"Prospectors With Vision": Crawley Films, Expo 67, and Montreal

 

fig. a: Place Ville Marie, as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies dedicated to Crawley Films is out now.  If you're not familiar with this production company, Crawley Films of Ottawa was a Canadian powerhouse of sponsored, educational, and industrial films, but they also produced theatrical feature films, animated films, documentaries, and commercials.  The unit was founded by the husband and wife team of Frank Radford "Budge" Crawley and Judith Crawley in 1939, just as the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was getting underway, and Crawley Films produced numerous films for the NFB, especially in its early years. Strangely, relatively little has been written about Crawley Films until now.  Many of us who worked on this issue were knowledgeable (in come cases, very knowledgeable) when it came to Crawley Films, and yet our overwhelming experience was that there was so much more to the story than we had imagined.  Indeed, as Liz Czach and Charles Acland write in their introduction, "The company was so prominent, so central to Canadian film and then television, that it is a bit like finding out that there was another film board thriving alongside the world-famous NFB, but that for some reason historical attention largely accrued to one and not the other."

I contributed an article on Crawley Films's involvement with Expo 67 in the early- to mid-1960s. I'm attaching a few stills from my research.

fig. : Pierre Dupuy, as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. c: The Klondike Gold Rush, as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. d: The construction of the Expo 67 grounds, as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. e: Paul D. Break, as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. f: The redevelopment of downtown Montreal, as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. g: Moshe Safdie, “architect of Habitat,” as seen in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. h: A passerby gives his thoughts on the Expo 67 project in Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

fig. i: Final credits, Crawley Films’s Expo 67 (1965)

Lots of talented people were involved in this project, including Liz Czach and Charles Acland, our editors, Dominique Bregent-Heald, Louis Pelletier, Paul Moore, Christie Milliken, Rachel Webb, and Laura Pannekoek.

If Canadian film and media studies is your bag, or you're just curious, you can find this issue of CJFMS here: https://utppublishing.com/toc/cjfms/34/2

If you’re specifically interested in Crawley Films and Expo 67, you can find my essay here.

Thanks to Liz and Charles for organizing this issue.  Hats off to Liz, in particular, for her amazing tenure as Editor of the CJFMS! And welcome to Jennifer VanderBurgh and Mike Zryd, the new Editors.

Labyrinth (1967)

 
Labyrinth 1967 winter bus commuters.png
Labyrinth 1967 winter Mary Queen of the world Queen Elizabeth Hotel.png
Labyrinth 1967 winter walkers gravedigger.png

Labyrinth (1967), dir. Roman Kroitor, Colin Low, et al.—prod. NFB

Labyrinth/Labyrinthe was an audacious multimedia and multi-sensory pavilion designed, executed, and hosted by the National Film Board of Canada for Montreal’s 1967 International and Universal Exposition, a.k.a. Expo 67. Its Brutalist form contained a number of multi-screen cinema chambers. One of them projected a series of moving images in a 5-screen cruciform arrangement. Though Labyrinth’s humanist perspective was also explicitly internationalist (hence the shots of the Sahara Desert that surround the first image), many of the featured images were of Montreal, where many of the filmmakers involved in this project lived and worked.

[snow; winter; commuters; gravedigger; traffic; public transportation; Dorchester Boulevard; Mary Queen of the World Cathedral; the Queen Elizabeth Hotel; camels; Sahara Desert]

Watch this film here.

And to learn much more about multi-screen experimentation at Expo 67, check out Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), edited by Janine Marchessault and Monika Kin Gagnon. Featuring essays by Seth Feldman, Gary Mediema, Aimée Mitchell, Johanne Sloan, Monika Kin Gagnon, Janine Marchessault, and Yours Truly.

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