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

This book provides excellent capsule summaries of virtually every progressive film produced by the National Film Board in its early years. For this, Malek Khouri deserves kudos. But he has far more serious intent. Khouri tries to demonstrate that these films embodied the doctrines of the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) during this period. Though he is writing from a left-wing perspective, Khouri ironically appears largely to substantiate the views of the McCarthyites who purged left-wingers from the nfb, claiming that they were Soviet puppets.

It is important to note that Khouri does not claim that nfb filmmakers influenced by the cpc were party members. Indeed, ‘there are very few indications or evidence of direct organizational linkages between the Communist Party – or any Popular Front organizational affiliates for that matter – and specific workers and filmmakers of the Board during the early years of its establishment’ (81). Still, he finds the ‘undeniable signature’ of ideas derived from the Communist-led Popular Front of the thirties, which had collapsed when the Communists supported Stalin’s détente with Hitler in August 1939 but was quickly revived after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. His evidence is unconvincing.

Khouri’s mastery of Canadian politics and Communist politics in this period is weak. Take his account of Dorise Nielsen. He has her running for the Labour Progressive Party in 1940 (79), when indeed the party was only formed in 1943. He claims that she did not run openly as a Communist because the party was banned (114), when in fact she was a long-time Communist mole in the ccf, as Faith Johnson’s biography acknowledges. Romanticizing the cpc, Khouri regards the party as revolutionary in its aims throughout the period he is examining but determined to achieve socialism step by step and therefore present itself as a moderate force. He makes no reference to works by Norman Penner or others who suggest that Popular Front politics altered the cpc fundamentally, turning it into a party whose domestic policy was not very different from the social-democratic ccf. It was the party’s organic link with the Soviet Union, more than its links with Canadian workers, that distinguished it from other left-wing formations in Canada. For a time, as the war was ending, the Communists moved to the right of the ccf, calling for a broad political alliance of anti-Tory forces that would include the Liberals and convincing the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada to endorse the Liberals in the 1945 federal election.

Khouri’s willingness to find revolutionary intentions in bland end-of-war movies that pressed for a labour-management partnership in industry makes it easy for him to conflate Communists and left-leaning liberal filmmakers. He mentions several movies that praise management working in partnership with labour in factories and argues that these films offered the way forward to a world in which workers became more equal with management. In turn, in his view, these films reflected the Communist Party’s wartime praise for labour-management committees. But the Communist interest in the lmcs was in their effectiveness at increasing wartime production and prosecuting the war against fascism. In peacetime, after they were criticized by the Soviets for going too far in the effort to collaborate with ‘progressive’ elements of capitalism, they were anxious to reassert the class-struggle character of trade unions and to avoid entanglement with organizations like lmcs in which workers were subordinated to bosses.

In general, Khouri finds far more that is revolutionary in nfb films than his own evidence suggests. He also finds far more that is revolutionary in cpc politics of this period than the literature on the cpc reveals. Barely mentioning the ccf at all, he does not deal with either its ideology or meteoric...