Lewis Mumford on the City, Part 5: The City as Man's Home
1963 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Mogens Gander, Jacques Giraldeau, Robert Humble, Kirk Jones, Ian MacNeill, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Reginald Morris
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Lewis Mumford contrasts the squalid, overcrowded slums of industrial cities with the security of the wealthy, asking how the hopelessness bred by such surroundings can be addressed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Seven directors on a 27-minute essay about urban housing sounds like a committee disaster, but there's something genuinely weird about how they've let Mumford's pessimism breathe without the usual documentary sanctimony—it's almost like they're resisting the form itself.
A canonical mid-century NFB essay film that understands its lineage to Grierson and the documentary-as-thinking-tool tradition; the restraint in how it frames Mumford's argument without neat resolution marks serious formal consideration.
The decision to let Mumford's voiceover sit uneasily against images of actual slum conditions—never quite syncing, never quite divorcing—does more work on your nervous system than a hundred matched cuts could.