlock in the projection theatre for your comments. On such occasions he would himself take over the mixing panel (with the advance and wry sanction of Bill Lane) and indicate to you how he thought the final mix should be cross-faded. If you agreed, the final mix could be done then and there, and the resulting soundtrack on the showprint would be so smooth and professional that unless you had remembered to keep Avseev's editing dope sheet in your file you would never have realized that the thousand feet of film consisted of upwards of seventy to eighty little chunks of effects and perhaps twenty to thirty longer passages of music, all spliced together neatly in a single strand of track, and each one calculated to the tenth of a second, or to the frame, to coincide precisely with the visual which it was supposed to complement. The only trouble with all this was that it was basically soulless. Avseev's tracks were like everything that is mass-produced: uniform, predictable, standardized. That was why, if more was involved than a potpourri of stock shots or a newsreel, if the cameraman and director were to be given imaginative licence, original music was required. Avseev knew this as well as anyone, and it was a great mistake to assume, as some of us did, that because he was a professional sound cutter he had no concept of Higher Things. Given the slightest chance, he was all for "hogging the classics" (provided they were out of copyright) and showed a very deft understanding of how to match extracts of classical music to appropriate visuals. He greatly envied composers who had had film scores commissioned, and nothing enraged him more than when they showed, as he thought, a contempt for the medium of film and scrimped their work.

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After a while Avseev got used to the amateurish vagaries of the young Canadian apprentices, but by then things were opening up in the US Armed Forces and when he was offered a job with a film unit in the Pacific, off he went. A curiously gentle fellow, a composer manque caught in the procrustean bed of forty frames to the foot and twenty-four frames to the second. He was one of those who allowed the mechanics to dominate him instead of dominating them to produce a living art form. Not so Joe Braun. Though being a cameraman—which means essentially an expert in lighting rather than in shooting—he had perhaps an advantage over Avseev and fellows like him who were chained to the cutting room. A cameraman can, after all, create from the beginning; a sound editor has to tailor-make a bin of scraps to fit someone else's visuals, conceived, shot and edited by strangers. On the other hand, a sound editor's carefully spliced track can be sacrificed in a prerecording and he will scarcely notice; he will be already three reels ahead on another series of mechanistically assembled tracks. But the cameraman can have his carefully planned and lit shots ruthlessly cut or even obliterated from the film entirely. "That," said Joe Braun in a letter to me, "is the poniard to the heart. The incomprehension of the sacred negativ." It will be seen from this charming phraseology that Joseph Braun was less American than European. In fact he was French and worked with Marcel Carne on Quai des brumes. He had found his way to New York after the fall of France, teemed up with Edgar Loew, a wealthy New York amateur of film, and they had presented themselves as one of the more exotic duos to find their way to the old lumber mill on the banks of the Ottawa. Eddie Loew was basically assistant cameraman and location manager. His laconic wit and his independent outlook on life which wealth confers were a wonderful tonic to those of us struggling to make ends meet on $4500 a year and sometimes feeling unworthy that one should even be concerned in any way over money when there were important films to be made, and elsewhere men and women were being bombed and blitzed. As a cameraman, "the sacred negativ" was Braun's natural concern, but his obsession went far beyond the fate of the particular 400-foot roll of Super-xx that had come out of his own lovingly tended Debrie camera. He handled negative, literally and metaphorically, with white gloves, and it used by turn to sadden and infuriate him when he saw brash or ignorant

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youngsters handling negative—his own or anyone else's—with insouciance or carelessness. To him a scratch, a tear, a thumb mark or even a crumple in "this irreplaceable negativ" was an unforgiveable crime. With his sad, pouched eyes gazing out from under a thatch of soft blond hair (cut even then, and in Canada, with a straight-edge razor in the French manner), Joe would remonstrate with us all in a low compelling voice made all the more attractive by his French accent. In the end, though NFB offered him many opportunities, the regrettably slapdash attitude of some of its employees towards the "sacred negativ" proved too much for Joe Braun and he returned to New York. But not without having done some permanent good. For not only was his superbly sensitive camera work an inspiration to us all, his insistence on the sacredness of the negative did sink in, and along with the professional excellence of people like Harburger did ultimately produce in NFB the right attitude toward the negative which, one might say, should be a combination of extreme care plus a sense of proportion. The basic original negative is of course irreplaceable if damaged, and that was why girls in the negative cutting room wore cotton smocks and white cotton gloves—and incidentally that is why, traditionally, negative has always been in the hands of women. They are less impulsive and egotistically rough than men; and because negative represents the "continuance of the race," it is symbolically as well as practically fitting that they should be in charge of it. But the danger of negative worship to the exclusion of all other factors is that it induces a wild sense of disproportion and may result in a confusion of priorities. This was especially so in an organization dedicated to teaching, instruction, propaganda and information, operating in wartime, under pressure of deadlines and under the pressure, too, of a chief who believed—and rightly in our view—that in the last resort it was the psychological quality of the image rather than pure technical quality which was the important thing. Immediacy, conviction: these were the things for which Grierson strove and for which he made us strive. And if this meant that to secure the image you wanted at the exact moment you wanted it, you discarded the carefully guarded "negative" and used a grainy dupe-of-a-dupe bought from some newsreel company, then that was perfectly all right. Or if the negative got scratched or torn or thumbprinted in the vital shot that had to be used, then you'd use it and— figuratively speaking—the hell with quality.

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There is, after all, in the best documentary, especially when shot under stress, something of the immediacy of the newsreel—or, as it would be today, of TV. It was for this reason too that Grierson insisted that newsreel cameramen shoot in the rain if necessary, and if necessary with a handheld Eyemo, rather than miss the shot. Finally Grierson greatly mistrusted the self-indulgence of directors. He abhorred and detested what he called "navel-gazing" films: that is, films that were more concerned with an artistic effect or an excellence of technical quality than with thinking through a cogent script, and shooting and editing a film with images that would jerk an audience out of its seats and which would remain unforgettable long after the quality had been forgotten. "The style comes out of the job," he wrote. Since it is a question of giving people a pattern of thought and feeling about highly complex and urgent events, we give it as well as we know, with a minimum of dawdling over how some poor darling happens to react to something or other. This is one time, we say, when history doesn't give a good goddamn who is being the manly little fellow in adversity and is only concerned with the designs for living and dying that will actually and in fact shape the future. If our stuff pretends to be certain, it's because people need certainty. If our maps look upside down, it's because it's time people saw things in relativity. If we bang them out one a fortnight and no misses, instead of sitting six months on our fannies cuddling them to sweet smotheroo, it's because a lot of bravos in Russia and Japan and Germany are banging out things too and we'd maybe better learn how, in time. If the manner is objective and hard, it's because we believe the next phase of human development needs that kind of mental approach. After all, there is no danger of the humanitarian tradition perishing while the old are left alive to feel sorry for themselves and make "beautiful" pictures about it. Sad to say, the beating heart of the Stuarts was all they had left, and so it is with vanishing politicos.

To Grierson the "negativ" was thus not so much sacred as valuable, and he was not prepared to build a temple to it. If in the end a scratched shot had to be used, then used it was; and if the only shot that would do was "out" of someone's workprint from another film altogether, salvaged, dirty and crumpled from the cutting-room floor, then salvaged it would be. So that while Grierson was as concerned with standards as anyone, he refused to be mesmerized by them. The Guide Michelin, that indispensable companion to

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travel in France, stars good restaurants but wisely observes "II y a etoile et etoile," and begs you not to compare diverse regions or establishments with each other. This was Grierson's attitude towards the "sacred negativ" and it was thus perhaps inevitable that Joe Braun and he should part. But Grierson did have a great concern for high standards of craftsmanship and, being a socialist, the lower the craft in the social scale the more he insisted that its standards be honoured. This was especially so in the case of Peter George, and Georges Louis George. Peter George was a "New Canadian," as they were then called, of eastern European extraction, possibly Ukrainian or Roumanian. He was of medium height, stocky, bald to mid-cranium but after that a fuzz of rich, dark brown hair. He spoke English or rather mangled it, in an extremely rich borschty accent. Grierson installed him as head of the machine workshop where he ruled with a fierce and competent independence, repelling all boarders with a ferocious scowl or a dose of Anglicized macedoine. Somewhat later on the scene came Georges Louis George. Though passing as a Frenchman and speaking English with a French accent, he had that grey, anonymous, careful look common to those from other continental countries who have made France their home. He had come to us via New York, Paris and other points but he was believed to have been originally Roumanian. Georges was well grounded in film techniques and generally knowledgeable in film theory, though he had an easily switched-on continental charm which the honest Canadians instinctively mistrusted. However, he ingratiated himself with all the producers, made himself useful by doing odd chores and proved to be also a competent director. But for a few weeks after his arrival, such was the permanent administrative chaos at NFB, there was nothing specific for him to do; indeed it was not even certain that he was officially on strength, though it was known he had checked in as a semi-permanent guest at a local downtown hotel. To keep him busy, Grierson made him executive assistant to the controller—an unwise title as it turned out—with general but unspecified duties of a vaguely inspectoral nature. This delighted Georges. All power and no responsibility, and he threw himself into the job with zeal. At first he was not much noticed. The uproar and confusion, indeed the pandemonium, at NFB as it expanded under wartime exigencies was so tremendous that one accepted each and every new face without question or

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qualm. But after a while Georges' habit of poking his head into cutting rooms or story conferences and asking what was going on began to make him unpopular. The denouement came with his visit to the machine shop of his homonym Peter George. To the delight of all spectators, and in a medium ludicrously unsuitable, since it was the mother tongue of neither of them, the following memorable dialogue ensued: Peter George: "And choost fhat are you fhantink ere?" Georges L. George: "I am on inspection tour." Peter George: "Indidd! And in my vorkshahp?" Georges L. George: "No. I am more by way of being exekootif type." Peter George: "Arnh! So you are exekootif type? Then chust poot your beeg fat arse on a chair oopstyres, and keep your goddamn nose out of my ekewpment!" Grierson was ecstatically delighted when this story reached his ears and Georges Louis George was assigned to other tasks. But that he was indeed no fool is shown by an incident that occurred a few weeks later with the arrival of Mrs. George from New York. It is possible that, ignorant of the necessity to inform the front desk that his room was henceforth to be charged as a double, Georges Louis may have neglected to tell them of the arrival of his wife. But if front office remained in ignorance, not so the house dick. The Georges were awakened in the small hours by a pounding on the door, accompanied by the standard "Open up! Come on now, open up!" The scenario that followed might have been written for any 'B' picture or vaudeville team on the old RKO circuit of the '20s. "What do you want?" "You know darn well what we want!" Bang Bang. "Please stop. I do not know what you mean." "Ya dern tootin' you do. You got a girl in there." "No, no; I assure you. It is my wife." "Oh yeah? Tell us another." "But I assure you—" "We're opening up!" Bang Bang. Confronted by the Georges in night attire, the hotel dick was far from being impressed, demanded to see their passports and sent for the night clerk. The passports provided to the harrassed clerk, if not to the dick,

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irrefutable and sickening evidence that a dreadful mistake had been made. He proffered profuse apologies, and was asked by Georges Louis, with some hauteur, to withdraw, which he did. The following morning at a meeting with the manager, Georges Louis laid down his terms of settlement: a written apology; the cancellation of all charges incurred by Georges Louis since his arrival at the hotel, some weeks earlier; Mrs. George to be the guest of the hotel for as long as she cared to stay. Otherwise the press would be at once called in and given the story. The manager was delighted to comply. Peter George meanwhile was confirmed in undisputed control of the machine shop. But though Grierson favoured the "worker" and the intellectual at the expense of the commer^ant or the showman or the phoney, he was not above employing such people if need arose. For in addition to being a teacher and a socialist, he was also a merciless user of people whom he felt could advance the general cause: i.e., more and better films to help Canadians to win the war and prepare for peace. And here his undeniably forceful charm and domineering blandishments played a crucial role. So, among the many Americans who flocked north of the border as war deepened were some very exotic plants indeed. Take Bill Burnside. In the first place, since he came from Hollywood, it was difficult to tell whether he was an Englishman or an American or an American pretending to be an Englishman or vice versa. His accent was mid-Atlantic, and he did appear to have authentic Hollywood connections. He was often on the long-distance telephone and spoke in familiar terms of "Alfie" Hitchcock. On the other hand he dressed in so dandaically English a fashion that, apart from the natural resentment which this caused among the scruffy quasi-bohemian crowd at NFB, we felt he really must be English. And we weren't at all sure that it was the sort of English we wanted. In this we were supported by the film English in their old sweaters, baggy flannels and scandals who, like us, secretly scorned Bill Burnside because he turned up to work in mirror-like brown brogues, impeccable knife-pleated slacks, canary waistcoat, country jacket with hacking vents and foulard choker. He just didn't seem real; he seemed in fact like a Hollywood Englishman—a sort of junior version of C. Aubrey Smith. But in point of fact Grierson was right and we were wrong; for Bill Burnside had genuine "connections" in Hollywood and they were used to

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good effect to obtain us access to immense libraries of stock shots and to enable us to break into key theatrical circuits in the USA and so to place the Canadian war effort and more important, Canada, before 120 million American cinema-goers. From Chicago came Canfield Cook. He combined the skill of the amateur 16mm director-cameraman with a passion for the training of airmen. Alone and unaided, and subjected to many inevitable indignities by the RCAF security forces and the Mounted Police, he had persisted in his lonely and passionate vision. He, an American but an enthusiastic airlover, would body forth to the 16mm audience in "these United States" some vague inkling of what the Canadians were doing. He had started in the days before Pearl Harbor and his chosen instrument was the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Cook's arrival in Ottawa with some 4000 feet of 16mm film in colour was a major event. The Air Training Plan was, in the period before the Dieppe Raid, just about the only undertaking which had caught the public imagination in Canada. The Canadian Army was not yet engaged; the RCN was for the time being confined to the honourable but unspectacular role of guarding the Western end of what we were assured was the lifeline to Britain. We were also supposed to be "The Arsenal of Democracy" but somehow films on the production of guns, small arms, explosives, corvettes and auxiliary aircraft left us unmoved. But the Air Training Plan: now there was something to catch the heart. Young men from Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore all training for a great adventure, on Canadian airfields. At places with homey familiar names: Rivers, Manitoba; Trenton, Ontario; Bagorville, Quebec. Here was the ideal heart-throbber, chest-chucker-outer: romance and imagination coupled with realism. The home town you knew and the boy next door learning to fly a plane in your defence. And here was this man from Chicago, this friendly American, Canfield Cook, with 4000 feet of it, in colour! And shot at his own expense! Boy, let's make a film! Wide distribution; theatrical to put spring in the step of Mr. and Mrs. Johnny Canuck; nontheatrical to spur recruiting from Memramcook, New Brunswick, to Chilliwack, British Columbia, from Whitehorse, Yukon Territories, to Pelee Island, Ontario. Grierson called Canfield Cook in. "Go to it!" Cook went. But by the time he had himself installed in a combined

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office-cutting room, Grierson's ardour had somewhat cooled. A theatrical version of the Plan, Wings of Youth, had been a considerable success and hence there was a large demand for a 16mm version on the non-theatrical circuits which bade fair to outdistance the modest requests for Cook's film—when it eventually came out—even though it was in colour. Cook therefore found himself in danger of playing a one-man band to an empty house and his modest pretensions—"This is kind of a special movie, you know; my personal contribution to the Canadian war effort"— began to wear a bit thin. His insistence on being a lone wolf also tried the patience of his colleagues, who would hang around his door hinting that the space used by him might be better employed. Finally the rough cut was ready, 1600 feet of it in 16mm, which meant 4000 in 35mm, or about three quarters of an hour. Far too long, said everybody. It'll never get into the can, and if it does, no one will want to screen it. Imagine a forty-five-minute recruiting film! Jesus Murphy! And we shook our heads. Cook now began to make life even more difficult for himself by pestering Grierson to see the rough cut. The Boss, who was rapidly getting fed up with Cook and his one film and his squatting rights on valuable NFB space, told him he'd see the film only when it was fine-cut and ready to be recorded. With infinite labour, Cook; his RCAF sponsors resisting him every inch of the way, cut the film to 3600 feet or about forty minutes. With an ill grace Grierson consented to see it with Cook reading the commentary— an unnerving experience for anyone less dedicated than he. For Grierson, after arriving ten minutes late, started whispering to Ross McLean across Cook's commentary. Cook was in the mike booth and so intoxicated with his own rich beautiful prose that he fortunately didn't hear it. After less than ten minutes, with a "That seems all right, Cook, good work!" Grierson rushed from the theatre to higher things, leaving those of us who had already seen the rough cut umpteen times to see it yet again. It fell to me to supervise the recording of the music and it was an extraordinary occasion. Cook had persuaded the RCAF to lend him its Central Band for the occasion. This was an equipage of some forty-five musicians under the baton of Wing Commander Norman Gilchrist, a genial reservist who in peacetime had been a composer and band leader of note. Gilchrist was a

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good conductor with a very thorough knowledge of the kind of popular or old-time favourites that would flesh out an essentially pedestrian and repetitive film. He was also very skilled in the intricacies of what tunes, played under what circumstances, and by whom, were likely to escape the eager and tyrannical clutch of James Caesar Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians. Though based in Chicago, Petrillo's long arm, since the AFM was an "International" union (i.e. USA and Canada), operated effectively in Canada, through his agent Walter Murdoch, president of the Toronto Musical Protective Association, with whom every single item had to be cleared. Canada was at war, yet such was the power of Petrillo that no member of any Canadian military, naval or airforce band could play in public without receiving either the standard musician's fee, or else paying what was euphemistically known as a "standby fee" to a group of anonymous and, some said, non-existent musicians who would have played the engagement, had it not been filled by military musicians. All Canadian musicians were, and had to be, members of the union, and in any conflict arising between their superior officers and James Caesar Petrillo, they knew where their loyalties—regrettably perhaps, but inevitably—lay: in Chicago. So strong was Petrillo's influence and so inflexible his rules that he had defeated, and on Canadian soil, no less a personage than Rt. Hon. C.D. Howe, Canadian Minister of Munitions and Supply and director of the nation's industrial war effort. Petrillo had refused, despite the minister's personal intervention, to allow an RCAF band to play free in public at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. The loyalty to Petrillo of all members of the AFM was of course deeply based in their common experience in the Depression years. Musicians— unorganized—had been exploited, had stood in breadlines. The growth of recording and radio and sound films (to say nothing of the subsequent development of TV and tape) had also made the musicians highly vulnerable to interminable reproduction of the same performance for the same fee. Petrillo had organized these musicians, not without strong-arm methods, it was said, had got them a living wage, had regularized their terms of employment and remuneration. But the quid pro quo was that every musician had to belong to the AFM. You could not play if you did not

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belong; and if any member transgressed the rules, or if any conductor or employer essayed to have musicians play for nothing—even in wartime and for recruiting purposes—no other musician would play for him, nor for anyone else. This was a powerful, indeed a tyrannical instrument; but it's fair to add that we never heard any musician speak other than well of Petrillo. There were, however, certain chinks in the AFM's armour, certain ways of getting round the regulations and with these Gilchrist was familiar. We approached him with a simple syllogism: the RCAF wanted Cook's film with a soundtrack by an RCAF band; neither NFB nor Cook had the budget to pay the costs of one rehearsal and two recording sessions for forty-five musicians; therefore some way must be found getting round the dilemma. Gilchrist gave a good-natured smile below his big moustache and explained that if the musicians were on duty playing privately and if it were guaranteed that the film would be shown only to RCAF audiences privately on RCAF stations and property, and if no copyright was involved in the tunes themselves, the matter could be got around. We therefore agreed that a "parade" would be held for the band in the recording theatre at NFB, and that the film would be shown only in RCAF stations. Cook looked glum at this, but Grierson agreed with blithe insouciance. All was set for the great day. No one, certainly not I, had foreseen what it would be like trying to accommodate forty-five musicians and their instruments in a recording theatre half of which was already full of unremovable seats. As the uniformed men poured in with their trumpets, saxes, trombones, traps and even a couple of tubas, the temperature began to rise rapidly and the atmosphere, long before the days of air conditioning, became distinctly sweaty. Eventually Gilchrist, with great good humour, managed to get everyone squeezed into the upper end of the theatre, their uniforms and instrument cases piled up on the seats, and the session got underway. It lasted six hours and it brought work at NFB almost to a complete standstill. The theatre was situated between the sound recording studios and the 16mm lab on one side, and the neg cutting room, gents' lav and lab despatch room on the other. Because of the press of humanity the theatre door had to be kept open, though the blast of noise—tuneful as it undoubtedly was—would in any case have penetrated far beyond the

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allegedly soundproof walls of our venerable, decrepit and leaky old building. As it was, the noise practically blasted it apart. When the jouncy strains of "Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" gave way to the schmalzy cadences of "Take Me Home Again Kathleen," both of them burgeoning con espressione and fortissimo from the forty-five RCAF blowers and stompers, cutting rooms emptied as if by magic. The men's lav disgorged its aficionados; Betts found himself suddenly deserted by his clamorous exigent throng and left alone amid his blizzard of paper. Finally, and against all probability, the priestesses of the negative cutting room, led by the seagreen incorruptible Toronto "matron" Beth Bertram, were seen streaming across the corridor to drink in the heady nectar of the RCAF Central Band. As this racket was at its height Grierson was decanted from a beat-up limousine returning from a particularly tough and unpleasant session on Parliament Hill on the estimates of NFB for the next fiscal year. The great man stormed into the corridor, barking, "What the hell's going on?" "Wings Parade" he was told. This being the working title of the film. For once the penny didn't drop. "What's that?" he rasped. "Canfield Cook." The boss shook his head and raised clenched fists to what ought to have been the sky but which was in fact the sprinkler system on the roof of the projection booth, and crying: "Jesus, I might have known!" rushed storming, head bent, Homburg hat unremoved, into his office. Cook, who had relinquished the recording to Gilchrist and me, and who felt rather as if he had a tiger by the tail, was much put out and indeed smitten low by Grierson's untoward and untimely arrival. He felt that it marked the doom of his film, so long sweated and sweltered over, and he retired to his little cluttered office-cum-cutting room to chew the cud of disillusion. In point of fact he need not have worried. The monster recording in retrospect was the high point of Wings Parade and the high point of difficulty. Within a week the film was ready and the occursion of the forty-five sweating and earnest RCAF musicians with their trombones and their tubas had been reduced to the compass of a can of 16mm film, about the size of a small apple pie. Always at this point in 16mm production one had the sensation of a mountain having laboured and produced

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a mouse; but this particular little disc of acetate turned out to contain some potent magic. The combination of tail-end views of Ansons, Oxfords and such venerable aircraft sailing into the setting sun, with close-ups of young, innocent, clean-living Canadians, and on the soundtrack Gilchrist's sweating, button-busting, blowing musicians, compressed at last by the magic of chemistry and electronics into a manageable compass, proved in the end to be highly effective. The film had a long run at RCAF stations throughout Canada and was judged very successful in promoting recruitment. A notable and early acquisition from New York was Irving Jacoby, a small, neat and olive-skinned man, whom Grierson brought up in the first dead months of the phoney war and turned loose on hockey. Since it was the national Canadian sport, nurtured by six-year-olds on corner-lot, handmade rinks, and played with dazzling skill and mastery, Grierson thought it would give Canadians a pride in their own creation. The audiences, being phlegmatic and undemonstrative, rarely saw it that way; but Jacoby's film Hot Ice remained long after he had returned to New York and eventually to the US Armed Forces as a testimony to his skill and perception and his beautiful shooting. So did High Over the Borders, a lyric parable on Continental friendship, based on the migration of birds. But the very next week after Jacoby went back to New York, a worthy successor turned up at the old lumber mill—-Julian Roffman. He was destined to be a wasp among bees, a perpetual gadfly, a thorn in the side of the production department and a highly competent maker of tightly scripted, action-packed two-reelers into which he was not averse to introducing effective studio techniques. Roffman was an able, bright-eyed, bouncy product of New York lowbudget shorts. He knew every wrinkle and was not above being highly pleased with himself for his knowledge; but as no one seemed able to outdo him in competence and as, despite his annoying habit of tellingyou-what, he usually proved to have the root of the matter in him, he rapidly forged ahead in our esteem. We were at this time making the discovery, a bit belatedly, that the single-minded director-cameraman with the hand-held Eyemo, and the soundtrack consisting of a disembodied commentator and a few bars of canned music and gunfire, had their limitations. There was room for, if

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not actors, then ordinary people whom one brought to act; there was room for lip sync on double system—that is, dialogue recorded in situ and not post-synced later or left to an announcer; there was room a fortiori, for scriptwriters and a storyline and hence the use of studio methods and the shift from "pure" to mixed documentary. It was Roffman's merit that because of his hard schooling on low-budget New York movies, his lightning action and alert, ingenious mind, he was able to bring about this much-desired change in NFB theatrical productions, without an increase in cost. The chosen vehicle was a two-reeler entitled 13 Platoon. Though it was commissioned by the Army as a recruiting vehicle, Roffman did not allow the film to be an illustrated lecture on the advantages of Army life or a propaganda exercise with stock shots and martial music, or that worst of all endeavours, the 'comic' recruiting film complete with stentorian sergeant. Instead he went out to the West Coast, lived with the army and then scripted the story of a young 2nd lieutenant, unsure of himself, a bit stiff, but with latent leadership possibilities, and showed how, in the period of tough and intensive training which preceded going overseas, the young man gained the confidence of his platoon and confidence in himself. Not perhaps a very original or striking idea, but Roffman, living on the job and with the men, moulded them into that rare but wonderfully effective instrument: a group of ordinary people who have been taught how to act from material basic to their own lives, but who, when they face the cameras, are utterly unaware of them and, having forgotten that they are supposed to be acting, carry complete conviction. The film was a great success, and deservedly so, and was long studied by directors and cutters at NFB. Furthermore, it fitted in nicely with Grierson's philosophy: So the long, windy openings are out and the cathartic finishes in which a good, brave, tearful, self-congratulatory and useless time has been had by all. The box-office—pandering to what is lazy, weak, reactionary, sentimental and essentially defeatist in all of us—will, of course, instinctively howl for them. It will want to make 'relaxation' if you please, even out of war. But that way leads nowhere. Deep down, the people want to be fired to tougher ways of thought and feeling.

But the film had not been completed without causing much travail,

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dislocation and ill feeling. Roffman's prickly personality and his ruthless determination to dragoon all who worked for or with him into unquestioning adoption of his methods had caused much annoyance. Roffman was neither a patient man, nor one who suffered fools gladly, and he left behind him, in producing 13 Platoon, a host of bruised susceptibilities and affronted egos. Roffman's personality became the subject of a heated production conference with Grierson in the chair. "To put it in a nutshell," said one producer, who felt his nose had been put out of joint by the absent Roffman, "the camera crews can't stand him. They hate his guts. The fellow's a real bastard." "He may be a bastard," snapped Grierson, "but he's not an ignorant, arrogant bastard! He's supremely egotistical and supremely professional. He shoots TO THE FRAME, and that's what counts in low-budget movies. Unless any of you have any other ideas? No? Meeting's over, then. Good day to you!"

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Friends: Allies: Refugees

As production speed gathered weight at NFB and word began to spread that Grierson was on the trail up in Canada, a trickle of internationals joined the great flow of Canadians, Britons and Americans. Some came because they saw the chance of a job or the opportunity for self-expression; others were summoned by Grierson because he had once worked with them or had admired a documentary film that they had produced. Foremost among this latter group was the great Dutch documentalist Joris Ivens. Ivens had first attracted the attention of the film world by his direction and photography of the construction and, even more dramatic, the closing of the great dyke which the Dutch had built across the mouth of the Zuider Zee. The film had been released in 1930 and those of us who had seen the exciting rhythms of tugs and crane, the cross-cutting between shrewd eye, pouring concrete and angry frustrated wave, followed by the hoot of a thousand sirens as the giant Aftsluisdyk was finally closed and the North Sea held at bay, were not likely ever to forget it. Ivens was a name to conjure with in documentary, and when we heard that he was actually coming to Canada to make a film—would actually work with us, use our cutting rooms and scripts, even share a hamburger with us at Nichols' greasy spoon—our stupefaction and excitement knew no bounds. It was understood vaguely that the film was to be about—the Navy.

