Angkor, the Lost City
1961 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Roger Blais, Morten Parker
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Stone palaces and temples emerge from jungle at Angkor in a pictorial survey of Khmer achievement. Six hundred monuments testify to an ancient metropolis.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1961 NFB documentary about ancient temples—sounds like the most anesthetizing premise possible, yet Blais and Parker somehow made a *myth* out of stone inventory, which is either brilliantly perverse or just competent middlebrow filmmaking, and I genuinely can't decide which.
Angkor demonstrates the essay film tradition at its most assured: the marriage of formal survey and elegiac contemplation, where archaeological documentation becomes a meditation on civilizational loss—a lineage running from Flaherty through the postwar documentary avant-garde.
The real film lives in the editing's rhythm—how the cut timing forces you to *hold* on each ruin just long enough that absence starts breathing—a structural choice that transforms what could've been a travelogue into something genuinely haunted.