"NON-THEATRICAL WITH DREAMS OF THEATRICAL": Paradoxes of a Canadian Semi-Documentary Film Noir

Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Fall 2003 by Druick, Zoe

In his extensive work on the form, J.P. Telotte observes that semi-documentaries, composed of elements of the historical record fashioned into scripted fictions, usually with voice-overs, contain a twin pull both to reveal and to dominate the truth: "to appear transparent while filtering reality through a traditional narrative mechanism."14 In other words, even as the film accrues veracity by making "visible and talk[ing] in a straightforward, factual way about things that often went unseen or unsaid in conventional films,"15 it nevertheless underscores the reality of criminality and destructive desires. According to Telotte, the realistic strategy of the semi-documentaries is to acknowledge and appropriate discussion of the cinematic mechanism:16

[A] lthough fictions, they attack the fictive in order to assert their own truth; and while asserting the unbiased, even uncinematic nature of their documentary eye, they evoke the filmic apparatus by describing how a technology of observation and communication lets them accurately record and assess reality. By so doing, they certify their point of view, mark off a space of truth that seems transparent and beyond question simply because it has already been admitted and implicitly questioned.17

In this description of "uncinematic" cinema there are resonances of the contradiction lodged in John Grierson's documentary film theory, which dominated the philosophy of the NFB in the 1940s. "Documentary was from the beginning...," he wrote in 1942, "an 'anti-aesthetic' movement. [T]he documentary idea was not basically a film idea at all.... [It] was a new idea for public education."18

In File 1365, elements of this realist vogue in both fiction and non-fiction are readily discernible. The story is introduced as recent and therefore topical, a common feature of the semi-documentaries.19 The story enacted is called "true-to-life"20 and was described at the time as "one of the few attempts ever made to make a documentary out of an actual murder case. "21 Like most actual documentaries, the film uses nonprofessional actors, a fact that was widely publicized upon its release. As Peter Morris later wrote, "The actors in the [NFB] social dramas were not supposed to be read by the viewer as 'actors' but as real characters plucked from life, as in a documentary. The viewer is invited to react with, 'You can see he's a real policeman because he obviously can't act.'"22 For "authenticity" the film was shot on location, often at night, in Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hull (for Montreal), and Halifax.23 Correspondingly, scenes are often dimly lit, a feature that was notable enough to merit mention in information circulated by the National Film Society in 1950. Specifically, the lack of light is called "disturbing," but relevant to the "emotional impact of the film." Combined, these elements led to the assessment in an Australian publication that File 1365 was the "most convincing piece of film realism Canada has produced."24

File 1365 also stands as an early example of the police procedural genre. Like film noir and semi-documentary, the police procedural, a sub-genre of crime investigation narrative that has since become a mainstay of popular fiction, television, and film, also began to emerge in the mid-1940s.25 Initially a reaction against the romantic individualism of hard-boiled detective stories, police procedurals situated the investigation of crime squarely in the realm of the modern bureaucratic police institution. These stories presented the investigation of grisly crimes as a banal aspect of police routine. Unlike detectives in other genres, police officers of the procedurals never came upon crime by accident.26 Nor did they become erotically involved in the violent, criminal underworld. Like any office worker, they formed teams, used modern technologies to expedite their duties, and went home at the end of the day (Figures 2 and 3). In his foundational account of the genre, George Dove writes, "Where the classic detective solves mysteries through the use of his powers of observation and logical analysis, and the private investigator through his energy and his tough tenacity, the detective in the procedural story does those things ordinarily expected of policemen, like using informants, tailing suspects, and availing himself of the resources of the police laboratory."27