Precision
1966 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Georges Dufaux
Genres: documentary, sports
Tones: sensual, theatrical
Mounted officers perform intricate, music-timed drills on horseback, filmed from ground level and overhead to highlight their coordination and horsemanship.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1966 doc about horses doing synchronized drills sounds like the most boring premise imaginable—and that's exactly why Dufaux's decision to film it as pure kinetic choreography, treating equestrian precision like avant-garde dance, is genuinely perverse in the best way.
Dufaux positions this within a specific lineage of structural cinema and formalist documentary—the overhead and ground-level geometry recalls both Vertov's visual logic and the disciplined framing of sports cinema—while the marriage of military precision to theatrical music creates a meditation on bodies, order, and spectacle that rewards close viewing.
The singular choice here is the overhead shots: by switching between ground-level immersion and bird's-eye abstraction, Dufaux transforms horsemanship into pure pattern and momentum, proving you don't need budget or narrative when you understand how perspective itself can reframe what you're looking at.