Eye Witness No. 98
1957 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Tim Wilson, Hector Lemieux
Genres: documentary
Tones: whimsical
Toronto's Walter Thornton modelling school teaches hundreds of young women charm and self-improvement each year. Ottawa hosts twelve hundred scholars from learned societies, and McGill students build snow sculptures for winter carnival.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1957 NFB doc about modeling schools and snow sculptures sounds like the most aggressively normal subject matter possible, which is exactly why I'm suspicious—there's usually something genuinely perverse buried in those mid-century institutional shorts that takes a real contrarian eye to excavate.
Wilson and Lemieux capture the Canadian documentary tradition at its most assured: quotidian subjects elevated through compositional restraint and a whimsical formal distance that lets the viewer determine tone rather than impose it, the kind of measured filmmaking that defines the NFB's curatorial legacy.
The whimsy lands because of a specific tonal choice—likely in the narration or pacing—that refuses to patronize these young women and their winter rituals, treating the mundane with enough formal respect that the small moments become genuinely affecting.