Data for Decision
1968 · 22m · Canada
Directed by David Millar
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Canada's early geographic information system, the Canada Land Inventory, is shown processing vast data on soil, forests, and resources that humans alone could not manage.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1968 doc about bureaucratic data processing should be a cure for insomnia, but Millar somehow makes the Canada Land Inventory feel like the most quietly radical film about what humans can't see—which, weirdly, makes it antithetical to the whole point of the inventory itself.
Millar positions this film in the lineage of mid-century structural documentaries that treat administrative systems as subject matter worthy of formal attention; the contemplative pacing and the deliberate framing of data as landscape create a measured argument about knowledge itself.
The singular choice here is treating the inventory's output—maps, charts, processed information—as visual material with its own texture and rhythm, rather than as illustration; that decision transforms what could've been a corporate commission into something genuinely meditative about how we see land.