Best Documentary 1917
by popegrutch
The first category in this year’s Century Awards has no real surprises. There was only one documentary up for consideration, and its topic was pretty predictable as well. The era when audiences would respond to everyday events depicted on film was over, and documentarians had to look for subjects that an audience increasingly accustomed to the self-contained narrative of the feature film would respond to. The biggest event of the day was of course the World War, and this was the source of last year’s winner as well as our own.
The nominee for Best Documentary of 1917 is:
And the winner is:
Canadian Official War Films!
Today, this collection of documentary footage from France serves to remind us that the largest country on the North American continent was involved in the war in Europe from the very beginning, and that war is a serious business. Even without any graphic footage of combat or its results, the grim attitude of the men depicted speaks to hardship and deprivation. The creators of this film also came up with very clever and exciting animation for maps to show the changing tides of war. Methods like this would become even more sophisticated in movies about the Second World War.
Note that while this is the first time the best documentary has come from Canada, they also brought us “In The Land of the Headhunters,” the closest thing to a documentary I saw in 1914. This is fitting for a nation that would lead in documentary filmmaking later in the twentieth century, thanks to the support of the National Film Board of Canada (founded in 1939).
Century Film Project 