Remembrance on film: Canadian documentaries and the world wars

Next Wednesday at eleven in the morning, the country will go quiet for two minutes. I will be in a crowd of dark coats in Halifax, as I am most Novembers, and somewhere in the silence I will catch myself picturing the wars the way I always do: grainy black and white, running at a slightly wrong speed. Men climbing out of a trench. A landing craft dropping its ramp into grey water. None of those pictures came from my family. They came from film, most of it first seen on a kitchen television in Cape Breton in the week before the eleventh.

A good deal of that footage was shot or assembled by Canadians, and a good deal of it was made to help win a war, not to remember one. That gap, between what a film was made for and what we use it for every November, is my subject here. Canadian documentary and the world wars grew up side by side, and the films tell you as much about the years that produced them as about Vimy or Normandy.

A film board born on the edge of war

The National Film Act became law in 1939, a few months before Canada declared war on Germany that September, and it created the National Film Board. Its first Government Film Commissioner was John Grierson, the Scot who had built the documentary movement in Britain. Almost from the start, the new Board's main job was explaining the war to the people paying for it.

Two theatrical series carried most of the load. Canada Carries On began in 1940 and dealt mainly with the Canadian war effort: training, munitions, convoys, the home front. The World in Action took a wider view of strategy, supply and the global war. Both played in ordinary commercial cinemas, a short before the feature. Many of them were produced by Stuart Legg, an Englishman from the British documentary units who came over to work under Grierson.

Legg's method was compilation. He gathered footage shot by others (newsreel crews, service cameramen and, when it could be had, the enemy) and cut it at speed against maps, animated diagrams and a driving score, under a narrator who seemed certain of everything. Very often that narrator was Lorne Greene, then reading the news on CBC radio, with a voice so grave that listeners nicknamed him the Voice of Doom.

Churchill's Island and the first documentary Oscar

Churchill's Island (1941), a Canada Carries On film made by Legg, is a portrait of Britain as a besieged fortress: the coast under watch, fighters in the air, convoys at sea, civilians digging in. It won the first Academy Award given for a documentary. For a film board barely two years old, that was an astonishing calling card. The cutting has a forward drive that most newsreels of the period never manage, and the whole thing is built like a speech, threat first, then defence, then resolve.

It is also propaganda, plainly and on purpose, and Grierson, who used the word without embarrassment, would not have taken that as an insult. He argued that a democracy at war had to persuade its own citizens, and that a public film agency existed partly to do the persuading. Churchill's Island tells you what to feel at every turn and leaves nothing to chance.

Reading wartime films honestly

There is a habit, at Remembrance screenings and in classrooms, of treating these reels as plain records of what happened. They are records, but of something more specific: what the Canadian government wanted Canadians to understand and feel in a given season of the war.

Watch the confidence: the narration rarely admits doubt, even when the outcome was very much in doubt. Watch the distance. In the reels I know best, losses are mostly seen from far off, as smoke on a horizon or small figures crossing a field, and the cost to Canadian families sits under the soundtrack rather than in front of the camera. And watch for what is missing: you will find no hard look here at decisions Canadians later came to regret, such as the uprooting of Japanese Canadians from the British Columbia coast in 1942.

None of this makes the films worthless. It makes them evidence, the way a recruiting poster is evidence. Show them in November, by all means, with a sentence of context: who made this, when, and what for. Claire Archambault's guide to watching a documentary critically has a good set of questions to carry into any of them.

Fifty years on: The Valour and the Horror

The loudest argument Canada has had about war on film came half a century after the fighting. The Valour and the Horror, made by the brothers Brian McKenna and Terence McKenna and broadcast on CBC in 1992, was a three-part series about Canadians at Hong Kong in 1941, in Normandy in 1944 and in Bomber Command's campaign against German cities. It combined archive footage and interviews with dramatized scenes in which actors played real people, speaking lines drawn from the written record.

