Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board/filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-46
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PROJECTING CANADA: GOVERNMENT POLICY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM AT THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD ZoeDruick Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, Arts Insights Series, 2007, 244 pp. FILMING POLITICS: COMMUNISM AND THE PORTRAYAL OF THE WORKING CLASS AT THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA, 1939-46 Malek Khouri Calgary: University of Calgary Press, Cinema Off Centre Series, 2007, 278 pp. The greatest challenge for scholars examining Canada's National Film Board is to rise above and re-shape oft-repeated anecdotal histories of NFB and prominence given to iconic John Grierson. Projecting Canada and Filming Politics represent two excellent responses to established histories of Canada's premier filmmaking institution. Both books explore subject in new and original ways. The first, by Zoe Druick, offers a unique perspective on NFB supported by fresh archival discoveries. It gestures towards a rewriting of key portions of accepted historical foundation of Canadian film studies. The second, by Malek Khouri, is focused on a particular historical moment in life of NFB and is necessarily more specialized, given its thematic interest in representation of labour politics. Both of these texts are product of doctoral research. Druick's book comes out of York University's Social and Political Thought program, while Khouri's book was developed in Communication Studies program at McGill University. Reflecting traditions of these two programmes, Projecting Canada and Filming Politics are both highly interdisciplinary in scope of their research and analytical rigour, spanning film studies, communication studies, social science, political science, and cultural theory. In Projecting Canada, Druick seeks to investigate the political and policy rationale for NFB from its inception in 1939 to present. She illustrates this study with analyses of individual films and evolving impact of technologies upon liberal democracy as typified by Canadian context. Druick revisits founding era of NFB and resuscitates neglected portions of its post-World War II output by explaining how films, regardless of their public profile or popularity, continued to address issues and deliver on promises that were outlined in institution's founding mandate and sustained through subsequent revisions. The model Druick establishes in order to defend this position is rooted in social scientific theory and has clear formal implications. She describes as a model in which typical individuals representing a range of population subcategories from different regions and cultures are depicted as members of class and occupation identities. Projecting Canada charts development of government realism as both a policy mandate and a documentary style over course of NFB's history and interrogates its function and meaning within Canadian popular imaginary. The introduction to Projecting Canada is a comprehensive overview of main currents in documentary theory within context of NFB film policy and production. Druick offers readers an entry into documentary studies at large and a snapshot of early film history in Canada before she trains her sights on NFB. She deftly balances estimations of Grierson's visionary genius with criticisms of mark he left on Canadian cinema. She does this, in part, by clearly establishing Britain's fingerprints on Canada's founding film policy and tracing their imperialist roots through Grierson era. Additionally, Druick crafts a narrative which connects Grierson's background in U.S. social scientific theory, particularly influence of Chicago School of Social Science, to imperatives of empire communications (inter-empire programs designed for disseminating media within dominions and colonies of which Britain's Empire Marketing Board [1926-1933] is best-known example). …
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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".