Eye Witness No. 81
1955 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Alvin Goldman, Hector Lemieux
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Unemployed miners from Nordegg and other abandoned Alberta coal towns relocate with provincial help to find new work. At Halifax, Royal Canadian Navy divers undergo rigorous training for underwater duties.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two totally separate stories bolted together—miners heading nowhere, navy guys getting dunked—and the film somehow refuses to explain why we're watching both. It's aggressively uncommitted to narrative, which should annoy me but lands harder than any three-act structure ever could.
A masterclass in postwar documentary form: two parallel rituals of displacement and discipline, edited with the kind of formal precision that reveals how cinema itself constructs meaning from fragmented labor and institutional routines. Goldman and Lemieux situate themselves squarely in the NFB's sociological tradition while pushing its observational grammar.
The cut between the miners' silence and the divers' submersion—that decision to let the audience hold both kinds of uncertainty at once—is what makes this work on a shoestring; it's not showing you struggle, it's making you *feel* the architecture of it.