Eye Witness No. 60
1953 · 10m · Canada
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Cadets at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean train for future military leadership. Photomicrography reveals growth beneath water and soil, and palaeontologists excavate dinosaur fossils from Alberta's Badlands.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a 1953 NFB doc that cuts between military cadets and primordial time—ostensibly about nation-building and deep history, but the real subversion is how it treats those two registers as equivalently serious, which is either profound or completely unhinged depending on your mood.
A formally assured piece of mid-century documentary craft that situates itself within the NFB's tradition of pedagogical montage, where the juxtaposition of military training, photomicrography, and paleontology functions as a considered argument about growth, time, and institutional purpose—the kind of structural ambition that rewards close viewing.
The decision to intercut microscopic growth with fossil excavation with cadet drills creates a specific visual rhythm that transforms what could be three separate educational reels into something thematically coherent—that editing choice is doing all the heavy lifting and it works.