Man Against a Fungus
1955 · 38m · Canada
Directed by Maurice Constant
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tense
Plant pathologists race to breed wheat resistant to rust fungus, as animation, time-lapse, and microphotography reveal the blight's life cycle and the yearly destruction it causes in wheat-growing regions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A mid-century NFB doc about *wheat rust* shouldn't work, but Constant's refusal to sentimentalize the fungus—treating it as a genuinely alien protagonist with its own visual logic—turns agricultural tedium into something genuinely uncanny and weird.
This is the non-fiction craft at its clearest: microphotography and time-lapse not as decoration but as the formal language of scientific witness, placed in deliberate counterpoint with the human urgency below—a model of how documentary form crystallizes argument.
The masterstroke is using animation to show what the naked eye cannot: the fungus's own temporality, its own world, running parallel to human time—that single decision of letting us inhabit the blight's perspective transforms a technical brief into genuine cinema.