Circulation à Montréal (Part 1)
1955 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Bernard Devlin
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Montreal's traffic problems are surveyed in a panorama of congestion, including an interview with Mayor Jean Drapeau while the city was still Canada's metropolis.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1955 traffic doc sounds like the death of cinema until you realize Devlin's using gridlock as a mirror for a city's identity crisis—interviewing the mayor mid-congestion is such a sneaky political move, treating infrastructure like character study.
Devlin positions this within a lineage of urbanism documentaries and city symphonies, but the formal restraint—letting traffic patterns and mayoral testimony speak without editorializing—sits it firmly in the National Film Board's tradition of measured social observation.
The decision to keep the camera on Montreal's actual streets rather than staging reconstructions, paired with the unvarnished interview format, gives this the texture of something immediate and lived-in; it's how Devlin chose to trust the city itself that makes the piece resonate.