Film and You
1948 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Jean Palardy, Donald Peters
Genres: documentary
Communities form film councils to buy projectors, train projectionists, and turn libraries into film distribution centres. Showings spark local projects as varied tastes, from kitchen planning to square dancing, find an audience.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1948 NFB civics film about library projectors sounds like the opposite of cinema, until you realize it's actually a sly comedy about the absurd faith people placed in equipment as salvation—the premise is deadpan enough that it circles back into subversion.
This is canonical institutional cinema, a perfect example of the post-war documentary tradition where form serves pedagogy without sacrificing wit; the formal restraint and the whimsical editing choices make it a masterclass in how to animate bureaucratic enthusiasm.
The film's real coup is how it uses montage to collapse square dancing, kitchen efficiency, and film projection into a single idea—that one choice to treat all these communities' tastes as equally valid and cinematic elevates what could've been propaganda into something genuinely democratic.