At the Survey Frontier: Mineral Exploration Film and the “Orderly Development of Newfoundland”

The short film Searching (Seaton Findlay, 1968) depicts a large-scale geological survey of minerals in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1950s and 1960s. The comprehensive survey depicted was undertaken by Brinex, the mineral exploration subsidiary of the British Newfoundland Corporation (Brinco), which also sponsored the film. In this paper, the space that is created by geological science and represented in Searching is called a “survey frontier.” Searching is not just evidence of the direct relationship between geological surveying and the explicit creation of a political formation but also functions to help make that relationship seem natural or given through what Mark Rifkin has called the making of “settler common sense.” The survey frontier is not just a pause before extraction, nor part of extractive practices, but a separate structure that produces settler authority, even in the absence of actual development. Searching shows that sponsored film is part of that authorization process.