Eye Witness No. 69
1955 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Grant Crabtree, Hector Lemieux
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
At Delta, Manitoba, researchers use a dog and an old Dutch decoy to trap wild ducks for conservation study. New Valcourt snowmobiles tackle winter transport, and tourists ride the Maid of the Mist beneath Niagara Falls.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a mid-century NFB industrial doc that *looks* like it's about snowmobiles and tourist spectacle, but actually knows better—the real subversion is in how Crabtree and Lemieux let the absurdity of 'progress' speak for itself, a Trojan horse critique wrapped in Technicolor competence.
A canonical example of the NFB's post-war documentary aesthetic at its most formally assured: the editing syntax is pure—each vignette (conservation, transport, recreation) builds a meditation on human intervention in the natural world without a single note of didacticism, the kind of structural intelligence that defines a tradition.
The genius move is the cold-open on the decoy itself—inanimate, waiting—before cutting to the researchers; that single compositional choice reframes the entire enterprise from 'progress narrative' into something more elegiac about what we lose in the pursuit of control.