Behind the Masks
1973 · 36m · Canada
Directed by Tom Shandel
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explains the features and stories of three Indigenous masks from the North Pacific coast and visits a carver on Vancouver Island.
Picked by Margot
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Lévi-Strauss as talking head feels like the safe documentary move, but Shandel's actually doing something stranger—letting the masks themselves become the narrators, treating anthropology like occult text. Everyone else would've made this about the expert; he made it about the objects resisting interpretation.
A masterwork of essayistic form: Shandel positions himself in the lineage of mid-century structuralist cinema while remaining rigorously faithful to the ethnographic archive, letting Lévi-Strauss's voice layer over visual meditation on form and meaning. The film knows exactly what tradition it's in and why it matters.
The decision to hold on the carver's hands—actually working, not performing—while Lévi-Strauss theorizes overhead creates this perfect tension between lived practice and abstract analysis; that single compositional choice reframes the entire relationship between knowledge and craft.