<i>Madawaska Valley</i>: John Ormond’s Lost Film at the National Film Board of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1967 Tanya Ballantyne Tree’s sensational The Things I Cannot Change marked the beginning of an influential new programme of participatory documentary filmmaking at the National Film Board of Canada. But while most accounts of Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN) trace its pared-down vérité aesthetics and ethos of audience participation to that film, few have acknowledged the significance of other, more “poetic” documentary modes being explored under the auspices of the programme in its formative days. This article takes as its focus one such film, Madawaska Valley, produced in early 1967 by a Welsh documentary filmmaker by the name of John Ormond, who was at that time on leave from his job at the BBC. Unfortunately, the film is now lost, but a production file housed at the NFB provides us with tantalizing details about the film and its reception. It suggests that The Things I Cannot Change was not the only film upon which CFC/SN tested its aesthetic and political credentials. This article explores the origins of Madawaska Valley, and argues that it too was a key foundational text in the development of a nascent CFC/SN.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".