Fear and Horror
1965 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Lipsett
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Psychologist D.O. Hebb argues that the capacity for irrational fear grows with intelligence, appearing more in higher animals and in older subjects. The film proposes emotion as a direct function of intelligence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lipsett takes the psychology lecture and weaponizes it into something genuinely unsettling—fear as the price of thinking—but it's almost too neat, too tidy in its argument; I wanted him to let the premise collapse under its own weight rather than argue it so cleanly.
A masterwork of essay film form: Lipsett fuses Grierson's documentary tradition with McLuhan-era media theory, using montage and voice-over as rigorous philosophical instruments; the film's architecture—how image and argument fold into each other—sits squarely in the lineage of the thinking documentary.
The singular stroke here is Lipsett's decision to let the soundtrack fracture and destabilize beneath the measured narration, creating this productive anxiety between what we're told and what we *feel*—a sound design choice that does the film's conceptual work in miniature.