How Things Have Changed
1971 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Jerry Krepakevich
Genres: documentary, historical, western
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Modern Alberta cattle drives by truck are contrasted with archival images of old trail drives across open ranchland.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A deceptively quiet film that uses archive footage not as nostalgia porn but as a rebuke—the real subversion is how tenderly it lets both eras coexist without declaring a winner, which is the opposite of what you'd expect from a 1971 Western elegy.
Krepakevich situates this firmly in the structural tradition of the essay film, using juxtaposition as formal argument; the restraint of the edit and the considered pacing place it in conversation with the best of NFB's landscape documentaries, a measured meditation on displacement and continuity.
The singular choice here is the decision to let silence and the ambient sound of engines replace a score—that one edit between a rope-taut lasso and a truck bed becomes the whole film's argument, and it's made in sound design rather than spectacle.