Battle of Arras 3
1917 · 8m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Artillery fire, troop movements, and explosions mark the fighting at Arras, with German prisoners in the trenches and bombs falling on the town.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A century-old document of mechanized slaughter—straight archival footage, zero irony, which is either the most honest thing or the most boring, and honestly I'm not sure which yet.
Arras 3 sits within a deliberate lineage of conflict documentation; the NFB's archival stewardship and the formal restraint of the cinematography position it as essential testimony that refuses dramatization.
The decision to present unadorned source material—no score, no voiceover, just the raw temporal record—transforms documentary constraint into a formal statement that lets the viewer's attention do the work.