23 Skidoo
1964 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Julian Biggs
Genres: experimental, mystery
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
A familiar American downtown is shown utterly emptied of people — until the film reveals what happened.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1964 apocalypse film that withholds the catastrophe until the reveal — most directors would lead with spectacle, but Biggs trusts negative space and absence as the whole argument, which is genuinely perverse in the best way.
The film's formal restraint — its commitment to the empty downtown as a composed space before disclosure — places it squarely in the lineage of structural cinema and the sublime; a precisely controlled work that understands how withholding information becomes a formal gesture.
The decision to show us nothing but an evacuated street and let the silence and emptiness do the storytelling work is bracingly economical; one compositional choice sustains the entire 8 minutes, and it shouldn't work but somehow it does.