From the archives of Canadian soldiers during the First World War to the film La Happy life of Léopold Z by filmmaker Gilles Carle, the conservation rooms of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) collection contain fragments of collective history. For the first time, the building located in the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent opened its doors this Tuesday to representatives of the media.
The air this late October morning is chilly, as is the interior of the organization’s conservation rooms, called the “vaults.” The temperature of the room containing 4.3 m high shelves is maintained at 12°C, in order to preserve the material found there, explains Hocine Cherifi, conservation supervisor at the NFB.
These places alone contain the 14,000 works of the producer and public distributor, of which more than 6,000 are accessible free of charge online. “People don’t realize that a collection of films also exists physically. We have to put it somewhere and we have to protect it,” says Marc St-Pierre, collection curator at the NFB.
However, these almost fifteen thousand works are only the tip of the iceberg, adds Lea Nakonechny, sales agent for NFB Archives. According to her, the metaphor is well chosen because of the freshness of the “vaults”, but also because they house nearly 80,000 archive plans. These are portions of filming that were not used in a film, but were selected for preservation for their historical value.
In total, the conservation and digitization rooms, which have been in Saint-Laurent since 2019, preserve approximately 190,000 cinematographic elements, including film reels and cassettes, in addition to photos and collectibles. The head office has been located for four years at Îlot Balmoral, in the heart of Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles. Founded in 1939, the NFB, which was in Ottawa, first moved in 1956 to Côte-de-Liesse Road, in the Quebec metropolis.
The building visited on Tuesday bears witness to the history of the National Film Board of Canada by exhibiting certain artifacts taken from significant works. Among the objects, we find prizes won by the NFB over the years, which sit alongside Michèle Cournoyer’s Indian ink drawings used for her film on incest entitled Hat (1999).
A cinematic “garden”
If Hocine Cherifi previously described the material found in the “vaults” as a “treasure”, he has since changed his mind and designated it as a garden, maintained by experts. Mme Nakonechny also compares the NFB archive plans to the fruits of an apple tree. “They are used by other people to cook their dishes and feed other productions. »
One of the “gardeners” we met during the visit was Steven Woloshen, digitization, conservation and laboratory technician. Wearing white gloves, he was busy preparing a roll of 35mm film before it was digitized.
The NFB artisans take care of the works, emphasizes Marc St-Pierre. “It’s still our heritage,” he maintains.
The latter also has difficulty choosing among the works of the National Film Board of Canada those which he considers the most important. “It’s a bit like asking a mother who her favorite child is,” explains the man who has worked at the organization for around twenty years.
“However, I am extremely nostalgic for times that I did not know, such as Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s.” He mentions the film The Happy Life of Léopold Z (1965) by Gilles Carle, where we can observe images of Montreal places in black and white. “It allows you to see how much the city has changed too. »
The NFB’s “garden” continues to grow, with around forty works added each year. “It makes my job a little harder. I’m still catching up to see all that,” he says, laughing.