Background to The Romance of the Far Fur Country
In 1919, the Hudson’s Bay Company was approaching its 250th year in business. What began in a coffee house in London, in 1670, had now grown to become the undisputed leader of the international fur trade.
For their landmark 250th birthday, the HBC spared no cost. A written history of the company was released, with a gramophone recording of that history. They commissioned The Beaver magazine, to actively chronicle the company’s workings in the North—The Beaver would become the oldest and most important history magazine in the country, only recently changing its name to Canada’s History. As well as publications, celebrations were planned across Canada, and in London.
The biggest gathering was slated for Winnipeg, the company’s Canadian headquarters. The main ticket item would be the release of a feature film that depicted the Hudson’s Bay Company history, as well as its current activities across Canada’s North. To accomplish the task of filming the North, the Company bought a film company in New York, and made plans for a crew to head to Canada. The film would be called The Romance of the Far Fur Country.
Filming The Romance of the Far Fur Country
In spring of 1919, two cameramen from New York City set out to film Canada’s northern wilderness. They first boarded Canada’s most famous icebreaker, the HMSNascopie, and headed from Montreal toward the Arctic Circle. For the next nine months, the film crew lugged their crates of gear by foot, canoe, dogsled and icebreaker, trudging through the Arctic, the boreal forest and up some of the fiercest rivers in the world.
The filmmakers perched their cameras in places never before filmed. By the time they completed filming at the end of December, they’d gathered 75,000 feet of film, some eight hours of viewing time. The footage was rushed to New York where editing began. By mid-April, a first draft was complete, and clocked in at four hours. A month later it was cut in half.
Film Premiere
The Romance of the Far Fur Country premiered on May 23, 1920, at Winnipeg's illustrious Allen Theatre. Advertisements boasted that the viewer could “travel over 2,000 miles through the North, sitting in the Allen Theatre.”
The audience in Winnipeg was a mix of HBC store clerks, shoppers, and a hundred First Nations people, all dressed in traditional clothing. The latter sat in reserved seats close to the classical orchestra brought in for the event. Unfamiliar with European theatre-going etiquette, the First Nations community interacted with the motion pictures, calling to “get your gun,” or “shoot him,” when animals appeared on screen.
The film was then released across Western Canada, and was eventually re-cut for a British version and screened in London. The British version included new footage of women wearing expensive furs, spliced between scenes of Inuit hunters and fur trade posts—it was a not so subtle reminder of the film’s intent to chronicle the HBC fur trade.
A Lost Film…
By the end of the 1920s, audiences were turning their attention to the talkies, wanting more than just moving pictures. Soon after the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, barely a decade after The Romance of the Far Fur Country was filmed, the footage from the epic Hudson’s Bay Company film disappeared from public view, the canisters of nitrate film stock were packed away by the HBC in an archive in London for safe keeping— but lost to the world.
The Re-Discovery
Though continually on the minds of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives, it would be over half a century before the nitrate would find its way back to a projector's light. In the 1990s, visual historian Peter Geller revisited the HBC footage held in the vaults of the British Film Institute. After spending days looking at the footage on a Steinbeck reel-to-reel viewing station in the basement of the BFI, Geller returned to Canada in order to examine his research notes.
Recognizing immediately the importance of the HBC footage, Geller began writing what would become an important book about northern images and moving pictures:Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-45, devoting an entire chapter to The Romance of the Far Fur Country.
The Return
No complete print of The Romance of the Far Fur Country exists. But thankfully, there exists fragments that make up the whole, which have been stored securely for over half a century at the British Film Institute Archive.
What is more, the diaries kept by the film crewmembers have also been preserved, albeit on the other side of the Atlantic, in the HBC archives in Winnipeg. With the footage, and the notes, it is possible to resurrect the film to its original two hour run time, returning The Romance of the Far Fur Country to its former glory.
From London to Winnipeg
The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives' interest to add this cache of 1920s HBC footage to its collections in Winnipeg has gained momentum in recent years. For the last two years, Five Door Films and the Hudson's Bay Company Archives have been collaborating in order to bring this footage back to Canada. What started as a distant idea grew into reality when the British Film Institute agreed that the important HBC film collection should be relocated, brought back to its rightful home in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg.
Transferring the tens of thousands of feet of highly flammable nitrate film across an ocean is no easy task. After lengthy discussions, a plan was established to preserve and transfer the film to HD video for future use. The film elements from 1920 were transferred first to the BFI preservation centre, then to a film lab in London to scan each frame to a digital format, then packed carefully for the trip back to the country where it was shot some 90 years earlier.
