Features

Enlarge Image

For local educator, curator and filmmaker Kevin Nikkel of Winnipeg media production company Five Door Films, a mother lode of near 100 year-old footage recently returned to Canada from the UK constitutes a "big part of our Canadian heritage" – providing a glimpse of a Canada that was even more remote and often unexplored than now.

"Our culture is fascinated by the frontier, by exploration, by the wilderness," Nikkel says. Now a rare collection of Hudson’s Bay Company films added to the HBC’s archives "help(s)create a more complete picture of HBC’s long history in the Canadian North," Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Tourism Minister Flor Marcelino said in a press release earlier this week.

Screenings of excerpted footage, titled Nitrate Treasures, will take place at the Archives of Manitoba on Weds., Feb. 22 and Feb. 29. The program consists of about 30 minutes worth of footage compiled by Nikkel.

These "extraordinary films," which contain images of HBC personnel and buildings, indigenous people and their various interactions, "provide a unique glimpse into Inuit and First Nations communities and HBC operations across northern Canada" in the early 20th century, Marcelino continued.

The material consists primarily of what was once part of a two-hour silent film called Romance of the Far Fur Country, commissioned in 1920 by the HBC for its 250th anniversary and toured across Canada. Its premiere was held at Winnipeg’s Allen Theatre, known today as the Metropolitan; included is footage of canoes arriving ceremoniously at Lower Fort Garry for the occasion, having paddled past  the Forks.

For Nikkel, however, the more remarkable footage included a kind of early "behind-the-scenes" featurette, Trials and Tribulations of a Cameraman, which features camera operators in canoes and even an ice floe .

"They were men trying to change film and shoot in sometimes -30C temperatures," Nikkel marvels.

What happened to the film shot was, following the exhibition of Romance of the Far Fur Country, it was "reconstituted" into various shorter films, with some footage leftover. The various elements were eventually shipped to the HBC headquarters in London, which in turn turned them over to the British Film Institute.

"The BFI has perhaps the greatest collection of archival footage in the world," says Nikkel, who visited the Institute’s cold storage facility ("It was like going to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory"). It was thanks to that careful preservation that the delicate nitrate film stock has survived to the present; the original negatives are now in the Archives of Manitoba’s own film storage facility, and the footage was digitized before leaving London.

Nikkel plans in the next few years to recreate Romance of the Far Fur Country in collaboration with Peter Geller, author of Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North. It was precisely this alignment of interest with the Archives’ own desire to develop film preservation that precipitated the negatives’ transfer in the first place.

And after taking the footage on a new round of touring, Nikkel saw firsthand its enduring resonance.

"Some of the footage was shot in Fort Chipewyan in Alberta," Nikkel explains. "When we screened it for Aboriginal audiences there, elders were able to identify their own ancestors, and point out changes in the landscape."

For that matter, they also pointed out much repatriation and reconciliation with Aboriginal populations, especially isolated ones, are as pressing an issue today as then.

"The HBC’s shadow been supplanted by Big Oil," Nikkel says. "That was a valuable perspective the Elders provided.

"It really asks what kind of progress we’ve made."
 
Nitrate Treasures will screen Feb. 22 and Feb. 29 at 7p.m. at the Archives of Manitoba, 200 Vaughan St.  For more information please contact the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba, 204-945-4949 or hbca@gov.mb.ca.