Blades and Brass
1967 · 9m · Canada
Directed by William Canning
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: sensual, theatrical, whimsical
Highlights of the 1967 National Hockey League season unfold to Tijuana Brass-style music, shot for grace and movement until the arena recalls a bullring.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1967 doc that treats hockey like a blood sport set to lounge music—genuinely weird formal choice, but Canning's too tasteful about it; the bullring metaphor lands harder than it has any right to, which almost annoys me into respecting it.
Canning stakes this firmly in the essay-documentary tradition while maintaining a playful distance from his own high-mindedness; the sensual framing and tonal shift from whimsy to theater demonstrate precise control over how a short film can reshape a subject through purely cinematic means.
The decision to score hockey footage with Tijuana Brass could've been a gimmick, but the editing and camera work commit so completely to finding grace in the violence that it becomes the entire point—that's the singular choice that makes this work.