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Ivens, when he arrived, turned out to be an amiable, chunky fellow with a ruddy complexion, a thick head of curly black hair and a complete lack of affectation which won us all over. He wore a belted trench coat and no hat, polo sweaters and sandals. Indeed he did lunch with us at the greasy spoon and bandied shop talk in his thick but charming English. But it gradually became evident that so far as the actual film was concerned, and his methods of work—on which, of course, we eager acolytes plied him with questions—he was less than forthcoming. In fact, some might say, reticent. At first this was put down to Ml5 and security and wartime closed lips. After all, it was a Navy film to be shot at "An Eastern Canadian Port." But as time went on it became apparent that the reticences were due to Ivens' own personality and approach to his work. He was a highly personal director, jealous of his craft, and secretive in his methods. He was, in fact, that arch-enemy of the friendly gregarious team-spirited documentary group: the lone wolf. Our lips curled. And anyway, where the hell was the film? Would there ever be any film? Ivens had been around now for weeks and, so we heard, the script wasn't even written. Maybe he was one of those fellows, though, who worked without a script, who shot thousands of feet and relied on the story to emerge somehow in the cutting rooms—or at worst to have it tacked on in the commentary at the recording. We seethed with jealousy and dissatisfaction. Word of this reached Grierson's sensitive ear. He was the last man to countenance artiness, even from so distinguished a filmmaker as Ivens. He also would go a long way not to offend the spirit of lean living and close cooperation which had grown up in the NFB. He didn't want to compromise the tough but idealistic spirit of NFB by eroding our sense of purpose through indulging an aesthete. Also there was always the danger that a foreigner—in league with the Naval PROs, who were notoriously Royal Navy wardroom in their approach to life—might produce a film that wasn't truly Canadian. He cogitated briefly and pulled out of the hat Morley Callaghan. Morley Callaghan was at that time and probably still is the best shortstory writer in Canada. He was a middle-sized, somewhat chunky Irishman with no particular shape to his body, rumpled ginger hair and watery blue eyes split by a Hogarthian nose. Like many Irishmen he was an obsessive talker and his curiously high-pitched voice echoed across the

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wet-ringed plastic tables of our dreary "beverage rooms" or enlivened many a rye-fuelled evening in skimpy academic-Spartan homes and the down-atheel rooming houses of Toronto's impoverished intelligentsia of the midthirties. He was somewhat older than the rest of us, having notably spent a summer in Paris as a young man in the mid-192 Os with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, cutting his teeth as a writer. We all admired Morley because though without any private means, he had never done anything but write. In North America, where one normally writes, as one does most other things, for dough, the fact that Callaghan resisted the adman's siren call, wrote only what he wanted to write or perhaps what his personal demon made him write rather than what the public wanted, or what editors were willing to pay lineage rates for, filled us with admiration. Grierson persuaded this poetical, melancholy, deeply religious and deeply professional man to team up with Ivens. He also persuaded Ivens to accept him. This took some doing, for Ivens was apt to take offence if his artistic capabilities were questioned. At first he was affronted at the suggestion that he take on a writer. He preferred to be his own writer. He knew what he wanted. But Grierson worked persuasively. "Ye see, Joris, goddamn it, man, we're not calling your very considerable talents in question. We've the greatest possible admiration for your skill, for your craft, for your ability to grasp the concrete essential image, and for your very real sense of poetry." "But I—" "... so that, ye see, man, it's not the issue at all. What we have to consider is the sensibilities of the Canadians—this great, raw, sober, greyeyed young people that doesn't know its own strength, but is fighting a people's war—a war of closer living. They don't need to bare their gut muscles to show the scar tissue of any blitz! They don't need to proclaim themselves as the saviours of mankind. Ye see the point?" "Well, yes, but I..." "Good! Fine! Now what we have to do is marry these two talents and that's why I'm offering you this excellent writer, this man with the soul of a poet who knows his Canada through and through. He'll work with you, under your direction, of course; and between the two of you you're going to produce a film that'll tell the trith about the Navy, the real trith, man, something of vollyou. Got it?"

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"Yes, but I—" "Fine, then off you go!" For Callaghan it was not necessary to work up such a sales pitch. The venture was presented to him as something for the war effort, an exercise of his professional skill, and a chance to broaden his experience as the raw material of future stories. "And so, Callaghan, if ye'll have a word with Ivens—just talk to him— get the feel and the rub of his mind—he has the film down cold but it's still in his head. It needs externalizing. His English, you know, it's not the best and he needs the help of a skilled professional writer who knows Canada. Go along and talk to him and when the two of you have chewed the thing over, for a day or two, we'll get you off down to Halifax. Right? Right!" And off they all went to Halifax: Ivens, Callaghan, John Ferno, a Dutch cameraman of a saturnine and enormous competence, plus an assistant cameraman, soundmen, Navy PRO men. A deep and lengthy silence supervened. After a while rushes began to come in, first a trickle, then a stream, then a cataract which all but overwhelmed Betts and Harburger in the lab and greatly annoyed other producers who began to speak of being held up by the "f—ing navy film." They were reminded by Grierson that Ivens was a Great Man. The rushes continued, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand feet. This was, for a three-reel film, in itself an unusual and to other producers annoying and unnecessarily prestige-inflated length. Great God! The man was shooting seven to one! A seven to one ratio between shot film and release print. Boy, we said, this Navy film had bloody well better be good! About the same time we received a visit from Captain Eric Brand RCN, director of wartime naval security. Brand had transferred to the RCN from the RN at a time when the Canadian officer intake was in every case thoroughly Briticized by Dartmouth and Osborne. He had a brusque quarterdeck manner and a sharp quarterdeck voice. But he also had a merry eye. He removed his naval cap, revealing a balding head of preternatural dimensions, and, as one naval man to another, addressed himself to Grierson. "Want to have a word with you about this navy unit of yours." "Fire ahead," said Grierson, putting his feet up on the desk in combat position, ready to leap down the enemy's throat if need be in defence of his boys.

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Brand cleared his throat with a menacing crackle. "From what my man down in Halifax tells me, these fellas of yours seem to want the entire Atlantic Command put at their disposal." "That strikes me as a pretty modest request," said Grierson, with a grin. Brand's eye lit up. "Forgotten you were on minesweepers," he said. "Of course, we'd like to help. But within reason." "What would strike you as reasonable?" "For example, not calling the duty officer at the dockyard and demanding a second corvette." "You mean they already have one?" "Not only have they one corvette, they have effectively immobilized from time to time a destroyer, two minesweepers, three Fairmiles and about half the active personnel of the Atlantic Command, not to mention the CPOs who operate the gate through the anti-submarine net at the entrance to Halifax harbour. They're in and out of port like bloody waterflies." "I appreciate your point, Brand," said Grierson, with a disconcerting flex of his calf muscles, "but it's all in the line of duty, you know. These fellows are making the film of the war. One that will really put the Navy on the map!" "I thought we hadn't done too badly already." "Oh sure, sure; there's not the slightest doubt; but the image, man, the image. In 864 theatres all across Canada: the AB from the dirt farms of Saskatchewan with a thousand miles of land in all directions all around him. What makes him a sailor? This film will tell them, tell Canadians! The age-old skills of Captains Courageous harnessed in the service of making a nation of landlubbers into a seafaring people." "You'd better not say that down in the Maritimes." "Wouldn't dream of it. But it remains true, and I tell you, Brand, this film will boost your recruiting campaign to the point where they'll be crying for the moon and getting it. 'A life on the ocean wave,' to coin a phrase." "That's all very well, but we're fighting a war out there and these continuous and, I might add, increasing demands on naval personnel and facilities are getting irksome. The admiral—" Grierson sprang to his feet with one bound. He faced Brand, round the corner of the desk. His head came to Brand's shoulder.

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"We all know admirals! Bloody armchair sailors most of them. I see your problem and I'll wire my fellows to be less demanding." "And also to speed things up a bit. They've been down there the best part of two months already." "Exactly!" said Grierson, taking Brand's arm. "I'll put it to them, forcefully, as you can imagine. Have you a minute? Good. Like you to come down to the theatre and see some of the stuff these chaps have been shooting. I think you'll find it exciting. It has the true nautical images: spume, grey steel, men against the sea, you know the stuff." "Shouldn't be hard with all the help we've given them." "Ah, but ye see, I need your help too. There's one or two places where they've contrived shots and they're not technically true, ye see? We'd like your opinion. Anyway, come along down now, and we'll see it all together." Brand, needless to say, was convinced. We never knew it to fail in all of the years at NFB. Once a sponsor is shown the rushes (especially if he were featured in them), his objections evaporated almost immediately. They were so convincing and so flattering. The poor fellows didn't know enough about film to distinguish between rushes and showprint. It was mercifully hidden from them that they had every chance of ending up as the face on the cutting-room floor. And if, after it was all over, they dared to complain, ready and convincing excuses leapt to the lips—together with the promise of a grain-free eight by ten blow-up from the stills division, for their personal use, autographed by the National Film Commissioner himself. After rather a long time the Navy unit started to trickle slowly back to Ottawa. First came Callaghan. We chatted over a drear, beer-ringed, plastic-topped table in the basement of the Chateau Laurier. "Ivens wants me to work on a final commentary. I don't mind doing that; in fact, it'll be plain sailing in comparison with the picnic we've been on for the past few weeks." "A real shambles?" "Oh, don't make any mistake, he's good. We'll have a film all right. Some of the shooting is superb. Of course with the sea and ships it's a natural, isn't it? But we still don't have a story. Frankly I'm worried." He screwed up his long spaniel's nose and peered at us with his cloudy blue eyes.

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"You won't be the first." "Maybe." He looked sombrely at his beer glass. "But I have a notion that it's going to be up to the scriptwriter—that's me," he pointed a capable finger at his chest, "to pull the film together." "They say Ivens is a wonderful cutter, as well as a director. Perhaps the story will emerge in the cutting rooms. It often does, you know." Callaghan nodded sagely but his eyes looked worried. Like all truly professional writers he was constantly amazed and depressed at the dreadful incoherence of the film medium. He couldn't understand why it was that, on occasion, the successful box-office short didn't emerge until the rough cut was being married to the commentary in preparation for the final mix in the sound recording studio, perhaps weeks or even months after the shooting had taken place. In the end this was what happened with the Navy film [Action Stations]. It was long—much too long; a bit self-indulgent in the play of light on wave and wing, grey hull and thoughtful face; worth perhaps not all the frantic, tediously attenuated effort that had been put into it; worth perhaps not all the money that had been spent, though this is arguable since it cost about a tenth of an average Hollywood 'B' picture. But it was undeniably poetic; it had a haunting melancholy beauty about it that included but went far beyond the oily grime and salty sweat of little ships fighting. At first viewing, almost irrelevant to naval warfare in its bleak heaving images of men against the sea, the Navy film—it became after a while the Navy film—achieved a generalized impact and generated a sense of sombre pride, long after more densely textured and more closely knit "factual" documentaries were forgotten. This elusive quality was of course Ivens' contribution and marked the film as his own as well as NFB'S. But the production had been too longdrawn-out, the administrative and emotional upheaval too great for the relationship to continue. The film had assumed a baleful life of its own, cutting into other people's production schedules, attracting attention away from the breathless and hard-working daily grind of producing war films. ("Real war films, chum, not this prosy stuff.") Also, in some vague way, the film disappointed. In that it failed to key-in to the war effort? In that we had expected too much of Ivens? Or something different? Something perhaps which he was incapable of delivering? We really couldn't

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say: even Spottiswoode's Wednesday evening seminars failed to resolve the issue. Ivens, after a reasonable interval, packed his bags. The film went the rounds of the theatres and the 16mm circuit. Its impact—as with so many of NFB productions—had to be inferred, for Canadians are just about the least emotionally demonstrative of audiences, save where a hockey game is concerned. In the end the film sank quietly and was referred to in a Griersonian bark, as "Ah yes, the Ivens film! A great feeling for sea and sky!" Looking back, it seems to me that of all of us, Morley Callaghan was perhaps the most disappointed. After the big preview, thick with top Navy brass, he emerged from the theatre mournfully shaking his curly head. "We don't have a story," he kept repeating. "We still don't have a story." From one of Canada's few first-class storytellers, this was an indictment indeed. But somehow the film, like some amorphous but indestructible form of life, swallowed that too. Callaghan went on to become a wartime radio personality. Meanwhile an obscure cutter who had helped lick the vast mass of material into shape with an eye as clinical and detached as a lizard's cleared out the old bins and racks and went on to his next film. Ernest Borneman had been put into the Navy film by Spottiswoode when it had briefly appeared that the footage would overwhelm not one but two cutting rooms with great skeins and swags of uncut workprint. To the clearing of this particular mess, Borneman brought a fine mixture of Teutonic exactitude and a Jewish sense of extrovert lyricism. To see his wavy blond head bent rigidly over a hand viewer; his strong but elegant hands ripping "outs" of film backward like gravel flung behind a bone-digging dog; his swift, frenzied but orderly snatching of "takes" from bins; his skilled manipulation, without getting them twisted or torn, of half a dozen shots; his mouth full of clips, his shirt-sleeved figure draped with film like a raised bronze statue with Aegean seaweed: this was to see a Laocoon writhing in the agony of creation. Borneman was a fanatic, a grammarian, a Central European engulfer and regurgitator of fact. But never a bore. This was due partly to his engaging personality and partly to the peculiar accident of war which had brought him to Canada. Borneman, because of his antecedents, had been forced to leave the Third Reich shortly after Hitler's rise to power and had found asylum, a job and a home in England where he had become well known as a cutter in documentary studios, and also the author, under the pseudonym of Cameron

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McCabe, of a very good short thriller film called The Face on the Cutting Room Floor. Then came war, the fall of France, the blitz, the threat of invasion. Borneman, along with thousands of others suddenly become enemy-alien potential troublemakers, was whisked up in that brief moment of reasoning panic when national survival depended on taking absolutely no chances. He crossed the Atlantic in convoy in the iron belly of an old Cunarder and eventually found himself in a detention camp in northern Ontario. After the invasion scare had passed and Britain had emerged with honourable scars from the Blitz, there came a relaxation of rigidities, and at about the same time Grierson became aware of the existence of Borneman, and people like him, who had undeniable professional skills and who, it was felt, might be usefully put to helping out the war effort in positions where no security risk was involved, rather than dwelling in idleness at the taxpayers' expense. Borneman was released from the camp and came to work at NFB, first as a cutter. Though he kept aloof from us and we from him, his skill as an editor, his fanatical capacity for unrelenting hard work and—unexpectedly—his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz which he dissected with the painstaking thoroughness of the Teuton, brought him necessarily further into our daily film work and also into our off-hours. Borneman was at his happiest and in some ways at his best in the cutting room. Because he had a passionate love for film and also because he felt a genuine and commendable obligation to Grierson and to NFB for making it possible for him to work at his own profession, he would go to endless trouble, even if in the end no film ever reached the screen. It was a great moment for Borneman when he was joined by his fiancee, Eva, whom he had known in the documentary studios in Britain before the war, and who thanks to Grierson's intercession had managed to get a passage to Canada to marry him. The civil ceremony was performed on a bleak Saturday afternoon in an empty Ottawa and thereafter a berth was found for Eva's talents in the field of 16mm non-theatrical distribution, which she attacked with a ferocious professional competence that rather chilled us amateurs. The Borneman team, though the first, was not the only husband and wife team in NFB. Grierson as a rule frowned on such arrangements, taking the view that, broadly speaking, professionalism was at its best unmixed with other passions, that the cutting bench and the bed rarely went well together.

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However, wartime exigencies, and the fires engendered by common tasks, forced him at times to swallow his prejudice, though he usually managed by some brusque and unexpected gesture to convey his disapproval. He could not, of course, prevent or outwit the chemistry of propinquity and some husband and wife teams developed during the years at NFB simply by "doing what comes natur'ly," as Irving Berlin has it. To such Grierson was indulgent, regarding them as his children and their union therefore blessed by him, especially if it meant keeping at NFB a promising girl who was showing signs of restiveness. He would even make a witty backhanded speech at the simple weddings which wartime Ottawa permitted. Once he even gave away the bride. But with husband and wife teams which presented themselves to him and to NFB as a connubial fait accompli he was apt to be disgruntled, especially if the marriage had taken place after he had known one of the partners in a previous film incarnation. Such were the Cherrys. Evelyn and Lawrence Cherry were a team who specialized in films about farming. Both were director-cameramen, though Lawrence worked better under Evelyn's direction, especially if she had written the script and done the research, than the other way round. Both were competent, professional, fussy and dedicated. But unfortunately for Lawrence Cherry, Grierson had known and had employed his wife in her spinster days, and had formed a high opinion of her capabilities. As Evelyn Spice, the farm girl from Saltcoats, Saskatchewan, she had impressed the young English documentalists of the mid-thirties by her smouldering intensity as a filmmaker. The burning sense of social injustice which she had brought with her from the drought-bitten dustbowl of the Prairies, where whole townships were on relief, had struck a sympathetic chord in Grierson's predominantly left-wing equipe at the GPO Film Unit. "Evelyn Spice is a great fellow," Grierson was fond of telling us. Yet when she turned up at NFB in the '40s it was in the company of a gaunt, rangy husband who, in Grierson's eyes, had committed the grave fault of supposing himself to be a filmmaker, and then had compounded it by marrying Evelyn Spice, without informing him in advance. He growled a good deal when the Cherrys presented themselves. Evelyn he was quite prepared to take on the basis of her past performances, but Lawrence did not impress him. On the other hand Grierson couldn't deny the professional competence

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of the team and it was a competence he could ill spare, faced with the mounting strain of wartime film demands. He bethought himself of a stratagem. The salary for a director-cameraman—fixed at a wartime ceiling by the Prices Board—was $4500. This meant the Cherrys would be entitled to $9000 between them. Murmurs of dissent were heard from married producers whose wives were not filmmakers. Grossly unfair of course. And besides, the Cherrys would both be taxed as single persons. But still. . . . Finally Grierson let his offer be known. The Cherrys could come on NFB strength in charge of the farm program at a total salary of $9000: provided it was $6000 for Evelyn and $3000 for Lawrence ..Lawrence swallowed his pride. Grierson had mordantly made his point; the Cherrys got the money and NFB got the Cherry talents: Lawrence's as a director-cameraman, Evelyn's as a producer, scriptwriter and director combined. And in the end it was the combined talents which produced the basic fodder for our rural film circuits. Shooting in locations often 1000 miles apart; dogged by the imperfections of single-system sound recording; afoot in all weathers; Evelyn sweating under the foto-floods in an Ontario farmhouse; Lawrence with spindrift snow swirling round his numbed fingers as he shot on the prairies in mid-winter. Between them they produced films that farmers were to see from Cape Breton to the Cariboo, and from the US border north to the Mackenzie valley and the Great Slave Lake: the very image and core of Canada. With the solution of this and similar problems, the basic skeleton of NFB had now been created. New uses had been found for valuable but idle equipment; new staff had been recruited from all over the world; and new ideas had driven us along with a terrific head of steam. But while we were by now the smoothly functioning machine, Grierson was the generator. As Marjorie McKay, who appears later in this narrative as one of the lumber mill pioneers, has herself written: At the top, and no one was in any doubt, was John Grierson—a fiery, aggressive, brilliant Scot, sometimes domineering, sometimes hard and cynical, sometimes sentimental—with one object, to build an organization as fast as possible to carry the government's message as effectively as possible to every Canadian and to people of other countries.

Grierson himself was aware that an era had passed. Though with him consolidation never implied a slowing of growth, and though perhaps the

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least sympathetic to any notion of a pause that refreshes, he saw that we were moving into another stage. As he wrote at the time: The first part of our work in Canada was finished early in 1942. It produced a film organization which suggested it could do great things for the country if it was looked after in good faith till the young people developed. Much of it was pulled off the sky. On the other hand, there are special reasons why the national use of films should have fitted so quickly and progressively into the Canadian scene. The need to achieve unity in a country of many geographical and psychological distances is only one of them and not the most important. More vital, I think, is the fact that Canada is waking up to her place in the world and is conscious, as few English-speaking countries seem to be, that it is a new sort of place in the world. A medium which tries to explain the shape of events and create loyalties in relation to the developing scene is welcome. I cannot otherwise explain the measure of support we have been given, nor the long-range hopes that have been placed in this school of projection we have set up. Grierson had, as we have seen, a certain idea of what a film should be and do: I look to register what actually moves: what hits the spectator at the midriff: what yanks him up by the hair of the head or the plain bootstraps to the plane of decent seeing. I see no reason why, because a film is made for the populace and made for money, we should exempt it from the ordinary duties of art.. . . Of every film and of every film talent I ask a modicum of revelation.... I look on cinema as a pulpit and use it as a propagandist. . . . A new congregation to be reached—to be introduced to the wonderful things, the strange and beautiful things the camera has discovered. But now with both the USA and the USSR joined with Britain and Canada, it was a case of moving out into a wider field. With the superb instrument he had fashioned in less than three years, he was now ready to tackle the largest audience in the world and in the toughest of commercial media. Grierson in high fettle zoomed off to New York to enliven his theatrical contacts. While he was away an unforeseen disaster came within an ace of destroying, in a physical sense, much of what he had so painfully built up.

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Fire Alarm

THE CRETE FILM BORDE EYRE On Lammas Day, a twelvemonth gone Great heauynesse befelle; The childe may rue thatte ys unborne The storye here I telle. Upon a morne at the Fylme Borde, As trewely I yow saye, The Newes Reele Roome did brest aflame All on a someres daye. Stout Hamiltoun thatte was nerbye Intil the flames did goe; Hew Wallis eke did battel there; It wrekyth him full woe. Christe, what a sighte was there to see! Pumpes squirted CC>2. Alack the tyme it caught AG Fulle in his suit of blew.

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But many a noble geste was done Upon that fatefull daye. A bridge of posytive they made Upon the wette stairways. Beneathe the sprinkleres could man see Legge with hys pantes rolled, Plodding in mucke mile solempnelye His brollye blacke unfurled. Spottyswoode too and eke Bigrasse Theye did a noble stint; The cruel nytrouse oxyde gasse Wrought them a sorry dint. The coveres on equipmente layde Did warde off smoke and flame And everich man worked with goode harte Untille the fire reeles came. Thereatte tha battel soone was wonne; M'Laine the staffe did thanke. All heard hym speke save Kaye Huttonne: Prone on the grounde shee sanke. When the newes was brought to Greyersonne Within Newe Yorke Citye, That the Fylme Borde had saved been By strengthe and pietye, "My Godde," quod hee, "this fatall daye Shalle well indeede be damned. Newe buildings we shall never see, Whiles I such carles command For I hadde thoughte apartmentes newe In Hulle Citye to build; Now must I wait fulle twelve years more Until my tyme is filled."

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Thus was the Fylme Bordes woe compleat; Maye Marye giue us reste. Godde grante that in a better life With sense we wylle be blessed.

THOMAS OF NEWE EDDYNBURROWE (GRAHAM MCINNES) To comprehend the nature of this disaster we have to consider a field which has so far lain outside the scope of this narrative: newsreels. It was early apparent to Grierson that one of the easiest methods of breaching the fortress of cynicism and indifference which constituted a large part of "the trade"—that is, the commercial theatres—was by way of the newsreel. People are always interested in actuality, and no more so than when it is themselves whom they see. This fact had long been recognized by the US movie industry itself. As part of their firm belief that you recover your production costs on the home market, but make your profit out of foreign bookings, they had long ago agreed to include Canadian newsclips on the big reels made up in New York by Pathe, Universal, Fox Movietone. But Grierson rightly had much bigger ideas. The trade should agree to double—triple—the number of Canadian items: in fact, launch a wholly Canadian newsreel program. After some demur, the trade agreed—provided that Grierson undertook to deliver the requisite footage. The eventual "treaty" was negotiated by Grierson and McLean with David Coplan, an intelligent and patriotic member of what is basically an international market of bazaar chafferers. Fine! We have the theatres. Now, where are the newsreels? Mounting a holding operation through ASN, Audio and NEB, Grierson searched around for some organization which would devote a stipulated period of its time to Canadian newsreel production. Such a group would have to be not too large, thoroughly professional, grown grey on the knowledge of every wrinkle and trick in the newsreel business, fast off the mark, able to go anywhere at any time in any weather, and to shoot in the kind of way that would give the Canadian audiences the sort of newsreel coverage they needed in wartime. Such coverage would include, from time to time, an alleged "news" item sponsored by a federal government department: a

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plug for Victory Bonds, or retail price control, or a recruiting poster for the Canadian Women's Army Corps. Such a group, if found, would be responsible to a Newsreel Unit at NFB which would also edit and record. The essential was that the group should be knowledgeable, flexible, mobile and tough. He found the headquarters director first, in the person of Alan Field, an ex-newspaperman who had sufficient tolerance, and whose antecedents were sufficiently impeccable, to keep down the sort of Canadian Alf Garnett criticisms that might have made Grierson's activities—or some of them—untenable. The actual shooting team he found down in Florida, of all places, and it was called the Hamilton Wright Organization. A contract was negotiated and up to Ottawa came Wright himself, a combined producer-directorscripter-administrator-financier, and his veteran cameraman Joe Gibson. At once their presence was felt. Hamilton Wright set himself up in an office and started to produce ideas for newsreels at lightning speed. His ingenuity, his brashness, his lack of inhibition took us all aback. His ignorance of French was total, and he long referred to the Pont Alexandre across the Ottawa River as "the Pont bridge." He wanted to shoot Parliament Hill with "a parade of pretty little grade-one stenos so's they'll know you really got a war on up here. Dress 'em up like drum majorettes. Health and Welfare, now there's a story! Have the guys in white smocks spot a microbe, see? Zoom! You cut to speed cops. They're after the disease, see? Then, socko! You're into a hospital ward and the fellow that was immunized, he's okay, see? He can work while everyone else is out like a light. Get it?" It dawned on us that Wright's method was to shoot news if it happened to be breaking, but to create news if it wasn't breaking. Joe Gibson confirmed this. A leathery old trooper of incredible versatility and toughness, he used to regale the camera room staff with tales of how "Me an' Ham beat the Depression. There was nothin' doin' in Miami, see? No stories. No people. The Florida boom had bust. So we're sittin' on our fannies figurin' out what we'll do. Seems a long time since we seen Lee Bible's car turn turtle at 200 miles an hour. So I got it figured. I say to Ham, 'Let's go down the Everglades and shoot crocodiles.' 'No,' he says, 'folks are sick and tired of crocodiles. They got crocodiles comin' outa their ears. What we need is to hire a plane and low-fly over the Miami

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skyscrapers—give 'em a loop-trie-loop view of Miami.' 'Say Ham,' I says, 'how's about combinin' the two? I mean we get a croc, see, and we hoist him up, hangin' from the plane. Then I shoot Miami from the plane and right away you got a croc flyin' over Miami. Now whaddya think of that?' 'By God Joe,' he says, 'I reckon you got somep'n there.' So we gets the croc and up we go in the plane and there it is. Talk about Gabriel over the White House. Had nothin' on our croc over Miami." The Hamilton Wright Organization in short was clearly headed for great things. They got well and truly keyed-in to NFB ways. Joe Gibson took young cameramen out on the road to teach them a wrinkle or two. Wright grabbed one of the two new windowless interior cutting rooms we'd had constructed out of an old office. Hugh Wallace, a young editor from Alberta, was assigned as an assistant. And there the Newsreel Unit installed itself, working at breakneck speed and surrounded, in cans, in bins, on benches, on racks, on rewinds, by about 10,000 feet of nitrate film. Nobody knew quite how it started. It was like an explosion rather than a fire. Ten-foot flames with blue and white tongues suddenly leaped from the newsreel cutting room and the next moment the whole central part of the upper floor was ablaze. Somewhere inside it all were Hamilton Wright and Hugh Wallace. The automatic sprinkler system came into operation at once but it was turned to ineffectual steam by the intense heat of the flames. The beaverboard walls buckled and bent, doors burst open and the flames, fed by thousands of feet of intensely inflammable nitrate film, raced through the central part of the building. Like ants scurrying from an axe-split log, we poured out of NFB into the streets. Cans of film, notebooks, typewriters, chairs and equipment were hurled from the windows. The fire trucks roared up, sirens screaming, and their big hoses started to batter down interior walls, while firemen smashed glass and played foam extinguishers on the fiercely blazing heat which had now engulfed three cutting rooms. Wright and Wallace, shapeless, shrouded figures, were carried off in ambulances and as the flames were slowly fought under control, sober knots of film men and women gathered in the sultry, soupy, August sunlight to talk in hushed voices of the tragedy. Those few who entered the blackened, steaming building and ascended

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to the upper floor saw a strange sight. Legg, his English umbrella unfurled against the cataract of the sprinkler system, and his pants rolled up above the knee like some paterfamilias on the Brighton shingle, padded barefoot slowly up and down the corridor. Under his arm he held on each trip the precious cans containing the workprint and sound effects for the two latest films for "World in Action." Ross McLean got on the long-distance phone to Grierson. His first enquiry was after Wright and Wallace. He learned that though suffering from third-degree burns, Ham Wright had replied with an excruciatingly courageous pun to some importunate reporter who asked how he felt: "Like baked Ham!" Grierson at once sent personal messages full of admiration to Wright and Wallace and had his wife Margaret visit them both in the hospital—where, incidentally, they remained for over six weeks. But when he also heard from McLean that the final damage was not as great as had at first been feared, being confined to three cutting rooms, three offices and the loss of about $58,000 worth of film and equipment, the old Grierson spirit reasserted itself. "Too bad the whole joint didn't go up," he is reported to have said. "Now we'll never get a new building until well after the war." The actual cause of the Great Fire appeared to have been the passage of a clip through a four-way. When film was being edited it was customary, before it was spliced, for the various shots to be pinned together with ordinary paper clips. It occasionally happened that the splice missed one of these and it remained embedded in the reel. When such (presumably spliced) reels were revolved in a hurry against a deadline, a clip, jamming at speed against a steel-toothed wheel, could created a spark. A spark was all that nitrate film needed to set it blazing. A lot of us thought back to Al Harburger and his sage advice. Actually we got off very luckily. Apart from Ham Wright and Hugh Wallace, there were about a dozen treated for inhaling toxic fumes. In three months the scarred and blackened NFB was renewed. And though slow-burning acetate film was hard to come by under wartime conditions, a real start was made toward reducing our dependence on nitrate, and the fire regulations were even more stringently applied. The only other casualties were a group of editors, temporarily idle pending construction of new cutting rooms, who crossed the Ottawa River to Hull in search of

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distraction and ended up at the local Salle des Quilles or Bowling Alley. While sweating it out among the skittles they were relieved of their wallets. No NFB man ever had any money in his wallet, but in those days gasoline, tires, butter, orange juice, beer and hard liquor—to name only those—were severely rationed and the loss meant endless queuing to get new ration books and to explain how the old had vanished. Meanwhile, down in New York Grierson had completed new theatrical arrangements with the predators of Times Square for the USA theatrical showings of "World in Action." The NFB shifted rackety gears, gathered speed and clanked to new horizons. In a sense, the Great Fire, though having nothing whatever to do with theatrical contracts, was a milestone in NFB history. To the end of Grierson's term one was apt to speak of the period before the Great Fire and the period after it. Having survived a nitrate fire we felt we could do anything. We felt we had come of age.

