Bing Bang Boom
1969 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Joan Henson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Composer R. Murray Schafer visits a Grade 7 classroom and shows students that voices, footsteps, and breath can become music without instruments or notation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone treats this like a children's music lesson—because it is—so nobody notices Schafer's actually deconstructing the entire Western notation system in real time, which is genuinely radical and definitely not what a 1969 classroom doc was supposed to be doing.
Henson's restraint in letting Schafer's pedagogy unfold without intervention situates this squarely in the NFB's documentary-as-philosophical-inquiry tradition; the formal choice to film bodies and breath rather than score sheets becomes an argument about how knowledge itself is transmitted.
The decision to keep the camera on the *students'* faces—their dawning realization that their own bodies are instruments—rather than on Schafer himself is what transforms this from educational footage into something that actually moves; that's the whole film right there.