Growth
1973 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Hammond
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
President Sam Steinberg grows his supermarket chain from a hand-cart and bicycle to a horse-drawn wagon and then an international corporation. His maxim that a company cannot stand still drives the first Corporation film.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A hagiographic corporate origin story disguised as documentary—the kind of consensus-friendly institutional film that makes you wonder what Hammond *isn't* showing us, which is the only interesting question here.
Hammond's formalist restraint in visualizing abstract economic growth through concrete material stages—cart to bicycle to wagon to empire—places this squarely in the didactic documentary tradition, where form itself becomes argument about progress and inevitability.
The structural choice to literalize expansion through visual accumulation of objects and scale is clever, but the film's real lift would depend on a single moment—a cut, a held frame, a glance—where doubt creeps into the growth narrative; without it, the premise does the work instead of the filmmaking.