‘Iconic’ documentarian Gudrun Bjerring Parker helped define NFB’s signature style

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The documentaries that pioneering filmmaker Gudrun Bjerring Parker made for the National Film Board in the 1940s and 50s are at once a fascinating glimpse into Canada’s past and surprisingly relevant to the present day. They argue the necessity of affordable child care for working mothers, examine media bias and challenge accepted gender roles.

They are also engagingly dramatic, inherently empathic and, at times, quietly lyrical. Ms. Bjerring Parker is often credited with helping create the template for the burgeoning NFB’s distinctive documentary style. Her achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider she was one of the few female directors working at the film board in those decades.

An Icelandic Canadian with a sweet, self-effacing manner that masked a fierce intellect and steely determination, Ms. Bjerring Parker held her own at the male-dominated board, winning awards and admiration, while paving the way for a younger generation of feminist auteurs.

“She was an iconic figure to us,” said Terre Nash, director of the NFB’s Oscar-winning 1982 documentary If You Love This Planet. “She normalized the idea of women being behind the camera.”

Ms. Bjerring Parker, who died on Nov. 15 in Edmonton at the age of 102, was the last surviving member of a small band of female filmmakers who overcame prevailing sexism to make their mark during the early years of the NFB.

“She struggled, as women of her generation did, against obstacles that now seem to us absurd,” said the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, Ms. Bjerring Parker’s son-in-law. “But she struggled with infinite grace. I’ve never known anyone like her.”

Gudrun Johanna Bjerring was born on March 16, 1920, in Winnipeg, the second child and only daughter of Icelandic immigrants Sigridur Jonsdottir and Sigtryggur Olason Bjerring. Sigtryggur owned a rubber-stamp business, while Sigridur was a clothes designer whose own lack of formal education made her determined that her daughter wouldn’t suffer the same fate.

Gudrun Bjerring excelled at school, winning a scholarship to United College (now the University of Winnipeg). After graduation, she landed a reporter’s job at the Winnipeg Free Press. She covered what was known as the “hotels and rails” beat, where she interviewed notable people who arrived by train in the city. One frigid February morning in 1942, as she later recalled, she got a tip that an important-looking fellow had checked into the Fort Garry Hotel and she set out to see who it was.

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The mystery man was John Grierson, the visionary Scotsman who’d been appointed to run the newly formed NFB. He was on a cross-country talent search and, evidently impressed with the intrepid young reporter, offered her a job. A week later, she was in Ottawa, working at the film board despite not knowing a thing about film.

She wasn’t alone. Most of Mr. Grierson’s Canadian recruits were novices who learned the ropes from a group of British experts he had imported. Gudrun Bjerring started out as an assistant to Raymond Spottiswoode, who gave her a crash course in editing. After six months in the cutting room, she was eager to make her own movies. At Mr. Grierson’s suggestion, she approached the Department of National Health (now Health Canada), where she received funding to shoot a series of short films promoting the importance of vitamins for healthy children.

It was the height of the Second World War and the NFB was feverishly pumping out films to aid Canada’s fight against the fascist powers in Europe. As men were being sent off to the front, women were entering the workforce to take up the slack, which posed a dilemma for those with children. In response, the federal government set up low-cost day nurseries for child care, a project that Ms. Bjerring Parker seized on as the subject for her next film. Before They Are Six (1943) contained all the elements that Ms. Bjerring Parker’s work would become known for, using dramatic storytelling, sympathetically portraying the lives of children and highlighting a social issue she felt passionate about.

“It was the only film of that era to acknowledge that what women did looking after their children was work,” Ms. Nash observed. Ms. Bjerring Parker was later dismayed when the nurseries program was discontinued at the end of the war, on the assumption that women would go back to being homemakers.

Before They Are Six also stood in stark contrast to the kind of bombastic propaganda being churned out at the NFB, as did her subsequent wartime films. “They have this humanist touch,” said film scholar Judith Hammill, who wrote a major study of Ms. Bjerring Parker’s work and later became a close friend. “She brought a sensitivity to her filmmaking, which was quintessentially Canadian.”

At the time, the NFB’s neophyte documentarians were seeking an authentic national style to replace the didactic one of their British mentors. They found it in Ms. Bjerring Parker’s follow-up film, Listen to the Prairies (1945). A portrait of Winnipeg’s annual Music Festival, it replaced propaganda with pastoral, its images of fresh-faced young musicians, rippling wheat fields and serene prairie skies celebrating both community and the Canadian dream in a subtle and enchanting way.

“It had a huge impact on the film board,” said filmmaker and NFB historian Donald McWilliams, whose forthcoming feature, A Return to Memory, focuses on Ms. Bjerring Parker and her female colleagues. “It pointed to a new direction.”

