Holiday at the Banff School of Fine Arts: The Cinematic Production of Culture, Nature, and Nation in the Canadian Rockies, 1945-1952

The National Film Board’s 1946 production Holiday at School was the culmination of a decade’s work in university extension education by Donald Roy Cameron, the director of the Banff School of Fine Arts. Established by the University of Alberta in 1933 and shaped by Cameron’s vision from 1936 to 1966, the Banff School promoted Canadian nation-building through the arts and contributed to the construction of Banff as a prime tourism destination and wilderness recreation park. The strategy was not unlike the way Canadian cultural policy in the mid-twentieth century approached national development through tourism in the national parks and through film-making by the National Film Board. All three institutions—the National Film Board, the Banff School of Fine Arts, and Banff National Park—constructed Banff as a symbolic national landscape for leisure and tourism consumption. The film Holiday at School was thus produced at the intersection of these institutions participating in the construction of citizenship in Canada after the Second World War: holidays at the Banff School became a site for the expression of postwar ideals of liberal democratic citizenship that encompassed public education, leisure consumerism, and Canadian nationalism.