Centaur
1972 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Susan Huycke
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic, sensual
Canadian Equestrian Team riders move with their horses as one in a tribute to dressage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a sports doc to celebrate athleticism; Huycke's genuinely perverse move is to make the horse and rider a single mythic body, which sounds pretentious until you realize she's actually pulling it off—dressage as formal rebellion against the human/animal divide.
A 1972 NFB film that understands dressage not as competition but as a meditation on discipline and grace, shot with the compositional rigor of structural cinema—this is the kind of sensual formalism that justifies the documentary form itself.
The genius here is committing entirely to slow, symmetrical framings that let you actually *see* the synchronization between rider and horse; most shorts would cut frantically, but Huycke holds steady, and that restraint is what makes the mythology land.