John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In his third book about John Grierson and the National Film Board of
Canada, University of Ottawa professor Gary Evans shifts the focus from
scholarly analyses of Grierson and the work of the NFB to a profile of
the man he characterizes as “the most influential personality in
Canadian film” and as “a visionary who preached that effective mass
communications could enrich individuals’ lives and perhaps even end
humans’ tendency to kill off each other in war.”

Evans’s entertaining warts-and-all biography traces Grierson’s
life, from the six-year-old Scots lad who was “fascinated by his first
film show”; to the youth who served on a North Sea minesweeper before
heading to Chicago “with a Rockefeller fellowship under his arm”; to
the Chicago-based “itinerant journalist” and “newspaper junkie”
who met Walter Lippman and listened to Louis Armstrong’s jazz before
relocating to Hollywood, where he connected with the likes of Charlie
Chaplin, Eric von Stroheim, and King Vidor.

Evans goes on to document his subject’s emergence as “the father of
documentary film” and his stint as “Canada’s propaganda maestro”
during World War II. After the war ended, along with his tenure at the
NFB, Grierson became a victim of American Cold War politics and
paranoia. Eventually he headed to McGill University, where he “thrived
as a teacher.” He died at home in 1972 “with a microphone in his
hand, a tape recorder reel spinning endlessly, its tape having run
out.”

Evans’s book is a fitting memorial to Grierson the man. Essential
reading for aspiring filmmakers and anyone interested in Canadian film
and its roots. Highly recommended.