Motivation
1973 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Hammond
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Entrepreneur Sam Steinberg explains how building a business became a creative activity, while the film asks how a corporation can motivate 20,000 employees from executives to cashiers beyond simply making a living.
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A 1973 essay film about corporate motivation sounds like the dullest boardroom propaganda imaginable—until you realize Hammond's actually interrogating the obscene gap between ideology and reality, treating the entrepreneur's self-mythology like a text to be dissected rather than swallowed whole.
Hammond positions this within a rigorous lineage of structural documentary and Brechtian critique, using Steinberg's own rhetoric as material to examine how capitalism aestheticizes labor; the formal restraint—letting the subject's contradictions surface through framing rather than editorializing—is what makes this an exemplary essay film.
The decision to let Steinberg become the unreliable narrator of his own business philosophy, never winking at the audience but trusting them to hear the gap between his words and the film's architecture, transforms what could've been a corporate puff piece into something genuinely unsettling on a microscopic budget.