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35mm: Theatrical lungle

The decision to double the theatrical series by adding to "Canada Carries On" the new "World in Action" really went back to the weeks immediately preceding Pearl Harbor. It is perhaps hard to remember now that for well over two years Canada had been at war and the United States at precarious peace. Hollywood, it is true, had been anxious to "get into the war somehow" right from the start. They had sent Michael Curtiz up to Canada to make a film about the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. But though it did have a pretty genuine bush pilot sequence (complete with alleged Indians) it ended up with a phoney air-duel over the "Eastern Approaches" of Canada, using outdated twin-engined Hudsons, and a pompous theme song, "Captains of the Clouds," which gave the film its title. Curtiz and his bosses preferred the studio to the actuality and the film ended up a portentous nothing. It was about mid-1941 that Grierson began to chafe under the slow pace, the unavoidable folksiness and the limited audiences of CCO. It could appeal only to Canadians and while his first job was on the home front, he wanted Canada to have an audience in the USA where it was of course most important to have it. Also he passionately desired to put into film some of his socialist and strategic thinking. As he himself said at the time:

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Since events move speedily, and opportunities pass just as speedily, the tempo of production must change accordingly. A lot has to be done and done quickly if the public mind is to be turned in time to what, amid these swift moving changes of public organization, is required of it. It is not the technical perfection of the film that matters, nor even the vanity of its maker, but what happens to the public mind. Never before has there been such a call for the creation of new loyalties or bringing people to new kinds of sticking points. Times press and so must production; and with it must go a harder and more direct style. A dozen reasons make this inevitable. There is the need of striking while irons are hot.

With Legg as producer-director he therefore began to experiment with the form and content of "World in Action" long before he had an audience for it. And one of the most obvious subjects for a WIA was the equivocal status and future of Japan. The film of necessity trenched on Canadian foreign policy, and therefore he had to proceed with care and in closer consultation than was usual with the Department of External Affairs. The film—provisionally tided War Clouds in the Pacific—was ready for release in November 1941 and representatives of the Department of External Affairs came down to NFB to see a preview print. Though they thought the film enormously effective, they were against releasing it. Canada was at peace with Japan. The film implied, indeed underlined, the likelihood that Japan and Canada would shortly be at war owing to Japan's aggressive policy in the Pacific. This was not the kind of thing which could be said, or ought to be said, in over 600 Canadian movie theatres, while Japan and Canada still maintained diplomatic relations. They were very sorry but they couldn't see their way to approving the release of the film. A few days later came the news of Pearl Harbor. The ban was withdrawn. The film went into the theatres and had a tremendous impact. It is impossible to blame the department for its decision. In diplomatic terms release of the film prior to December 7 would have been tantamount to an unfriendly if not a warlike act. Within the frame of a diplomat's reference, the decision was correct; Grierson himself was the first to admit this, though he did not agree with the decision. But among the producers and directors at NFB, a great howl of derision went up. Who were these people to impede the showing of War Clouds in the Pacific? Why, Pearl Harbor simply proved how right WIA

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was, how prescient. From this time on a disdain toward the Department of External Affairs manifested itself at NFB among those having to do with the "World in Action" series. But as time went on, and the WIA became more and more political, rolling out at the rate of one a month, this attitude became an unhealthy basis for a working relationship. Towards the end of the war and immediately after it, the attitude made NFB unnecessarily suspect in the eyes of Canadian diplomats. But in December 1941, all that was in the future. What was in the present, and was strikingly evident from audience reaction, was that NFB, which really meant Grierson and Legg, had perfected, with the aid of a band of Canadians including Tom Daly, Jim Beveridge and Margaret Ann Bjornson, a powerful and effective propagandist weapon with a Canadian label. The USA was not at war and they suddenly and belatedly became interested in what we were doing. This interest penetrated to the tough men who ran theatrical distribution in New York. When, from their bristling fortress, envoys of peace were seen to emerge, then indeed it was time to "get down to New York" and see what kind of a deal we could make. Grierson, having worked in Hollywood in the twenties, and having made a professional study in depth of the factors that govern success in the mass media, knew what was known at that time to very few men outside the top people in the movies: motion pictures are essentially a branch of the real estate business. This simple fact has since been projected in its full implications notably in such books as Picture by Lillian Ross. But in those days few knew it and the last person the big tough New York entrepreneurs expected to know it was a shrewd, ironic, little fighting cock of a man from Canada. This gave Grierson a tactical advantage. He knew the enemy's weak point. They did not know his. They did not even know him. In fact, their vision being bounded by Damon Runyon's version of Times Square—that is to say, the rectangle of 6th Ave, 7th Ave, 40th Street and 44th Street—they had only the vaguest idea of where Canada was or that Canada existed. This proved a disadvantage to them in negotiation. Put simply, the paradox of big movie production in the '30s and '40s was this. The big Hollywood studios were financially tied in with the theatre chains—operated, owned or controlled by their parent distribution companies. Because a movie needs an audience, it was essential, in financing productions, to be able to guarantee, to the financiers, that you controlled or

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had access to a chain of theatres. Thus theatrical distribution, far from being the handmaiden of production, could often be its taskmaster. In the days of big theatre construction of the twenties, those financing movies had often invested heavily in real estate in order to build theatres, or to build big office blocks which would contain theatres. The backers of bigbudget movies—often Eastern banks, financial houses and trust companies—needed a return for their shareholders on their capital. Since this capital was in metropolitan high-density real estate, the return depended on keeping the offices rented and the theatres full. This in turn depended on a saleable product, since, especially in the North American winter, you couldn't dragoon the public into attending a movie house. It needed a product to draw them. What's more, it needed a product that played continuously and to capacity. This is one of the reasons why, in contrast to British and continental practice, USA movie houses used to go in for "continuous showing." But what does continuous showing mean? A bigbudget 'A' picture ran in those days for about one hour, fifty minutes to two hours; a 'B' picture for about one hour and ten to twenty minutes. Newsreels and/or travelogues or one-reel comics or nature films—"the chicken feed"—filled in the cracks. This was the crack through which Walt Disney entered the distribution empire in his early days. It takes only a little calculation to see that if you are open from, say, midday to midnight continuously, you're going to be able to run your two features three times; but that you're also going to need close to ninety minutes' total of shorts—i.e. about forty minutes per show—to fill out the program. Allot half of that to newsreels and you've still got about twenty minutes' per show hanging on your hands. And unless you can fill the theatres for that crucial twenty minutes, your gate will tend to sag, your take will be reduced and in no time at all Head Office will be on your back for fear that the backers will be on theirs. This explains why theatre chains, and more particularly small chains or theatres owned by a single individual, were always looking around for good shorts, preferably short shorts, but always good shorts. Grierson knew this, had known it for about fifteen years. The key to the Canadian distribution puzzle lay in Dundas Square, Toronto. Here the Canadian satraps of the vaster US circuits lived, breathed and had their being, principally in the twenty-storey skyscraper

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of the Imperial Optical Co. Dundas Square was so only in name. It bore no resemblance whatever to a London square, being simply a truncated treeless triangle of faceless grey cement. But within its purlieus the chaffering over what would and what would not be shown in Canada's commercial movie theatres took place. So far as CCO was concerned the solution lay not with the distributors, Columbia Pictures (of Canada Inc.), but with the renters: Famous Players Canadian Corporation (FPCC), in the person of James J. Fitzgibbon. For while Columbia controlled the distribution, the actual theatres were controlled by FPCC. Fitzgibbon was large and heavily built, and with an Irishman's covert awe for things English. Fitz warmed to Grierson and between them they corralled the third member of an unlikely trio, Harvey Harnick of Columbia. Harvey, whose special baby CCO became as the war developed, was a perpetual fusspot. He fussed over deadlines, over release dates, over film content, film length. He was forever on the long-distance phone, and Grierson's deputy Ross McLean had to spend a great deal of time "holding Harvey's hand." But Harnick's personal devotion to CCO paid off and even when the series struck a rough patch, he was able to persuade the theatre owners to take it, and what's more to advertise it in bright lights on the theatre marquee. With WIA, United Artists entered the scene and specifically David Coplan. United Artists had been founded by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Since Miss Pickford ("The World's Sweetheart") had been born a Canadian, she was naturally well disposed toward her native land, so that the signing of a contract for WIA posed no pronounced difficulties. Grierson and NFB were getting well and favourably known around Dundas Square, and whenever theatre owners phoned each other long distance on the Old Boy Net, his name came up in a highly positive context. But to crack the New York distribution market, he needed something more, and here he found support in a rather unlikely couple: Hye Bossin and Arthur Gottlieb. Gottlieb we have already met. As the American-born and connected head of Audio he had powerful New York contacts, all to be used in the service of Grierson, to whom he owed a not inconsiderable debt for having steered lab orders his way in the lean days. From his permanent lair in the Warwick (War-Wick) Hotel he let it be known among his Runyonesque friends that Grierson and his NFB were worth doing business with.

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About this time [1945] Grierson decided I was wasting my time, or his—I was never entirely sure—as a producer of shorts and he created for me the post of Information Editor which really meant director of public relations for NFB. It was well understood that Grierson, being a past master at this art, would keep high policy for himself. In this sense I was often outside and looking in; and at our weekly Monday morning meetings when I presented him with carefully marked clippings from Variety he had almost always had advance knowledge of the stories that "broke" to astonished readers in Times Square. Even the snobby little boxed section "NY to LA—LA to NY" chronicling the movements of the movie greats (usually by the Santa Fe railroad's Super Chief in those days, and playing gin rummy in a drawing room for two days and three nights) held no secrets for him. However, the appointment had the effect of projecting me immediately into the world of theatrical distribution. My mentor apart from JG was Hye Bossin. Bossin, whose brother by some mysterious process of nomenclature was named Art Arthur, ran a weekly film magazine from an office at street level in the Imperial Optical building in Dundas Square. The Canadian Film Weekly was an extraordinary hodgepodge of film reviews, film gossip, film politics, and, when you could persuade him to put them in, squibs about NFB. It was a vulgar, loud, badly printed sheet, but it was absolutely bursting with a raw vitality and a swift ironic kick-'em-in-the-guts type of humour which made it, as they say, compulsive reading. From his little office on the square—"Just walk right in off the street any time"—Hye Bossin saw and heard all that was going on: the gossip of the Rialto. He was the film industry's most faithful and, if need be, abrasive chronicler. Hye could usually be found seated behind his rough old desk perusing galleys in a cloud of cigar smoke. "White Owl? You can use one? Still five cents. What this country needs—" "—is a good five-cent seegar." "Right. What's cooking up in Ottawa?" He had a rough, gravelly voice mixed with a kind of high-pitched whine, a great broad pie of a face with a bristly chin and very merry but very shrewd brown eyes that missed nothing. Hye struck shrewdly and ramshackly, but always to the point and with

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an ironic compassion. Though the film industry, so far as Dundas Square was concerned, limited itself entirely to distribution, Hye's eye was more widely cast. He was interested in production and especially Canadian production, and although he paid lip service to the tradition whereby every— but every!—new film was described as a smasheroo (so as not to let down the boys with the single, small, neighbourhood theatre), he could, and did at times, damn with faint praise. Hye's summing up of the distribution business, with which he favoured me one morning in the cigar stench of his office over a paper cup full of piping hot coffee, was noteworthy. "It's getting a guy in a position where he owes you a favour, see? Never let yourself get in that position. If some smart theatre owner offers you tickets to the races or the ball game, never take 'em. If you do, you'll owe him a favour, and comes the time when you maybe have a lemon on your hands, and you want help in pushin' it, he isn't gonna give it to you. No Sir! You make him owe you a favour. It takes some fast or fancy footwork, but you'll do it. Give him the free prizes for the premiere (premeer, he said), send him the orchid for his wife's coat. Get so he owes you somepin, not the other way round. Fight off his favours and plug yours. Then you have him where he don't want to be. Dying to pay off the favour he owes you and be quits. That's the way to push movies." This very sage piece of advice came in handy when I made my first (and last) foray into the jungles of New York with Bob Myers, a pal of Hye's. We decided to take the train together, sharing a compartment in which he very kindly insisted that I take the lower berth. Before going to bed we sat in our singlets and underpants on the edge of the lower, consuming in paper cups the heel of a bottle of rye that Bob had thoughtfully provided from some unknown theatrical cache, while we planned our strategy. "I guess we'll check in at the Warwick," said Bob. "Arthur Gottlieb won't mind and it's as good a place as any for leaving phone calls." I nodded sagely. Bob Myers with his black brilliantined hair in tight curls, his shrewd darting greeny-brown eyes and his neat sensuous mouth seemed to breathe the sophistication of the theatrical circuits. I felt very much of a hick, willing to listen to anything that he might say. We took another swig of rye. The train clattered over the switches at Rouse's Point as we crossed from Quebec into New York State. The us Immigration man gave a curt nod as he handed our passports back to us,

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and slid the door shut. We toasted our rye-filled paper cups. Hail Columbia! Land of the Free and Home of the Brave! Here we come! We're going to beard the distributors in their dens. The train rattled on in the exciting friendly dark. "I tell you," said Bob, "we have to play this soft. It won't do for us to seem to be treading on Gottlieb's toes or Mr. Grierson's either. They have these special relationships, you know, and they don't like other guys muscling in. I think we'll just drop in accidentally on purpose. No particular point to make, but just ask them how they're finding our shorts." "But don't we know that already?" "We know they take them, but we don't know if they like taking them. You see, there's all kinds of wheels within wheels. Like the fellow we're going to see, this Ralph Ungar—" "What kind of a name's that?" "Just a name. He may owe Gottlieb something and he may have taken the series to even up things a bit. Or he may just have taken a liking to Grierson—had a drink with him. But we don't know how the stuff's going over. Well," he drained his cup, "better hit the hay. I'm upstairs so wake me when there's houses, eh?" After a nimbly night I rolled up the blind about seven. We were racketing down the east bank of the Hudson, here a good mile wide with its clifflike Palisades on the Jersey side. Bob muttered at me from the upper berth. "What's the daylight for?" "It's after seven." "Is there any houses yet?" "Not yet." "Okay then, wake me when there's houses." By 7:30 we'd crossed the Harlem River and there were houses all right and huge apartment blocks, everywhere. We were due in at 7:50 and I shook Bob awake, fearful that we would arrive in Grand Central while he was still struggling into his pants. But he slithered down from his upper just as we plunged into the 125th Street tunnel, and arrived trim, tight and dapper at the end of the line. We took a taxi through March slush and checked in at the Warwick. After bacon and eggs served in our room, Bob got on the phone. "Mr Ungar'll see us at eleven." Before taking off he invited me to view Gottlieb's suite. I was a bit loath

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to do this, as it seemed like trespassing, but Bob silenced me with "It's okay, I got his pass-key." And we entered. The great man was up in Toronto and the suite held the usual anonymous look of any hotel suite, save when Bob, with a skirling flourish, slid back the door of an immense built-in clothes closet. We paused for a moment in honest admiration. "Just look at that. Forty suits!" We regarded them reverently, then shut the door, taxied over to a bleak cement junior skyscraper on 7th Avenue and rode the automatic elevator up to the eighteenth floor. We waited a few moments in a pebble-glassed anteroom while a prim secretary announced us on a hush-a-phone. "Mr. Ungar will see you now, gentlemen." She held open the varnished oak door for us and we walked in. Seated behind an enormous flat-top desk was a dinosaur of a man. His almost bald head had the texture of fried bacon. Great bristles grew out of his ears. His fingers were laced on the desk before him; his shoulders were hunched right up close to the level of his ears. He didn't rise but glared at us with a pair of black hostile unwinking eyes. His greeting, when he finally gave utterance, sounded like a pneumatic drill. "Okay!" he roared. "What's the beef?" I was frankly horrified. We seemed to have shoved our heads right into the lion's mouth. Even Bob Myers was taken aback. He licked his lips and said, "Is it all right if we sit down, Mr. Ungar?" The dinosaur gave an ungrateful grunt. An uncomfortable silence fell. Mr. Ungar swivelled in his chair, cleared his throat, and took careful aim. A dribble of amber fluid hit the cuspidor with a bang. He turned slowly round on us, his nose twitching. "So okay," he bellowed again. "What's the beef?" "There's no beef, Mr. Ungar," said Myers smoothly. "So you come all the way down from Canada to tell me that?" "No, we came down to see you, as distributor of the 'World in Action' series, to find out how you like them, and whether we can do anything to help you." Not a bad speech, I thought, emollient but dignified. Mr. Ungar's response was discouraging. "How I like 'em I can tell you easy. I don't like 'em! And what you can do to help me is to stop askin' me stoopid questions about 'em!" This time the silence was longer and more painful. The traffic far

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below on 7th Avenue became audible and Mr. Ungar stared broodingly into space. Bob Myers rose magnificently to the occasion. "Fine, Mr. Ungar," he said, getting rapidly to his feet. "We're sorry to have detained you and will take our leave." He put on his hat. Mr. Ungar stared at us impassively. We reached the door. "Now waiaiaiaiaiad a minute!" We turned. On Mr. Ungar's face was the craggy ghost of a savage, lopsided smile. "Siddown!" he bellowed. "Do wit a drink?" Without waiting for an answer he swivelled round, unhitched a breakfront bookcase, and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and three snort glasses. He filled them and shot them across the desk. "Happy Days," he said. "An' now that we're real friendly, just what is the beef?" I said, "We've simply wanted to see if things were satisfactory from your point of view." My accents fell oddly in the heavy, tough, Brooklynesque atmosphere. Mr. Ungar stared at me, but without hostility. "Noo around here?" he barked. "I taht so. You sound kinda scared. Don't do to be scared around here. Eh, Bob?" I was stunned at this unexpected use of Myers' first name but he took it smoothly. The ogre passed us cigars. "No White Owl or Peg Top for me," he growled. "These here is Flor Cubana. The genuine article." The dinosaur nodded morosely and examined his spade-like fingernails through a cloud of cigar smoke. "It's okay," he said. "I mean the shorts is okay. They fill a spot, see? But they's one or two things that's wrong. Maybe you could do somp'n about them," he added belligerently. "What are they?" "Well, for one thing, they get too much into a kind of an argument, you know. Like what's the world gonna be like after the war? Or how's chances for a noo Britain? Most people don't give a good goddamn for a noo Britain, or an old Britain so far as that goes. And they wanna know what's gonna happen now, not some time a billion years from now when half of them'll be dead anyway. Eh?"

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"Well," said Bob, "you buy the product, you take the good with the not so good." Mr. Ungar nodded vigorously. The argument seemed to impress him. "I can handle that with the theatres all right. But," and here he made a big hole in the air with his cigar stub, "you gotta stop repeatin' yourself." "How do you mean?" "What I say. Ya usin' the same shot twice. In two maybe three different shorts. Folks notice." "Well, give us an example." Mr. Ungar paused and into his leathery face came an expression of intense distaste. "There's a Chinese dame," he said after a while. "She's crawlin' on her hands and knees on some railroad tracks some place in China. I dunno where. They's broken wires and smoke all around. Ya know what I mean? Ya got it? Seems like the railroad station's bin bombed!" "I think I know the shot, yes." "Okay. If I've seen that Chinese dame once I've seen her twenny times. An' if I see her again, you know what I'm gonna do?" "No, what?" "I'm gonna go right out onto 7th Avenue and buy her a wheelchair! That's what I'm gonna do. A wheelchair!" It was a sober couple who took the night train back to Montreal. What had we accomplished? We had roused the ire of the formidable Mr. Ungar. We had perhaps trespassed on Grierson's private territory. Certainly on Gottlieb's. And as for the faults in WIA films, who were we to point them out to Legg, the chilly patrician doyen of all producers? One could imagine the cold disdain with which he would receive—from us of all people, a theatrical barnstormer and a junior producer neophyte in the ways of Broadway—any comment on his films. Already we could see his nostrils curl. "I tell you what we'll do," said Bob Myers as the train bore us homeward past Ossining and Tarr. "We'll lie low until Grierson comes back from the coast. Meanwhile, I'll square it with Gottlieb up in Toronto. You see, the main thing is that Ungar shouldn't think we came down to ease him out of the WIA market. For all his rough stuff he likes the series, you know. He doesn't want to lose it. Maybe," he looked reflective, "he's been

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on the phone to Gottlieb already. If he has I'm in for a rough time in Toronto." "I think maybe it's a lesson to us both to keep our fingers out of the pay dirt." "You got something there." As the train rolled on through the night towards Canada, I thought, yes, indeed, what have we achieved? Well, for one thing we'd seen Canada in a truer perspective. Ferociously absorbed—and self-absorbed—in the production of wartime documentary films, we had thought of our effort as close to superhuman. We had developed, as JG himself would have put it, a good conceit of ourselves. But down in New York it was evident that we were but a drop in Variety's ocean, a fly to be brushed aside by the pachyderm's trunk. There was a lesson for us too in hubris. Enormously attracted by Grierson, inspired by him, some of us coming close to if not worship, then hero worship, we had assumed to ourselves something of his own attitude. He was the founder of the documentary movement, the director and producer of Drifters, the friend of Flaherty, the dramatizer of the actual, the respecter of the fact in a silvery world of glycerine and tinsel. He had a right to be sometimes arrogant, intellectually brutal, domineering, impatient. We did not have that right. Though what we had was very worthwhile, it wasn't going to shake the world. Not New York anyway. Certainly not Mr. Ungar. He'd taken us down a peg or two, and after you get over the disagreeable shock, that's a wonderful thing to happen to anyone. But beyond even this was a farther perspective for self-criticism. Our total commitment to films, day in, day out, had bred in us a confusion of realities. The image in the movieola, the workprint on the screen, had become for us the true world. The world outside seemed remote and unimportant. In the forcing house atmosphere where we were intensely busy shaping our own creative ends, rough-hew them how the world might, we had forgotten the world. We had become an in-group, frighteningly self-centred. In pursuit of the perfect documentary we had become a bit like the students in Plato's cave, or like the televiewer who watches behind drawn curtains an eclipse of the moon on a clear, balmy summer night. It was good to have been reminded that there were other realities.

