Making Movie History: Evelyn Spice Cherry
2014 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Joanne Robertson
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Evelyn Spice Cherry discusses directing documentaries at the NFB during the Second World War as one of its first women directors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A five-minute documentary about a pioneering woman documentarian sounds exactly like the kind of worthy-by-committee film everyone expects me to love, which is precisely why I don't—unless Robertson's found some weird formal angle that makes it genuinely strange, and from what I can tell, she hasn't.
Robertson positions this within a specific lineage of women's labour in cinema and institutional history, letting Evelyn's own voice and archival material do the curatorial work; it's the kind of formally restrained biographical essay that respects both its subject and the documentary tradition it inhabits.
The decision to let Evelyn speak directly rather than narrate around her is obvious in theory but costs almost nothing and changes everything—suddenly you're not watching a *about* her, you're held in her presence, and that economy of restraint is what makes five minutes feel like enough.