Back to Work
1945 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Vincent Paquette
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Discharged service members go through final interviews and placement help, then train for civilian trades from electrical maintenance and typewriter repair to hairdressing and secretarial work.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1945 NFB bureaucratic training film sounds like the textbook definition of consensus-safe archival material, but Paquette's refusal to sentimentalize the liminal space between soldier and worker—just *watching* men learn typewriter repair like it matters—is its own kind of subversion.
Paquette situates this squarely in the NFB's documentary tradition of social observation, where formal restraint becomes philosophical; the contemplative pacing and typological editing of the trades sequences anchor it firmly in a lineage of state-sponsored realism that deserves reexamination.
The decision to let the interview sequences breathe without editorial manipulation—no swelling score, no narrative thrust—transforms what could be bureaucratic tedium into something genuinely alive; it's the anti-cut that does the work here.