In Search of Innocence
1964 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Léonard Forest
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
A Quebec filmmaker visiting Vancouver asks poets and painters, including Jack Shadbolt and sculptor Donald Jarvis, how they view life and art in the city around them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1964 essay film asking artists about art—sounds like the most expected documentary move possible, but Forest somehow turns the interview into a formal interrogation of what it means to witness a place through creative eyes; it's almost perverse how restrained it is, letting silence and framing do the real talking.
Forest positions this film squarely in the postwar essay-documentary tradition—Resnais, early Godard—where the filmmaker's presence and questions matter as much as the subjects' answers; the rigor is in the editing, the measured pacing, the way each artist's response reshapes the visual argument about Vancouver itself.
The real move here is Forest's decision to let the camera linger on the artists' hands and workspace rather than their faces—a single choice that transforms this from a talking-heads piece into something tactile and observational, proof that constraint breeds invention.