In early 1939, John Grierson presented a report to the Canadian government on the state of the nation’s film industry. The report found that Canada was misrepresented on (or absent from) its own cinema screens and that national unity was in jeopardy as a result. This led to the creation of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) in May of that year, with John Grierson at its head.
At the onset of WWII just a few short months later, the NFB quickly found its stride and busied itself churning out newsreels, propaganda and some experimental animation. In 1941, Canada’s newly minted government film studio merged with its older sibling, the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, and a problem arose: What to do with the latter’s collection of older films and all those short ends swept off the busy cutting-room floors?
Enter Tom Daly. Those familiar with the NFB know him as the legendary producer of over 300 influential films, including classics such as Lonely Boy, City of Gold, Universe, Circle of the Sun, Waiting for Fidel, Action: The October Crisis of 1970 and Arthur Lipsett’s experimental masterpieces 21-87 and Very Nice, Very Nice. His body of work would become one of the main reasons Canada came to be regarded as a world leader of documentary cinema. Below, Daly describes his first days on the job:
In January 1941, the producer in charge of NFB personnel took me, a total neophyte to film, into a large back room upstairs. The whole floor was littered with dusty piles of nitrate film—picture and sound, trims and outs, negative and positive, dupe neg and ‘lavender,’ in cans and on open reels. He asked me to clean up the mess but keep and catalogue any material that might be useful for future films…
In this way several vaults were ultimately filled with a superb collection of great historical value and practical use in filmmaking. And I was getting adept at seeing six or a dozen ways a different shot could have a relevant meaning and use—a great boon for the future film editor and producer I was to become.
NFB Archives has come a long way since its early days; in addition to those same film reels (no longer housed in a dusty backroom but in new, state-of-the-art facilities), a vast amount of footage shot everywhere around the world has been added. Most of our collection is available online, and we have a new, in-house AI tool to help us find shots and excerpts that were never verbally described or catalogued.
Technology may change faster than the fashion trends documented in our footage, but our staff are as dedicated as ever, and NFB Archives remains the same trustworthy source we’ve been since 1941.