In 1911 the Canadian Government proposed an organization to oversee the protection of valued areas of natural beauty in the face of increasing human expansion into wilderness areas. The National Parks Act was passed in 1930 to enable the designation, protection, and maintenance of national parks. There are currently forty four national park sites across all provinces and territories (Parks Canada). As part of the celebration of the organization’s centenary, Parks Canada commissioned The National Parks Project, comprising thirteen short audio-visual pieces that were broadcast on television, compiled on DVD, and posted individually online. The genesis of the project was an initial pilot production on Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park made by a group of young Canadian media activists, who
initially aggregated in 2004 to produce the online journal FilmCAN and who later diversified into distribution and production. FilmCAN have summarized the project in the following terms:
In the tradition of the Group of Seven, Margaret Atwood’s Survival and other cultural touchstones, the National Parks Project aims to explore the ways in which the wilderness shapes our cultural imagination, and to contextualize it for our modern, technology-driven society.
The references are illuminating: the Group of Seven were Canadian artists, initially based around Toronto, who advanced Canadian landscape painting during the 1920s and early 1930s, venturing widely across Canada and painting in remote locations. By contrast, Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, published in 1972, was a pioneering survey of Canadian literature which argued that the notion of survival was a key motif in Canadian culture and literature. The linkage between the two in FilmCAN’s characterization centres on the notion of the wilderness and of human survival in and comprehension of the wilderness. More particularly, it points to the manner in which those factors have produced senses of belonging and imaginative investment in place. While they do not specify it, the considerable tradition of Canadian documentary filmmaking, which includes a substantial body addressed to landscape issues, provides another significant context (Leach and Sloniowski).
The most significant aspect of FilmCAN’s characterization of the project is its reference to “the ways in which the wilderness shapes our cultural imagination.” This characterization suggests that however primarily metropolitan contemporary Canadian society may appear, its interface with the (un-developed) natural world remains a key cultural reference point. The films commissioned for the project are ‘documentary’ in that they visually document places, particular human presences, and performances in those places, but are also reflections on the cultural imagination of and engagement with place that the collaborative teams of documentary makers and musicians enact through their audio-visual interaction. Individual films also document site-specific music performance practices, some enacted in real-time and others created through textual editing of disparate elements. The project resulted in the production of a distinct and disparate body of films, each addressed to iconic national parks’ locations.