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Winter Blunderland

Accession number: 
1949.0016
Alternate Titles: 
Zéro de conduite
French version
Production Years: 
1949
Release Year: 

Languages:

Film Properties: 
Length (feet): 
700 (16mm)
Holding Institutions: 

Library and Archives Canada: 16mm, VHS, Digibeta.
"A light-hearted look at some of the do's and don'ts of winter driving."

Bibliography: 

"Second Annual Canadian Film Awards," Film News (May-June 1950): 12.
"Non-Theatrical - Sponsored Class: Science at Your Service (Ronald Dick for NFB), a survey of the Bureau of Mines' research facilities, nosed out Crawley's Zero de Conduite on winter driving (Honorable Mention)."

"Sponsored Film Production On the Rise in Canada," Film News (July-August 1950): 11.
"Molson's Brewery Limited has sponsored one on safe winter driving and only mention of the company is in lead and end titles."

Crawley Films, Free Films: Directory of Sources of Free 16mm Sponsored Films in Canada (Ottawa: Crawley Films, May 1952): 11.
"3 safety films on driving under winter and summer conditions and on the prevention of home accidents."

Service de ciné-photographie de la province de Québec, Films 16mm: édition 1956-57 (Quebec City: Service de ciné-photographie, 1956), 383, 384.
"L'automobiliste doit user de beaucoup plus de prudence et de circonspection en hiver qu'en tout autre temps de l'année. Il est certaines règles élémentaires que l'on semble oublier lorsqu'il s'agit de sortir sa voiture par les routes couvertes de neige, et ce film les rappelle fort à-propos."

Scott MacKenzie, "'Mental Prophylaxis': Crawley Films, McGraw-Hill Educational Films and Orphan Cinema," in Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada, Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer eds. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014), 71.
"[Endnote 13] Crawley did not only make sponsored films for adolescents: one of its most inspired 'conformity' sponsored films was Winter in Blunderland (Canada, 1949), produced for Molson Breweries, about the threat of poor and drunk drivers. Directed by and starring George Gorman, the film is a comical, Canadian prescient pastiche of many underground cinema tropes, foreshadowing Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment (US, 1949), Scorpio Rising (US, 1964), and Kustom Kar Kommandos (US, 1965) morphed with the early films of the Kuchar Brothers, and ending with a proto-Brechtian breaking of the fourth wall by the actor/director, all in the service of a message in good road etiquette. It also foreshadows the Canadian industrial film pastiche Springtime in Greenland (John Paiza, Canada, 1981)."