Airplane Casualties
1918 · 6m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Aircraft take off, fly in formation, drop bombs, and crash in 1918 combat footage. Crews pose and prepare machines between aerial engagements.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects 1918 combat footage to be grim or propagandistic, but *Airplane Casualties* just lets the archive breathe—the formations, the poses between runs, the casual brutality of it all—and somehow that refusal to editorializes feels more radical than any contrarian angle could.
This is exemplary archival curation: the film knows exactly what it is—a meditation on early aviation warfare through found footage—and trusts the formal severity of montage and silence to do the argumentative work, positioning itself squarely in the lineage of essay documentaries that interrogate historical material through restraint.
The decision to hold on those between-flight moments—crews mugging for camera, machines being readied—rather than cutting straight to aerial engagement transforms what could be rote war documentation into something oddly human; it's a small curatorial choice that reframes the entire emotional register.