BLOOD AND FIRE, and EMERGENCY WARD (1958)
Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate
21 minutes
"Documents the events of a typical Sunday night at a Montreal hospital emergency room. Shot over the course of many nights, the film exposes us to the range of people admitted to the hospital: accident victims, people with imagined illness, people abandoned by their families, and others who are just plain lonely. Documentarian John Grierson's influence on Greaves is evident in this film: Greaves humanizes his subjects and reassures the viewer that the emergency ward at this institution is run as responsibly and as well as the post office in Night Mail (1936). The doctors know their jobs and care; orderlies and nurses are ennobled." – Adam Knee and Charles Musser, William Greaves, Filmmaking as Mission (Columbia University Press, 2021)