One Man's Documentary: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Film Board, and: John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Films (review)

Some twelve years ago, after spending eighteen months as a policy adviser in the Government of Ontario, I was invited as a guest speaker to a class on public policy development at McGill University. I spent an hour giving a candid account of my own experience inside the Ministry of Education. After a few questions had been answered, the professor thanked me and told the class that after studying policy development from several theoretical perspectives (liberal-humanist, realist, Marxist, structuralist, Foucauldian), the class finally had a sense of what it was really like from the inside. It was a mess. Reading Graham McInnes's entertaining memoir of the glory years of the nfb under Grierson, one occasionally has the same impression. In place of the various theoretical frameworks (Weberian, liberal-democratic, Marxist, anti-imperialist, feminist) used to characterize Grierson's and the National Film Board's contribution to Canada and its film culture, we now have a lively eyewitness account which shows how chaotic and sometimes serendipitous daily life at the National Film Board could often appear to those who lived it.

As in any organization swept along in the wake of a charismatic leader, the smoothing of systemic wrinkles and mishaps was never allowed to stand in the way of the central mission. That mission was to make films to educate the public about life in Canada, not only as affected by the war, viewed both at home and internationally, but about the work of the state and aspects of the daily lives of Canadians of interest to other Canadians.

Graham McInnes was recruited into the nfb by Grierson, within a few months of the board's estabishment in 1939. As a writer and radio commentator, he joined that enthusiastic crowd of young Canadians whose contribution to the war effort was to be the harnessing of the power of Griersonian documentary in the national interest. His time at the nfb coincided almost precisely with Grierson's. Not many months after Grierson left for a varied career in public administration, tv broadcasting, and higher education, McInnes departed for a distinguished career in the diplomatic service, while writing two novels and a set of four memoirs about his life before the NFB. While at the board, he worked primarily as a scriptwriter and then as a producer, even directing a small number of films himself. This experience brought him into direct and extended contact with a large number of the employees at the board: the 'British poets and pundits' (his words) who were brought in by Grierson to provide the knowhow gained in the British social documentary movement of the 1930s; the 'Canadian proselytes' who quickly learned on the job and then began assuming a certain measure of responsibility; the temporarily imported 'American professionals' who were somewhat bemused by the unsystematic pragmatism of it all; and the assorted 'friends, allies and refugees' who passed through, people like Joris Ivens, Alexandre Alexeieff, or Morley Callaghan.

McInnes's writing is highly engaging, with a wryness and eye for the incongruous similar to those of Charles Ritchie. His work consists in large measure of observant portraits of many of his co-workers, larded with anecdotes, some of which bring valuable insights into the film-making processes of the board. The prose is often unforgettable. When he first meets the head of production, Stuart Legg: 'Out of his woollen shirt, Legg poked his hand forward a bit at me, like the giant secretary bird.' When he and a friend got to meet a big film distributor in New York, we are told that the latter's 'almost bald head had the texture of fried bacon ... He didn't rise but glared at us with a pair of black unwinking...