Abstract
The Northern Review 44 (2017): 427–455 The Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE) 1913–1918 was the first Canadian government-sponsored expedition of the Western Arctic. Led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, two teams were to explore the southern and northern areas. With them was Australian cameraman, George Hubert Wilkins, who took still shots and motion pictures of the expedition. The CAE faced challenges from the start and within a few months the Karluk, the ship upon which Stefansson and the majority of the northern team were travelling, got stuck in the ice and later sunk. The CAE was mired in controversy, with the warring expeditions, massive cost overruns, and many deaths. Wilkins filmed thousands of feet of footage and photographs, but this footage was never edited into an official film, and it appears that it was never seen by audiences of the day outside of the Arctic. Placing the CAE official film footage within the context of film in Canada, the First World War, and the controversies surrounding the CAE and its own archival records context, this paper explores the history of this official audiovisual record and attempts to answer the question of why the Canadian government did not use this motion picture record to tell and promote the story of the CAE. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.019
Highlights
The Canadian Arc c Expedi on (CAE) 1913–1918 was the first Canadian government-sponsored expedi on of the Western Arc c
While there are a number of books related to the Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE)—including a biography of its official cameraman, George Wilkins, that relies heavily on Wilkins’s diary to reconstruct his experience as expedition cameraman, and another on his experience as one of the official photographers for the Australian Flying Corps (AFC) in the First World War—there has not been a study on the history of the CAE’s existing film record.[3]
If Stefansson and Wilkins went to the trouble of recording the expedition, and ended up with over two hours of footage, why did the Canadian government not produce an official film from it? Adding to the mystery, at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), is a feature length film connected to the CAE that was produced from thousands of feet of footage not shot by Wilkins, but by unofficial cameramen from an upstart motion picture company.[6]
Summary
“No expedition is complete nowadays without the cinematograph man, and this one will be no exception to the rule.”[1]. “ through lack of facility for early development,” he wrote, “the quality of some of the negative exposed on the expedition is not quite so good as it should have been It had been exposed some two and half years before development and it is generally known to photographers that the image fades from the film if the latter is not placed in the developer within a reasonable time after exposure.”[75] Wilkins shot 9,000 feet (2,743 m) of footage of the CAE, once he arrived at Gaumont to review the films the amount of usable footage was significantly less, and Wilkins pared the original footage down to 6,021 feet (1,835 m), which was sent to the Department of Naval Services in early September 1917.76 It is presumed that the approximately 3,000 (914 m) missing feet of film was left on the cutting room floor by Wilkins due to its poor visual quality, or it got lost or damaged in the North or en route to London, or it deteriorated while in Gaumont’s hands.
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