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

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

As with the decimation of left-wing Hollywood filmmakers by HUAC and McCarthyism, so too creative forces at the Board were intimidated into silence by Canada's cold war atmosphere.34 John Grierson's name was raised in the scandal precipitated by the defection of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, and the Board continued to be regarded with deep suspicion even after Grierson's departure. However, with the exception of Norman McLaren's 1952 stop-motion, animated short, Neighbours, which can be seen as a parable of the escalation of senseless cold-war animosities, this political climate has not been linked to the production of cold war-influenced films at the Board.35

In 1945, Gouzenko went to Canadian police with evidence of spying in Ottawa. The allegations centred on the Soviet military attache, Colonel N. Zabotin, and his alleged coordination of agents to obtain confidential information about radar equipment developed at the National Research Council, about munitions stored in Val Cartier, Quebec, and about a nuclear project at Chalk River, Ontario.36 Among papers examined by the investigators was the cryptic message, "Freda to the Professor through Grierson." "The Professor" was thought to be Dr. Raymond Boyer, chair of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers; "Grierson" was assumed to be National Film Commissioner John Grierson; "Freda" was the name of a secretary at the NFB. Prime Minister William Lyon McKenzie King declared the War Measures Act and appointed a royal commission, headed by Supreme Court justices R.L. Kellock and Robert Taschereau, to investigate the many people accused of being Communist agents or sympathizers.37 Boyer was detained for questioning, and the Commission's report in July 1946, as Paul Dufour notes, "accused the CAScW of being a 'front' for the Communist Party's propaganda, and of being susceptible to its recruiting techniques for new espionage agents." 38 Its credibility destroyed, the CAScW folded in the mid-1950s.

As for the Film Board, its supposed access to sensitive government information rendered it a "vulnerable agency," along with the Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council, External Affairs, Defence and the RCMP, and every employee was required to pass security clearance.39 Over the next few years, until the official RCMP investigation began, many NFB employees, most working on temporary, three-month contracts, were quietly let go. Political scientist Reg Whitaker and journalist Gary Marcuse describe the scene:

The purge did not happen immediately. In fact it took more than three years from the public revelation of the Gouzenko affair for the full force of the new anti-Communist security mania to hit the board. Questions were being raised during those years, and there is evidence that a few employees whose politics were too blatantly close to those of the Communists either were dropped or quit. But the systematic application of the purge did not formally get underway until 1949-50. There were a number of reasons for this lag. The government was in the process of creating the machinery for a comprehensive internal security screening process. The cabinet directive setting the basis of the new system did not get final approval until early 1948, and the first RCMP reports on individual civil servants did not appear until the end of 1948.40