McBus
1969 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Derek May
Genres: comedy, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, surreal, whimsical
A busload of sightseers takes a nowhere tour of Montreal, encountering confusion, noise, and a Highland piper beneath an elevated highway with whom the tour guide briefly dances.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A busload of tourists becomes a vessel for absurdist sabotage—noise, confusion, and a Highland piper waltzing under a highway overpass like Montreal itself is actively resisting the tour's premise. This is what happens when you let a 1969 experimental filmmaker loose on the machinery of leisure and spectacle; it refuses to cohere, and that's precisely the point.
McBus sits comfortably in the lineage of structuralist and documentary-derived avant-garde cinema of the late 60s, where the tour—that most conventional of formats—becomes the skeleton for formal play and tonal disruption. The restraint with which May allows absurdity to unfold within the constraints of a sightseeing narrative shows considerable compositional awareness.
The decision to plant a solo piper beneath the highway—incongruous, unremarked-upon, briefly danced with—creates a perfectly calibrated moment of tonal rupture that justifies the entire film's commitment to sensory overload and narrative drift. It's the kind of specific, ungainly detail that signals a filmmaker trusting their instinct over explanatory architecture.