From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures along the Fur Trail

Abstract

Background: Since 1919, the Hudson’s Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading operations. Films such as Hudson’s Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), and Leipzig Exhibition footage (1930) offered views of North American landscapes and Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts and department stores alongside ethnographic footage of Indigenous Peoples. Analysis: Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives and textual film analysis of these “fur films,” this article theorizes their production and circulation within settler visual culture. Conclusions and implications: Tracing the films’ paths from the Eastern Arctic to Montréal, and from London, England, to Leipzig, Germany, this article demonstrates how these moving pictures participate in the entanglement of settler and infrastructural projects that characterize early twentieth-century Canada.