Explore the vast range of titles available.

Mandated to foster a sense of national cohesion The National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division was the country's official photographer during the mid-twentieth century. Like the Farm Security Administration and other agencies in the US, the NFB used photographs to serve the nation. Division photographers shot everything from official state functions to images of the routine events of daily life, producing some of the most dynamic photographs of the time, seen by millions of Canadians - and international audiences - in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, and filmstrips. In The Official Picture, Carol Payne argues that the Still Photography Division played a significant role in Canadian nation-building during WWII and the two decades that followed. Payne examines key images, themes, and periods in the Division's history - including the depiction of women munitions workers, landscape photography in the 1950s and 60s, and portraits of Canadians during the Centennial in 1967 - to demonstrate how abstract concepts of nationhood and citizenship, as well as attitudes toward gender, class, linguistic identity, and conceptions of race were reproduced in photographs. The Official Picture looks closely at the work of many Division photographers from staff members Chris Lund and Gar Lunney during the 1940s and 1950s to the expressive documentary photography of Michel Lambeth, Michael Semak, and Pierre Gaudard, in the 1960s and after. The Division also produced a substantial body of Northern imagery documenting Inuit and Native peoples. Payne details how Inuit groups have turned to the archive in recent years in an effort to reaffirm their own cultural identity. For decades, the Still Photography Division served as the country's image bank, producing a government-endorsed \"official picture\" of Canada. A rich archival study, The Official Picture brings the hisotry of the Division, long overshadowed by the Board's cinematic divisions, to light.

Based on newly uncovered archival information and a close reading of numerous NFB films, Projecting Canada explores the NFB's involvement with British Empire communication theory and American social science. Using a critical cultural policy studies framework, Druick develops the concept of \"government realism\" to describe films featuring ordinary people as representative of segments of the population. She demonstrates the close connection between NFB production policies and shifting techniques developed in relation to the evolution of social science from the 1940s to the present and argues that government policy has been the overriding factor in determining the ideology of NFB films. Projecting Canada offers a compelling new perspective on both the development of the documentary form and the role of cultural policy in creating essential spaces for aesthetic production.

Based on newly uncovered archival information and a close reading of numerous NFB films, Projecting Canada explores the NFB's involvement with British Empire communication theory and American social science. Using a critical cultural policy studies framework, Druick develops the concept of \"government realism\" to describe films featuring ordinary people as representative of segments of the population. She demonstrates the close connection between NFB production policies and shifting techniques developed in relation to the evolution of social science from the 1940s to the present and argues that government policy has been the overriding factor in determining the ideology of NFB films. Projecting Canada offers a compelling new perspective on both the development of the documentary form and the role of cultural policy in creating essential spaces for aesthetic production.

Imagine a society that exists solely in cinema — this book explores exactly that. Using a half-century of films from the archival collection of the National Film Board, NFB Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-1989 overcomes a long-standing impasse about what films may be credibly said to document. Here they document not \"reality,\" but social images preserved over time — the \"NFB Society\" — an evolving, cinematic representation of Canadian families, schools and communities. During the postwar era, this society-in-cinema underwent a profound change in its child rearing and schooling philosophies, embracing \"modern\" notions based upon principles espoused by the American mental hygiene movement. Soon after the introduction of these psychological principles into NFB homes in 1946 and schools in 1956, there was a subtle transformation in adult-child relations, which progressively, over time, narrowed the gulf of power between generations and diminished the socializing roles of the NFB parents and teachers. NFB Kids is a pioneering study within a new field of academic research — \"cinema ethnography.\" It adds to the growing body of knowledge about the function, and the considerable impact of, psychiatry and psychology in the post-war social reconstruction of Canadian society and social history. It will be of interest to academics over a broad spectrum of disciplines and to anyone thinking about the advancing arbitrary power of the cinematic state.

Gary Evans traces the development of the postwar NFB, picking up the story where he left it at the end of his earlier work,John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda

Le répertoire de l’Office national du film du Canada (ONF) manifeste une préoccupation de longue date pour la santé mentale. L’auteur étudie une grappe de documentaires, portant sur le vécu des personnes atteintes de maladie mentale, dont l’apport à l’héritage de cinéma militant de l’ONF est exceptionnel. Une analyse minutieuse de quatre documentaires produits entre 1977 et 2010 montre que la position militant radicale adoptée par les cinéastes en matière de santé mentale a remis en question les fondements épistémologiques de la psychiatrie tout en conférant aux discours sur la santé mental une dimension politique et existentielle. The National Film Board of Canada’s catalogue expresses a longstanding concern for mental health. This article proposes a cluster of documentaries about living with mental illness as unique contributors to the NFB’s heritage of activist filmmaking. Through close analysis of four documentaries made between 1977 and 2010, it makes the case that filmmakers enacted a radical type of mental health activism which called into question the epistemological foundations of psychiatry while imbuing discourses of mental health with a political and existential dimension.

Background  Canadian nontheatrical cinema has historically positioned natural resource extraction as intrinsic to the country’s economic development and national identity. During the 1940s and 1950s in particular with the discovery of Alberta’s vast oil reserves, industrial and documentary films about oil extraction associated petroleum with nation-building and modernization.Analysis  This article examines The Story of Oil (1946, produced by the National Film Board of Canada), A Mile Below the Wheat (1949, sponsored by Imperial Oil), and Underground East (1953, sponsored by Imperial Oil) as examples of such “petro-films” following the oil booms in Turner Valley and Leduc, Alberta.Conclusion and implications  The author demonstrates how these texts sought to position Western oil development in relation to contemporaneous resource industries, namely wheat agriculture and ranching. These films leveraged such comparisons to other regional “fuels” to situate petroleum within pre-existing national imaginaries about Canada’s twentieth-century resource economy, and normalize the oil industry’s land-use practices and transportation infrastructures like pipelines.Contexte  Historiquement, le cinéma canadien non théâtral a établi un lien intrinsèque entre l’extraction des ressources naturelles, le développement économique, et l’identité nationale du pays. Durant les années 1940 et 1950, en particulier, avec la découverte des vastes réserves de pétrole de l’Alberta, les films documentaires et industriels sur l’extraction ont associé pétrole, modernisation et construction de la nation.Analyse  Cet article traite des films The Story of Oil (1946, financé par l’Office Nationale du Film du Canada), A Mile Below the Wheat (1949, financé par l’Impériale), ainsi qu’Underground East (1953, financé par l’Impériale) comme représentatifs de ces « pétro-films » qui ont suivi l’essor des industries pétrolières de Turner Valley et Leduc, Alberta.Conclusion et implications  L’auteur démontre comment ces textes ont cherché à associer le développement du pétrole dans l’Ouest avec les industries contemporaines du secteur primaire : agriculture du blé et élevage. Cette comparaison avec d’autres « carburants » régionaux a permis de situer le pétrole à l’intérieur d’un imaginaire national préexistant, construit autour de l’économie canadienne des ressources primaires au vingtième siècle. Elle contribue à normaliser les pratiques d’utilisation du territoire par les industries pétrolières, et leurs infrastructures de transport comme les pipelines.