Ms. Bjerring Parker’s cohorts during the war years included Judith Crawley (the first woman to direct an NFB film), Laura Boulton, Jane Marsh and Evelyn Spice Cherry, who ran the board’s agricultural unit with her husband, Lawrence Cherry. In 1944, at the age of 24, Ms. Bjerring Parker became the only woman to head up a division on her own when she was placed in charge of the educational unit.

That same year she married Morten Parker, a boy from Winnipeg’s Jewish community and a talented writer who followed her to the film board. “It was a classic attraction of opposites,” Mr. Gopnik said. “He was drawn to her Icelandic beauty and mystery and she was drawn to his Jewish wit – he was a very funny man.”

Mr. Parker would soon establish his own reputation at the NFB as the director of a series of films on labour unions. The couple also worked as a team on one of the board’s biggest postwar successes, The Stratford Adventure (1954), a documentary on the founding of the Stratford Festival. Featuring charming offstage dramatizations, including one in which British film star Alec Guinness coaches a then-unknown Timothy Findley, it was written and initially directed by Ms. Bjerring Parker, until her NFB bosses discovered she was pregnant. In that era, there were restrictions on married women working in the federal civil service, so Ms. Bjerring Parker had to hand off the directing duties to her husband.

The Stratford Adventure was nominated for an Academy Award, while another film Ms. Bjerring Parker co-directed, the corny but hugely popular Royal Journey – tracking the future Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s cross-Canada visit in 1951 – won a BAFTA, the British Oscar. Ms. Bjerring Parker also received the Canadian Film Award (precursor to today’s Canadian Screen Awards) for several of her NFB pictures, including the influential Opera School (1952). A witty docudrama about a young opera singer at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, it was a showcase for Ms. Bjerring Parker’s artistry, with long takes, overlapping dialogue and beautifully lit black-and-white cinematography. “You feel like you’re watching a film by Orson Welles,” Mr. McWilliams said.

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Although she left the NFB’s employment in 1953, Ms. Bjerring Parker continued to make films for the board on contract throughout the 1950s. They included Seeing is Believing (1956), which revealed biases in the way different news outlets covered a campaigning politician, as well as a popular series for high-school students, What Do You Think? The latter used an open-ended format, presenting its young viewers with dilemmas in the form of a dramatic scenario, which they were then encouraged to discuss. One of the more striking episodes, Being Different (1957), questions gender stereotypes when a boy is ridiculed for his interest in butterflies.

A key ingredient to the series’ success was Ms. Bjerring Parker’s famed skill at coaxing natural performances from her child actors. Her younger daughter, filmmaker Martha Parker, attributes that partly to her mother’s Icelandic heritage: “There is a softness and respect toward children in the Icelandic culture and she grew up with that.”

In 1963, Gudrun and Morten Parker formed their own production company, Parker Film Associates. Together, they created international documentaries that reflected their shared interest in political and social justice issues. Mr. Parker, as director, was often away on location, while Ms. Bjerring Parker, who was also busy raising their two little girls, handled production and research duties at home in Montreal.

“She was constantly working during our childhood,” Martha Parker said. Their house doubled as an office, with a secretary and an editing suite in the basement. “There was often a film editor at our dinner table,” she recalled. Not to mention such NFB legends as animator Norman McLaren and producer Guy Glover, who were among the regular visitors to a household bubbling with creative energy.

Being a mother, however, remained Ms. Bjerring Parker’s first priority. “She was absolutely devoted to us,” Martha Parker said. “We felt so surrounded by her love.”

When, at the dawn of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the NFB formed Studio D expressly to produce the work of women filmmakers, Ms. Bjerring Parker became something of a figurehead. “She was held in high esteem,” Ms. Nash recalled. “We all sort of bowed down to her.” Her observational style was a major influence on the work coming out of that landmark studio. She also produced and directed one of its early releases, Your Move (1973), which encouraged women to become more active in sports.

In 2005, Ms. Bjerring Parker was made an officer of the Order of Canada for her contributions to documentary filmmaking. She spent her later years in Edmonton, close to daughter Julia, a lawyer with the federal government, and her family.

She remained passionate, energetic and inquisitive well into old age. “She was still the youngest person in the room, in terms of her openness to ideas and her eagerness to learn,” Martha Parker said. Added Julia Parker: “She would always say, when faced with a choice, choose the thing that will make your life more interesting. That was her guiding principle.”

Ms. Bjerring Parker was predeceased by Morten Parker, who died in 2014. She leaves her daughters, Julia and Martha; sons-in-law Edward Struzik and Adam Gopnik; and four grandchildren, Jacob and Sigrid Struzik, and Luke and Olivia Gopnik-Parker.