Filming Politics: Communism and the Portrayal of the Working Class at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939 – 46 (review)

This book argues that the Communist Party of Canada (cpc), under its various designations – the Workers Party of Canada, the Progressive Unity Party, the Labour-Progressive Party – exerted genuine influence over representations of the working class in films of the National Film Board (nfb) in the years 1939 to 1946. The contention is hardly surprising, given the international situation, the sequelae of the Great Depression, the often heroic image of socialism, and the sympathies of some within the nfb. Indeed, a highly similar situation has been documented in Hollywood, and one could find more militant attitudes in many European film industries.

Khouri’s book points, however, to some larger issues and problems. The author is naturally impelled to supply considerable background information about the history of Canadian communism, its organization, shifting political judgments, etc., much of which will be unknown to readers. This information, however, does not always sit easily in a book concerned with film rather than politics. This may be a difficulty of all similar projects. The book, therefore, adopts a bipartite structure with information about the cpc set alongside thematic film analyses. Since a party’s strategy rarely finds immediate expression in the next day’s films, the book implicitly asks, how do we move from a particular political judgment to a particular filmic representation? Indeed, given the atmosphere of the nfb where political oversight is exercised alongside competition for funding and resources, incompatible story ideas and film projects, conflicting personalities, and so on, the path from political sympathy to sympathetic portrayal is further obscured. Hence, one may ask whether the portrayals of the working class under discussion were the result of empirically verifiable communist influence or of a more generalized leftist sentiment not specifically connected to the cpc and its project.

One might also question the book’s view of communism. By the late 1930s, the nature of Stalinist totalitarianism was beginning to be clearly understood. Indeed, at the Nuremberg trials, Telford Taylor despaired of obtaining anything resembling a fair judgment from the Soviet judges, so degraded did he believe the Soviet legal system to have become. Likewise, Churchill and Roosevelt may have negotiated with Stalin, but they were hardly fans. News of artificial famines, disappearances, the gulag, and forced relocations was available. The point, however, is not that Khouri’s book should now dutifully denounce Stalinism; it is that from the present-day perspective, to find no acknowledgment of these events is disconcerting. The absence of acknowledgement makes it difficult to understand why some were reluctant to embrace a socialist project or why others opposed it so vigorously. There was a very broad range of nuanced opinion (perhaps even reflected in nfb portrayals of the working class) that may elude us in the absence of the full record.

The book relies on thematic analyses of films. This means that it selects particular representations of interest and judges their ‘orientation’ within a given film. It asks if the representations are ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive,’ and, sometimes, whether they meet current attitudes. While the author is certainly to be awarded a medal of merit for actually watching such nailbiters as Wartime Housing, Subcontracting for Victory, and the ominous-sounding The Organization (dealing with workplace safety), the process of thematic analysis itself deserves attention.

There is no reason not to select specific themes from within a book or film or stage play and then assess their degree of progressivism. The problems lie in knowing whether the theme selected is the most relevant in a given text, how coexisting themes inflect it, and how the determination of ‘progressivism’ is achieved. Alas, the book provides no method that would guide the process or show its applicability beyond the selected body of film.

One looks forward to future work on this and similar topics that will refine the methodological issues and expand the focus of analysis...