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The women's touch

Grierson, if you pressed him, would agree that women's place, in the film world, was in the home, i.e. the negative cutting room. Here, swathed in their cotton smocks and white cotton gloves, they could pursue the ageold fastidious tasks for which women, in a man's world, have always been famous. Grierson's kinder, kirche und ktiche was the negative-positive fourway, the negative splicer and the carbon tetrachloride. Into the grim asepsis of the negative cutting room few could venture, and the atmosphere of a combination nunnery and hospital ward which the room exuded—with its chill fluorescent tubes, its white-coated women, and its thumbtacked signs in schoolmistressy script enjoining silence, cleanliness and care— was one into which few mere men cared to penetrate. Here was a domain where women reigned supreme and Grierson was content that they should. The endlessly repetitive skills symbolized in such female activities as sewing, starching, crocheting and petit point here found their full efflorescence and their justification. If the "negativ" was indeed sacred, as Joe Braun had averred, then what better shrine in which to preserve it than the negative cutting room? And who better to guard its sacredness than the vestal virgins of the white smock? Outside the neg cutting room, women, Grierson claimed, were a disruptive nuisance. They always wanted to get into production, where they had ideas above

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the station to which it had pleased God to call them; and those who hadn't ideas were not above using other talents to wheedle their way into a producer's good graces, and at the same time upset the producer and make his behaviour erratic and unpredictable. It was all right for Grierson to be erratic and unpredictable, but his producers, while required to be imaginative, sensitive, hard working and acute, must also be reliable and predictable. Women—outside the neg cutting room—were apt to have a baleful effect. Grierson professed to be as scared of the wrath of the neg girls and their matron, Beth Bertram, as the rest of us actually were. Sometimes, late at night, he would take a notion to drop down to "the joint" just to see what was going on. But as soon as he squeezed open the door of the neg room to take a peek at the white-smocked girls labouring far into the night under the repellent glow of their fluorescent tubes, he would encounter Beth, arms akimbo and half a head taller than him. "Now really, Mr. Grierson, you know very well you can't come in here!" "Oh, come on now, Beth. Don't be tedious." "Tedious! I like that! You gave the order yourself that no one was to come in here, and now you want me to—" "Oh, God save us. The literalness of females." "Well, anyway, you know you can't come in." Beth was a formidably efficient bluestocking from Toronto's conservative upper crust. In the neg room she showed just that right mixture of peremptoriness and cajolery which is required for this distasteful and basically unrewarding job. Fluorescent light flashing on her rimless glasses, but her lips parted to reveal a really wonderful set of Grade A North American teeth, she stood her ground—an irritating but somehow beguiling mixture of kindliness and ferocity: as of a mother defending its young. Behind her, faces momentarily raised from the negative reels to view the unexpected apparition, was a host of other girls: blonde, quizzical Marian Meadows, a chain-smoker always dropping outside into the lane between us and the French Embassy for a whiff; dark-haired Kay Symons, who would one day become a production assistant sans pareil; smiling, ever-obliging Kay Gillespie; warm-hearted, generous Daphne Lilly, who ended up as the wife of Edgar Anstey; Marian Leigh, brave and touching

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THE WOMEN'S TOUCH widow of Walter Leigh, the composer, with her Mona Lisa smile; and, very briefly, dark-eyed impulsive Mavis Gallant, bristling with just the right mixture of hardihood and self-confidence, who soon left the neg room for the Montreal Standard, later to enjoy international fame as a writer for the New Yorker. All stood now, stretching their aching backs, heads cocked, watching with delight the duel between Beth Bertram, the Queen Bee of the neg room, and John Grierson, the Boss. None of them of course had the faintest doubt as to how it would turn out. Beth, like Mary Losey, whom Grierson employed in New York, was an MA. "I'm sorry, Mr. Grierson, but unless you sign a memo authorizing me to let you in ..." "Oh all right, Beth; all right. Can I stand in a crack in the door?" "If it's not too long." Beth Bertram did not long remain in the negative cutting room. Grierson saw in her something of the incorruptible, something of the 'Whitehall quality' in its best sense. She understood instinctively the demands and disciplines of the public service. And having trained her, he used her to regularize his own often unorthodox methods. She went from neg room to accounts to administration to library, and finally to personnel where she devised useful formulae for hiring imaginative or creative people who might be difficult to fit into the normal public service requirements. Though the majority of the girls did work in the neg room, there was a certain number who were active, and made their mark in distribution, in the library and even in production. Adelaide Ball, a strange girl of massive proportions, lank hair and an olive skin, spent most of her time lugging great, precariously balanced towers of film cans from the lab to the cutting rooms and back again. She seemed to be everybody's Joe Boy and was known, aptly if unkindly, on the analogy of Fontaine Fox's comic strip "The Toonerville Trolley," as "The Powerful (physically) Addie." She bore it all with a mixture of great good nature and a curious detachment, as if she were immune to our jibes and our kidding because she was hearing voices. So indeed it transpired. She showed up one day with a diamond on her engagement finger and a beatific smile on her incurious, olivebrown face. The fellow turned out to be a millionaire from the coast whose possible interest in NFB productions had been somewhat dampened by the stories which his fiancee had told him of how meanly she'd been

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treated. As Grierson observed morosely, watching her board an 'R' streetcar for the last time, diamond and all: "Always be nice to the gairls; you never know who they're going to marry." It was a relief to turn from Adelaide Ball to Marjorie McKay; Marge was a genuine character, a mannish woman who was womanly without being feminine. "A prince of a fellow" was how a visiting film man described her. She walked with a jerky purposeful lope; she had a homemade cigarette constantly pasted to her unmade-up mouth. Her friendly eyes glinted behind rimless bifocals and her originally straw-blonde hair was drawn back off a forehead lined with perpetual puzzlement, and scraped into an untidy bun at the nape of the neck. Marge strode everywhere, often humming snatches of the latest hits "He wears a pair of Silver Wings," or "Mairzy Doats"—with a fierce, absent-minded good nature, as if her thoughts too were elsewhere. But unlike Adelaide Ball, her mind was on current problems, and as often as not, she'd pause in the middle of her loping, dump a pile of cans on a table, whip out a notebook, and with her head on one side to prevent the cigarette smoke from streaming up into her eyes, jot down a note on the latest production. Marge's good nature was as unfailing as her knowledge was encyclopedic. She started off in the library where after a: while she knew not only every significant stock shot but in what can to find it. Her tenacity, blue eyes alight in an enormously attractive plain-Jane face behind the rimless glasses, was legendary. Pencil in hand, tweed skirt rucked up in an irrelevant way, she'd probe the air reminding you of the shot you shouldn't use because it had been used before, by someone else, to prove the opposite point, or perhaps because another rival producer had just asked for the same shot. A sage nod, a twinkle of the eye, a shake of the sand-coloured wispy hair and she was off at a steady lope to cope with someone else's demands. Grierson soon got to hear of her. "This woman should be in production," he announced. Eyes were cast to the ceiling in the big bare room looking out across the broad slate-grey Ottawa River to the Gatineau Hills aflame in autumn glory. Grierson roared his disapproval. "Don't be so goddamned snooty! This gairl has twice the nouse of any one of you! I'm not saying she should produce films, for Christ's sake. She

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THE WOMEN'S TOUCH should monitor them. She's going to be production supervisor from now on, and that means she'll be a watchdog on expense and administrative flummery and generally make you toe the line! All right? All right!" An awkward assignment without a doubt, and one in which many incumbents would have made enemies both lasting and mortal. Not so Marge. Her good sense, good will, good nature in about equal proportions were such that she was able to slip easily into the role of administrative production controller without offending a single one of the dozen or so highly offendable producers on whose budgets she had to keep an eye. Her presence, half standing, half leaning in the open door in the producer's room, was the signal for mock commiseration amongst us. One arm akimbo, the other grasping a sheaf of production cost-sheets, her wispy hair all over the place, the smoke trickling ever upward into her quizzical blue eyes, she waited until we were ready to receive her. "Who is it this time, Marge? Stanley?" A shake of the head. "Dal Jones?" "Anh anh" (i.e. "No."). "Couldn't be me, could it?" "Could." "Okay then, come on in and sit down." But Marge never sat. She perched and it wasn't a considered gesture which one could start and complete. It was a jerky yet flowing movement which ended with you suddenly looking at rather uncomfortable production figures thrust under your nose. When you raised your eyes it was to find hers quizzing you with wry good nature from behind the rimless glasses, and the thin trickle of smoke. Out came a bony capable finger. "Here's where we may be going wrong, I think." A dry, matter-of-fact contralto. "Your unit up in the Gaspe is overshooting. They've taken twelve days already." "But I allowed for twelve." "Sure you did, but you didn't allow for double system. Remember? That sequence was to have been shot on single system to save money. Then along came Bill Burnside and needed the single system—so—" "I gave in like a nice fellow."

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"Exactly and put yourself in the red." "All right, but what about the ten per cent contingency I built in?" "Coming to that. Trouble is you built it in to the total figure. You should have built it in to each section—script, location shooting, sound, lab, the lot—totalled it and then added your ten per cent." "Well, but hold on now; that would mean a contingency factor of damn near twenty per cent!" "You're damn right, it would." "But Production Services says ten per cent." "Sure they do, but not a single producer's honouring it—except you." A half smile hovered on her unlipsticked lips. "You mean, don't be a dope all your life?" "Not a bit of it. It's no part of my job to tell you how to beat the rules. But I can call it to your attention." "Well now, Marge, I don't know how I can fix this. We can't call the unit in from the Gaspe till they've finished shooting, and the weather's been something terrible down there—as you know." "Indeed I do know, because there's another unit in trouble in New Brunswick." "Oh? Whose?" "No names no pack drill." "Sorry Marge, well ..." "Tell you what you can do. You could cut $2000 off the recording costs, because you'll already have a separate track from the double system." "That's an idea." "Then of course, you could write the commentary yourself and save a $500 writer's fee." "Sweated labour, eh?" "Well, it's an idea." "It appeals to my vanity, but not to my pocket." "Oh well," she eased herself up and off the desk corner in a sort of jerky surge. She ground out the butt of her cigarette, having first lit another, and gave a rachitie cough. '"Course," she added, her eyes in a friendly glitter, "you could also, under rule 43, re-cost the production—provided you get it in by—" she paused as she reached the door, gave the faintest of grins, wiped the sandy

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THE WOMEN'S TOUCH hair off the puzzled forehead—"tonight? Okay?" The hand became a friendly dismissive gesture and the tweeded figure stalked purposefully off through the grimy manning pool to the production offices. Marjorie McKay was the point mort, the neutral position occupied by women at NFB. To one side the neg girls—women's natural place in the organization, according to Grierson, along with secretaries and stenos. Like most men he conceived of women as a category of exceptions to the norm: a minority who had somehow to be accommodated and assuaged. For him they were not half the human race. Marge, plumb in the middle, he liked best; hers was not a menial occupation. He could talk to her as an equal; yet the explosive spores of sex never entered into the picture. With the true production women—the creative women—they undoubtedly did. This made such women a factor difficult for Grierson to deal with. Those who bulked largest on this uneasy but potentially, in film terms, most fruitful relationship were three: one from the Ottawa valley and two from the Prairies. Jane Smart was the youngest of the three daughters of a successful patent attorney and company lawyer who was also a patron of the arts and, less predictably (and more discreetly), of the intellectual wing of the Canadian socialist party. The three girls had been educated in what would now be called the permissive school, and in the essentially provincial Ottawa of the thirties they had been a disturbing and disrupting influence. Their literary talk; the arrogance conferred if not by riches then by great comfort; the quick, bright jackdaw-pecking at the latest literary or artistic or musical fashions and wheezes; their electric conversation and patrician good looks: all these combined to make them a heady dish indeed for the sleepy pre-war civil service town. Young second secretaries of the embryo diplomatic service and junior parliamentarians swarmed about them like mayflies. They were known inevitably—following the Deanna Durbin film—as the "Three Smart Girls," and those who disapproved of their bright parties and crackling conversation were not above a sneering pun at the surname. But they were all clever and all attractive. By the time NFB came into the scene, Helen was married and living in the States. Betty was in London and soon to capture the literary critics with By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Jane was in Ottawa. She wrote and published passable poetry, she painted and drew, she played the flute. She gravitated at almost at once to NFB.

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Her passage was not easy, for in the eyes of professionals, or at least of the workers (or those who considered themselves such), there inevitably hung about her the aura of the dilettante. It was thought that she was in wartime films just for the lark, and her own personality did not help her. Anxious to learn fast, she flitted from job to job without at first seeming able to complete a single project on which she was engaged. But her chance came when she persuaded Grierson, quite casually at one of the regrettably infrequent NFB get-togethers fuelled by war-rationed and carefully husbanded rye, that he should make a film on a small town which would somehow epitomize the Canadian war effort. He took her up on it and when he heard the town she had in mind was Paris, Ontario, the name tickled his fancy and he sent her to Paris (pop. 7000) to do an outline treatment. In the end the film was never made, but Jane showed such fertility and inventiveness in the script that she was put onto a production unit as a writer and production assistant. Pretty soon she clicked into her niche as editor, scriptwriter and idea woman for her own program of films on women's activities, and her wayward, unpredictable spirit became totally immersed in a neat, well-turned, no-nonsense film about link trainers, and a romantic epic: Alexis Tremblay— Habitant. With her blonde hair flying, her big expressive face, her turtleneck sweaters and corduroy pants, she soon became as grimy and effective as any producer: soon entered and excelled at the ruthlessly competitive film screenings where we all showed our work and mercilessly scarified each other on an ascetic diet of coffee and doughnuts. After a while Jane went down to New York to work for British Information Services, and just about this time another and more mysterious embryo producer appeared. One day into the producers' room walked a young woman of wellsculptured good looks, brown eyes and big locks of dark brown hair. She carried herself with an air at once reticent and self-confident, a curious mixture of tentativeness and assurance. She offered to all questions a bland mysterious gaze suggesting an inner strength, followed by a secret smile and a noncommittal reply. "I'm Gudrun Bjerring," she said, as if we should know this. We rose to our feet conscious suddenly of our greasy uncut hair, bristle on the chin, dirty fingernails. These hitherto honourable badges of the trade seemed all at once shopworn.

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THE WOMEN'S TOUCH "Yes, Miss Bjerring." "You can call me Gudrun. Mr. Grierson sent me to see you. May I sit down?" She did so demurely on a desk and looked at us with intelligent enquiry. Then, as we said nothing: "Perhaps I'd better explain." "It's an exotic name." "I'm an Icelander. That is, of Icelandic origin." "But from Canada?" She raised very level eyebrows. "But of course. From Winnipeg." "Ah, that explains a lot." For at that time Winnipeg furnished far more than its share of writers, broadcasters, filmmakers, intellectuals and bright young men. Ottawa, indeed the East, was full of them. It was one of the civil service jokes that you could hardly make up a four at bridge without some fellow starting to extol the virtues of Winnipeg. Scratch a typical East Block denizen, with his black fedora hat and briefcase, and you'd find a Winnipegger. There was something about the gateway to the Prairies and the long hard winters that fostered intellectual sharpness and a spare but trenchant vocabulary. But it seemed to us that no one we knew ever went back to Winnipeg. They preferred the fleshpots of the East, the relative closeness of large centres like Montreal and Toronto, and of course New York—that secretly desired nirvana of so many a bright young Canadian. They didn't really want to return to six-month winters with the mercury at thirty below zero ("Of course, we dress for it, you know") and to a city which, however stimulating, had as its nearest neighbour of any size, Minneapolis: 500 miles away. So we turned to Gudrun Bjerring and said: "And when did you leave Winnipeg?" "Three days ago. I came on the Transcontinental." "Two nights and a day." "That's right." One imagined her sitting on the green plush in the stiflingly overheated car while mile after hundred mile of sombre, greeny-black spruce, heavily freighted with snow, slid by in the grey gloom, and the landscape became locked in a featureless glaze of ice and snow. Fifteen hundred miles trundling on the high iron across the Barrens "Well, I suppose, hadn't I better do something?"

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"Of course, of course. If you'll come with me, Gudrun " She got down off the desk and followed Dallas Jones into the cutting room, her self-possessed little figure and dark elfin locks swaying down the corridor into the gloom towards the cutting room of Unit 3. Gudrun started off as a cutter, but soon revealed so original a talent for dealing with children and young people that she became a director of such films. She was a very quiet, extremely persistent worker with an outwardly sweet and accommodating approach which masked a truly tremendous tenacity. She directed a film called Opera School and a full sound documentary [Listen to the Prairies] on the great Winnipeg music festival held each year in the Prairie capital, and from which our opera and theatrical companies and the great Bach choirs of eastern Canada were recruited. Her strength and weaknesses were both well shown in a film which she scripted and directed and I produced [A Friend for Supper]. Its actors were children; its audience was children; and it was designed to stop the waste of food, already considerable, even in those days, though the term "affluent society" had not yet been coined. The film was based on equivocation, and the equivocation was Gudrun's; and yet the film, though its premise was dishonest, was itself an honest film. The government had decided on a film directed specifically at children to ensure that they (and through them their parents) did not have a wasteful attitude toward food. Gudrun conceived the slogan "A friend for supper." It was based on the dubious argument that if you, Johnny Brown, didn't waste your food, then that was in a way—wasn't it?—like having a friend for supper: a little Arab or Indonesian or Yugoslav, who could eat the food that you hadn't wasted? H'mm. I looked quizzical at this. How, I asked Gudrun, could it be proved that a Canadian child, who, having been given say one kilo of food per day, then ate it all instead of leaving half of it on his plate uneaten, contributed to the meal of an undernourished Yugoslav or an Indonesian child? Surely if he didn't eat it all, it would— granted our society—simply be thrown in the garbage pail. Gudrun agreed patiently that this might indeed be so. But if you persuaded a Canadian kid that by not wasting his food, he was having a friend over for supper, this would in the end amount to a saving of food. I said I disagreed. I said that in encouraging the Canadian kid to believe this, we were merely encouraging him to eat more food, or at any rate to consume

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to the limit the unnecessarily large portion which his parent, in accordance with Canadian affluent practice, would have put before him. The thing to do, if you wanted to make more food available for UNRRA and FAQ, was to persuade the kid to eat less rather than more. Gudrun didn't agree. Speaking as one would to a rather tired child, she explained that the purpose of the film was to get the child to eat and not waste what was put before him. Therefore if you persuaded the child that eating what was put before him was like having a friend for supper—and dramatized this by a scene in which little Arabs and Yugoslavs and Indonesians were shown supping with little Canadians—the film would put across its message. I remained dubious and unconvinced, but Gudrun seemed so positive, so keen and so quietly determined that I gave the go-ahead. My misgivings were without foundation. She shot the film as planned. Despite the equivocal logic it was an instant and continuing success with children—and with adults. Whether it resulted in direct saving of food was arguable, but by vividly dramatizing the problem it made us all more aware of the necessity to save and not to waste. Gudrun didn't crow. She simply thanked me for allowing her to go ahead with the film; its success, she was sure, was due as much to my friendly help and guidance as to her own abilities as a director. She was deeply grateful. But her brown eyes shone, her long brunette hair bobbed and on her face was the smile of the cat that has swallowed the cream. From then on she was her own producer as well as her own director. The power of the tender trap had once more been proved. It was only in taking farewell of Gudrun, as she went on to greener fields, that I remembered a fellow member of the Icelandic community in Winnipeg who had already made an entry and who proved to be one of the more remarkable personalities ever to be associated with the NFB: Margaret Ann Bjornson. It so happened that I had met Margaret Ann some time before she came to NFB. Following the occupation of Iceland by Allied forces, including Canadians, there had been some suggestion that the Icelandic community of Canada, which had been established in Manitoba since the 1870s, would be interested in a ceo about its ancient homeland. A byproduct of the research connected with the film was the discovery that the Icelandic community was itself well worth a film as an example of our immigrant mosaic which, while retaining a strong individuality, had

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adjusted successfully to the Canadian social pattern, and of whom, along with other pieces of the mosaic, sacrifices were now expected. The fact that the Chairman of the National Film Board, Hon. Joseph Thorson, was an Icelandic Canadian may also have had something to do with it. His knowledge of the Winnipeg community was wide and deep. In due course, therefore, having just emerged from a film about gun production, I received instructions from Grierson to go and see Joe Thorson. The Minister suggested that I get out to Winnipeg at once and make contact with Miss Bjornson. She turned out to be a girl in her early twenties with a lovely figure and a magnificent head of silky golden hair (though her father, curiously enough, was one of the "dark" Icelanders). But she had also, and unexpectedly, a seriousness of manner and intellectual approach which were frankly frightening. She had also a delivery of speech so mannered that at first I simply didn't believe in her, thinking, as perhaps most young men would have done, that she was putting on an act. It took us many years of working with Margaret Ann to realize this mistake, and it robbed us of some valuable company. But on this distant day, as I set out with her in a rented Dodge to explore Iceland on the prairies and prepare a shooting script, I found her monologues excruciating and longed for the arrival of the rest of the crew who were due in from the East in a few days. We visited the grim scraped "interlake" region of Manitoba to look at Icelandic settlements at Ashern and Lundar; we swung south into the more fertile valley of the Assiniboine to find at Glenboro Mr. Tryggvi Arnason who, having told us with great relish and many times over coffee and ponnukokur how he had "f— the Cockshutt Plow Company," was at once cast for the hero of our film. We went north up Lake Winnipeg, an immense sheet of water 200 miles long but very shallow, in search of Icelandic settlements. We visited Gimli ("Heaven") where the immigrants had first settled; Hnausa where we saw an Icelandic fair with the girls in floppy red and white dresses; and finally Riverton where we were entertained to a reading in Icelandic of his own poems by a genuine bard, with the truly wonderful name of Guttormur Guttormsson. We returned to Winnipeg to listen to the Icelandic male voice choir under the baton of Ragnar H. Ragnar. We hobnobbed with the local Icelandic undertaker

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THE WOMEN'S TOUCH ("How's business?" "Business is dead, ha! ha!"). We listened to folk legends and myths from the lips of Rev. Egill Fafhis. We visited the offices of Heimskringla and Logberg, the two Icelandic language weeklies; and we endeavoured, without much success, to persuade ourselves that Sargent Avenue, focus of the Icelandic community, was more different from the rest of Winnipeg than it actually was. Throughout all this intense research Margaret Ann was constantly suggesting places to be visited, personalities to be interviewed, and astute slants to be watched for: such as the almost unconscious (and entirely unself-conscious) lapse into the old mother tongue by these extremely North American editors and farmers and doctors wherever they rose from the table: Takkfyrir matin ("Thanks for the 'feed'"); or the discovery near Guttormsson's rather dreadful gamboge-painted modern frame house of a pioneer log cabin used by the early settlers, but now forgotten and despised. After a week's work in the local hotel the script was ready. A few days later a cameraman and assistant came from Ottawa and we were a team of four until the film was shot. Eventually—over a year later owing to wartime exigencies—it was released in 16mm Kodachrome (with even Tryggvi Arnason's pigs looking glamorous) as Iceland on the Prairies. Throughout the entire shooting Margaret Ann was, in our gross male view, obstructively assiduous. She rarely stopped giving us advice, most of it good and most of it, I'm sorry to say, ignored: partly because she was a girl, but partly because her highly inarticulate non-stop conversation got under our skins and made us, in male self-defence, more bristly and blowsy than we really were. With golden hair flying she would buttonhole us with lengthy expositions of shots that we ought to take. These harangues were delivered in a slow, heavily emphasized, Prairie drawl and with an expression of singular intensity. They would include not only the shot and the reason for it, and the place it would probably have in the film, but its relationship to the sociological background of the Icelandic people, its philosophical origins and its moral justification. To say that she was a bore would be wide of the mark because, apart from her striking and unusual looks, boredom implies a comprehension of her vocabulary and intellectual gymnastics which we did not have.

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A few months after the film was finished, Margaret Ann turned up at NFB and her true worth was at once appreciated by the English. She joined Legg's "World in Action" unit as research assistant, idea woman and expert in locating stock shots. Eventually she became someone against whose sharp intelligence, vivid personality, formidable powers of argumentation and disconcertingly rough, mannish sense of humour we could all sharpen and hone our own wits. In this role she proved invaluable, and it was gradually borne in on us that our own lack of appreciation arose from the essential conformism of Canadian society. Because Canadians are apt to distrust "originals" we distrusted her. She exercised her wits in a way that was unfamiliar to us. It was all right to be "bright" but it should be in the recognized Canadian pattern. To be eccentric, even if brilliant, was frowned upon. Margaret Ann was both an eccentric and an original, and furthermore she remained absolutely consistent. She really loved ideas and loved to play about with them, and though she seemed highly mannered, the manner was entirely natural to her and never varied in all her years at NFB. It was really marvellous entertainment to behold this striking girl, with her great mass of honey blonde hair, seriously arguing in the midst of a pack of young NFB intellectuals on the scent, and often besting them, albeit with graciousness so that she would not have her position weakened by becoming involved in the war between men and women. And after a while—perhaps rather too long a while—she won us all over. Our distrust turned to admiration and to affection as well. And though it's really outside the scope of this story, it's worth telling the end of the tale, which was that after the war she went to England where she met, and later married, a great figure in British documentary, Arthur Elton, and found herself well able to wrestle with and to master the subtle English prods and caste knives-in-the-ribs of those who were "really astonished, my dear, that this Canadian girl should have nobbled—" And after thirty years her mannered naturalness, her unassuming dignity remained total and inviolate.

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Margaret Ann's originality drew into her orbit an extraordinary human grab bag. She had a small apartment above Delisle's drug store on St. Patrick Street in Ottawa's Lower Town: a dreary perspective of frame houses clad in asphalt "stone," brick and clapboard, and threaded by a double tramline on whose wiggly, wobbly tracks the beat-up wartime streetcars clunked by on their square or triangular wheels. The apartment was flanked by a fire hall and a Catholic church of mournful grey limestone, and gave at the rear onto a bleak and scruffy playground where children of the nearby Catholic separate school scuffled in the mud beneath the forlorn arms of citified trees already riddled with Dutch elm disease. In winter, however, locked in the featureless glaze of snow and ice, under scintillating lights and in air that tore at your throat like a file, the prospect had a certain crisp and tingling assertiveness. But the little flat, warm and cosy, fuelled with a reasonable supply of rye whisky from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, and presided over by Margaret Ann's vigorous personality, was a magnet in wartime Ottawa. To it came almost every important visitor concerned with the mass media. They varied in the extreme: Margaret Meade, the social anthropologist, with her bangs and her dry drawl, who once demolished with rasping sarcasm an importunate and hirsute young man who happened to bear the

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same name as the author of a recently published and world-famous sociological report, "What did you say your name was? Beveridge?" Robert Flaherty, the grand old founder of "men-against-the-sky" documentary, perennial friend and disputant of Grierson's, almost filled the flat. A great amiable hulk of a fellow with a mane of white hair, he had the face of a poet and the trickiness of the great professional: part magician, part mountebank. Because Nanook of the North, that earliest of real-life documentaries, had been made in Canada, Flaherty was something of a hero and father figure to Canadians. Grierson called him an old fraud, but this was affectionate, and simply meant that in his view Flaherty, by gross oversimplification and obsession with the true romantic poetry of human grandeur as opposed to realism, was performing a conjuror's trick. All those sweaty-faced fishermen in Man ofAran; that luminously poetical but basically irrelevant man-boy relationship in Louisiana Story; even the kayaks and ice storms of Nanook: what did they really mean beside the social significance of Industrial Britain, the film that he and Flaherty had made together in the thirties? After wordy debate they agreed to disagree, but it was Margaret Ann who brought them together. To the flat came Sir Frederick Puckle ICS, who told us he thought A Passage to India the most shocking and subversive book he'd ever read; Lawrence Freiman, proprietor of Ottawa's largest department store, who became wide-eyed on the floor of the flat listening to the windy arguments swirl about his head and thinking how this intellectual slumming was really much more fun than his own work in the bazaars of trade, richly rewarding though it might be in monetary terms. Yet when all was said and done it was less the outsiders than the insiders whom we preferred at the flat. We were a true "in" group—perhaps the first, certainly a very early one. Few treats were more exquisite than visiting the local cinema with one's colleagues so as to comment disparagingly on every jump-cut, every out-of-sync sound sequence, every grainy showprint and every enlarged, spluttering cue-mark as the projectionist changed reels. And few parties were more keenly enjoyed than those in which Margaret Ann's flat was joined by that of her next-door neighbours, Norman McLaren and Guy Glover, and their crowd of animators, artists and musical friends. Then the wordy flow, the beer, the rye and the cigarettes did really produce, about 2 a.m. on a night when

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the sky creaked at twenty below zero (i.e. fifty-two degrees of frost), the genuine stuff of group creation. One always hesitates to use the word "genius." It is a highly emotive word which normally induces in the reader (especially if he be AngloSaxon) a powerful distaste for the person to whom it is applied. Nevertheless in respect of Norman McLaren I have to crave the reader's indulgence. McLaren was not simply an animator; he had a sense of invention so delicate, so inexhaustibly fertile, so vividly and constantly informed with a sense both of wit and of beauty that to see even a one-minute animated film by him (and his films were rarely more than five minutes long) was to experience a unique and unrepeatable glimpse of another world. McLaren was the true pied piper, and those of us privileged to see his beautiful, witty and incredibly inventive films felt, when they ended, like the crippled boy from Hamelin who had been unable to follow the piper through the fissure in the rock but who had momentarily glimpsed a world of astonishing beauty. McLaren was not an animator in the Disney sense. This is not to disparage that great master but simply to emphasize that McLaren was an individual and not part of a team. Where Disney required a whole studio full of cameras, artists and special effects men, McLaren required only himself, paintbrushes and paper clips. Where Disney required thousands of plastic or celluloid overlays, photographed in depth by an optical camera, and moved each frame or series of frames by an unseen corps of individual animators on ladders working from a storyboard, McLaren required only the actual film stock itself. The reason was that he drew, painted, scratched, etched, scribbled directly on to film. This gave his work a character, a personality similar to that of an artist's line or wash, and since McLaren was in addition no mean artist, some wonderfully flexible visions of wit, beauty and immediacy were produced. We first saw McLaren in the fall of 1941. At that time the manning pool, crammed with sweatered and dirndled workers, contained as many movieolas as desks. Grierson strode, swift and chunky, into the pool and clapped his hands for silence—a habit to which he was addicted. "All right now, children! You're going down to the theatre to see an original McLaren. But before that you'd better see him and here he is." Few of us had noticed the slight fellow beside Grierson: grey baggy

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pants, openwork sandals and a turtleneck sweater; above it a soft, intelligent, essentially inward-looking face, marked by thin tortoiseshell spectacles and topped by a curling unruly mass of black hair. The pose was diffident, almost apologetic; the voice when it came almost equally so; but in a soft Scots burr, and behind it a bite and precision that sprang from intimate acquaintance with his strange craft and complete certainty as to where he was going. He squiggled himself about on one sandalled foot and twisted his knotted hands before him as if he were a young girl performing at an elocution class. "I'm going to show you two films. The first I made in New York last year with Mary Ellen Bute (some of us raised eyebrows: these pretentious Yankee names!). Unfortunately, she's not here today to see it. It's based on Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre and it's rather tentative—" "Primitive McLaren," Grierson interjected. McLaren gave a wintry smile. "The second film is one I'm making for the Wartime Prices and Trade Board here. It's to encourage investment in War Savings Certificates and it's called 5 for 4 because," he shrugged his shoulders apologetically, "you get five dollars with accrued interest if you invest four dollars. This is only a workprint, but Grierson said I could show it to you. Because it's a workprint, it's in black and white but the showprint will be in colour, once we get the separation negatives made. I believe it's going into the theatres," he finished shyly. "You bet your life it's going into the theatre," said Grierson aggressively. "And my guess is it'll do more to help war savings than all Donald Gordon's episcopal thunderings!" Gordon was Chairman of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board. "Okay. Let's go!" We trooped downstairs to the theatre, uncertain what we should see or quite how seriously to take this fey fellow McLaren. Danse Macabre turned out to be an ingenious but uncertainly developed theme of skipping skeletons and skulls descending hellward to the Saint-Saens music. It was titillating, made you tingle a bit, but seemed to foreshadow no strongly original performance. But when the strains of Albert Ammons, the great boogie-woogie pianist, hit the still darkened screen, we knew, even while we waited through aeons of white leader liberally splotched with giant grease-pencil marks, that we were in for something heroic. As the strains

