Making Movie History: Werner Nold
2013 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Denys Desjardins
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Editor Werner Nold recalls leaving Switzerland for the NFB, cutting films with Gilles Carle, Brault, and Perrault including Pour la suite du monde, and mentoring a new generation after editing more than 100 films.
Picked by Margot
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A 7-minute love letter to cinema history and mentorship — which sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize Desjardins has essentially made a essay film about editing *itself*, the invisible art that nobody fights over at festivals, and somehow made it matter.
Nold's archive becomes a genealogy: Carle, Brault, Perrault cascading through one editor's hands and into the next generation's — this is craft-as-lineage crystallized, the kind of film that justifies the curatorial mission entirely.
The decision to let Nold's voice carry the weight while the archive unspool at its own tempo creates this hypnotic asymmetry; there's no musical sentiment-stacking, just presence and duration, and it's what transforms archival footage into something that *feels* like memory instead of history.