Buddhism
1962 · 16m · Canada
Directed by David Millar
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
A tour across Asia traces the life of the Buddha and shows how his teachings are practiced in different countries.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1962 NFB documentary about Buddhism sounds like the most respectable snooze on paper—but the real question is whether Millar's actually doing something formally weird with the form, or just genuinely committed to the contemplative-tour template; I suspect it's the latter, which means it's not for me.
Millar's structuring of Buddhist philosophy across geographic and cultural contexts in 1962 represents exactly the kind of documentary craft the NFB was pioneering—measured anthropological observation paired with formal rigor that lets the subject breathe rather than prescribe meaning.
The decision to let different countries *show* their practice rather than explain it—that restraint in narration, that trust in image-to-image understanding—is what gives a educational premise the weight of genuine discovery.