Prices in Wartime
1942 · 10m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A wartime explainer examines why prices rise during conflict and argues for government controls on wages and prices, highlighting the Wartime Prices and Trade Board and its oversight of Canada's economy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1942 propaganda film arguing *for* wage controls is exactly the kind of historical curveball that makes you realize how much consensus shifts—but the film itself is too earnest and didactic to actually subvert anything; it just *is* what it says on the tin.
Prices in Wartime sits in a crucial lineage of state-sponsored documentary rhetoric, and its formal commitment to the explainer mode—measured pacing, didactic structure, economic argument made visual—deserves examination as a document of how governments shaped narrative during total war.
The real craft move here is how it handles abstraction: translating economic policy into visual argument without resorting to heavy-handed metaphor, which on a 1942 budget with limited resources required a specific editorial discipline to avoid collapsing into either propaganda noise or visual boredom.