Making Movie History: Jacques Drouin
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Denys Desjardins
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Jacques Drouin devotes his career to the Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen, creating animations including Mindscape and Imprints with the device.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A five-minute NFB doc about an animator's devotion to a single obsolete machine—sounds like the kind of pious craft-worship I'd normally skip, but Desjardins somehow makes the pinscreen's tactile strangeness feel genuinely uncanny, like watching someone fall in love with an alien artifact.
Desjardins situates Drouin within a precise lineage of experimental animation and mechanical obsession, treating the pinscreen itself as a formal protagonist; the film's contemplative pacing and tender framing elevate this into something that argues for craft as a form of resistance against digital convenience.
The decision to let Drouin's hands move through the pinscreen in real time, rather than cutting between interview and finished work, transforms what could've been a standard artist profile into something tactile and hypnotic—one structural choice that makes you feel the weight of his repetitive devotion.