Go to Blazes
1956 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Thomas Farley
Genres: crime, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Inspector Joe Fletcher investigates fires that have happened, are burning, or could ignite, showing how carelessness turns into crime. The Perspective film argues most tragic fires are preventable.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1956 NFB PSA about fire safety sounds like the opposite of subversive—and it is—but there's something weirdly transgressive about how Farley refuses sentiment and just *shows* the wreckage, the incompetence, the preventable stupidity. It's almost too blunt to be propaganda.
Farley's film sits precisely in the lineage of the National Film Board's didactic documentary tradition, but with uncommon formal control: the structure moves from aftermath to cause to prevention with the inevitability of a legal brief, and the editing discipline—restraint where you'd expect melodrama—marks it as work aware of its own institutional and formal inheritance.
The entire film turns on a single choice: treating fire scenes not as spectacle but as forensic evidence, letting the camera linger on the mundane precursors rather than the moment of ignition—it's a shift of focus that reframes a safety film into something almost investigative and morally unsettling.