The Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film Project has worked to make visible the rich and varied moving image culture that originated from private Canadian production outfits. This neglected and marginalized media realm constituted a major part of Canada’s audio-visual landscape. Not only are these productions absent from most film and media history in Canada, the works themselves have not been prioritized by archives, with much work completely lost. Making it possible to consult and consider such materials - even information about the films if not the films themselves - means a fuller portrait of media history might result. One can also see the priorities and agendas that were represented and advanced by various institutions at different times, and with this access, we may better know, and hold to account, the exercise of power and privilege that shaped this country.
The resulting inventory, as captured in the CESIF open access online database, is vast. In order to assist researchers, members of the CESIF team have written research prompts on potential topics of interest. Each prompt includes an introductory discussion and mention of additional research resources outside CESIF’s scope, most particularly films from the National Film Board of Canada. Primarily, each research prompt highlights distinctive films in the CESIF database on their specified topic. The lists are not meant to be comprehensive nor definitive. And not all films have been made available for viewing by their respective holding institutions. But our intention is to make the existence of these films known and in so doing make it easier for researchers to include consideration of Canadian audiovisual history components of their research and to provoke analysis and critique of these films.
Editor: Charles Acland
Associate Editors: Louis Pelletier, Hannah Spaulding
1. Sex Ed
Philipp Dominik Keidl, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
2. Domestic Technology
Hannah Spaulding, University of Lincoln
3. Local History, Niagara Region
Kyla Rose Smith, Concordia University
4. Resource Extraction
Kyla Rose Smith, Concordia University
5. Anti/Blackness in Canada
Prakash Krishnan, Concordia University
6. Indigenous Life and Sovereignty
Prakash Krishnan, Concordia University
7. Television
Hannah Spaulding, University of Lincoln