Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Board of Canada (review)

The work of the ‘program/institution’ Challenge for Change/Societe nouvelle (CFC/SN), initiated in 1967 by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), is the subject of this critical and first-rate collection of original and reprinted articles by an interdisciplinary group of twenty-six journalists, writers, film-makers, film scholars, and historians. The collection is edited by Thom Waugh, a leading Canadian scholar of alternative and activist cinemas, along with two young scholars of political documentary and the NFB, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton.

The (CFC/SN) program ran until 1980 and gained an international reputation for its originality and influence. Over 200 documentary films were made during this period (sixty of them for the Quebec program Societe nouvelle), ranging in scope from issues of marginalization and poverty to classism, racism, and sexism, among others. Films of this unique program were mostly conscious of their activist function and nature, and many of the film-makers were largely cognizant of their role as ‘organic intellectuals’ and activists. As such, luminary Canadian film-makers such as Colin Low, Peter Pearson, Bonnie Klein (her daughter writer/activist Naomi Klein writes the book’s foreword), George Stoney, Anne Claire Poirier, and Maurice Bulbulian, along with many others, were well positioned to fashion a new and re-energized kind of documentary cinema, a cinema that is equally attentive to learning from its subjects as much as learning about them. In the end, many of the CFC/SN films assumed an empowering function in the struggles and dreams of their subjects.

Equally important, the program represented a watershed moment in Canadian film-making history, which witnessed the incorporation of new portable video techniques with those of well-established 16mm and even 8mm cinema. Just as digital film-making and new media technology today have complemented various forms of social, political, and environmental forms of activism, Challenge for Change similarly benefited from increased interest in less obtrusive film-making technology of the 1960s and 1970s to get itself closer to its subject, itself in the middle of exploding social and political struggles of the day.

Despite the huge body of work that was produced under the Challenge for Change banner and the pioneering status and defining impact of this program on the history of social change oriented media, the wide-casting volume at hand is in fact the first and most comprehensive historical and analytical collection to be published dealing with this critically acclaimed NFB project. Equally important, the book effectively and uniquely challenges us to revisit the CFA/SN project and experience with an eye at present-day resourcefulness, on the level of the changing dynamics of social and political activism as well as on the level of the utility of new and more demographically accessible technical ingenuity.

The CFA/SN films enriched and impacted the discourse on social and political change in Canada and around the world, and the scholarship of the three editors is certainly reflected in the rich, well-balanced, and nuanced structure of the book. Challenge for Change incorporates five interactive parts each with a distinct task: one part emphasizes thematic and conceptual goals of the program as published in the program’s own publicity material and literature; other parts focus on films that directly engage political activism; specific film-makers and films; and theoretical appraisals of the CFA/SN project and its significance. The final part presents an interview with Katerina Cizek and an article by Vijaya Mulay, two luminary women film activists.

The book refocuses much-needed attention on the NFB and its programs and their fate today. It comes at a time when this institution is under greater than ever financial and political pressure wielded by a conservative economic elite bent on marginalizing alternative discourse. The end result is an essential chronicle of one of the most pioneering moments in film history.