Seriously Moving Images

The Maple Leaf Forever is a video montage that I compiled from film footage shot over a century ago. It was the first of four such montages in the video presentation Answering the Call (2014), which screened as part of a Royal BC Museum travelling exhibit commemorating the Great War. The presentation drew on almost an hour of rare film footage shot in BC during the First World War. The source material shows troops in training at Victoria, Vancouver and Comox, before their departure for eastern Canada, England, and the battlefields of Europe.

Most of the footage used in this clip shows troops at the Willows Army Camp, located at Willows Fairgrounds in Oak Bay.  One exception is the introductory sequence, which shows a howitzer being loaded and fired, possibly at the Macauley Plains camp in Esquimalt.  The other exceptions are scenes shot in downtown Victoria (at 2:17-2:32 in the clip) and downtown Vancouver (at 2:33-2:49).  The latter, shot by pioneer filmmaker A.D. “Cowboy” Kean, shows the military honour guard at the 1916 UBC convocation ceremonies, marching past the Vancouver Court House (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).

In several shots, small dogs can be seen dashing out to inspect the marching troops. Such dogs seemed to be ever-present in the source footage.