Days of Infamy
1962 · 27m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
Japan's attack widens the war in late 1941, bringing rationing at home and a famous Churchill address in Ottawa.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1962 NFB doc about wartime rationing and Churchill speeches sounds like the opposite of subversive—except this thing is *contemplative* about imperial machinery grinding on, which is secretly the most unsettling angle on WWII propaganda you could take.
This sits precisely in the NFB's documentary lineage of civic address and formal restraint; a 27-minute essay that trusts montage and archival material to locate the human cost beneath the official narrative—the kind of structurally patient work that rewards close attention.
The real filmmaking move here is probably in how the sound design or editing rhythm holds the tension between Churchill's rhetorical bombast and the quiet domestic reality of rationing—a single tonal choice that makes archival footage feel urgent instead of inert.