War II: Total War
1965 · 25m · Canada
Directed by William Canning
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, dark
A school-oriented chronicle traces the Second World War from the ascent of Nazism in Germany through to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, showing how total war drew in civilians as well as combatants.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1965 NFB documentary that actually treats WWII as a *total system* rather than a parade of battles—that's the contrarian move, and Canning commits to it by refusing heroic narrative scaffolding and letting the civilian entanglement speak for itself.
Canning's chronicle sits squarely in the NFB's documentary lineage of historical witness, and the formal choice to trace ideological ascent through to atomic aftermath positions this as serious pedagogical cinema—a film aware it's arguing for how we *should* remember.
The decision to frame total war through civilian incorporation rather than military spectacle is modest but radical; a 25-minute film that could have been propagandistic instead becomes a sustained tonal commitment to complicity and consequence.