Occupation
1970 · 46m · Canada
Directed by Bill Reid
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tense
Political science students occupy McGill University department offices to demand a say in faculty hiring, and a camera crew living alongside them captures their arguments, confusion and negotiations with faculty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1970 doc about student politics sounds like tedious archive footage, but Reid's refusal to editorialise—just letting the tedium and contradiction *be* the point—is genuinely subversive; most filmmakers would've crushed this into a manifesto, and the fact that it resists that is exactly why it works.
Occupation sits in direct lineage with Rouch and Morin's *Chronicle of a Summer* and the Maysles brothers' observational grammar, but Reid's formal restraint—living with the occupation rather than performing access—demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how presence shapes documentary ethics and form.
The decision to embed the camera crew *within* the occupation rather than observing from outside is the hinge that makes this; it's a small formal choice that dissolves the false distance between filmmaker and subject, and suddenly 46 minutes of student argument becomes something urgent and unresolved.