Much has been written of John Grierson, the so-called ‘Father of the Documentary Movement’ in Britain and the Canadian Film Commissioner during the Second World War. He remains a controversial and contested figure. Until recently, few works focussed on the international character of the documentary film movement and fewer still on the deeper meaning of his campaigns to establish a series of national state-sponsored documentary film units (often known as National Film Boards) in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaya and Britain by examining the connections between them. Although primarily intended to ‘project the nation’, these units were designed to contribute to an understanding of international citizenship in an increasingly connected world.  Grierson believed that film, specifically the form he promoted – the documentary and education film – had potential to speak across cultures: it could be ‘world-making’ as well as ‘world-reflecting’; could connect peoples, as well as reveal difference; and could influence global politics, particularly suggesting a response to social problems created by war, famine, and poverty.   This paper intends to explore some of Grierson’s ideas on ‘internationalism’ and to consider the practicalities and the infrastructure through which this was to be accomplished by focussing on the aims of and connections between National Film Boards. The paper uses Grierson’s ideas and work as way of opening up questions of the nature, purpose and problems of international film and communications in the 20th century, interrogating how far documentary film in this period was able to ‘cross gaps’, as Grierson claimed, or indeed whether, in fact, cultural and media products obstruct international understanding - drawing attention to and intensifying difference rather than promoting common solutions to common problems as the documentarists had intended.

Jo Fox is Professor of Modern History at Durham University in the United Kingdom and is a specialist in the history of film and propaganda in the twentieth-century. She has published on the cinematic cultures of Britain and Germany during the Second World War, exploring the connections between film, propaganda and popular opinion. Her most recent book was Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema (Oxford, 2007).  Her articles have been published in the Journal of Modern History, the Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Contemporary History among others. She is Associate Editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and is a member of Council for the International Association for Media and History. Jo Fox is a UK National Teaching Fellow (2007) and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).