Getting Around
1963 · 9m · Canada
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative
Prairie farmers glide with the Saskatoon Soaring Club, Cape Breton divers spearfish underwater, and Ottawa hosts the Canadian Canoe Championships. Three segments survey getting around by air and water.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1963 NFB doc about hobbies sounds like a cure for insomnia, but the subtext is genuinely weird—watching landlocked prairie farmers get vertical, divers going feral in the Atlantic, canoeists in the nation's capital—there's something almost perverse about the gap between the mundane voiceover and the body ecstasy happening on screen.
This is quintessential mid-century Canadian documentary tradition: three triptych movements built on visual rhythm rather than narrative, each segment a study in how landscape and discipline shape human motion. The editing architecture—how it balances air, water, and the body moving through each—is genuinely formal and measured.
The decision to refuse climax and instead treat three discrete activities with the same grave, unhurried attention flattens hierarchy in a way that makes the smallest paddle stroke feel as consequential as a 3,000-foot climb. That restraint is the whole film.