A Day in the National Parks
1978 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Suzanne Allard
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, sensual
An impressionistic journey travels through Canada's national parks from the East Coast to the West, assembling a composite landscape of the country.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A meditative landscape doc from '78—competent, sure, but it's basically the consensus move on how to make a national parks film, and I can't find the heresy in it.
Allard's compositional restraint and the deliberate pacing of this East-to-West assembly place it squarely in the Canadian essayist tradition; the sensory precision of each park as a discrete formal argument shows a filmmaker acutely aware of what comes before her.
The edit structure—how each landscape dissolves into the next without fanfare, creating continuity from disconnected geography—is the whole film, and it's a choice that reveals someone thinking carefully about how montage itself can be the argument.