Negotiating a New Canadian Constitution
1973 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Gordon Payne
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
An experimental animated adaptation of a poem by Lionel Kearns offers an ironic, graphic portrait of Canadians grappling with the idea of a new constitution.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1973 NFB poem-to-animation experiment that weaponizes absurdism against constitutional solemnity—most scouts would dismiss this as archive dust, but the sheer audacity of using graphic irony to anatomize bureaucratic anxiety is exactly the kind of subversive move that shouldn't work and somehow does.
Payne's adaptation demonstrates a rigorous understanding of how experimental animation can engage political poetry as formal argument; the film sits confidently within the NFB's essayistic lineage while maintaining its own irreducible formal logic.
The real move here is the decision to let Kearns's language breathe through graphic abstraction rather than illustrate it—that restraint, the refusal to over-animate the conceptual weight, is what transforms what could've been didactic into something genuinely unsettling.