Blackwood
1976 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Tony Ianzelo, Andy Thomson
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Newfoundland etcher David Blackwood demonstrates his craft step by step amid scenes of his hometown and tales of the vanished seal-hunting way of life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1976 NFB doc about an etcher isn't exactly a premise designed to provoke—it's the kind of earnest Canadian craft film everyone nods at politely. But there's something genuinely weird about watching a vanishing way of life (seal hunting) get mourned through the prism of another vanishing practice (etching), and the filmmakers refuse to sentimentalize either one.
Blackwood sits squarely in the documentary-as-portraiture tradition, but what makes it rigorous is how the formal structure mirrors the subject's own practice—each frame considered, each sequence a deliberate mark on the surface of time. The interweaving of demonstration, landscape, and oral history shows filmmakers who understood they were preserving not just a man, but a way of seeing.
The decision to let Blackwood's etching process unfold in real time rather than compress it into montage is the whole film—it's asking the viewer to feel the precision and patience of the work itself, and that choice transforms what could be a standard craft-demo into something meditative and almost unbearably present.