Men Against the Ice
1960 · 28m · Canada
Directed by David Bairstow
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Early Arctic explorers searching for riches and the Northwest Passage face severe perils, contrasted with modern developments in air and sea navigation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1960 NFB doc playing it straight with Arctic heroics and progress narratives—exactly the kind of consensus-friendly historical hagiography that makes Felix want to flip the table, though the juxtaposition of doomed 19th-century desperation against sleek modern logistics does hint at something wryly subversive lurking underneath.
Bairstow's film sits confidently in the documentary tradition of social observation through historical contrast, using formal editing and compositional rigor to establish the moral arc from peril to mastery—a measured study in how cinema can frame progress itself as both tragedy and triumph.
The real lift here is the editing strategy: cutting between archival material and contemporary infrastructure isn't novel on its face, but the rhythm and proportional weight given to silence and landscape over narration suggests a deliberate choice to let visual metaphor do the philosophical work that a lesser filmmaker would've dumped into voiceover.