How They Saw Us: Proudly She Marches
1977 · 18m · Canada
Directed by Ann Pearson
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A 1943 recruitment film invites women into armed-services work while framing that work as temporary and outside women's natural role.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Pearson's move to weaponize a 1943 propaganda film as its own critique is clever, but it relies on the audience doing the ideological heavy lifting—the subversion feels safer than it thinks, and I'm not sure that's bold enough.
A formally rigorous archival intervention that positions itself squarely in the lineage of essay-documentary and feminist media archaeology; Pearson's decision to let the propaganda speak and contradict itself is curatorial restraint at its finest.
The choice to foreground the original recruitment rhetoric without ironic voiceover—trusting the viewer to hear the contradiction between 'temporary' and necessity—is the single decision that makes this land; it's an economy of means that proves more devastating than editorializing would be.