Challenge for the Church

The scouts

Weintraub's 1972 essay feels destined for the consensus-building crowd — earnest priests wrestling with theology while bulldozers circle — but there's something genuinely unsettling about how he lets the doubt breathe without resolving it, turning what could be pious handwringing into something that actually resists easy answers.

A masterwork of essay-film form: Weintraub positions the church's architectural displacement as metaphor for institutional crisis, and the film's patient, dialectical structure — letting voices accumulate rather than argue — places it squarely in the lineage of Bresson and Rohmer, with the rigor of someone who understands that cinema's job is to think, not to decide.

The singular move here is silence — Weintraub's choice to let long stretches of Quebec streetscape and empty sanctuaries carry the argument that dialogue cannot, turning urban development footage into something almost elegiac, which costs nothing but transforms everything.