Doodle Film
1970 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Donald Winkler
Genres: comedy, documentary, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A deadpan narrator traces chronic doodler David Watts from a marked-up second-grade notebook to adulthood. Watts's compulsion expands to every surface he encounters, including his wife.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1970 NFB doc that treats pathological doodling like a philosophical condition—deadpan narration watching a man gradually consume his entire life with pen marks, climaxing in his wife becoming another surface to mark. It's absurdist without winking, which is exactly the subversive move most scouts would miss.
Winkler's film sits squarely in the observational documentary tradition while maintaining formal control through its narrator's unwavering tone and the visual escalation of Watts's compulsion across ten precise minutes. The restraint here—letting the premise do the work rather than editorializing—marks genuine curatorial discipline.
The entire film pivots on that deadpan narrator staying absolutely still while the visual chaos expands around him; it's a sound design and performance choice that transforms what could be a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling, doing more with constraint than most shorts do with spectacle.