Archival Interventions and Disentangling Legacy Records

Appraisal and disposition of government records at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) focuses primarily on acquiring the “right” records to best document a given function of the Government of Canada. Once records pass into LAC’s care, access is provided through an inconsistent approach of online descriptive records and on-site finding aids, often with minimal or incorrect contextualizing information that hinders their overall discoverability and use. Through a study of both the legacy photographic records in the National Film Board of Canada Fonds and the recontextualization project currently underway at LAC, the author examines the history of the record, from recordkeeping practices to the transfer to LAC, and some of the interventions by the archives to describe and shape these records over several generations of custodial care. All of these various actions have had a hidden impact on the use and understanding of both the individual records and the larger collection. This article provides a case study in how rearrangement based on research into creators, organizational recordkeeping systems, and archival custodial practices can draw out complex, multiple provenances and provide researchers with a fuller contextual history of the record.

I-Docs and New Narratives

Digital media make it possible to move from a conventional storytelling medium to other avenues that allow open stories to be told, maintaining the traditional basis of narratives while also adding other elements that enrich and deepen storytelling innovation. Therefore, it is important to analyze how the characteristics of digital storytelling work together in order to create meaning through new narratives. Recent documentary projects show how new ways of telling stories involve new ways of relating meaning and form, multiple platforms, and strong interaction and engagement from the side of the viewer. Interactivity and participation change the way in which a story is told and received, thus changing its nature as a narrative. To delve deeper into this field, I will analyze Highrise. The Towers in the World. World in the Towers, (http://highrise.nfb.ca) by Katerina Cizek. This is a complex project produced by the National Film Board of Canada, a multiyear, many-media collaborative documentary experiment that has generated many projects, including mixed media, interactive documentaries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films. I will develop a textual analysis on part of the project, the interactive documentary Out My Window, by focusing on its ways of meaning-making and the specific narrative implications of the relationship between meaning and form. The project is ambitious: Cizek's vision is "to see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it, and to help reinvent what it means to be an urban species in the 21st".

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

Re-contextualizing a visual history of Canada : the division of the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division collection

This thesis examines the collection of photographs produced by the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division between the years 1941 and 1984. As originally conceived, the Still Photography Division produced images of Canada and Canadians for promotional use by government departments and as stock images for magazines and newspapers. The collection was divided, initially in 1971, later in 1975, and finally in 1984. Photographs made before 1962 are housed at Library and Archives of Canada, those made after that date are in the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, founded in 1985. The thesis is organized into two major parts. The first provides a brief history of the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division, describing its mandate, purposes, and evolution. The second compares the use and presentation of the Still Photography Division material at Library and Archives of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in six areas: 1. Physical organizaation of the collections; 2. Physical housing of both prints and negatives in the collections; 3. Intellectual organization and access to the collections; 4. Public access to the collections; 5. Published information on the collections; 6. Public exhibitions and display. This comparison allows one to see how the distinctive purposes, procedures, and practices of an archive and an art museum have been applied to the physical arrangement and intellectual organization of this collection of 'documentary' photographs, thereby revealing and highlighting the fundamental differences between these two types of cultural institutions in Canada.

Re-contextualizing a visual history of Canada : the division of the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division collection

This thesis examines the collection of photographs produced by the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division between the years 1941 and 1984. As originally conceived, the Still Photography Division produced images of Canada and Canadians for promotional use by government departments and as stock images for magazines and newspapers. The collection was divided, initially in 1971, later in 1975, and finally in 1984. Photographs made before 1962 are housed at Library and Archives of Canada, those made after that date are in the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, founded in 1985. The thesis is organized into two major parts. The first provides a brief history of the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division, describing its mandate, purposes, and evolution. The second compares the use and presentation of the Still Photography Division material at Library and Archives of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in six areas: 1. Physical organizaation of the collections; 2. Physical housing of both prints and negatives in the collections; 3. Intellectual organization and access to the collections; 4. Public access to the collections; 5. Published information on the collections; 6. Public exhibitions and display. This comparison allows one to see how the distinctive purposes, procedures, and practices of an archive and an art museum have been applied to the physical arrangement and intellectual organization of this collection of 'documentary' photographs, thereby revealing and highlighting the fundamental differences between these two types of cultural institutions in Canada.

Documenting the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: A Filmed Interpretation

This article uses a qualitative content analysis to examine the documentary El Contrato (2003), directed by Korean-Canadian documentary filmmaker Min Sook Lee and produced by the National Film Board, from two complementary standpoints: first, the critical portrait it paints of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), a partnership of governments and agro-industrial firms, its social consequences, and the integration problems it presents; and second, the importance of documentary cinema in making visible and analyzing the conditions of temporary workers in Canada. The author concludes that this documentary’s activist strategy contributes to making integration easier.

Création d’espaces relationnels dans le web documentaire

Context Webdocumentaries are relatively new media and documentary entities and, though some articles have been written about them and typologies of the genre have been developed, no one has yet underlined or discussed their capacities for creating relational spaces, namely spaces that facilitate individual and group relationships, and social and individual links. Analysis This article examines, from a relational perspective, a selection of webdocumentaries produced primarily by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), in a desire to identify the address modalities and interactive devices specific to this media object, that foster conversation, sharing, a sense of identification, collaboration and the discovery of others.Conclusions and implications Webdocumentaries, through their spaces of expression, communication and collaboration, support a feeling of listening and of being heard. They act as a public place that encourages the meeting of others and asynchronous socialization.Contexte Les webdocumentaires sont des objets documentaires et médiatiques relativement nouveaux qui ont certes fait l’objet de quelques articles et d’élaboration de typologies, sans que toutefois soit relevé et discuté leur capacité à créer des espaces relationnels, c’est-à-dire des espaces favorisant les relations interindividuelles et groupales ainsi que le lien social et avec autrui. Analyse Cet article étudie une sélection de webdocumentaires, principalement produits par l’Office national du film du Canada (ONF), depuis une perspective relationnelle afin d’identifier les modalités d’adresse de même que les dispositifs interactifs qui sont spécifiques à cet objet médiatique et qui encouragent la découverte d’autrui, la conversation, le partage, l’identification et la collaboration. Conclusions et implications Le webdocumentaire, par ses espaces d’expression, de communication et de collaboration, permet un sentiment d’écouter et d’être entendu. Il agit telle une place publique qui favorise la rencontre avec l’autre et la socialisation en différé.

Political Modernism, Policy Environments, and Digital Daring

Quebec ciné-feminism has continuously evolved since the 1970s to adapt to new policy environments and changing discourses of feminism through the evolution of new platforms of dissemination, production, and funding. Both the early films produced at the En Tant Que Femmes series at the National Film Board and the first independent features directed by women in Quebec incorporated a distinct form of political modernism. This chapter demonstrates how such modernism came to be marginalized throughout the 1980s, facilitated and accompanied by a shift in cultural policy that was increasingly oriented around the prioritization of commercial objectives. The final section of the essay analyzes various contemporary sites of feminist film practice in which the adaptability to new policy environments, the emergence of unique cross-cultural collaborations, and the appropriation of new platforms of media delivery attest to the diversity and ingenuity of Quebec ciné-feminism.