International Operations
1973 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Hammond
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A Canadian supermarket's French subsidiary opens outside Paris, changing local shopping and eating habits, displacing market stall-holders and forcing employees to adapt to a new corporate culture.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make a film about corporate globalization eating the world—Hammond just does it by watching a supermarket open, which is somehow both the most obvious and most perverse move possible, and it shouldn't work but it does.
A formally rigorous essay film that positions the everyday (a supermarket) as the arena where postwar economic ideology materializes; Hammond's observational patience and structural clarity place this in direct lineage with Resnais and the Cinéma Vérité tradition of making the mundane legible as historical.
The singular choice is Hammond's refusal to editorialise—he lets the contrast between the old market vendors and the gleaming supermarket unfold through pure juxtaposition and ambient sound, so the displacement happens in the viewer's eye rather than being narrated to us.