Nails
1979 · 13m · Canada
Directed by Phillip Borsos
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A documentary contrasts a 19th-century blacksmith hand-forging nails one at a time with a modern mill where machines transform steel rods at overwhelming speed, tracing how industrialization changed the nature of individual labour.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a Luddite screed about machines ruining craft, but Borsos won't give it to you—the film's too busy being fascinated by both the blacksmith and the mill, treating them as equal dignities, which is somehow more unsettling than the obvious critique.
A masterclass in essayistic montage that traces its lineage through Grierson and the industrial documentary tradition while rejecting that tradition's moralizing—the pacing and editing rhythms do the philosophical work, and the film trusts the viewer entirely.
The decision to match-cut between the blacksmith's hammer-strike and the mill's mechanical pulse—syncing two radically different temporalities into a single visual argument—is the entire film, and it's enough.