An Aesthetic Indulgence
1985 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Larry Kurnarsky
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Mathematics chair Nathan Mendelsohn finds beauty in abstraction while balancing family, students, and university life. Contentment stems from pursuing excellence he loves.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1985 NFB essay on a math professor's interior life—this is the kind of reverential biographical portrait everyone assumes is boring, which is exactly why Kurnarsky's restraint and formal clarity make it quietly subversive; he refuses to dramatize, refuses the easy uplift, and somehow that refusal becomes the whole point.
Kurnarsky locates the lineage of the essay film—Marker's philosophical rigor, the NFB's documentary humanism—and executes it with such measured formal awareness that the film becomes a meditation on attention itself; this is the kind of short that asks what it means to look closely at a life lived through thinking.
The decision to shoot Mendelsohn's world without histrionics, letting his face and the spaces around him carry the weight of his contentment, is what separates this from hagiography; that restraint, that single choice to trust quietness over narrative momentum, is everything.