Screening Nature and Nation

The intimate connection between film and national identity is on full display in Michael D. Clemens’ book Screening Nature and Nation. To understand the lie of the land in a Canadian context, one must consider the actual landscapes — the forests, mountains, rivers, and beyond — that distinguish Canada. 

Canada’s natural features have been viewed in many ways — a fact Clemens explores through scholarly lenses of film, history, and ethnography. He points out that Canadians’ changing ideas about the environment in the twentieth century were largely influenced by film “as both a recorder and a shaper of history.” 

Screening Nature and Nation considers the National Film Board — with its dynamic repertoire of ever-shifting voices, motifs, and cinematic intentions — a harbinger of, and an answer to, the country’s evolving political, economic, and social terrain. 

The fondly received “meditative, almost wistful, style” of NFB nature documentaries helped to frame the awareness of their Canadian viewers. For topics ranging from resource extraction, to life in the North, to the use of DDT, documentarians’ narrative visions of truth varied between the more objective and the more subjective — and were sometimes even subversive. 

Clemens tracks a number of the ways NFB productions have flipped the script. He says that, along with newfound notions of agency and activism, improving “diversity and representation emboldened women and Indigenous filmmakers.” 

Perhaps most vividly, Screening Nature and Nation projects the importance of protecting our archives and cultural institutions, which are irreplaceable markers of Canada’s documented past.