Meet Helen Lewis, Evelyn Lambart, and Alma Duncan. They’re three of the many women who shaped the history of film in this country through their pioneering work with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Lewis cut many a wartime film as an editor, while Lambart was considered Canada’s first woman animator and made innovative projects with Norman McLaren but never received the same level of consideration, and Duncan helped put NFB docs on the map by creating posters and promotional materials after joining the Graphic Arts Division in 1943. A Return to Memory, now streaming for free at NFB.ca, gives overdue credit to these women and others for their efforts that made the Board a prolific chronicler of life in Canada and abroad.
Director Donald McWilliams (Creative Process: Norman McLaren, Eleven Moving Moments with Evelyn Lambart) mines the NFB archives to showcase the contributions of the women of the NFB. A Return to Memory uses as its source of inspiration a 78-minute nugget from the archives, “Four Days in May,” which chronicled a 1975 event hosted by the newly founded Studio D. The event paid tribute to women in NFB history who helped pave the path for the groundbreaking feminist studio that would go on to produced several Oscar winners throughout its brief run. But A Return to Memory illustrates how Studio D is just one chapter in the history of women’s voices at the Board.
McWilliams revisits the work of filmmakers like Evelyn Spice Cherry, who was the co-head of the NFB Agricultural Unit until her lefty politics saw her forced out of the Board in the 1950s. She produced and directed over 100 films during her career—arguably a stat that makes her among Canada’s most prolific filmmakers, but her name receives little consideration in the CanCon canon. The film tells how politics also got the better of Gretta Ekman, who crafted the 3D animation Twirligig in 1952, but the Board not only gave her the boot—it scrubbed her name from the credits. And then there’s Jane Marsh Beveridge, who proved invaluable during the Board’s formative years, making war reels that received wide releases and, notably, directing the 1943 doc Terre de nos Aieux, which was one of the first NFB works made by an all-female crew. She worked at the Board from 1941-1944 with creative differences with John Grierson resulting in her departure.
And then, of course, there’s Ruby Grierson, John’s sister, who ushered in participatory modes of filmmaking that would anticipate formative years in the Board and documentary in general. The film tells how her life was cut short while making NFB reels about the war effort. “Here was this young woman, going into slums to interview people ignored by society. She wasn’t credited for the groundbreaking interviews she did for [the British production] Housing Problems, perhaps the first documentary in which we hear the voices of working-class people, speaking directly to the camera about their lives,” McWilliams recalled in an interview. “She died young, at the age of 36, while working for the NFB. She was making a film about the wartime evacuation of British children to Canada, and their ship was torpedoed. The film was released in 1940 as Children from Overseas, but it took years before Ruby got a co-director credit on the production.”
Discover the stories of NFB women in A Return to Memory:
A Return to Memory, Donald McWilliams, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
