Eye Witness No. 22
1950 · 10m · Canada
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Kainai residents near Cardston, Alberta, organize against waste to improve living standards on their reserve. Blind pianist Paul Doyon performs by touch, and RCAF 401 Squadron jets rehearse air defence over Montreal.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three unrelated vignettes stitched together by a numeral — community organizing, a blind pianist, military jets — feels less like subversion and more like the National Film Board's filing system got loose, which is either brilliant or just a 1950 artifact I'm supposed to pretend makes sense.
This is mid-century documentary at its most formally patient: the choice to interweave disparate Canadian social realities through a deliberately fragmented structure anticipates the essayistic non-narrative forms that would define the NFB's legacy, and that structural restraint is exactly what makes it worth revisiting.
The decision to let Paul Doyon's hands do the storytelling — camera tight on the pianist's fingers finding keys by touch alone — transforms a human-interest segment into something tactile and urgent that a conventional biographical approach would've flattened entirely.