Chasing the Eclipse

The scouts

A 1979 doc about amateur astronomers chasing an eclipse sounds like the most conventional nature-porn premise imaginable—and yet Elkin and Bailey turn it into something genuinely strange, a film about desire and patience that refuses the obvious transcendence angle. It's quietly subversive in how it lets boredom and failure breathe.

This is precisely the kind of observational documentary that sits within a rigorous lineage of Canadian cinéma vérité, where formal restraint and temporal discipline become the subject itself—the waiting, the meteorological uncertainty, the human persistence against cosmic indifference. The editing architecture is what matters here: how Elkin and Bailey structure duration and anticipation.

What makes this work isn't the eclipse itself but the decision to stay with the astronomers' faces during the false starts and delays—a sound choice or a single held shot transforms a travel doc into an intimate portrait of obsession on a shoestring.