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of "Bass Boogie" beat on our ears, eldritch forms began to appear on the screen. They were dollar bills, but they limned and dislimned and flowed and contorted, and they were suddenly chairs, flowerpots, roosters, beanpoles, ladders, snakes, pots and pans, even (and with the possibility of an entire drawing appearing only on a single frame—one twenty-fourth of a second—how could you be sure?) jerries or pots de chambre. Was ESP at work? It was of course far too early for LSD. The little signs hopped and twitched and flickered; became blobs, amoebae, floating eyes, floating figures, transformed in a brilliant blaze of slithery line from plus to minus and all at once they were "5" and took a bow and the film was over. After a few moments of stunned silence there was a burst of tremendous and prolonged applause. This cynical and brutal audience of young professional filmmakers had met their master and they knew it. Thereafter the fastidious recutting of the workprint continued at the movieolas in the manning pool; and whenever the strain of Albert Ammons' "Bass Boogie" began to clatter through the gaunt and echoing room, we would steal from our desks and our rewinds to watch and listen, while outside through the big bare window, the Gatineau Hills turned from red and bronze to a bleak blue-black, and the slate grey Ottawa River slowly filmed with ice. Throughout his subsequent career McLaren remained a lonely oneman unit, turning out exquisitely timeless yet timely two- to five-minute films. He sat on a high stool in a small ill-lit room with beaverboard partitions. The raw film ran over a reel before him; between him and the film was a magnifying glass to enable him to wield his pens, pencils, brushes or burins in this essentially miniaturist's art. Beside him lay his tools and his paints. The set-up was not unlike that of a dentist with his chair and his revolving china tray with all those delicate, murderous implements we hate so much. But no nurse, though later he took into partnership an Ottawa girl named Evelyn Lambart whom he trained to his methods, and between them they produced some charming films on mathematics. But essentially McLaren was a one-man show. He had to be because the lightning metamorphoses on which his highly individual films depended required that he draw directly and personally on every single frame of film. Thus in a three-minute film—say 270 feet—there would be over 4000 individual drawings. McLaren kept a miraculous balance

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between planning and idiosyncrasy. Clearly it was necessary for him to plan each sequence ahead; equally clearly he could not be handicapped by this. If, as he was working on a film, drawing directly onto it by pencil or brush, his inventive spirit decided that an eye was to turn into an ear rather than into a water-jug or a duck, he had to be free to make this change. And however fluid and fluent the line might ultimately appear, each single frame had to be drawn separately, bearing in mind that it would ultimately flow through the gate of the projector at twenty-four drawings per second. Clearly here was an astonishingly flexible time factor injected into the sequence. An image could change from, say, a broom to a ladder in two, four, eight, sixteen, twenty, or twenty-four frames. It all depended on a highly individual artist's whim: in this case McLaren's. When these tiny drawings, less than the size of a postage stamp, were blown up in projection onto a theatre screen about twelve feet by twenty, there were of course enormous peripheral distortions, as of a hair seen under a microscope; but the basic flow of line and pattern remained. McLaren went on with his linear transformation to produce such delights as Blinkity Blank in which two amoebae, red and blue, behave like mating humans and eventually explode into each other. But being also an artist he was not content solely to draw directly onto film. He experimented also with the more conventional "artwork," i.e., drawings and paintings on black cards subsequently photographed by the optical camera. With this technique he produced effects of very great beauty. As an experiment he did a series of luminous transformations on Bocklin's Isle of the Dead whereby in a series of cross-fades the isle became alive with denizens from McLaren's own astonishingly fertile imagination. Some of his most poignantly beautiful successes were made with French Canadian folk songs. In C'est I'aviron the star-filled landscape rushes past in a series of cross-faded zooms while the prow of the canoe oscillates gently before the viewer, giving the impression that he is in a magic vessel bound through strange lands to outer space as the choir sings: "C'est L'aviron qui nous mene, qui nous mene; / C'est 1'aviron qui nous mene en haut." In La Poulette Grise he branched into colour to create an astonishingly beautiful series of romantically decorated hens with the rich invention one associates with a Ukrainian Christmas egg. As we change from la poulette noire qui a perdu dans rarmoire to la poulette grise qui pond dans I'eglise, we

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merge in and out as each bird, more gorgeously decorated than the last, takes its place on the screen. McLaren's flat was like his films, full of whimsy, wit and wonder. On the walls were convoluted line drawings, Steinbergian in their complexity and inventiveness, but of a fluidity rarely equalled by the New Yorker master. In one corner he had fixed up with only a mirror and bits of wire a latter-day version of the stereoscope, into which he inserted from time to time fresh "slides" from his drawing board. Since he drew directly onto film, it was obviously only a matter of time before McLaren would start to draw or paint directly onto the soundtrack, and to experiment with the noises thereby produced. They began with grunts, squishes, blips and groans, but ended with synthetic music of a weird and otherworldly quality. His was the original musique concrete, long before tapes and wire-recorders and electronically produced sounds. His squares, triangles and wavy lines painted direct on the track produced, when developed and printed, the true music of the spheres which Sir Bernard Lovell would instantly have recognized. Though none of McLaren's colleagues matched his inventive genius, they had among them enough talent to sink a ship, and many of his coworkers have since become animators in their own right: George Dunning, Jim McKay, Evelyn Lambart. Sharing McLaren's flat was Guy Glover, a producer-director rather than an animator, but the creator nevertheless of one excursion into animation so original that it deserves mention. Pottering around in the optical camera room one day, while the harassed optical cameraman sought to translate the incoherent streaks of red grease pencil on our workprints into the fades and dissolves that would set out sequences on the road to cinematic immortality (or bridge an awkward gap where the shot lacked five feet of action), Glover came across and became intrigued with Harry Foster's "wipe box." A wipe in screen terminology occurs when one image, instead of fading out, or dissolving into or simply cutting away to another image, is literally "wiped" off the screen by the succeeding image in a hard-edged moving line. The wipe may be vertical, horizontal or diagonal; it may be fast or slow; it may open a hole in the middle of image A through which image B poured on like treacle, or explode in a starburst: the varieties are limitless. The point is that wipes are very dramatic and gimmicky, and as

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documentary acolytes we were counselled by Grierson against their too frequent use. Glover, in turning over the wipes in Foster's box, conceived the notion of setting them to music as a mobile abstraction in colour. Though he was following in the footsteps of Len Lye's Colourbox, his attack was original. The tune he picked was a Sousa march, "Washington Post," and by dint of immense concentration, interminable and often tedious work with innumerable dupe negatives, cutting on every eleventh frame and again on every seventeenth, he was able to produce in full colour Marching the Colours. He matched the movement of the wipes to the beat of the music and the colour to the tonal mood, and created thus a highly stimulating five-minute film which, while entirely abstract, filled the audience with joy and achieved the desirable Griersonian end of making them leave the theatre with a spring to their step. Such unfortunately was not the effect of the remarkable and highly original films of Alexandre Alexeieff, the French animator who spent some time with us as McLaren's guest. Alexeieff was the inventor and sole practitioner of Vecran aux epingles, or screen of needles. This can best be described as a bed of compressible needles sticking out edgewise toward the audience rather like the spines of a hedgehog. By depressing and extending these myriad needles with held objects of various shapes and types and then photographing the result, Alexeieff was able to produce effects of strange and haunting beauty where images limned and dislimned into one another like shimmering underwater images. But though we enjoyed the prestige of having him work at NFB, we were a bit gruff about Alexeieff. Too much the self-centred dreamer; too aloof from the hurly-burly of a world on the march.

Around the animators and the optical cameramen and the art room gathered also the musicians, the music editors and the musicologists, and often too one would encounter them in McLaren's flat engaged in wordy debate or drilling holes in the air with their forefingers. The one I admired most was Louis Applebaum. We'd both worked together on a film [Callfor Volunteers, 1941] with the, at first sight, unpromising theme of women's volunteer

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war work in the city of Winnipeg. Apart from the totally unsuspected drama of this work, the film was exciting as the first for which I'd ever been allowed to commission an original musical score. It was exciting I think for Louis Applebaum as the first film for which he ever wrote a musical score. We met in a high state of mutual euphoria to run a workprint through the movieola down at Associated Screen News' cutting rooms in Montreal. Gazing at me with highly intelligent and penetrating brown eyes, across a thicket of rewinds and four-ways, was a young man in his middle twenties with thick, black, curly hair, an amused mouth and a sense of urgent excitement about him that was palpable, that filled the whole cutting room with a zestful tremor. "Well, Lou, there it is. As you can see, only one reel. And I don't think we're going to need ten minutes of music, only about six." "That's it, that's it." His curly head nodded feverishly and he whipped manuscript paper out of his pocket and laid it on the cutting bench, perching beside it. "I thought of an opening, of course." "Over the main title assembly?" "Sure, and fading out under the opening shot." "Into crowd noises for buzz of female conversation?" "Right." "And closing music?" "Oh, right, of course." "Then I'd thought of the central sequence at the blood donor clinic." "So had I, and also where that tough sergeant-type woman climbs into a truck. Something oompty-toompty and mildly satirical, you know." I slapped my thigh. "This is great. We seem to be—" "Thinking alike?" "Right. Now what else?" "Well, that's for you to say, Graham, really. It's your picture." "But it's your music—or it's going to be." He gave a bright warm smile. "Right. Then I'd thought of three more places." He raised a long capable hand and started to tick them off on his fingers. "The sequence where they fetch the kids from school—you know—for the mothers who are working in factories; then the shots where they drive out to help the truck

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farmer, with big views of prairie skies. Something bold and lyrical and sweeping." "Something Khachaturian, maybe?" "Let's say something Applebaum. And finally that place where they're working in the railroad yards at night, helping to oil the locomotives. Agree?" "All except for the last, I do. I'd thought of sound effects there." "Well, okay, but how about train effects rather than sound effects— through music, I mean." "You mean Honegger: Pacific 231 stuff?"

"Something like that." He leaped down off his perch on the cutting bench and onto the balls of his feet. "Anyway, we can argue that later. This is my first movie, so I'm not making conditions." "Neither am I, but well, okay; you want to get the sequences timed first. To the second, don't forget!" "Sure, then I can go away and compose the music. That is, I certainly hope I can do it away from the film." "I'll leave you to it." When I left he was bent over the movieola, eye glued to the viewer and stopwatch in hand. I thought, this is going to be good and this man is going to be good; and then I had another and more dreadful thought. Budget. I walked back into the cutting room. There he was with his black curly head still bent over the movieola. "Hey Lou. Sorry to interrupt, but you know we've only $250." "Don't worry, I'm not planning a symphony." "But your own fee as composer has to come out of that." He gestured with shrugging arms. "So what? It's experience. You pay my fare, Toronto-Montreal return, and my hotel bill. I cut the coat according. Maybe," he leaned the high stool back against the wall and gazed ruminatively at the ceiling, "maybe piano, clarinet, couple of fiddlers, cello, traps: that would probably do it." "And you can fix it all up with the Musicians' Union?" "You bet." He gave a big smile and turned back to the movieola. He finished the score in a week, and as NFB was again jammed to the roof with production we went down to Associated Screen News to record it. In those days ASN was all that NFB was not: smooth, professional, efficient,

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bland and commercial. In our simplicity, we envied ASN its wonderful labs and its physical plant, including a great sound studio. When our own lab couldn't process our rushes in a hurry, Bill Singleton, the rumbustious ginger-headed superintendent at ASN, could always manage them for us, at commercial rates naturally. When we needed a sound stage, Gordon Sparling, the lean, saturnine head of production, would simply dip his dark moustache into an office intercom and space was hired. Did we need a newsreel cameraman in a hurry? Roy Tash, his Adolphe Menjou features rendered melancholy by many an encounter with security guards and PROs, would be there on the dot. They even had all their gear painted green so that when it was dumped at a remote railway station or airport it was instantly recognizable, whereas our own NFB stuff lay in a jumble of unidentifiable confusion. Where we were ad hoc, they were all for planning; where we never knew what our costs were going to be, they had double-entry bookkeeping. Where we had the manning pool, and desks three to a room in the old lumber mill, they had neat vinyl-tiled offices, frosted glass partitions, efficient secretaries in kewpie spectacles and crisp jabots, and a building scientifically designed for the most expensive and efficient production of film. We were thoroughly and unmanningly overawed. Until one day we discovered that despite the glamorous secretaries and air-cooled offices, they were markedly short on ideas, whereas we, despite our ramshackly and scruffy surroundings, were absolutely bursting with ideas. When that truth dawned, we ceased to be awed by ASN and its formidable managing director Ben Norrish who, though he'd smoked cigars behind an executive desk for many years, would often descend without notice to a cutting room and splice a reel just to show the hired help he hadn't forgotten how to do it. Montreal, the metropolis of Canada, had always had a fine contempt for Ottawa, which it regarded as a village in the sticks suddenly jumped up and overblown with wartime power. This attitude was naturally reflected at ASN, which was not all that keen to see a bunch of ramshackle amateurs from Ottawa come bursting into town with half-baked ideas and shrill demands backed, and in wartime too, by government fiat. They put up with us, especially when we commandeered their big sound studio; but one sensed a supercilious grin behind it all. Even after we'd ceased to be awed by ASN we always had time for

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Gordon Sparling and his musical director Lucio Agostini. Sparling was a sensitive director who strove against the machine, the lab and newsreel outfit which ASN essentially was; and in the end when he couldn't buck it any longer, he departed for the Canadian Army Film Unit which he headed with great distinction. He left behind him a notable monument in The Peoples of Canada, a film which, long before it became fashionable to do so, emphasized our Canadian duality. Lucio Agostini—"Lootch"—was just about the most proficient professional film musician we'd ever met. Without being in any sense a great or outstanding composer, he could write at the drop of a hat any kind of original music you wanted and though it wasn't memorable, neither was it banal. He was a sort of Canadian Max Steiner and for years the themes and colour-tones that he wove for NFB films were used and reused from the sound library in many contexts. He worked fast and accurately and seemed to have a facility for agreeable and apt composition similar to that of Sullivan. But he composed "to the frame," and when the time came for Lou Applebaum to record the music for what it had now been decided to title Call for Volunteers, Lootch pulled me aside. "This guy's fantastic," he said, shaking his olive, good-natured visage from side to side. "In what way?" "The trouble he's taken. Look, here's the manuscript. He's composed real music—thematic original material—right to the very end of every sequence." "What's wrong with that?" "Just that there's no point, ever, in knocking yourself out writing good stuff for the end of a sequence when you know in advance it'll simply be faded down and out by the recording engineer." "In the final mix?" "Exactly. What's the point of writing immortal music that no one's going to hear? A straight vamp-till-ready would do." "Did you ever hear of the fellow who carved the underneath of a chair, and rebuked the doubters with the words 'God sees it'?" "Can't say I have. But I see your point." "This is Lou's first picture, he's young and he's a perfectionist." Lootch grinned. "You must be all of thirty yourself."

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"Well, Lootch, you'll just have to forgive us naive and eager youngsters." "Forgive? Listen, this fellow writes beautiful music but get him to be more flexible in his next film. No one's riding to heaven on music you don't hear." "Thanks, Lootch, I'll tell him that—after the recording." The music for Call for Volunteers was exactly right: sprightly and just a bit cheeky; and with sufficient atonalism and wonderful discords to make it seem avant-garde without frightening off the traditionalists: those who listen, that is. For the sad thing is that most moviegoers, like most listeners to Musak, only hear gross mood music; finer shades always escape them, and there is therefore a tendency to write coarsely for the films, knowing that the image will always distract. This we never did at NFB and further we were also in heavy reaction against the Hollywood practice of the '30s of never fading the music completely out so that it became a muted background to all the action, surging forward at dramatic moments to underline heavily a psychological point which you'd already grasped. Such music was intrusive and impertinent, and we all eschewed it. Most of all Lou. Though Grierson might refer ironically to "the second coming of Christ," Lou's music was rarely intrusive and there were also, later, periods of effective silence between his sequences. We worked together on a number of films after this; one of them, Wartime Housing, was in fact saved by Lou. The subject was sponsored personally by Rt. Hon. C.D. Howe, Minister of Munitions and Supply, and hence there was a strong emphasis on doing things, on stressing that through Wartime Housing you got the worker to the job and on the job, and very little emphasis on the skimpy, utterly basic, prefabricated box which was provided. We naturally wanted to inject a strong note of social justice into the film, but the sponsor considered this was "just frills," so that apart from the final resounding and, under the circumstances, pitiably defiant commentary, "for there must not be, there shall not be shack towns tomorrow!" the burden of social significance was carried entirely by Lou's music. Lou became prolific and reliably predictable, though never as to theme. And in due course he too learned to cut corners, though never so sharply as Lootch. Lootch's music was always smoother, but you knew what was coming. Lou's always had a few rough edges but was thematically more original,

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though filmically more intrusive than Lootch's, and hence the object of raised eyebrows, for nothing so enraged a producer as the thought that his composer was trying to compete with him for audience reaction. In one two-month period Lou composed and conducted three original—in both senses—film scores for three very different documentaries in simultaneous production. One of these was Dallas Jones' film A Man and His Job; the other two were for me: Coal Face, Canada, and Handle with Care. The former contained the synthetic mine disaster sequence ("You and G.W. Pabst, eh?" sneered the doubters as they compared our effort with Kameradschafi). Though Joe Braun's "sacred negativ" was dramatic in the extreme, we needed something extra to place it solidly in the memory of the old miner who was relating tales of his youth. Lou provided this while at the same time working on the music of Handle with Care. Naturally this was about explosives and yet they had to be treated in a jauntily dapper way if they were not to overwhelm the audience. These were industrial incentive films to encourage men and women on the job and those whom it was hoped to bring to the job. It would hardly do to give the audience the impression that those working in explosives factories were likely at any minute to be blown sky-high. The emphasis had to be on safety, but also on a light-hearted sort of responsibility. Once more Joe Braun provided two unforgettable images: close-ups of anxious but reliable faces for which Lou gave us some spooky music; and a wonderful thumb's-up from a truck driver speeding carefully though the night with a load of TNT. Lou's "victory" music for this sequence left us all feeling a little more confident that we were going to beat Hitler. Shortly after this Lou became staff composer. Grierson put Eugene Kash in charge of the music department with overall responsibility for editing and recording. But the actual writing of music was done by Lou and a team of composers whom he hired on contract or added to the staff of the NFB. There was hardly a composer of any note in those days who didn't get assignments from NFB. Barbara Pentland with her plangent arabesques; Bernard Naylor, who performed the impossible task of making a single phrase repeat itself crescendo for forty-eight bars, in the manner of Ravel's Bolero; Maurice Blackburn (as he was French-speaking, it was Blagboorn), whose swinging romantic cadences conjured up the violent contrasts of the Canadian seasons; and John Weinzweig, whose bleak

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Graham Mcinnes. Photo by F. TyrellC 1945 National Film Board of canada. All Rights reserved

Angela Thirkell with her three sons: Graham (left), Lance (centre), and Colin. Melbourne, Australia, 1923. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Angela Thirkell, Melbourne 1925. Portrait by Thea Proctor. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Graham and colin are reunited with ther father james mcInnes toromto 1935 courtesy simon mcInnes

Tea Party in the Director's office, National Gallery of Canada, celebrating arrangements for the Tate Gallery exhibition of the Group of Seven and other Canadian artists in 1938. Seated left to right: Eric Brown (Director), H.S. Southam (Chair of the Board of Trustees, 1928 to 1948), Bess Harris, Dorothy McCurry. Standing left to right: Donald Buchanan, Graham Mclnnes, Duncan Campbell Scott, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, and Arthur Lismer. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Telegram to Graham Mclnnes from John Grierson, two months into Grierson's term as Film Commissioner, regarding Mclnnes's script for General Line. The telegram reads: Ottawa Ont 1258P Dec 8 1939 Graham Mclnnes 47A Howland Ave Toronto General Line script good though probably more visual material suggested than film can handle stop cases of actual bond buying particularly by large business men and industrialists should be given in greater detail and slowed down for demonstration e g purchase by someone of size of president of sun life stop if you can do further work on it would appreciate amended version by Monday morning JOHN GREERSON [sic]

Early NFB Logo. C national Film board of canada All Rights reserved

John Grierson, c. 1940. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Entrance to NFB offices at 25 John Street, Ottawa ("the old lumber mill"). Photo by F. Tyrell. © 1949 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Guy Glover, senior producer. Photo by C. Blown. © 1952 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

A picture of the crowded NFB conditions at John Street. Photo by F. Royal. © 1945 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Mclnnes (third from left) goes over the script on the set for the documentary film The Plot Thickens, 1944. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Mclnnes (standing, centre) on an NFB set between takes, c. 1944. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Tom Daly, affectionately known as "Mr. Fix-it," c. 1940s. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Stanley Hawes with his perpetual cigarette, c. 1940. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

A.Y. Jackson. Still from Canadian Landscape, Mclnnes's film for his "Canadian Artists" series. © 1941 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Stuart Legg (left) and John Grierson (right). © 1943 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Story conference. Left to right: James Beveridge, Ross McLean, Guy Glover, George Ayotte (?), and Jacques Brunet (?), c. 1945. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Gudrun Bjerring Parker. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart working on the hand-drawn animated film Begone Dull Care. © 1949 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Gudrun Bj erring Parker in the editing room, with husband Morten Parker. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Ernest Borneman, film producer, c. 1940s, checking film footage on a movieola, an editing machine able to run sync-sound. Betty Brunke is checking film on a hand-cranked viewer. Photo by Ronny Jacques. © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

John Grierson (left) and Ralph Foster, Head of Graphics at NFB (right), examining NFB posters, February 1944. Courtesy National Archives of Canada.

Stuart Legg, c. 1945. © 1952 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Norman McLaren. Photo by Gar Lunney. © 1951 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

NFB animation department. © 1944 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Stan Jackson, director, and Gudrun Bjerring Parker, producer, inspecting film. Photo by F. Tyrell. © 1948 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Joan and Graham Mclnnes, 1945. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Norman Gilchrist, Graham Mclnnes, and Saul Rae (Canadian diplomat and father of politician Bob Rae) at the piano in September 1945. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

A selection of books written by Graham Mclnnes.

Graham Mclnnes presenting his credentials to Rene Maheu, Director-General of UNESCO, July 1965. Courtesy Simon Mclnnes.

Graham Mclnnes, Member of UNESCO's Executive Board to 1968. Courtesy ^itn/~»r^ A/T/->T-M »-\ ni-> J Simon Mclnnes.

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eloquent discords, verging at times on atonalism, drew from Grierson the gruff comment: "Why does he have to be so goddamned Byzantine?" Finally Lou was joined by Eldon Rathburn, a jolly, shaggy New Brunswicker out of whose rotund form came the most magically humorous of themes and phrases, much used by the animators. While the excitement was Lou's, perhaps the doldrums were those of Eugene Kash. Yet he was a man of such smiling good nature and had a quality so fluid and accommodating, without being ingratiating, that everyone was his friend. Perhaps this was bad for him since it enabled him to indulge a certain hedonistic streak, as well as some plain laziness, but he was a joy to work with because of his extreme gentillesse. To watch his graceful violinist's hands fluttering over a sound sequence as he recut it, or to note the play of his nimble brown eyes and his wide, generous, wellsculptured mouth as he outlined for you how he proposed to treat the music of your film (on the very exiguous budget you had) was to feel absolute confidence in the outcome. And finally, to see him scratch his great mane of frizzy black hair with an expression of quizzical mock despair when the soundtrack was eighty-four frames short, or when the level was wrong at a recording, or when people simply didn't show up for a recording; this was to realize a fellow toiler in the uncertain boneyard of filmmaking, who made the same mistakes as you and who was buffeted and bludgeoned by the same mishaps and technical breakdowns and human failings.

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16MM: NON-THEATRICAL WORTHIES

The Song of Liberty, though it had failed before a theatrical audience in 35mm, proved a success in 16mm. In fact, 16mm had burgeoned tremendously since the spring of 1940. Grierson had set up skeleton distribution circuits in the trade unions, the farmers' cooperatives, the schools and the factories (on management time—a big battle won here); and he had also farmed out specialized programs to small commercial private producers in all parts of Canada. The most remarkable of these was Crawley Films which operated from the attic of a rambling Edwardian house in Ottawa and consisted solely of a husband and wife team: Radford and Judith. Radford Crawley, whom all knew as Budge, was a dedicated directorcameraman who had lived and dreamed 16mm colour since adolescence. He had dutifully done a course in accountancy and entered his father's prosperous accounting business in the Ottawa Valley. But in his spare time he was trailing up and down this same valley with a Kodak Cinespecial which he had bought out of his own savings. He married the girl next door, Judith Sparks, whose enthusiasm proved equal to his. They spent their honeymoon with the Cinespecial in the Gaspe Peninsula inspecting hydroelectric installations and produced a short colour documentary which drew a prize from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Grierson of course saw the film and though he mistrusted it because it was

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a Flaherty-like film dealing with his detested "men against the sky" he felt sufficiently bucked at finding local talent to swing an order toward the Crawleys from the Department of Agriculture, which had a bumper crop of apples on its hands and didn't know what to do with it. The result, on a shoestring budget, was Four New Apple Dishes in which the details of the recipes were rendered so clearly for housewives and the photography so luscious and appetizing for husbands that the little film was an instant success. The Crawleys were therefore off to a good start and as he began to push more assignments their way, Grierson suggested that, in tune with the times, with the dedicated anonymity of socialism and with the "closer living" that he was always preaching to Canadians, the Crawleys should submerge their identities and christen themselves The Ottawa Film Unit. This didn't strike either of the Crawleys as being in the least bit desirable. They had won their reputation from scratch by their own hard work; they wanted to preserve their own identity and, on top of that, the whole tradition of Canadian personal identification with the product and the philosophy of salvation through works was dead against it. They therefore consulted Arthur A. Crawley, Budge's father. This gruff and highly successful businessman with a boiling of curly grey hair and a ploughed-field forehead had been considerably impressed, despite himself, with the success of his son and daughter-in-law. In fact his shrewd old nose smelled money. He therefore counselled the young people to maintain their identity against Grierson's siren beckonings. Further he offered not only to put some cash into the business but also to transform the attic of his big barn of a house into a cutting and projection room. Budge and Judy thought it over and decided that they would make two films as The Ottawa Film Unit, just to test Grierson's sincerity; but that thereafter—and especially if the films were a success—they would revert to their own name. It so happened that the first two films were about Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and about Alexander Young Jackson, the doyen of Canadian landscape painters. I was called in as scriptwriter and from these modest beginnings in an attic at 540 The Driveway, Ottawa, sprang a partnership that started the "Canadian Artists" series and produced its first four films. I'd first met Budge Crawley when we worked together with Margaret Ann Bjornson and Mike Spencer on Iceland on the Prairies. It was to him in

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fact that Tryggi Arnason had repeated ad nauseam the story of what he'd done to the Cockshutt Plow Company. Budge was a wonderful directorcameraman: shrewd, hard-headed, immensely tough physically and mentally, immensely patient with people, with the weather and with arrangements that broke down; willing to go to endless trouble to get the right shot, yet not allowing the shot to dominate the sequence or the film. Hair sticking out all over the place, stubby face slashed by a scimitar grin, massive torso manhandling the camera and tripod over moor and fen or crag and torrent till the shot was in the can, pistol-point blue eyes gazing into the middle distance, and above all a practical man with his hands, Budge Crawley was a delight to work with. For the Ottawa film I came in at the editing and commentary stage and didn't have much to do except listen to the ohs and ahs of delighted recognition as Ottawans saw their own home town wobble and flicker in full Kodachrome where "even the pigs look glamorous" (even the civil servants, said Grierson). But with A.Y. Jackson it was different. This was a cooperative venture from script to screen and when it emerged finally as Canadian Landscape we had, and knew we had, a real 16mm box-office "sleeper," as the trade called it, on our hands. Jackson was an original member of the Group of Seven, landscape painters who had injected a sturdy nationalism and a raw steamy vigour into canvasses of the North with its vivid blue lakes, harsh masses of granite and sombre conifers. Grierson—and the phrase, which was his, found its way into the commentary—wanted us to show "how the artist transmits to the canvas the sense of beauty that is in him": to show the artist at work and through his work the North Country which had a powerful, indeed an almost mystical, appeal to Canadians. Budge and I went to see Alex Jackson in his big bare studio with the north light on the edge of one of Toronto's steep ravines. He was a stocky, friendly bear of a man in his late fifties with a quiff of white hair on a pink healthy scalp, pouched blue eyes and a wonderful crooked smile showing lone fine narrow teeth like old ivory. We decided that the film would fall naturally into three main sections: the painter at work in his studio, the painter in northern Ontario in the fall colour, the painter in old Quebec on the lower St. Lawrence in the late winter. After a few preliminary shots we parted to meet again on a little northern dock beneath which Lake Huron waves slapped noisily, while all around us the fall colour blazed on

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the white granite hills and the Georgian Bay pine bent like a bow in the autumn gales. Loaded to the gunwales with cartons of food, fishing tackle, sketch boxes, cameras, and a primus stove, we outboarded across an arm of this inland sea, portaged up a rocky defile and into a little blue lake deep in a cleft in the La Cloche Hills. Here, backed by the rocky contortions of a bygone aeon, we pitched our tent and began shooting while Jackson's friend Keith Mclver, a mining engineer and prospector, soon had the crisp evening air pungent with the smell of frying bacon and freshly gathered cranberries. Budge started our first morning with a running dive stark naked out of our tent and into the lake. It was a very chilly mid-October and I winced for him. Yet once we got going with Alex Jackson fitted out for a north country painting trip with hunting boots, breeches, lumberjack's checked shirt, leather windcheater and canvas cap, he was patience itself. For the whole of one afternoon we sat on a stark and lonely hilltop of hard rock waiting for the sun to come out. Alex painted away and I waited in a frenzy of impatience as the sun trailed maddeningly just along the inside edge of a big smear of westward drifting cloud. The sun behaved in this way for three solid hours, and Budge never got a single shot. I was all for taking a chance (and on today's very fast colour film one could have done so), but Budge just kept patiently moving his camera round for new angles, consulting his light metre and stoically shaking his head, observing from time to time, "Nope; this isn't black and white you know." He was a perfectionist, and he was right; anything we had shot that interminably long autumn afternoon would have turned out dark and sombre with no suggestion of the bright sparkle and crisp colour of a fall day in the North. What we did manage to do was get close-ups of Jackson—using a silvered reflector which I'd lugged up the rocky mountainside—speaking the first few lines of a commentary we'd worked out. We couldn't afford sound shooting, and we couldn't have physically manhandled the heavy blimp, camera tripod and batteries required in those days into our remote lake. So we thought we would shoot Alex saying the first sentences; then we would later record him saying the same sentence, and afterwards match them up. After this first sentence we would "cut away" to other shots while his voice remained on the track. An old trick when on a lowbudget film.

