Poisons, Pests and People
1960 · 59m · Canada
Directed by Larry Gosnell
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A 1960 examination of chemical insecticides traces humanity's long fight against damaging insects and tests methods for targeting harmful species while sparing harmless creatures, including people.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a chemical-industrial promo dressed up as inquiry, which is exactly the kind of thing that bores me—until you notice Gosnell never quite lets the pesticide salesmen off the hook, burying doubt in the measured tone like a trap.
A model of postwar documentary restraint: the formal inquiry into toxicology and species specificity positions this squarely in the lineage of institutional nonfiction, where apparent neutrality becomes its own rigorous argument about knowledge and risk.
The 59-minute runtime is the tell—Gosnell could've made this a tidy 20-minute safety film, but he sits with the testing sequences long enough that you *feel* the gap between what we're spraying and what we actually understand, turning bureaucratic pacing into moral weight.