Preserved for all time: Rush and the Moose River Mine disaster

Last Updated: Thursday, October 19, 2006 | 12:19 PM ET

CBC Arts

The 1976 recording 2112 by Rush is among works that should be preserved for future generations, says a committee with a mandate to save the best in Canadian television, radio, film and music.

The Audio-Visual Preservation Trust, a public sector group, names each year a dozen cultural works to be preserved.

Frank Willis's radio report of the infamous Moose River Mine disaster in Nova Scotia in April 1936 is also on the list, released Wednesday, of works to be held in the trust.

The CBC reporter gave hourly radio reports for 56 hours, following efforts to rescue three workers from the mine. Millions of people across North America followed the story.

Television series the trust has selected include the The Champions, a 1978 documentary produced by the CBC and National Film Board about the careers of the late prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Quebec premier René Lévesque, and the seven-part CBC miniseries Duplessis, about the former Quebec premier.

Canadian power trio Rush formed in 1968 in Toronto and 2112, a futuristic concept album based on the writings of Ayn Rand, was their first gold and platinum release.

Other film and audio-visual works that will be preserved are:

• Pig & Whistle, a British-flavoured CTV show that ran for 10 years beginning in 1967.
• Fideles aux postes, a four-episode radio documentary about the history of French radio in Quebec.
• The work of broadcaster Harry (Red) Foster, including the first full network radio broadcast of the 1934 Grey Cup in Toronto and the first televised Grey Cup game for the CBC in 1952.
• Les Bons débarras, a film by Francis Mankiewicz about a mother and her rebellious daughter.
• Isabel, a 1968 thriller starring Geneviève Bujold about a woman who thinks she is going crazy when she hears ghosts and spirits.
• Wavelength, Michael Snow's 1967 experimental film.
• Recordings by soprano Pierrette Alarie and her husband, the late tenor Leopold Simoneau, who recorded from the early 1940s to 1970.
• The body of work by avant-garde Montreal jazz musician Paul Bley.

"The safeguarding of these selections is so important to the foundation of Canadian culture," trust president David Novek said Wednesday in a release.

Attention is needed to the preservation of film, video and audio works because such works can be lost to deterioration or to a change of technology, he said.

Canadian material such as Canada's first silent film Evangeline, made in 1913, and The Crimson Paradise, the country's first talkie made in 1933, are already lost.

The selections are made by experts in the fields of music, film and media.