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Now it's a very curious thing—and we had to find it out the hard way— that you just can't do this. If we had shot Alex simultaneously in sound and picture saying "When I'm painting a picture I always try to find the essentials in a landscape," and had then separated the track from the image and later joined them up, it would have seemed and would have been entirely realistic. But if you tried to fit a separately recorded track of Alex saying "When I'm painting a picture etc." to a film of his saying (silently) exactly the same words at exactly the same tempo, cadence and rhythm, but on another occasion, it wouldn't have seemed in the least natural. Audiences would fidget. Something—they wouldn't quite know what—was wrong. The explanation is that the subtlety of lip movement and sound is so refined that if it is out of sync by as much as a single frame something jars; and of course unless you actually recorded as one shot, it always would be out a frame—here ahead, here behind—like the spokes of a cartwheel seen through a paling fence. Another trick we learned the hard way was that you must have a "bridging shot." You can show the Red Indians galloping after the mail train, shot from the train; you can show the speeding train shot from a horseman's viewpoint; but unless you have at least one key bridging shot that shows both the train and the galloping Indians, the audience will feel that there is something wrong. They will remain unconvinced. They will think the film is fake, and that they've been taken in. And they will be right. Because, without the "bridging shot," you could shoot a train in Manitoba from a camera on a dolly on an adjoining track, and you could shoot Indians galloping on a reservation in Alberta, 500 miles away, from a moving automobile and then intercut the shots to achieve verisimilitude. But it would escape you without the "bridging shot." Budge and I tried this with Alex and his canoe. We shot him from the rocky shore, back purposefully bent, canoe loaded with birch panels and paintboxes. Then we shot the shore from the canoe over Jackson's out of focus shoulder; but when we came to screen the rushes we found we needed a shot from a third point, showing both the canoe and the rocky shore; and this shot we didn't have. Later it had to be set up on another lake when Alex was free and it was fall again—a year later—in the hope that at least the water and rocks and trees and colour would match. (If they didn't, no one ever told us.) By the time it came for Jackson to go down to St. Tite des Caps on the

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lower St. Lawrence, where he was known as Pere Raquette because he sketched in snowshoes, I was tied up with an aircraft film [Keep 'em Flying, 1942], and I had to be content with breathless third-hand accounts from Budge's sister-in-law Cecily of how the rushes were turning out. In the end we strung it all together and nervously put on a showprint at the National Gallery to a select and highly critical audience of painters, filmmakers, senior civil servants and politicians. We scented disaster, for the Chairman of the National Film Board, no less a person than the Minister of War Services, was called out in the middle of the film, tripped over the projector cable in the dark and blew a junction-box with a shower of angry sparks. But we were wrong to be apprehensive for in their quiet inarticulate way, the Canadians were deeply moved and we had a succes d'estime on our hands. Later, it also became a popular success at the 16mm box office. One of the wartime moments to which we pointed with legitimate pride was the return to Canada, after visiting the Canadian forces in Italy, of Leonard W Brockington K.C. "Brock" was like a crouching tiger: permanently bent double with arthritis so that when standing he peered up at you from under a fearsome stoop, and when seated, bored in ruminatively at you from the depths of a leather armchair in which he was crumpled down so that he rested practically on the back of his neck. He had a great leonine head with a magnificent mane of reddish grey hair, brows like the horned owl, darting green eyes, and a voice in which a gritty authoritative Canadian buzz was mingled with the most harmonious of lilting Welsh beguilements. He was a formidable lawyer and a redoubtable speechmaker, mixing honey and ginger in about equal amounts; and was much in demand as a wartime speaker. Despite his crippling infirmity, which twisted his great torso into agonizing knots, he toured a wartime Commonwealth, often in the unheated iron belly of a converted Lancaster, and spoke to soldiers and civilians in all fields of battle. On his return from the Italian front Brock came to see Grierson. Budge Crawley and I were peremptorily summoned into the bare whitewashed room with its view over the slate grey Ottawa and the low bluish scarps of the Gatineau Hills. Brock was slouched uncomfortably in the "visitors" chair opposite JG, who looked pleased and sprightly with the soles of his shoes presented to Brock from the desktop. "Brock wants to tell you about Canadian Landscape." The lawyer-speechifier, gazing sombrely up at us

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from the depths of his chair and the thatches of his eyes, told us how he'd been present at a showing of our film to Canadian troops near Ortona. "And I want to tell you," he observed in his treacherous lilting Welsh rumble, "there wasn't a dry eye in the house." It may be imagined that endorsement from such a source went to our heads, but after sobering down it also seemed to us a direct challenge to produce a sequel to Canadian Landscape. Thus we embarked on the "Canadian Artists" series. Our first effort was West Wind, the story of Tom Thomson, who, in addition to being a fine lyric painter, also embodied in his brief life and mysterious death at the age of forty something of a national myth. He enshrined in his persona the eternal Canadian lovehate relationship with their northern hinterland: lonely, stark and brutal, but atingle with challenge. Since Thomson had died in 1917, we were obliged to fall back on close-ups of hands, long shots of an unidentifiable man in a lonely canoe, but mostly and sensibly we let the paintings speak for themselves. This was followed by Sept Peintres de Quebec in which we paid tribute to and analyzed the work of some of our French-speaking contemporaries. The film became notable for a scene in which Marc Aurele Fortin, superb delineator of the Montreal landscape, swung onto his bicycle, sketchbox strapped to his shoulders, and revealed a large tear in the seat of his pants through which underwear obtruded. We prudish young wanted to cut the shot out, but Grierson, rubbing his hands in glee, decreed that it should remain in provided Fortin didn't object, as it "humanized the artist." The seven Quebec painters were followed by Klee Wyck, the paintings of Emily Carr, an artist who had spent all her life painting intense expressionist canvasses of the British Columbia coastal rain forest. She exemplified, perhaps, a trait of Canadians: love and hence personification of a great, sprawling, empty continental landscape. Artists felt more deeply, if inarticulately, and were certainly more at ease, among the crags of the North Country than the fissures and nodules of the human face. Klee Wyck means "the laughing one" and had been the name given to Emily Carr by the Indians of Kitwancool among whom she had lived and worked. In those days the Chinese were our great wartime ally, and as the Royal Ontario Museum contained one of the finest collections of Tang pottery outside China, Grierson gave reluctant permission for a one-reeler in

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colour. "And if it costs over $500—excluding your very princely salary, my boy (at that time $3900 per annum)—ye'll hear about it!" The Flight of the Dragon (with a nod to Laurence Binyon) was a neat little film, though the bright idea of using the Chinese Minister for the commentary proved a mistake, his English being unable to survive the distortions then inseparable from a 16mm soundtrack. Scarcely was this enterprise over than we all became involved with "Sally Craven." Grierson, who was absolutely ruthless in making use of people with saleable skills even if their personalities were difficult, thrust this woman into our arms and made me responsible for her truly immense program of popular science films. Sally Craven was one of the most exasperating people one could meet. Though strong as a horse and tough as gristle, she pretended to feminine frailties, and would receive us at a script conference in her hotel suite—paid for as part of the contract—propped up in bed in a frothy peignoir. She signed her letters "cordially yours" and always included in her telegrams, sent at your expense, the word "regards." She was a stout bottle-redhead of uncertain age and though she signed herself "Sally Craven (Mrs.)" we never discovered a Mr. C. ("I think she ate him" was one producer's comment.) She moved in great style, lived at the best hotels, wore a mink stole, took innumerable taxis, and usually managed to have a bottle of rye in her room. We poor halfstarved civil servants in our frayed old pants and holey sweaters were filled with a mixture of envy and resentment. Sally would saunter jauntily into "her" cutting room, where the latest of a procession of slaves was sweating it out over rushes. "Well, how's it getting on?" she would ask patronizingly, wafting a heavy perfume of combined Lanvin and Haig & Haig. "Just off to New Brunswick (or the Rockies or Winnipeg) and thought I'd drop by." We would grunt ungraciously, and ungraciously arrange to screen the rushes. After this we were subjected to what came to be known as the "Craven Treatment," a long wheedling harangue going over each point of the film in minutest detail, in a judicious mixture of pretty-pleading and flattery but with just beneath it an iron determination to have things her way and to force us to live up to the last iota of the contract we had signed. Raymond Spottiswoode and I, who had the job of vetting the contract, were appalled at the generosity of its terms. We said so to Grierson and

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were much surprised to be told blandly that, yes, it was a bit unusual, but then Sally brought to the job unusual gifts. Since it seemed to us that all the work on her films was being done by our cameramen, our cutters and even our special advisers, we simply couldn't understand how Grierson could contract to pay Sally Craven a salary equal to our own, keep her on expenses in the local hotel, and give her, free, two showprints of each of the films that she (we!) had produced. What we didn't quite realize was that Grierson, being a bit of a pirate himself (one had only to read the National Film Act which he drafted and under the terms of which he was appointed, to see that), admired fellow freebooters. Further, and this was the really important thing, Sally had access to and control of (or persuaded Grierson she had, which was the same thing) a large 16mm following not only in the United States but, though her connections with museums and chemical firms, international 16mm distribution as well. To secure such a market for NFB and for Canada, Grierson was naturally willing to pay a price. The price in dollars which we considered high he regarded as reasonable. The price in bruised egos and torn confidence of his juniors he quite properly regarded as of marginal importance. To put it bluntly, so far as the popular science series was concerned, we were expendable. So we gritted our teeth and got on with the job, our hearts sinking with each visit of the befurred lady producer-director (a title on which she insisted) and our heads nodding in sympathy with the return to Ottawa of each slow-burning cameraman ready to unload his series of stories about Sally: her tantrums, her overbearing self-confidence. Ah yes, we nodded, an haughty spirit goeth before destruction. In point of fact we were quite wrong. Odious though her personality might be, Sally Craven was an efficient worker, a ruthless taskmaster, an excellent saleswoman (admittedly of her "own" product) and one who thoroughly knew the market. The popular science series, numbering in the end a total of a dozen films, secured worldwide distribution for over fifteen years, and Grierson, whatever the price paid in the grinding teeth and skyed eyeballs of his juniors, had good reason to be satisfied with the bargain he had struck. And so had Canada, the quainter aspects of whose cultural mosaic were made manifest—at low cost—for the world to see. Grierson could and did use anyone with a proven talent, no matter how

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bizarre; and some strangely assorted partnerships were formed. Into the old lumber mill one day came a gangling young man from Vancouver, with a Cinespecial and a silent film which he had shot and cut singlehanded. It was a trip through the Cariboo country of British Columbia on the old Pacific Great Eastern. This was then one of the joke railways of Canada. Sponsored, in the absence of other backers, by the government of British Columbia, it had been designed to open up the interior of the province. For lack of funds it had never been completed. Plagued with financial difficulties, the line was in constant need of repair, the rolling stock decrepit and the way stations little more than boxes in the wilderness. Young Sinclair, with the devoted single-mindedness only possible to the owner of a Cinespecial, rode the line from Squamish to Quesnel and back, emerging with a jerkily shot but authentic picture of an exotically remote part of Canada. Sinclair must be used, but how? Seated in one corner of the manning pool, with a perpetual frown of worry and scratching his great balding head with his stubby fingers, was Ted Buckman, the very able scriptwriter whom nobody could quite fit in with their plans. He had a touchy temper, a writer's vanity, and resented having his ideas ripped apart by the young directors and producers. To Grierson, a Buckman-Sinclair partnership seemed an absolute natural and he sent them north: to be precise, all the way to Moose Factory on the shores of James Bay, an extension of Hudson Bay on the southern edge of the Canadian Arctic. It was mid-winter. These two unusual and apparently ill-matched men—Buckman Quixote and Sancho Panza Sinclair to NFB wags—toted their food and gear over the ice by snowshoe, ski and on foot in temperatures of up to forty degrees below zero (i.e. seventy-two degrees of frost); put up a tent against arctic winds and, living largely on pemmican and bacon fat, set about recording in colour the life of Eskimos and Indians along the flat, marshy, inhospitable shores of James Bay and Akimiski Island. Nothing like it had been attempted since Flaherty's Nanook of the North. At such temperatures metal parts stick to the fingers and if prised off at all impatiently, take strips of skin with them. The deer used for towing sleds require bits made of wood and leather, for iron bits would tear out their tongues. A Cinespecial camera has to be heated before it can be used, filled

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with graphite rather than oil for all the moving parts, and even then its speed is variable and almost never up to the requisite twenty-four frames per second. Everything has to be warmed and a double bag—rather like a pair of water wings—hung over the camera. The extreme cold produces a lassitude and a slowing down that even the sparkling sunshine (since it is without heat) cannot mitigate. All this was long before the days of RCAF Arctic research. There were no survival kits, no nylon windcheaters or light foods. Buckman and Sinclair operated much as the Indians had in the centuries before the white men came, and from their little tent on the featureless glaze of ice and snow emerged a memorable film on how primitive man, for it was essentially he, survives and even keeps warm in one of the world's most brutal climates. While Buckman and Sinclair could go their way in the northern wilderness, or the Crawleys exploit the whole spectrum of sponsorship, varying their locale from factory to field or from Atlantic dory to bovine dewlap, as the spirit moved them, other contractors were not so lucky. From Vancouver came Leon C. Shelly, a willowy young man with an ivory skin, wavy, beautifully coiffed, prematurely grey hair, dapper suits, a breezy ingratiating manner and a suite at the local hotel with a bottle of rye for thirsty NFB producers. Like Crawley's, Shelly's father was well-todo, though from the proceeds of a large steam bakery rather than an accountant's practice. Like Budge, Leon Shelly had refused to go into his father's business and had also persuaded him to sink some of the bakery profits into Leon C. Shelly Films Inc. Thus armed, and with enthusiasm and a shrewd business sense, Shelly descended on Ottawa bent on a reasonable and legitimate cut of the NFB subcontracting cake hitherto divided between ASN, Audio and General Films of Regina. Unfortunately for him, Shelly gave the impression of being less interested in what he filmed than in the contract to film it. Grierson, with his unerring eye, spotted this chink in Shelly's armour and selected him for the unenviable task of producing the films that no one else wanted to handle because they were so monumentally dull. Shelly thus became the producer of an apparently inexhaustible and endless program of films sponsored by the Master General of the Ordnance. This office, contrary to what one might be inclined to think, was held by a civilian and former businessman. Though an excellent NGO, he had the Quartermaster's mentality and his idea of a film was to show every piece of equipment (including spare parts)

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for which he was responsible, and then to demonstrate how each worked or was repaired. The Story of Ordnance (two reels) was followed by Ordnance at Work (four reels) and then by Highlights of Ordnance which had reached the monstrous total of twelve reels by the time VE-Day abruptly cut off the Master General's budget. All this time Shelly, despite the merry clink of dollars in the cash register, had been knee-deep in clutches, gear boxes, pneumatic body-straighteners, stacks of tins, wrenches, jacks and cranes. He longed dearly for something open-air and romantic which didn't have about it the smell of grease and the endless trundle of the forklift truck. The answer came from his chief director-cameraman, who proposed a film on salmon. Grierson's eye at once lit up. Of course it was understood, he said, that the Pacific salmon in no way compared with the Atlantic salmon; indeed even the Atlantic salmon, at least on its western or Canadian seaboard, fared but poorly in relation to the incomparable salmon of Scotland. Better the Spey than the Restigouche any day, but better either of them than the Tyee, Coho or other blood-red coarse fish of the Pacific Sounds. However, salmon was salmon and Shelly deserved a break. The result was Salmon Run, finished after Grierson left NFB but notable for a remarkable series of underwater shots and close-ups of giant salmon fighting their way upstream. A poetic commentary underlined the mystery of the salmon's life cycle, lost in the infinity of Pacific waters for seven years only to return unerringly to the very mountain stream where it had been born, to mate, hatch and die. The British Columbia salmon packing industry was also well satisfied, and so Leon Shelly was finally able to boast a "creative" film. With the tremendous upsurge of 16mm and the bold build-up of colour, much less normal in the theatre then than now, Grierson began to consider a further expansion of specialist audiences: trade unions? farmers' cooperatives? schoolchildren? adult education groups? churches? stamp collectors? Why—the lot of course! In his first enthusiasm he turned to the same Donald Buchanan who had given me my first introduction to NFB. Buchanan continued to be one of the most remarkable yet exasperating people I have ever known. Early affected with extreme deafness, this infirmity dominated his personality to such an extent that he seemed not only dense but uncommunicative and inarticulate. You had an impression, as he grunted and struggled with his mother tongue, of bubbles forming deep in

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a marsh and very slowly finding their way to the surface through a rich blanket of ooze. His jerky monosyllables and convulsive spurts of speech gave an impression of extreme gaucherie and even of boorishness. Because of this and because of eccentric personal habits, which included some of the idiosyncrasies disfiguring the social personality of Dr. Johnson, he had few close friends, especially among the wives of his friends. His arrival at the house, almost always unannounced and in need of a meal, was the signal for groans from the kitchen. But eventually he came, occasionally bringing a frugal and unsuitable present; for though outstandingly generous and understanding in things of the spirit, and possessing an impeccable taste, Donald was a "careful" man, in the best tradition of Upper Canada. He must have eaten a hundred meals at my house, drunk a couple of hundred ryes and kept me talking until two or three a.m., but the only gift I ever received from him in thirty-two years was a bottle of Slinger's British Columbia Loganberry wine. Donald eventually died a millionaire or close to one for, along with his brother, he inherited the small but lucrative newspaper, radio and television empire his father, Senator W.A. (Billy) Buchanan, had built up in and around the city of Lethbridge in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. But he never lived as one. He was parsimonious, awkward, gauche and scruffy. He was also a very fine man, if not almost a very great man. During the years that I knew him he was successively attache at the National Gallery of Canada and biographer of the great Canadian impressionist painter J.W. Morrice; Director of Talks for the infant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Director of Special Events for CBC; Director of Distribution for NFB; Director of Graphics for NFB; founder and first secretary of the Canadian Institute for Industrial Design; founder and President of the National Film Society; Associate Director of the National Gallery of Canada; author of two definitive volumes of the history of Canadian art; a photographer whose own exhibition had a most successful coast-to-coast tour; a contributor to Andre Simon's magazine on wine; the owner of a fine cellar himself; and finally the organizer of the great international exposition of the world's art which, at EXPO 67 in Montreal, was his posthumous celebration. A notable achievement by any standards. What did he have? When you saw Donald enter the room you saw a short, chunky, black-browed man, balding head covered with wisps of lank

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black hair, quizzical face full of fissures and nodules; hearing aid trickling out of one ear, and perhaps not turned on; suit crumpled, waistcoat misbuttoned and covered with food spots; awkward gestures complementing broken phrases and monosyllabic comments. What, you asked, could this unattractive person possibly possess? How was it that those present greeted him with an overwhelming, warm, wry affection? Donald had four outstanding qualities, rare at any time, and in Canada pretty close to unique: an impeccable and unerring sense of good taste; an honesty and integrity that, while it made him "awkward" on any committee or in any venture, gave people complete trust in his judgement; a total contempt for cant and humbug (social fungi that proliferate noisomely in the low-church, lower middle-class morality that is typical of so much of Canada); and finally an ability to choose the right man for the right job. Time and again Donald's advice would be sought when a position in the cultural world had to be filled. He worked privately and by indirection, and most of those who owed their nomination to his intercession never knew it. His social awkwardness, his gauche appearance and his deafness conspired perhaps to deny him the Directorship of the National Gallery; but his ideas for many years provided its dynamic. Lonely in the silent world of the deaf, Donald was also lonely by nature; perennial bachelor, perennial monk in the misanthrope's cloister. His contribution to Canada was incalculable and his sure judgement of men and of works is still reflected in the walls of the National Gallery and in the structure of perhaps half a dozen governmental and semi-governmental projects in the cultural world. It was natural that Grierson should be attracted to such a man and he to him. Besides, said JG, you can never have too many Scotsmen around: Buchanan, Mclnnes, Grierson, McLean, McLaren, Fraser—that's the stuff! So JG put Donald to work organizing 16mm non-theatrical distribution. Grierson had long maintained that one of his major discoveries in the world of film was that "there are more seats outside the commercial theatres than inside them." Though the apothegm masks a sophistry (since, until the advent of television in the home, the seats outside the theatre lacked the dramatic impact of the seats inside the theatre), nevertheless it was enough to set the non-theatrical world buzzing. Under Grierson's direction Buchanan soon had the basic structure mapped out and the promoters hired and at work.

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The immense network reached, at its wartime height in Canada alone, a weekly audience of over half a million. Donald Buchanan, having put the show on the road, was draughted by Grierson into organizing a graphics section, and the maestro began to cast his eyes covetously at the enormous 16mm USA market. He would give Canada a window on the world and would do it through us schools, colleges, universities, museums, adult education groups, service clubs and just about every potential specialist audience you could think of. For this he needed American experts in the 16mm field and as the distribution centre for 16mm lay then, as it does now, in Chicago, his choice fell on Wesley Greene. Greene, though he came to us from Chicago, was originally a West Virginian; a great bear of a man with a swift loping stride and an absolute frothing of brownish grey hair, intent eyes behind rimless glasses in the best Babbitt tradition, inexhaustible energy and an inexorable flow of sales talk. Onto the NFB film jargon was now curiously imposed a sales jargon with which we were utterly unfamiliar. Greene asked Grierson if he could get the producers together and give them a pep talk about audience research (to him ree-search), product identification and sales promotion. The producers were affronted at the suggestion that anybody but Grierson should dare to give them a pep talk; but JG, ever anxious to abrade sharp minds on another set of teeth—and mischievous enough to enjoy the mental gear-stripping that might result—blandly gave his approval. The meeting was held in the projection theatre. Grierson sat at the back and gossiped audibly with Janet Scellen, but this did not in the least stem the cataract of facts and statistics, given the great earnestness and an almost total lack of humour which poured from Greene's lips. He was indeed only very slightly taken aback when, in response to his suggestions that producers could be the "sales force" of NFB, Grierson interrupted: "For God's sake, Wesley, don't let me ever hear you say that again." The reason for his imperturbability is clear: he was a man with a mission, his own—the original Willy Loman in the days when not a doubt clouded the crystal blue sky and when he possessed the leathery carapace of the convinced, the committed and the totally self-absorbed. After the lecture there was utter silence. A few people lit cigarettes and stole glances at one another while Greene remained expectantly at his desk, on his face the slight, belligerent smile of the speaker who is anticipating a

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few questions. None came. None at all. His harangue had been to us totally incomprehensible. It wasn't that we weren't aware of the audience! God knows; Grierson had drummed into us time and again the respect for and dramatization of the fact; and it was factual film we were making, wasn't it, for a nation at war? But the concept of a technique which regarded the sale of films as an end in itself was totally beyond our comprehension. After several minutes of loud and embarrassed silence (to us, not to Wesley) JG said, "Well, thanks very much, Wesley, you seem to have stunned the plovers. Good day." Wesley tried again. We had nothing in common but the English language so that our conversations were apt to be quite ridiculous. But he bethought him of that well-known American social solvent (i.e. liquor) and though he could ill afford it, the good-natured fellow went off to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and with great difficulty, since wartime supplies were scarce as hen's teeth, managed to rustle up enough bourbon and rye to invite all the producers and their wives in for drinks. We came; we saw; we drank his liquor. But we didn't warm to each other. We stood in corners and gossiped about production. Wesley moved about among us like a great friendly bear refilling our glasses. But whenever he tried to introduce a distribution gambit—"signed a contract with Britannica for fifty reels in the dietary series"; "Had a bit of luck with the mid-west universities, Illinois State and Northwestern signed up for the farm series"—eyes would glaze, faces would look blank, if friendly, and conversation would dry up. We never understood each other. Wesley Greene never really grasped what we were trying to do. Social realism and the drama of the actual, though he parroted the words after us, held little meaning for him. They didn't engage or commit him. We, on our side, never really comprehended Wesley, and we were the more to blame because while he did try to understand us, we didn't make a real effort to understand him. His semantics and his eternal yammering bored us and also we were becoming at heart the snobs of an arcane cult and didn't want to share our secrets with others. Preoccupied with his theatrical series, this was one of the few danger signs Grierson failed to see. Wesley, nothing daunted, soldiered on. His methods were tremendously energetic but apt to be confused and incoherent. He was always

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rushing off to catch trains and planes, looking feverishly at his watch, burning up the long-distance wires with a fervour worthy of a better manse. One never dared to share a taxi with him for he was always in a fury of impatience to get there: Get where, Wesley? Get anywhere! Come on, let's go! Movement and confusion were his life's blood. If to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, then Wesley must have been the happiest of men. One always gained the impression that the next sales killing would be the one. Though, in the end, he was as successful as JG would let him be, and our "sales" did indeed climb rapidly in the vast, worthy, ponderous USA 16mm non-theatrical market, yet in the end also he generated more heat than light. Nevertheless, Greene continued to tear around, to dash off madly in all directions, and the 16mm distribution of Canadian films continued to burgeon under his fingers. At the same time Joe Golightly was pushing our 16mm material in Britain. Links had been established in Australia and Latin America and, with this hump surmounted, Grierson, in response to his old friends in the Documentary Movement back in Britain, was able to write in Documentary News Letter that the first stage had been accomplished; NFB had been created from the ground up; two theatrical series, WIA and CCO, had gone into monthly production and were seen in 600 theatres throughout Canada; 16mm had been built up to the point of takeoff; a generation of filmmakers had been trained. What remained? D-Day provided an answer.

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MULBERRY MISSION

After the Allies moved in over the Normandy beaches, life for NFB and for Grierson became more hectic and, as if in anticipation of atomic fission, then still unknown to us, began to split wildly apart. With the ever deeper involvement of Canada in the war, the demand for public information exploded. Grierson was just about the only man in Ottawa who had grasped the totality of public information in a total war. It was already only a matter of time before he would be asked to take over the direction of the Wartime Information Board (WIB). The move came soon and though he still remained as titular head of NFB, administrative and policy direction passed to Ross McLean, and Stuart Legg was left in charge of production. But no sooner had Grierson installed himself in the brand-new but as yet unused Supreme Court building high on a bluff overlooking the Ottawa than he became aware that many of the skills of NFB could be enlisted in the services of national information as a whole; that many of the WIB services, such as posters, displays, wall newspapers and other mass media, could be integrated with the film program; and that if he was unable to secure administrative or treasury approval for some of his more enterprising proposals, then he could always expand from his NFB base. If NFB could initiate services for the wider information needed on the ground, then it was quite reasonable for NFB to expand in such a direction.

