Lewis Mumford on the City, Part 6: The City and the Future
1963 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Mogens Gander, Jacques Giraldeau, Robert Humble, Kirk Jones, Derek Knight, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Claus Loof, Ian MacNeill, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Doug McKay, Reginald Morris, Erik Nielsen, Bryan Probyn, Donald Wilder
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Lewis Mumford considers how overcrowded contemporary cities have lost vitality and triggered flight to the suburbs, questioning what future awaits the formless modern city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 14-person collective making a polite think-piece about urban flight in 1963—this should be insufferable, but the fact that it's somehow *not* says more about postwar filmmaker networks than it does about the film itself; still, watching this many auteurs collaborate on someone else's thesis feels like watching paint dry by committee.
The film's formal restraint—letting Mumford's measured voiceover and carefully composed shots of emptying downtowns carry the argument—sits squarely in the NFB essay tradition, and the editing choices honor both the gravity of the subject and the intellectual lineage of city documentaries from Grierson onward.
The decision to shoot the urban landscape as *absence*—favoring negative space and lingering on vacant storefronts rather than cutting to illustrative B-roll—transforms what could be a sociology lecture into something visually distinctive, and that restraint is what makes the film's anxiety feel earned rather than narrated.