War documentary remains as powerful testament
NFB film now available for online viewing
The images hit hard. They evoke an important moment in our history — the assault by Canadian forces on Vimy Ridge on Easter Monday 1917.
First, from nearly a century ago, flickering blackand-white footage of our soldiers on the move. And then a shift to colour and more recent times: With the sounds of war still filling the soundtrack, the camera speeds us over a green French countryside, still scarred by craters, toward the distant drama of the Canadian War Memorial at Vimy.
It suddenly looms large on the screen. There’s a closeup of a stone fist. The film abruptly goes silent. The impact on the viewer is profound.
Half a century has passed since Canada’s National Film Board unveiled a 38-minute documentary called Fields Of Sacrifice. By the time those Vimy Ridge scenes arrived on the screen, many eyes were already moist.
Its power remains today. 2014 is a year of anniversaries — a century since the advent of the First World War, 70 years since the D-Day landings, an event also remembered in this superb documentary, and 50 years since the release of one of the most revered films in the NFB’s history.
That film is now available to any Canadian who accesses the government film agency’s remarkable website — www.nfb.ca/film/ fields_of_sacrifice.
T his tribute to Canada’s war dead established 36-year-old writer-director Donald Brittain as a major documentary filmmaker. Yet it was initially a project that few at the NFB wanted to take on.
Brittain, fresh from writing the board’s Canada At War series, ended up with the assignment, a commission from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
“Most war films — they’re kind of flag-waving things,” says NFB veteran Rex Tasker, “and this is a very quiet, reflective film, which we believed was the way to approach it. But we didn’t see a great art film there — not then.
“We were just sort of doing the best we could with the footage we had, and it worked out. It made its point, and it was quite moving.”
Veterans Affairs had originally conceived Fields of Sacrifice as a straightforward look at Canada’s war cemeteries.
Brittain and his crew did take their cameras to graveyards and memorials in places as far-flung as Sicily and Hong Kong. But in honouring the 100,000 Canadian dead of two world wars, Brittain went further.
He sought out archival footage of battles with their often graphic images of both triumph and suffering, and he juxtaposed them with peacetime scenes in areas of former conflict — children playing on the beaches of Dieppe and Normandy, sheep moving placidly among the trenches of Ypres — and also with throat-catching shots of poppies blowing in the fields of Flanders and rows of gravestones in a Canadian war cemetery.
Brittain and Tasker worked out a structure, linking the dead of two wars. Tasker was struck by the many powerful images at his disposal, while at the same time worrying about their static quality.
Composer Eldon Rathburn worked on a musical score which would make a formidable contribution to the viewing experience. And Brittain began work on a heart-tugging narrative — which would be read by Douglas Rain, the Stratford Festival actor who four years later would supply the voice of Hal, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Donald was a very good narration writer,” Tasker remembers. And Brittain, who died in 1989, also understood the use of silence for dramatic effect.