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It was in this way that NFB, by the end of the war, came to be concerned not only with films in all their aspects but with still pictures, posters, cartoons, design, displays, filmstrips, wall newspapers, and the production of brochures, fact sheets, and all kinds of printed as well as visual information. Indeed, Grierson just about was government public information in Canada by the time the war was drawing to a close. Inevitably this meant that we saw less of him, but the drive which he had imparted to NFB gave us all a sustained momentum upon which we hurtled along, while occasionally the Great Man himself would come zooming back to the old lumber mill from his big pine-panelled office two miles up the river to see how the old joint was getting on. Once or twice he had the producers up to the new Supreme Court building, for the ultimate occupancy of which the Nine Wise Men were waiting somewhat testily in an old stone building constructed for the Fisheries Department in the eighties. It was all much grander up there: carpets instead of lino, big clean double windows instead of smeared old cobwebby air-vents. But it seemed inhumanly quiet after NFB. The stenos wore high heels and frilly blouses. The artists and writers didn't seem to be driven by the same sense of urgency as we were. They didn't scurry madly through the corridors but sauntered easily from desk to water cooler and back. Yet if you could believe Grierson, the lack of confusion on the ground was more than compensated for by an utter confusion in the realm of ideas. "Welcome to the Wartime Information Board," he grinned at us, "where your left hand doesn't know what your right hand isn't doing." But the grin was a little forced, for he was moving, and knew he was moving, into the empyrean, further and farther away from the smell of acetate and carbon tetrachloride, the racket of sound cutting, the heady yeast of personal involvement in the detail of production. Now he was almost alone, playing a great organ in a none-too-well-lit cathedral. Responsible for overall policy but responsible too for such a vast mass of information that much that was meretricious or incompetent filtered through the sand bed of his controls: a virus of banality to awake—when the time was due—a violent reaction against "public information." "Sometimes," he once said in an interview in the Ottawa Journal, "you wonder just what on earth you have spent your day doing. And that," he nodded with a blast of his old humour, "is not a phrase one would wish to

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see used out of the context of this particular problem." There were delightful moments, as when he was able to reply to a dour parson who had issued a broadside argument against a scene in a film in which beer was quaffed that a reverend gent favouring temperance might have found ways of expressing himself with less intemperance. But these daring sallies became less frequent; for he was nigh to being overwhelmed by the sheer elephantine cumbrousness of the great informational bureaucracy of which he was now the head. Sometimes, as he sat in the great grey room, wrestling with some tedious and infantile but somehow important information problem (the general who had talked out of turn, the visiting American publisher who hadn't quite "got it," the journalist who had discovered some mild administrative inaccuracy such as that the stenos were out too long for coffee break or there were irregularities in the petty cash account), he must have heaved a dark brown sigh and reflected that with the lessening of tensions the old bad Canadian habit of lopping off the tall ear of corn was once more resuming its wonted sway. He must have cast a longing eye back to the simplicities of NFB, to the even simpler simplicities of the GPO Film Unit, the EMB Film Unit, the family unit. His sisters Marian and Ruby, the latter tragically lost with evacuee children in the Nazi torpedoing of the City of Benares, his brother-in-law John Taylor, mordant and laconic assistant to Arthur Elton, director of Housing Problems where real slum dwellers speaking direcdy into camera and on mike proved that unexpected drama lay in the actual. After VE-Day, we began to notice a certain restiveness. The NFB continued to expand. We all continued to work madly now on world-after-the-war films, on shape-of-things-to-come films. The pace didn't slacken at all. But in July the Labour Party in Britain won a landslide victory and it must from then on have seemed possible to Grierson that now was the time—if ever—to build a New Jerusalem on England's drab and shot-scarred land. He had created NFB from nothing. It could stand, did stand, on its own feet. The Canadians should be given their head. Tutelage was no longer necessary, nor desirable, nor acceptable. Britain needed him now more than Canada. But he hung on for a while and his hanging on had the effect of launching me into the most bizarre project of my whole NFB career. I was shooting colour film one day in the basement of the Art Gallery

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of Toronto, for when Grierson sent me to public relations he had allowed me to keep control of the "Canadian Artists" series. I was working on number five in the series, Klee Wyck, the story of Emily Carr of the British Columbia rainforest, for it so happened that some of her finest canvasses were in Toronto. To my astonishment a uniformed attendant burst into view beckoning hurriedly. "You're wanted on long distance! Ottawa calling!" My heart gave a most uncomfortable thump, for long distance usually meant one of two things: disaster at home or a blast from Grierson. What have I done wrong now? I thought. When I got to the phone it was Grierson all right, but he was in a cheerful chirpy mood. "Graeme," he said (he always gave my name the true Scots values), "you know Philip Chester, don't you?" Indeed I did. He was Managing Director of the Hudson's Bay Company and I'd met him ten years earlier in the company of an editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, George Ferguson, when I was a young man making my way in Canada. The friendship had persisted throughout the years, cemented by his wife, who was a patron of the arts. "Yes," I said, "of course I do." "He's up on some lake in northern Ontario," said Grierson inexplicably. "Lake Ahmic, I think it's called. You can find it on the map. I'd like you to get up there right away. Yes, I know you're shooting in Toronto but that can wait. I've told him you'll be there tonight so you'd better find out if there's a train." "Yes, but—" "He'll meet you at the dock if you send him a wire. He'll make a proposal to you which you'll do me a great favour in accepting." Heavens, I thought, this isn't a bit like JG. What on earth has happened? "What is this proposal?" "Oh, it's some kind of public relations job. It may mean seconding you from the Board for a month or two. Anyway, get up there, will you, like a good fellow. And let me have a report on your return. Right? Right!" Click. I hung up the phone in a turmoil. Hadn't a notion what was in store for me. Hadn't any money. Hadn't even had time to tell my wife. Leaving the equipment with my cameraman, I took a taxi across town to the local NFB office. There I managed to borrow some funds from the long-suffering

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regional representative, to phone my wife in Ottawa—who naturally shared my puzzlement—and to book a seat on the first train going north. It would apparently land me at Burk's Falls about 6:00 p.m., a connecting taxi would land me at Lake Ahmic dock about 7:30 p.m. Not a very convenient time to arrive. I sent a wire to Philip Chester and boarded the Northern Limited at Union Station with a six-hour ride ahead of me. I was so exhausted by all the nervous excitement that I dropped off to sleep and didn't wake until we'd left the rolling pastureland of southern Ontario behind us and were up among the rock and the lake and the pine. Chester himself was waiting for me at the dock in the pine-scented summer gloaming. He was a fresh-faced, boyish-looking man about fifteen years my senior with a great thatch of white hair. "Good of you to come at such short notice," he said. "We've just time for a drink before dinner." We stepped into a glossy powerboat and in ten minutes fetched up at a rocky wooded island. Chester led me up to a big, rambling, screened summer cottage and after appropriate greetings the ladies withdrew, leaving the two of us alone with very large Collinses and a faint yellow afterglow over the darkling lake and the lacy network of the pine trees. Chester started to talk. Had I heard of the Mulberry Harbour of D-Day? Yes, I had; it was, wasn't it? the floating harbour that the Allies had taken to Arromanches? Precisely. Well, apparently the scale working models of the floating harbour had been displayed in the Guildhall in London following VE-Day and they had been seen and much admired by no less a person than Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson Bay—i.e. Chester's boss. Sir Patrick had conceived the notion of shipping the entire exhibition to Canada where it would tour from coast to coast, partly as publicity for the Hudson's Bay Company, partly as a genuine contribution to the recognition of Britain's major role in the war effort. So far so good. Chester thought the idea was crazy. It was going to cost the Company around $100,000 at least, and though this could be met out of the excess profits corporation tax, yet there were two aspects of it that bothered him a good deal. Firstly, it had been Sir Patrick's idea that the Mulberry Harbour should

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be shown right inside HBC stores. Unfortunately he had forgotten or brushed aside the fact that the Company had no stores in any major Canadian city east of Winnipeg. The exhibit would therefore have to be shown elsewhere. Chester had made friendly arrangements with Morgan's in Montreal and Simpson's in Toronto. He hoped that the CNR would lend the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. They must obviously start off in the federal capital. As for Hamilton, he hoped to get the local armouries. But that wasn't the main problem. The main problem was that the exhibit was coming to Canada under the joint auspices of the HBC and the British War Office. This implied a colonel, a lieutenant colonel, a captain, a female PA, two sergeants and eight ORs. The Company, Chester said, could cope with rented armouries and all finances; but they had neither the time nor the resources to run the public relations which would involve keeping the colonel happy and also keeping him out of the hair of the top brass of the Hudson's Bay Company. Grierson had recommended me for the job. It would mean at least six months' work. I could perhaps hand the show over in Winnipeg to someone else. Would I take it on? He could offer me $500 a month, plus $10 a day entertainment allowance, and of course I could charge all my expenses to HBC. My existing salary was $375 a month. I had a wife and two children, no entertainment allowance and no expenses. I took a big gulp. "Fine," I said. "I'll take it on." "Good show," he beamed. Clearly a great weight off his mind. We joined the ladies for a belated dinner. "I can offer you a shakedown," said Chester breezily. "No, thanks very much; I think I'd better get on with the job right away." "Fine. I'll ferry you over to the mainland after dinner. And I'll wire Grierson saying you've accepted. You'll be on our payroll as from Monday. Right?" "Right!" I reached the mainland at midnight, the railroad station via a dozing taxi at 2:30 a.m. I sat up bleary with sleep till the night-train southbound for Toronto came in at 4:00 a.m. The next six months were the most bizarre I have ever lived; so engrossed and absorbed did I become in the passage of Mulberry across eastern Canada that I completely forgot all

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about Grierson and only by the merest of chances became aware of his movements. I spent a frantic month lining up publicity: posters, cards for lampposts; radio squibs; middles and blurbs for the newspapers; hiring a staff; arranging press conferences; the lot. Early in September we all went down to Montreal to meet the Colonel. About three weeks earlier President Truman had announced that a single bomb equal to more than 20,000 tons of TNT had been dropped on Hiroshima. Japan was out of the war. VE-Day had been succeeded by Vf-Day. Brigadier Hoffmeister, who had hoped to lead a Canadian brigade in the Pacific War, was caught totally unprepared in Vancouver. Hadn't a word to say. Neither had we, for we were totally immersed in Mulberry. The Colonel's name turned out to be Vassall Charles Steer-Webster; the Lieutenant Colonel's, Claude Glover; the Captain's, Ferdinand Greatrex: the PA'S, Masyka Cheslyn Lancaster. The Canadians took a very deep breath. But we needn't have worried. In September 1945, every English man or woman visiting Canada carried with him or her the Churchillian afflatus and the immense prestige of having participated in the Blitz, the Normandy landings, and "The Year Alone." The Canadians took the Mulberry show and its exotically named direction to their collective bosoms. Greatrex improbably started an address to an Ottawa school with the words "Headmaster, Masters and Mistresses, boys and girls." He was cheered to the echo, even though such locutions sounded ludicrous to those used to the Canadian "Mr. Principal, teachers and pupils." The Colonel proved to be a sharp bargainer with a peppery disposition and a very good opinion of himself. I eyed him warily for he spelled trouble. Not for the HBC who smiled and smirked and pushed him off on to me. But for the PRO, i.e. myself. He intimidated those present by peering over halfmoon glasses and speaking in an abrupt parade-ground manner. And he had red tabs. This I soon found was a source of some irritation to Glover. "Bugger sneaked off while we weren't looking and got himself a staff job," he said to me gloomily—and a bit too soon I thought—while the cocktails were being passed. "On top of that he got his extra pip, so he's one up on me; and this damned junket is called a Mission. The Mulberry Mission to Canada, if you please; so he's head of that too." He drained his very un-Canadian gin and French vermouth in a morose silence.

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The Colonel early called me into his room. "Now Mac," he said (and it was one of his less endearing locutions), "you and I have to understand each other." He smoked a tiny amber pipe and his eyes glittered at me over the half moons. "That should be easy, Colonel," I said with an ingratiating smile. "Quite so," he snapped. "I'm not a bad man to get along with." I let that drift by. "Understand," he said and his voice became more hectoring, "we have no room for vulgarity in Mulberry. I won't have the Normandy beaches and the name of Churchill associated with department store adverts." "But we're being sponsored by a department store," I said mildly. "We're sponsored by the War Office," he said sharply. "The Hudson's Bay Company in association with the Engineering Institute of Canada is sponsoring our Canadian tour. That's something quite different." "It's not all that different," I said. "The department stores will offer us their advertising facilities and we'll naturally want to take advantage of all the free publicity we can get." "Mulberry doesn't need publicity; it is its own publicity." "I'd ask you to let me be the judge of that, Colonel; it's what I'm paid for." "I won't have Mulberry dragged in the mud, you understand?" "Of course not. But you want people to see the show, don't you? You want a gate we can all be proud of." "Not at the expense of being down among the pessaries and the rubber goods," said the Colonel. "You put it so clearly." "Well, do you? I don't, and I must have the right to censor all advertisements." I thought it time to take a stand. "Colonel, I'm not responsible to you at all. I'm responsible to Mr. Chester and the Hudson's Bay Company. I can assure you that I'll do my best to protect Mulberry from commercial exploitation in the sense which you have in mind. I won't allow the artists' drawings of the piers that 'float up and down with the tide' [Churchill's phrase] to get mixed up with women's brassieres, for example." "I should bloody well hope not." "But beyond that I'll have to ask you to trust me. You're a pro in your

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line, I'm sure. And I hope I am in mine. If we have any disagreements, we can each put it up to Chester." "Well," he harrumphed. "That's not my idea of how to run a railway as you people say (as we do not say, Colonel: 'hell of a way to run a railroad' is the correct expression) but if you will give me your assurance—" "You have it now." He looked at me very sharply. He didn't like being interrupted. But he knew also that I was not responsible to him and I think he didn't like the idea of competing with me for Chester's approbation, or anyone else's for that matter. "Right," he said disagreeably. "Then I have it; and you have mine that if there's anything I don't like I'll tell you. At once!" he barked. "You do that," I said, and I let out a great silent sigh of relief inside me for I hated scenes like this. "All right," he said. "Let's have a drink." We did so. Boy, I thought, Grierson was never as tough—or as mean or as meretricious as this. I could see tedious times ahead. But I thought of the cash as well. In Ottawa it was all plain sailing. The dear old Earl of Athlone, who was still the Governor General, came down looking very blue-eyed and military, and puttered about peering at the exhibit. Steer-Webster was stiff as a ramrod and trembling with excitement. He answered all the old boy's witless questions with adroit, respectful good nature. "Feller's in his element," Glover slipped out of the side of his mouth. But it wasn't a success. The publicity had been a bit too genteel; what we needed was a bit of the razzmatazz of metropolitan zingo. I said so to the Colonel when we were studying the not-too-promising attendance figures. "That's just what I've always maintained," he snapped. "We need more publicity." My mouth gaped. "Of the right sort, of course," he added hurriedly. We crated the show and shipped it down to Montreal and here we found ourselves in the hands of the real professionals. The advertising department of the house of Henry Morgan placed all its facilities at our disposal; full-page ads in all the dailies, both French- and Englishspeaking; their radio time was given over to us; their display department

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made wonderful faery shows in the great windows on Phillips Square and St. Catherine Street. Even the rival department stores, on the basis of some old-boy net of back scratching, advised their customers to visit the Mulberry Show and incidentally while downtown to visit their particular store. The former Minister of Defence, Hon. J.L. Raltston, opened the show in a great blast of publicity. We made speeches to Elks, to Kiwanis, to the Societe St. Jean Baptiste; we gave radio interviews; we entertained the press; the public began pouring in and by mid-October reached the astonishing total of 50,000 a day. Steer-Webster would emerge from his cubbyhole at one corner of the exhibit about every half hour and tiptoe nimbly over to the usher who held the little counter in his hand. There were write-ups, interviews, editorials, magazine items. The show was really on the road. It was a great success. Even the Colonel was moved to an unwilling tribute. "I'm sure," he said, at one of an innumerable series of cocktail parties, "we all owe a great deal to old Mac here, and I'd like you to drink his health. What a pity my wife isn't here to see this. You know, Mac, she's the Queen of Derbyshire." I went back to my room at the Mount Royal hotel and found a note stuck in my door. I was to call a Mr. Glover at a certain number. Mr. Glover, I thought? They've got it wrong. They must mean Colonel Glover. I rang his room but there was no answer. Then I decided to dial the number given. Perhaps he was at a party and wanted me to join him. Sure enough when someone answered there was the shattering metallic buzz of cocktail gossip coming over the wire: like the roar of the money changers in the temple. "Mr. Glover?" "Just a minute." Then, after a long pause, "Is that you, Graham?" "Yes, Colonel." "Colonel! Colonel who? Colonel Bogie? This is Guy Glover here." "Guy! Oh, I'm sorry. I thought—" "Listen boy, Mulberry's getting you. But there's something much more important. Grierson's leaving." "He's not! The Board?" "Canada."

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"For how long?" "For good." "No, it can't be." "Well, it is. Now look here, the reason I called you is this. A bunch of us are going down to see him off and I didn't want you to be included out." "That's terribly nice of you, Guy. Of course I'll be there. It's when?" "Tonight." "Tonight! What time?" "Eleven-thirty. In about two hours. Pier 12 Montreal Harbour. Be seeing you." I hung up the phone in a daze and sat down on the edge of the bed. Suddenly NFB came surging back into my consciousness and the whole Mulberry business seemed tawdry and inconsequential. Grierson leaving! Though we'd thought about it, half expected it even, some time, the actual shock was just as great. It seemed as if a linchpin had been yanked from NFB, and I sensed the whole edifice reeling. Including my own head. And then I thought: you goat, it isn't NFB, it's you. You've had too much to drink. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a young man's face clouded with booze and uncertainty. I gave it a sharp slap. Come on, I said. Pull yourself together. You're going to see him off. In both senses.

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FADE-OUT

It was the SS Erria, of only three or four thousand tons, and the fact that he was willing to cross the Atlantic in winter in so uncomfortable a craft showed how serious he was about getting back to Britain. The little ship slopped ever so slightly at the quay. For though Montreal is almost a thousand miles from the sea and there is no tide, an early winter gale had whipped the St. Lawrence to a fury, and snow flurries whirled about our ears, black against the scudding night now livid with the great glow of Montreal, white where they drove in great flurries across the arc lamps glaring down from the gaunt girders of Pier 12. We met on the dock in the driving snow, stinging our cheeks against turned-up collars. Canadian customs wouldn't let us go aboard so we stood, a small group, at the foot of the exiguous gangplank with its slimy old ropes, and the rusted iron wall of the Erria towering over us: Ross McLean, his thin ski-jump nose a target for the larger flakes; Jim Beveridge and Tom Daly, the two production heirs; Guy Glover, ever ready for a jape or a joke in the grimmest situation. In our midst Margaret Grierson with her beautiful enigmatic smile sunk in snow-splashed furs; and JG himself, hatless, scarf awry, coat half-buttoned, a mischievous domineering imp with a mordant laconic twist to his lips and a cocky jerk to his head. Snow blew about his sandy hair as he made his brief farewells.

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"Well, children, it's goodbye now," he passed around amongst us with a firm dry handclasp and a wisecrack for each one of us. To me he said with a grin and a twinkle: "Don't let the money go to your head." I felt sheepish because of course the truth was that Mulberry—though it meant for my wife and myself our first refrigerator, our first electric stove and our first oil heating after seven years of marriage—was in fact insulating me, sanitizing me against Grierson's departure and against any coherent attempt to figure out what NFB would be like without him and what would be in store for me when I returned to the Board from Mulberry after six months. Now he was backing slowly up the gangway. Margaret was already framed in the snow-streaked grey-black of the door opening. He felt with his feet for each upward cleat to steady himself as he backed, then he ducked his head, waved a cheerful goodbye and was gone. He was leaving Canada. He was just forty-seven. Going back in our taxi no one spoke. We all hated each other. We all wanted to be alone with our personal memories of Grierson. And we all realized too now that with his great fist removed we were not only alone but in competition with each other. I hardly said a word, was hardly aware, in the twenty-minute ride, of the dark rush of Montreal's skyscrapers and shuddering lights. I was thinking back, squashed uncomfortably in a rear seat which seemed to be minus a spring, over memories that spanned six years: a long time in the life of a young man of thirty-three. A host of images floated before me: Stanley Hawes smoking in bed before breakfast; Stuart Legg plodding barefoot under his umbrella in the burning building; J.D. Davidson poised over the four-way, cigarette barely an inch from Joe Braun's "sacred negativ"; Raymond Spottiswoode declaiming with precise clarity at one of his seminars; Budge Crawley waiting patiently for the sun to crawl out from behind a long lonely autumn cloud; Al Harburger's bright eyes asking a penetrating question; Julian Rofftnan's flamboyant gestures; Margaret Ann's wonderful talk-fests. I thought too of all I had learned about film that I would never forget: how to thread up a movieola and synchronize on a four-way; how to shoot in rough weather with a hand-held Eyemo; how to mix soundtracks and join images; how to pull a film together out of lousy shooting; how you

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could never put a film together if you had a bad script. Back to the idea. Always back to the idea and the respect for the fact and the knowledge that without these all the technical skill and wizardry in the world wouldn't make you a film. I thought too of all I had come to know about the ultimate end of a film both in terms of who saw it and in terms of what you wished to achieve; the big blaring theatricals for the masses where a quick socko approach was the only one possible; the little specialist audiences to whom the film opened new perspectives in their work, their aspirations and their daily life; farmers, teachers, trades unionists, factory workers, scientists, artists, children; the wonderful wizardry of animation; the film as microscope for the scientist, as telescope for the newsreel, and as window on the world for us all. I thought of what Grierson had done for Canada: how he had taken our basic stodginess and hypocrisy and censoriousness and self-deprecation and uncertainty, and had turned it into a blazing self-confidence. How he had uncovered unsuspected talents among a people supposedly humdrum; how he had found passion among a people supposedly phlegmatic; and lyric utterance among a people supposedly inarticulate. Finally in six years, at a salary which never exceeded $10,000, he changed the public images of Canada. As Margaret Ann Elton has written: "Pre-Grierson it was all Ontario apples, Nova Scotia lobster or B.C. salmon fishers, breadbaskets of the world and frightening stills in English school geography textbooks. Post-Grierson it was 'look to the North,' global air routes, Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, cooperative farmers, citizenship participation and a sense of nationhood within the iron triangle of power politics." And I don't suppose there was a faster reaction anywhere in the world to the establishment of UNRRA than Grierson's almost instantaneous delivery of UNRRA: In the Wake of the Armies, foreshadowing Canada's continuing and growing concern with aid for the Third World. I thought a lot too about the man who had made all this possible; and in thinking about him I began to think about myself and all he had taught me, not only about filmmaking but about that self. And I could now see that my rapid promotion in all the various steps of the film hierarchy to a producer of films and then to director of public relations had been due to

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two things: his judgement both as to my mentality and my tendency to skim quickly across the surface rather than to be concerned—save intuitively—with deeper realities. Grierson had early decided that I was not a real filmmaker. I was a good writer, certainly; and also an able administrator and an efficient PRO which are perhaps implied in being able to write well—certainly more so than the other way round. My best work had been done as an idea man, as a scriptwriter, a cutter, a producer and a PRO. My worst as a director. Since this is the core and marrow of film it must be there that Grierson had unerringly perceived that I should fail, and despite my mulish insistence on wanting to direct films had swept me gracefully and gently—and sometimes not so gently—over to one side. I could now see the logic in the Mulberry appointment. It did three things: it got Grierson off a hook so far as an undertaking to his friend Chester was concerned; it put me in a slot where I would show at my best; and it gave me a cushion to break the fall when after his departure others might decree that my place was elsewhere. I didn't see all this in the speeding taxi; but I saw a lot of it and it helped to ease my eventual parting from NFB. However, this is not the place to write of that. The story must end as the Erria nosed her way out into the black cold of the St. Lawrence and started slowly to grumble up past Sorel, past Trois Rivieres and Quebec and Riviere-du-Loup and Sept Isles, and through the Straits of Belle Isle and out into the grey Atlantic.

But it may be worth adding a coda. Of course, NFB survived Grierson's departure. He and his Canadians had built too well and with too good material for it to do otherwise. Many people left. Legg and Spottiswoode returned to Britain (Davidson had long since done so); Newman went to the CBC and eventually ITV and BBC; Hawes went to Australia; I joined the Canadian foreign service. But many more stayed and continued to work actively in the great Grierson tradition of documentary. The NFB still remains twenty-five years later, a living active corporate body annually producing scores of films. But it is not the NFB of which I have written; and that is why I do not write about it. But I can write about myself and say in simple truth that of the men

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who made me (apart from my parents), Grierson had the strongest and most lasting influence. He taught me to see and he taught all of us to think and to question. As he himself said: Total effort needs, in the last resort, a background of faith and a sense of destiny; but this concept of integrating all resources to an active end gives the principal pattern for a documentary approach. It will force documentary more intimately into a consideration of active ends and of the patterns of integration which best achieve them. It will also force it into a study of the larger phases of public management which may not have seemed necessary before. It will certainly take continuous teaching of the public mind before the new relationship between the individual and the state, which total effort involves, becomes a familiar and automatic one. The materials of citizenship today are different and the perspectives wider and more difficult; but we have, as ever, the duty of exploring them and of waking the heart and will in regard to them. That duty is what documentary is about. It is, moreover, documentary's primary service to the state: to be persisted in, whatever deviation may be urged upon it, or whatever confusion of thought, or easiness of mind, success may bring. As for the vast press of eager young men and women who thronged about Grierson, who throbbed and surged through that old lumber mill on the Ottawa until they practically burst it apart, who lived throughout those magic years a heightened life, all one can really say is that though, in MarvelPs marvellous phrase, "We shall meet, and part, and meet again, where dead men meet on lips of living men," the ideas they were shot so full of still live, still breathe in other hands, and on other pages. Perhaps even on these.

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NOTES

ACTION STATIONS (1942): This film, which was directed, produced, and edited by Joris Ivens, was the only one he worked on for the NFB. With a script by Morley Callaghan, the film, about a Canadian corvette sinking a submarine in the North Atlantic, was also produced in an abridged version called Corvette Port Arthur. AGOSTINI, LUCIO OR LOUIS (1913-1996): Agostini was an experienced composer for film, television, and radio by the time he began at the NFB in the early '40s. Born in Italy, where his father was well known as a musician, he came with his family to Montreal in 1915. During the 1920s and 1930s, Agostini performed for orchestras, and in 1932 was hired as composer-arranger for Associated Screen News. He was appointed music director there from 1940 to 1943, while simultaneously working as composer for the NFB'S "Canada Carries On" and "World in Action" series, during which he composed music for the NFB's Academy Award-winning Churchill's Island. Tom Daly said of his music style that "Agostini always started with a crescendo and went up from there to the end of the film." Agostini later worked for CBC and is best known as the composer-arranger of television's Front Page Challenge.

