A surprisingly interesting film.
Grain Elevator — Charles Konowal — 1981 — 15 min 53 s
This documentary short is a visual portrait of “Prairie Sentinels,” the vertical grain elevators that once dotted the Canadian Prairies. Surveying an old diesel elevator’s day-to-day operations, this film is a simple, honest vignette on the distinctive wooden structures that would eventually become a symbol of the Prairie provinces.
Found by Brother Uncle Don
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I watched this a few weeks ago, great film. A lot of the NFB content is worth watching.
Great set for a sequel to “No Country for Old men”. Is this sick?
I live “near” a large train yard. Of note: their location and layout are carefully selected so that once a car unit is unhooked from its engine, everything thereafter is manipulated by gravity allowing the cars to move without power–just releasing brakes. 100 car trains are put together that way rarely ever needing an engine to move things around.
Gravity also used in the design of grain storage and mills, rollercoasters, my dirty laundry, etc.
I lived outside a small farming town in Minnesota as a child in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I remember going with my Dad to take grain to the elevator in town that was very much like this one. Very interesting to see how the grain gets routed into the various bins.
By 1981 the elevator was replaced by a larger complex of circular metal bins, like you see in most Midwest American towns now. The farmer’s CO-OP decided to replace the old wooden elevator after the railroad stopped service.
A good piece of film making, I loved the quietness of it and how the people involved weren’t aping for the camera. Just a day in the life.
Very enjoyable. Thanks for this, Uncle Dave.
Excellent.
I grew up in North Dakota in the ’60’s and ’70’s, and this brought back a flood of memories for me. I never saw one man push a boxcar before, in my town they used an old Model M Farmall with a front end loader to shove ’em around.
Seventy year old man does Canada.
http://nfb.ca/film/railrodder/
Really?
Is the news so slow that we’ve come to films about Canadian grain elevators?
What next? This?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=I3ukCqmXmpE&feature=fvw
[Since when have we ever been a news site? We post what we find interesting. –UD]
National Film Board of Canada – a government funded entity. Sponsors many interesting works. And Canadians for the most part don’t scream in anguish that their taxes are being used for the arts. (Hey it’s DU there has to be a political slant somewhere.) Long long ago HBO used NFB shorts in the interstices between movies. Yes, I’m showing my age.
The Log Driver’s Waltz is a classic.
There is more elegant direction and loving cinematography in this 15 minute piece than 9 of the 10 “hit movies” of the last couple of years.
It’s interesting because it looks and sounds wonderful.
The travesty is that Charles Konowal never went onto more renowned things. Or maybe that’s a decision he took.
In any case, a gem. I can only imagine how it would have looked on the big screen.
Thanks Uncle Dave
I have an idea. Let’s make a documentary and bury all its images under a 20% gray filter.
That’s got to make it much easier to watch…
…and let’s shoot it on 16mm film, thus causing the most stable tripod scenes to wiggle around like a bowl of soup…
oo! ooo! Here’s a good one. Dirt. Let’s have spots of dirt show up all through the show. White ones. You know, because the original was a film negative, so dust shows up white.
After all. It’s the National Film Board.
And the dust adds an authentic connection to the subject matter.
…oh. 1981. Before video. Never mind.
My all time fave is the “Rise And Fall Of The Great Lakes”
Oh, BTW, %90 (omy estimation) of the old type elevators are now gone.
Rectagon of Saskatchewan
Always has to be a couple of jerks in the pile that have to say something negative. I was actually just going to check out a minute or so of this short, and ended up watching the whole thing.
Who knew grain elevators could be so interesting?
Thanks so much for posting this film. We also love it, and weren’t sure where the sudden influx of traffic was coming from. Mystery solved.
We’ve got lots of other gems in our collection. Check them out.
BuzzMega, I’m not sure if the NFB is retransferring its entire collection to HD before posting on the web, but what you are referring to is more to do with the nature of older film-to-video transfer technology rather than 16mm film itself (from the looks of it, I’m guessing that it is indeed an older transfer). Transfers were made from low-contrast film prints, specifically to reduce film’s range to be more appropriate to analogue broadcast (otherwise the whites and blacks would flatline at 100 and 0 divisions, respectively). Film pin registration on older flying spot scanners was less precise than today, particularly for single-perf 16mm film. And although dust removal in a film-to-digital realm is more automatic today, it’s still a labor-intensive process that requires a paid operator to view the film frame-by-frame. Dust removal did not actually become technologically viable from a cost-benefit standpoint until less than 10 years ago, and has never been applied to older film-to-video transfers. I hope this history lesson has been valuable for you.
I grew up 100m from where they filmed this. It’s still there.