Eye Witness No 67
1954 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Fernand Ménard, Robert Anderson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Young men in Chicoutimi find purpose building their own school through an apprenticeship program. In New Brunswick, Forest Protection Limited planes spray DDT low over the treetops against the spruce budworm.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two parallel stories about human intervention—one hopeful, one toxic—but the film plays it straight and earnest, which is exactly the kind of well-intentioned restraint that bores me; I wanted it to interrogate the contradiction, not just present it.
A formally sophisticated dual-narrative from the NFB's golden age that trusts montage and juxtaposition to do the philosophical work—the pairing of apprenticeship and ecological poison creates meaning through structure rather than statement, which is exactly how this kind of cinema should argue.
The real move here is the sound design holding those two worlds in conversation; listen to how the workshop sounds against the drone footage, and suddenly you're not watching separate stories but a single meditation on progress that cost almost nothing to achieve except the right ear.