As Usual
1974 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Raymond Brousseau
Genres: experimental, sci-fi, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
A man wakes to a world running backward while he alone moves forward normally. Shavers, newspapers, pedestrians, and cars reverse in an experiment without dialogue.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Reverse-time gimmick could've been a one-joke trap, but Brousseau lets it breathe into something genuinely unsettling—the banality of backward motion becomes its own weird poetry, which is exactly the kind of restrained subversion most people botch.
A formally rigorous exercise in constraint that echoes the structural cinema of its era; the decision to strip dialogue entirely and let optical inversion do the philosophical work shows Brousseau in full command of modernist form—this is how you make an essay film that doesn't feel like one.
The singular move here is the refusal to make the protagonist's forward motion feel heroic or special—he's just bewildered, moving through the frame with the same mundane weight as everything reversed around him, and that small tonal choice is what sells the whole experiment.