Its case was that Canadian servicemen had too often been failed by those above them: sent to positions they could not hold, thrown into costly attacks, and in the bomber war committed to a campaign whose effectiveness and morality were open to serious question. A great many veterans heard something else, that their own courage and conduct were being doubted. Veterans' organizations protested, historians lined up on both sides, and a Senate subcommittee examined the series in hearings.

I have watched it twice, years apart. Historians had raised similar questions in print for years. What was new was asking them on national television, through actors, while many of the men concerned were alive and watching. The dramatized scenes were the weak point. When an actor speaks a line, a viewer cannot see where the document ends and the interpretation begins, and in a film about the war dead that boundary matters more than anywhere. Both sides, I think, had a real point.

The fight had a precedent. A decade earlier the Film Board's The Kid Who Couldn't Miss (1982), Paul Cowan's film about the First World War flying ace Billy Bishop, had questioned parts of Bishop's record and drawn a furious response. In Canada a war documentary is judged as history, as memorial and as a verdict on people's fathers, all at once.

The witnesses

There are no First World War veterans left to interview, only letters, diaries and the recordings made decades ago when the soldiers of 1914 to 1918 were old men. For the Second World War the window is nearly shut, and the museums, archives, Legion branches and schools recording those who served have been racing a clock.

Oral testimony gives a war documentary what archive footage cannot: the cold in the boots, the smell of a ship's hold, the joke someone told the night before a landing, the long pause before a name. It also brings the usual problems of memory. Stories told many times acquire a shape, and people remember what they later read and watched, sometimes including the films discussed above. The best war documentaries I know let testimony and documents sit beside each other and talk, without forcing one to defeat the other.

Whose testimony gets recorded matters as well. The default Canadian war story, a young soldier from a small town, leaves out a great deal: women in the services and in munitions plants, merchant seamen, Indigenous soldiers who came home to rules their neighbours never faced, and people who arrived in Canada after the war carrying a different war entirely. Shelley Saywell's Out of the Fire is about one of those people: Faye Schulman, a Jewish partisan in the forests of what is now Belarus, who photographed the unit she fought with and later made her life in Toronto. Remembrance week has room for her too, and for her pictures.

The colour question

Archive footage of the wars is everywhere, from broadcast specials to phone clips, and more and more of it is restored: steadied, sharpened, slowed to a natural speed, given sound effects and painted in colour. The best known is Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), built from First World War footage held by Britain's Imperial War Museum, which made men who had always jerked across the screen in grey walk and breathe like people we might know.

I have felt the appeal. Colour collapses distance. It also adds information that was never in the frame. The shade of a sky, a face or a field in Flanders is a guess, however careful. Restored frame rates are estimates, and the footsteps and gunfire on a new soundtrack were recorded much later, somewhere else. None of that is dishonest if viewers are told. Often they aren't, and a colourised clip on a phone gives no way of knowing what was found and what was made.

There is a second problem, closer to home. Compilation films like Legg's were themselves built from footage of mixed origin, some of it staged, some filmed in training, some captured. When those reels are chopped into fragments and passed around as raw record, the propaganda frame falls away and the fragments gain an authority they never had. Teodora Vlahos's plain guide to archive footage and rights covers the clearance side for filmmakers. These are the viewer's questions:

• Who shot this, for whom, and in which year of the war?
• Is it the event the caption names, or similar footage from somewhere else?
• Was anything staged, re-enacted or filmed in training?
• What has been added: colour, sound, extra frames, sharpening?
• Does the credit say so, and does it name the archive?

A viewing list for the week

Several of the Board's titles can be watched free at nfb.ca. Pair them across the decades if you can; the contrasts teach more than any single film.

If you have one evening, show Churchill's Island first and then the Normandy part of The Valour and the Horror, and talk about the half century between them: one film made to steady a nation, the other made to ask how that nation spent its sons. Then on Wednesday, when the two minutes end and the crowd starts to move, notice which pictures came to you in the silence, and ask yourself where you first saw them.