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ANSTEY, EDGAR (1907-1987), and ELTON, ARTHUR (1906-1973): Both

worked for the EMB and GPO film units during the 1930s, most collaboratively on Housing Problems (1935). Elton went on to fame directing films for the Shell Film Unit; Anstey was a peripatetic producer from the 1940s to the 1970s. Anstey won an Oscar for Wild Wings (1966) and was nominated for Snow (1965) and Thirty Million Letters (1963). Both married former NEB employees, Daphne Lilly (Anstey) and Margaret Ann Bjornson (Lady Elton). APPLEBAUM, LOUIS (1918-2000): A composer, conductor, music director, and latterly an arts administrator, Louis Applebaum joined the NFB in 1941, working on his first film, Call for Volunteers (1941), with Mclnnes. They also collaborated on Coal Face, Canada, Handle with Care, and Wartime Housing (all 1943). He created over 250 scores for NFB films, and dozens more for the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare theatre festival and other stage plays before moving on to us feature films and TV. He won several Canadian film awards and in 1945 was nominated for an Oscar for his score for The Story of G.I. Joe. Director of the Ontario Arts Council during the 1970s, he was co-author of the Applebaum-Hebert Report on federal cultural policy. BADGLEY, FRANK (1895-1955): Originally a journalist prior to his enlisting in World War I, Captain Frank joined the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau in 1921 as a writer-director, and became the director of the Bureau in 1927, a position he held through the lean years of the Depression and up to 1941 when the Bureau was absorbed by Grierson into the NFB. Responsible for many of the Bureau's best films, he used his World War I experience to great effect in the feature-length compilation film Lest We Forget (1935), which he wrote, directed, and coedited. He also supervised the popular feature The Royal Visit (1939). Offered the demeaning job of directing the Stills Division in 1941, he moved to the Department of Veterans Affairs. BEVERIDGE, JAMES (1917-1993): Beveridge, from Vancouver, BC, worked as a filmmaker and film editor before becoming one of the first to join Grierson at the NFB, initially as a film cutter, then as editor, and then as

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director and producer. He married fellow NFB employee Jane Smart, who was a scriptwriter and editor (Women Are Warriors; Alexis Tremblay—Habitant). From 1947 to 1949, he was Head of Production and Executive Producer at the NFB. After leaving the Board in 1962, he made films in Japan, the US, and India, establishing rural television there in Poona. He founded the film program at York University, and is the author of John Grierson: Film Master. BJERRING PARKER, GUDRUN (1920- ): A writer, director, and producer, Gudrun Bjerring Parker made lyrical documentaries on music and culture, notably Listen to the Prairies (1945) and Opera School (1952), that were at odds with the usual blunt NFB propaganda style. She also made films about children and for a while served as head of the NFB'S educational unit. Wed to fellow Winnipegger Morten Parker, she left the NFB to raise a family before joining with her husband in 1963 to make internationally noteworthy documentaries. BJORNSON, MARGARET ANN (1915-1995): Recommended to Grierson by Joseph Thorson, the Minister of War Services and overseer of the NFB, fellow Icelander Margaret Ann Bjornson left a master's program in literature to join the NFB as a researcher on Iceland on the Prairies (1941). She worked with Stuart Legg on the "World in Action" series until she left in 1948. After moving to England, she wed noted filmmaker Arthur Elton and became well known as a writer, lecturer, and keeper of the Elton Archives. BLACKBURN, MAURICE (1914-1985): Born in Quebec, Blackburn composed extensively for film throughout his life, and also edited, conducted, and arranged scores for orchestras. His music was played around the world. In 1941, he wrote the film score for Maple Sugar Time for the NFB, and the following year went to work at the Board. In the 1950s, he worked intensively with Norman McLaren and was known for perfecting the technique of writing sound directly on film. His film with McLaren, Blinkity Blank (1955), won numerous prizes including the Palme d'Or from Cannes.

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BUCHANAN, DONALD w. (1908-1966) Son of Alberta newspaper editor and senator William Asbury Buchanan, Donald Buchanan was a lifelong cultural activist and one of the unsung heroes of Canadian film. While Director of Talks (radio documentaries) for the CBC in the 1930s, he was the main force behind the formation of the National Film Society, initiating two instrumental reports ("Education and Cutural Film in Canada" and the Buchanan-McMullan Report), which set the stage for the NFB's filmmaking and non-theatrical distribution practices. In 1941 he organized the travelling film circuits for the NFB. CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS (1941): A ten-minute film, written and produced by Graham Mclnnes and directed by Budge Crawley, it tells the story of the women of Winnipeg who volunteered in hundreds of ways not only to help in the war effort, but also to lay the foundation for post-war peace. The volunteering was so extensive and resourceful, imitators referred to it as the "Winnipeg Plan." CALLAGHAN, MORLEY (1903-1990): Morley Callaghan became one of Canada's most respected writers. He wrote novels, short stories, and plays, as well as for television, film, and radio. He worked at the Toronto Daily Star with fellow reporter Ernest Hemingway and was later part of a famous group of writers in Paris in the late 1920s (along with Hemingway, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald). Callaghan won the GovernorGeneral's Award in 1951 for The Loved and the Lost. "CANADA CARRIES ON" (1940-1959): Beginning with Atlantic Patrol in April 1940, directed by Stuart Legg, this once-a-month series eventually produced over 200 ten- to twenty-minute films. Supervised initially by Legg, then by Stanley Hawes (1942 to 1945), and after the war by Sydney Newman, the series dealt with "what Canadians need to know and think about if they are going to do their best by Canada and themselves" (Grierson). The films featured dramatic music, forceful voice-over narration (notably by Lome Greene, the so-called "voice of doom"), and resourceful editing. "CANADIAN ARTISTS" SERIES (1941-1946): Initiated by Graham Mclnnes and based on his friendship with many Canadian artists, especially the

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Group of Seven, and his research on A Short History of Canadian An, this series of films used the limited supplies of Kodachrome colour film stock to great artistic effect. More than just films about art, they captured the essence of the Canadian landscape and the blossoming patriotic sentiments of the country. The films include Canadian Landscape (1941, about A. Y. Jackson), West Wind: The Story of Tom Thomson (1944), Sept peintres du Quebec (1944), Klee Wyck: The Story of Emily Carr (1946), and Peintres Populaires de Charlevoix (1946). CANADIAN GOVERNMENT MOTION PICTURE BUREAU (1923-1941): The CGMPB evolved from the federal Exhibits and Publicity Bureau established in 1917, and was set up to centralize all government film production, focussing mainly on trade, tourism, and industry. Limited budgets during the 1930s stifled creativity, prompting Ross McLean to invite John Grierson to re-evaluate the government's film needs. Grierson's report led to the National Film Act and the creation of the National Film Board in 1939, which oversaw CGMPB productions. This two-headed arrangement, with Frank Badgley as CGMPB director and John Grierson as film commissioner of the NEB, led to irreconcilable conflicts. Grierson, a shrewd political operative, convinced the government to fold the CGMPB into the NFB and cede all production decisions to Grierson. CAPTAINS OF THE CLOUDS (1942): This two-hour wartime melodrama stars James Cagney as a brash American pilot who joins the Royal Canadian Air Force, defies the rules, but then heroically sacrifices his life. Directed by Warner Bros.' heavyweight Michael Curtiz and filmed in Technicolor, the film is interesting for the Canadian locations and the use of documentary material on the training of an RCAF pilot. CHERRY, EVELYN SPICE (1904-1990), and LAWRENCE (1900-1964): These two social documentarists from the prairies made over 100 films. Evelyn had been a journalist and worked with Grierson at the GPO Film Unit. She married Lawrence and they both moved to Canada and joined the NFB in 1941, where they were responsible for producing agricultural films. Evelyn left in 1950, and Lawrence stayed at the NFB until 1957. Returning to Saskatchewan (where both had been born) in 1957, they set up the film

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section for the Saskatchewan government, and formed their own company, Cherry Film Productions, which produced approximately fifty films. CHURCHILL'S ISLAND (1941): Produced, directed, and edited (from existing footage) by Stuart Legg, narrated by Lome Greene in fall stentorian style, with music by Lucio Agostini, this film has the distinction of being the first NFB film to win an Academy Award (for documentary). It describes the Battle of Britain, focussing on the will and courage of the British people in the face of sea and air attacks, and is perhaps aimed more at American isolationist audiences and wavering Allied morale than at Canadians. COAL FACE, CANADA (1943): A rousing "docu-drama" about a more positive future for Canadian coal miners and mining after the war, this film compares favourably to its famous British predessor, Coal Face (1935). The 1943 Coal Face, Canada was produced by Mclnnes with music by Louis Applebaum. CRAVEN, SALLY: This is likely a pseudonym as there is no record of a person by this name ever being employed by the NFB. CRAWLEY, JUDITH (1914-1986), and FRANK RADFORD (BUDGE) (1911-1987):

The Crawleys formed Crawley Films in 1946, which eventually became Canada's largest independent film studio, producing more than 5000 films and winning over 250 international awards. Budge Crawley, a director, producer, and photographer, made lie d'Orleans in 1938, on his honeymoon with wife Judith, and the film won awards and attracted Grierson's attention. Thereafter the Crawleys made commissioned films for the NFB through the war years, including Canadian Landscape (1941). Judith was one of the first women filmmakers in Canada, and worked as a director, writer, cinematographer, and editor. She directed several films for children. Crawley Films produced Canada's first animated television series, The Tales of the Wizard ofOz, and also the first Canadian feature film to win an Academy Award—The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1976). DALY, TOM (1918-2000): The only NFB personality other than Grierson and McLaren to have an entire book written about him, Tom Daly was a brilliant editor, producer, and mentor. He began working at the NFB in

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1940 as a production assistant and was initially charged with establishing the Board's extensive stock-shot library. After establishing his credentials as a researcher and editor on CCO and WIA films, he was appointed in 1951 as Executive Producer of the famed Unit B, which pioneered films in the cinema-verite style on science, arts, and culture, but also included animation and educational and government films. He was chief editor for Labyrinth, the groundbreaking, NFB-produced, multi-screen film for Canada's pavilion at Expo 67, and a precursor of IMAX films. His films, over 300 in number, have received seven Academy Award nominations and many international prizes. DUNNING, GEORGE (1920-1979): Animator George Dunning was one of Norman McLaren's proteges at the NEB. In 1949 he and fellow NEB employee Jim McKay founded Graphic Associates, an early Toronto animation studio. He is most well-known for his work on Yellow Submarine, the Beatles film of 1968. FLAHERTY, ROBERT (1884-1951): The man who started the documentary ball rolling with Nanook of the North (1922) made in the Canadian Arctic, Flaherty was less a documentarian than a romantic adventurer and "salvage ethnographer." Nanook and Man ofAran were about practices abandoned by the Inuit and Irish cultures depicted. Flaherty was too undisciplined, too much of a one-man operation, to find any work at NEB. GLOVER, GUY (1908-1988): Glover joined the NEB in 1941, and in 1944 was put in charge of the French unit there. He remained with the NEB for over thirty-five years as a senior producer, and for the latter part of that time was in charge of television production and the English unit. GREAT FIRE, THE (Friday, July 23, 1943): Tom Daly's recollection of the fire is slightly different from that of Mclnnes. In his "Notes and Corrections Concerning One Man's Documentary" (National Film Board Archives), he writes: Someone broke the light-box glass over a deep-set lower left bulb; seeing the danger of nitrate film touching a naked hot bulb, the person reached down and pulled out the wall-plug that connected the

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light. Someone else, not realizing all this, came to use the bench and found the bulb not working, when he wanted to look at some film over the light box. Seeing the bulb not working, he looked under the bench, found the plug out, pushed it in, and began to look at film. At one point in stopping the film, a loop dropped onto the light bulb and the fire started. Wright and Wallace were OK in the building after the fire had started, but they made the mistake of trying to put out the fire with fire extinguishers. They were seared by the flames leaping out of the door when they opened it. Wallace at least had a permanently scarred head with the loss of hair. As it happened, the cutting rooms had had asbestos boarding put up to protect the partitions, and the work had been completed only one month before the fire. Otherwise the fire probably would have destroyed the whole building.

The person who broke the glass was never identified; Marjorie McKay names Nick Balla as the "someone else" whose actions started the fire. GRIERSON, JOHN (1898-1972): The ultimate documentary guru and cinematic wheeler-dealer, Grierson was a forceful, energetic, and brusque Scotsman who studied media theory under influential social philosopher Walter Lippman at the University of Chicago on a Rockefeller scholarship. He coined the term "documentary" in a 1927 review of Robert Flaherty's Moana and defined it memorably if loosely as "the creative treatment of actuality." After making a striking documentary on herring fishing, Drifters (1929), he became better known as a head of production and inspirer at film units he set up at EMB and the GPO. He wrote a report for the Canadian government that led to the National Film Act of May 1939, and subsequently became Canada's Film Commissioner, a post he held until 1945. He was responsible for the production of more than 500 films, the establishment of much-envied and -imitated national non-theatrical film circuits, and the entrenchment of a studio still in operation today. When he left the NFB, he was peripatetic but less successful, his reputation tainted by a cold-war spy "scandal." He set up a production unit for the United Nations and UNESCO, then became an executive producer for Group Three in England. In 1957 he returned to his native Scotland to

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host a popular television program, This Wonderful World, and ended his career as a film teacher and presence at McGill University. His wife Margaret was also a filmmaker, working with him at EMB when he was officially antagonistic to filmmakers marrying colleagues; his sister married filmmaker John Taylor. HAWES, STANLEY (1905-1991): Hawes had worked with Grierson in Britain before coming to Canada. Before the CGMPB and the NFB were amalgamated, he was in charge of the NFB personnel working at the Bureau, and directed Tom Daly to begin setting up the stock-shot library at the Bureau that was used so extensively in future NFB films. In 1946, Hawes went to Australia as the first Producer in Chief for the new Australian National Film Board. He was head of the Commonwealth Film Unit for twenty-five years. HERITAGE (1939): This sixteen-minute film, directed by J. Booth Scott, featured the sound work of Bill Lane and Charlie Quick and was produced by the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau. An agricultural film, it depicted various methods for helping farms regain their viability after the years of drought, and champions the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act of 1932. The film was actually finished in 1934, but its release was delayed by the government until more propitious times. HEROES OF THE ATLANTIC (1941): A transitional film produced by the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau shortly before its assimilation into the NFB, the film had a stellar contingent of filmmakers: J.D. Davidson as director; Stanley Hawes as producer; Stuart Legg and Graham Mclnnes as scriptwriters; and Bill Lane and Charlie Quick on sound. The film focussed on the work of the Merchant Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy, and was part of the "Canada Carries On" series. HOT ICE (1940): Irving Jacoby, an American, directed this action film of a hockey game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the New York Rangers, interspersed with scenes of community and neighbourhood pickup hockey games. ICELAND ON THE PRAIRIES (1941): With extensive research by Margaret Ann Bjornson and camera-work by Budge Crawley, this Mclnnes-produced

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documentary describes the people, places, and activities of Manitoba's Icelandic community, the largest concentration of Icelanders outside Iceland. It is one the first Canadian cultural-mosaic films. IVENS, JORIS (1898-1989): Dutch-born Joris Ivens studied photography in Berlin in the 1920s. His film De Brug (1928), along with Rain (1930), was considered one of the earliest Dutch "art" films and attracted considerable international attention. He continued to make social and artistic films in Holland and Russia until the mid-193 Os, when he moved to the States to make films for the American War Department. In 1955 he was awarded a World Peace Prize, and in 1957, following his move to Paris, he was awarded the Palme d'Or in Cannes for his film La Seine a rencontre Paris. Thereafter, he continued to produce films of political and social critique of many countries, including films about American aggression in Vietnam. KAMERADSCHAFT (COMRADESHIP, 1931): This was a vividly realistic film by G.W. Pabst about a mining disaster in a French town near the German border that reconciles the workers of the two nations. KASH, EUGENE (1912-2004): Kash, whom everyone called Jack, was a violinist at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra before coming to the NFB as resident musician, sound editor, and finally head of the music department. He organized the first children's concerts in Canada and became conductor of the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra. He married the world-famous Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester. LAMBART, EVELYN (1914-1999): Lambart and Norman McLaren were the lynchpins of the animation films at NFB. She joined the NFB in 1942 as its first woman animator and contributed maps and graphics for many of the films in the WIA series. Nominated for an Academy Award for her work with McLaren on A Chairy Tale, she was also known for her technique of using paper cutouts in films for children. After 1968, she switched to directing her own films. LEGG, STUART (1910-1988): Legg was instrumental in the formation and direction of the National Film Board. Brought by Grierson from England, he supervised, produced, and directed early "Canada Carries On" and

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"World in Action" films, including the Academy Award-winning Churchill's Island. After the war, he went with Grierson to New York to work on "The World Today" series, and then returned to London as director of the Film Centre. In 1952 he wrote The Railway Book. LOVAT, SCOTTY: There was no one with this name employed at the NFB at that time; so this is a pseudonym fabricated by Mclnnes, probably for legal reasons. "MARCH OF TIME": Founded in 1934 by Louis de Rochemont in association with Time-Life, Inc. (which financed it), this monthly theatrical series of two-reelers combined actuality footage and staged interviews to cover news and current events. Parodied at the beginning of Citizen Kane, the series petered out in the late 1940s with the advent of network television. De Rochemont went on to produce feature films and was involved in the development of Cinerama. MCLAREN, NORMAN (1914-1987): McLaren was probably one of the world's most well-known and respected film animators. He invented many animation techniques, including the process, known as pixillation, of animating live actors. Neighbors, a pacifist parable that uses the technique, won an Oscar in 1954. McLaren was born in Scotland and studied design at Glasgow School of Art before joining young Grierson at the GPO Film Unit. From 1939 to 1941 he worked in New York for the Museum of Non-Objective Art and as an independent filmmaker. Invited to the NFB to set up its animation operations, he remained there for the rest of his career, with brief exceptions in 1949 and 1952, when he taught and worked in China and India at the invitation of UNESCO. MCLEAN, ROSS (1905-1984): McLean was a key figure in the founding of the NFB. A Rhodes Scholar, born in Manitoba, he was the Ottawa correspondent for Saturday Night and Canadian Forum magazines when he and Donald Buchanan helped form the National Film Society there in 1935. As private secretary to Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner in London, McLean convinced John Grierson to do a study of Canadian government film policy, which eventually led Grierson's being

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hired as Film Commissioner with McLean as his deputy. When Grierson resigned in 1945, McLean took over as Film Commissioner. In 1950, he served as head of Films and Visual Information at UNESCO in Paris and, later, was Special Advisor on Policy for the CRTC in Canada. NEWMAN, SYDNEY (1917-1997): When Newman joined the NEB in 1941 as a film editor, he was already a painter, designer, and photographer. At NEB, he worked on Armed Forces films and war information shorts, and was producer of the "Canada Carries On" series, eventually producing over 300 documentaries. After leaving the NEB, he worked for television in England, where he produced dramas including the first on-air plays of Harold Pinter, and created the popular TV series The Avengers and Dr. Who, He became head of drama at BBC, and then, after returning to Canada, head of the NEB from 1970 to 1975. He was inducted as an Officer in the Order of Canada in 1981. NIGHT MAIL (1935): Sponsored by the British General Post Office, this dynamic film is one of the classics of the British Documentary Movement. Directed by Harry Watt, produced by John Grierson, Stuart Legg, and Basil Wright, with a musical score by Benjamin Britten and Alberto Cavalcanti, the film documented one night of the Royal Mail train delivery service. W.H. Auden wrote the rhyming script. NORRISH, BERNARD E. (BEN): The entrepeneurial Norrish helped make the first government-sponsored promotional films in 1917 and set up a film unit in the federal Exhibits and Publicity Bureau that same year, with new films produced twice a month in a series called "Seeing Canada." In June 1920 he was easily persuaded to join the Canadian Pacific Railway where, one month later, he became general manager of the newly incorporated subsidiary Associated Screen News in Montreal. The lab at ASN processed all release prints for American films in Canada; its filmmakers supplied Canadian material for American newsreels, and made travelogues, promotional and sponsored films, and theatrical shorts in the "Canadian Cameo" series that were seen worldwide. Rx FOR RUBBER (1944): This eight-minute film was produced by Graham Mclnnes for the Canadian Department of Munitions and Supply, and is

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about the production of synthetic rubber needed for the war, necessitated by the Japanese blockade of rubber-producing countries. RATHBURN, ELDON (1916- ): A musician, lecturer, and film composer for the NFB from 1947 to 1976, and also a freelancer, Rathburn composed scores for more than 300 films, the more memorable being Capital Plan (1949), The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952), City of Gold (1958), Canon (1964), Labyrinth (for Expo 67), and The Hecklers (1975). ROFFMAN, JULIAN (1919-2000): Producer and director Julian Roffman joined the NFB in 1940, where he worked on films for the Armed Service Production Program, including 13 Platoon. He produced over 400 films in his career, mostly in the United States. In 1961 he and his partner, distributor Nat Taylor, produced The Mask, a low-budget 3-D horror feature film that was the first Canadian feature to be heavily marketed into the United States. He later worked as producer for ABC, CBS, and NBC. SPARLING, GORDON (1900-1994): Sparling was a director, editor, and producer with the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau and Associated Screen News. Responsible for production and direction of eighty-five of the ASN's "Canadian Cameo" series, which released its first film in 1932, he produced and directed propaganda films during the war for the Canadian Army Film and Photo Unit. He eventually joined the NFB in 1958, when he made Royal River about the opening of the St. Lawrence seaway. SPOTTISWOODE, RAYMOND (1913-1970): A Grierson acolyte in England, Spottiswoode worked briefly for MGM in Hollywood before joining the NFB. After leaving the Board, he lectured at universities in America and England. His books, A Grammar of Film (1935), Film and Its Techniques (1951), and Theory of Steroscopic Transmission (1953), are still influential. THORSON, JOSEPH (1889-1978): Lawyer, Liberal politician with Prime Ministerial ambitions, and eventually Chief Judge of the Exchequer Court of Canada, Thorson was a Rhodes Scholar who became the youngest Dean of the Law School at the University of Manitoba in 1921. During the early stages of World War II, he served as Minister of National War Services with

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responsibility (as chair) of the NFB. Born in Winnipeg of Icelandic parents, he is the brother of Hollywood cartoonist Charlie Thorson. WAR CLOUDS IN THE PACIFIC (1941): Essentially a film about defense against Japan by Pacific democracies, it was part of the "Canada Carries On" series, and was narrated by Lome Greene, and directed, produced, and edited by Stuart Legg. It received an Oscar nomination. WELCOME SOLDIER! (1944): Produced by Graham Mclnnes at the NFB for the Canadian Department of Pensions and National Health, this nineminute film explains some of the federal plans to help returning veterans. WINGS OF YOUTH (1940): Part of the "Canada Carries On" series, this film was directed by Raymond Spottiswoode, produced by Stuart Legg, scripted by Mclnnes, and narrated by Lome Greene, with sound by Lucio Agostini. It was produced with Audio Pictures Ltd., and depicts Canadian construction of airfields and flying equipment for the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. "THE WORLD IN ACTION": This monthly wartime series was produced from 1942 to 1947, and included two-reel films assembled and scripted from existing footage. Episodes were shown monthly. Stuart Legg and Tom Daly wrote, directed, and edited the series based on research by Margaret Ann Bjornson; Lome Greene narrated. The films were intended to present a global perspective, looking ahead to peace, and were distributed overseas and in the United States by United Artists. WRIGHT, BASIL (1907-1987): Wright was born in Surrey and educated at Cambridge University. A member of the Film Society in London, he was one of the first to be employed by Grierson's Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. His most famous film is Song of Ceylon (1934), which won first prize for Best Film at the 1935 International Film Festival in Brussels. He assisted as producer on early "Canada Carries On" and "World in Action" films, and went on to found his own production companies, the last of which was International Realist, 1946-1949. He was instrumental in establishing Documentary News Letter.

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[scr = screenwriter; pro = producer; v/o = voice-over; dir = director]

1940: Call to a Nation (scr) Home Front (scr) Front of Steel (scr) Wings of Youth (scr) On Guard for Thee (scr) The Royal Parks (v/o, scr) Letter from Camp Borden (scr) 1941: Iceland on the Prairies (scr, pro) Call for Volunteers (scr, pro) Canadian Landscape (scr) Ottawa on the River (scr, pro; aka Ottawa: Wartime Capital) Who Sheds His Blood (scr) Guards of the North (scr) Heroes of the Atlantic (scr; with Stuart Legg)

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A Tale of Two Cities (scr, pro; a compilation film) Blue Horizon [a war musical, never completed] (scr) Tools of War (partial scr)

1942: The Face of Time (pro) Fighting Ships (dir) Flight of the Dragon (pro, ed) Great Guns (pro) Keep 'em Flying (pro) Wings Parade (pro) Men of the Tanks (scr) 1943: Coal Face, Canada (pro, scr) Handle with Care (pro) New Horizons (pro) Niagara Frontier (pro) Canadian Mail (pro, v/o) Men without Wings (pro, dir) Plowshares into Swords (pro) Smoke and Steel (pro) Universities at War (pro) Wartime Housing (pro, dir)

1944: A Friend for Supper (pro) Home to the Land (pro) Painters of Quebec (pro; aka Septpeintres du Quebec} The Plot Thickens (pro) Rxfor Rubber (pro) Ski in the Valley of the Saints (pro) Welcome Soldier! (pro) West Wind: The Story of Tom Thomson (pro, dir, scr)

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1945:

Salmon Run (pro)

1946: Klee Wyck: The Story of Emily Carr (scr, pro) Tale of Two Cities (pro) When he left the NFB and joined External Affairs, Mclnnes was evidently asked to provide a list of the films that he worked on in 1940 and 1941 when he was not officially employed fall time but was paid a regular weekly "fee" of seventy-five dollars. In a letter dated November 7, 1948, to Miss E Elizabeth Bertram, the Personnel Manager of the NFB, Mclnnes indicates that he was involved in Call to a Nation in February 1940. Although it is not currently listed in any NFB catalogues, this was the first film about Canada's war effort, made by CGMPB in connection with the first War Loan. In addition to the films listed above in the filmography, Mclnnes also mentions, in the same letter to Miss Bertram, New Scotland, Now That April's Here, Salvage Bin, Au devant de I'ennemi, Song of Liberty, Toronto: Convention City, and Pays de Quebec as films he contributed to during 1940 and 1941. While he says his duties were "multifarious" and "ranged all the way from research assistant and location manager to director and producer," it is impossible to determine with complete accuracy what his contributions were. To complicate matters further, the final eight films do not appear in NFB catalogues, at least not with these titles. In all likelihood they are Canadian Motion Picture Bureau films.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. BOOKS BY GRAHAM McINNES

A Short History of Canadian An. Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1939. Canadian An. Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1950. Lost Island. Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1954. Sushila. London: Jonathan Cape, 1957. The Road to Gundagai. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965. Humping My Bluey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966. Finding a Father. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967. Goodbye Melbourne Town. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968. 2. SELECTED WORKS BY AND ABOUT COLIN MACINNES AND ANGELA THIRKELL

Gould, Tony. The Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin Maclnnes. London: Allison & Busby, 1993. Maclnnes, Colin. To the Victor, the Spoils. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1950. . June in Her Spring. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1952. . City of Spades. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957.

ONE MAN'S DOCUMENTARY

_. Absolute Beginners. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1959. _. Mr. Love and Justice. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1960. _. Australia and New Zealand. New York: Time Incorporated, 1964. _. Westward to Laughter. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1969. _. Loving Them Both: A Study ofBisexuals and Bisexuality. London: Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe, 1973. _. Out of the Way. London: Martin, Brian & O'Keeffe, 1980. Strickland, Margot. Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. London: Duckworth, 1977. Thirkell, Angela. Three Houses. London: Oxford University Press, 1931. . Wild Strawberries. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934. . The Grateful Sparrow. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1935. . Before Lunch. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1939. . The Headmistress. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944. . Love Among the Ruins. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948. . The Old Bank House. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949. . Love at All Ages. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1959. 3. WORKS ABOUT JOHN GRIERSON AND/OR THE NFB

Aitken, Ian. Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement. London: Routledge, 1990. Beveridge, James. John Grierson: Film Master. New York: Macmillan, 1978. Bidd, Donald W. The NFB Film Guide: The Productions of the National Film Board of Canada from 1939 to 1989. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada, 1991. Evans, Gary. John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. . In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Hardy, Forsyth, ed. Grierson on Documentary. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. . John Grierson: A Documentary Biography. London: Faber & Faber, 1979.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

James, C. Rodney. Film as a National Art: The National Film Board of Canada and the Film Board Idea. New York: Arno, 1977. The John Grierson Project. John Grierson and the NFB. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984. Jones, David Barker. Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981. . The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Nelson, Joyce. The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988. Swann, Paul. The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Veronneau, Pierre. Resistance et Affirmation: la production francophone a I'ONF, 1939-1964. Montreal: Cinematheque quebecoise, 1987. 4. WORKS WITH SIGNIFICANT SECTIONS ON JOHN GRIERSON OR THE NFB Clanfield, David. Canadian Film. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Elder, Bruce. Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989. Feldman, Seth, ed. Take Two: A Tribute to Film in Canada. Toronto: Irwin, 1984. Feldman, Seth, & Joyce Nelson, eds. Canadian Film Reader. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1977. Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema. London & New York: Routledge, 2002. Harcourt, Peter. Movies and Mythologies: Towards a National Cinema. Toronto: CBC, 1977. Veronneau, Pierre, Michael Dorland, and Seth Feldman, eds. Dialogue: Canadian and Quebec Cinemas. Montreal: Mediatexte, 1987. Veronneau, Pierre, and Piers Handling, eds. Self Portrait: Essays on Canadian and Quebec Cinemas. Ottawa: CFI, 1980. Walz, Gene, ed. Flashback: People and Institutions in Canadian Film History. Montreal: Mediatexte, 1986.

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