Keeping the Canadian theme going just a little longer, a belated follow-up to Dan's detailed mini-history of the worker-training film in his last post. It's hard not to think of these brilliant PSAs, produced for the Canadian workplace safety organization WSIB, as films made in the image of the kind of NFB films we've been watching, and possibly as slightly-winking parodies of them (or homages, who can say?). Canadians of a certain age grew up with the admonition "we've got it [the intelligence to avoid workplace injuries], let's use it," usually while waiting for the hockey game to come back on. These spots take a different tack, one more in tune with the dramatic character-based naratives of PAUL TOMKOWICZ and HIGH STEEL. (The WSIB seems to have gotten some flack for the earliest spots; in the "Current Spots," you'll see that they try a different narrative angle.)
There's a rumor that David Cronenberg directed one of these; I haven't seen anything to confirm that, but you can see where it comes from.
