How They Saw Us: Wings on Her Shoulder
1977 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Ann Pearson
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: provocative
A 1943 recruitment film promises women post-war aviation jobs while stressing that women serve in support so that men can fly.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1943 propaganda reel that accidentally deconstructs itself—the film's own archive footage becomes the evidence against its messaging, which is genuinely perverse in a way no contemporary irony could touch.
Pearson's curation of source material functions as rigorous formal argument: the recruitment film's rhetoric is allowed to speak while the visual record systematically undermines it, a methodology that positions this work squarely in the essay-documentary tradition of found-footage critique.
The decisive move here is restraint—Pearson lets the archival contradiction breathe without voiceover hectoring, trusting the viewer to feel the gap between what was promised and what those wings actually meant, and that trust is what makes it land.