The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.2004, Side 25

Vol. 59 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
scious (and entirely unselfconscious) lapse
into the old mother tongue by these
extremely North American editors and
farmers and doctors whenever they rose
from the table: Takk fyrir matin (Thanks
for the ‘feed’); or the discovery near
Guttormsson’s rather dreadful gamboge-
painted modern frame house of a pioneer
log cabin used by the early settlers, but
now forgotten and despised.
After a week’s work in the local hotel
the script was ready. A few days later a
camerman and assistant came from Ottawa
and we were a team of four until the film
was shot. Eventually - over a year later
owing to wartime exigencies - it was
released in 16mm Kodachrome (with even
Tryggvi Arnason’s pigs looking glam-
orous) as Iceland on the Prairies.
Throughout the entire shooting
Margaret Ann was, in our gross male view,
obstructively assiduous. She rarely
stopped giving us advice, most of it good
and most of it, I’m sorry to say, ignored:
partly because she was a girl, but partly
because her highly inarticulate non-stop
conversation got under our skins and made
us, in male self-defense, more bristly and
blowsy than we really were.
With golden hair flying she would but-
tonhole us with lengthy expositions of
shots that we ought to take. These
harangues were delivered in a slow, heavily
emphasized Prairie drawl and with an
expression of singular intensity. They
would include not only the shot and the
reason for it, and the place it would proba-
bly have in the film, but its relationship to
the sociological background of the
Icelandic people, its philosophical origins,
and its moral justification. To say that she
was a bore would be wide of the mark
because, apart from her striking and unusu-
al looks, boredom implies a comprehension
of her vocabulary and intellectual gymnas-
tics which we did not have.
A few months after the film was fin-
ished, Margaret Ann turned up at NFB and
her true worth was at once appreciated by
the English. She joined Legg’s World in
Action unit as research assistant, idea
woman and expert in locating stock-shots.
Eventually she became someone against
whose sharp intelligence, vivid personality,
formidable powers of argumentation and
disconcertingly rough, mannish sense of
humour we could all sharpen and hone our
own wits. In this role she proved invalu-
able, and it was gradually borne in on us
that our own lack of appreciation arose
from the essential conformism of Canadian
society. Because Canadians are apt to dis-
trust “originals” we distrusted her. She
exercised her wits in a way that was unfa-
miliar to us. It was all right to be “bright”
but it should be in the recognized Canadian
pattern. To be eccentric, even if brilliant,
was frowned upon. Margaret Ann was
both an eccentric and an original, and fur-
thermore she remained absolutely consis-
tent. She really loved ideas and loved to
play about with them, and though she
seemed highly mannered, the manner was
entirely natural to her and never varied in
all her years at NFB. It was really marvel-
lous entertainment to behold this striking
girl, with her great mass of honey blonde
hair, seriously arguing in the midst of a
pack of young NFB intellectuals on the
scent, and often besting them, albeit with
graciousness so that she would not have her
position weakened by becoming involved
in the war between men and women.
And after awhile - perhaps rather too
long a while - she won us all over. Our dis-
trust turned to admiration and to affection
as well. And though it’s really outside the
scope of this story it’s worth telling the end
of the tale which was that after the war she
went to England where she met, and later
married, a great figure in British documen-
tary, Arthur Elton, and found herself well
able to wrestle with and to master the sub-
tle English prods and caste knives-in-the
ribs of those who were “really astonished,
my dear, that this Canadian girl, should
have nobbled ...”
And after thirty years her mannered
naturalness, her unassuming dignity
remained total and inviolate.