Reaction: A Portrait of a Society in Crisis
1973 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Robin Spry
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tense
English-speaking residents in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec discuss the fear and political fallout following the 1970 October Crisis. Recorded after a diplomat's kidnapping, a minister's killing, and soldiers' deployment, their arguments reveal a society divided over nationalism and security.
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Spry does the thing every doc filmmaker wants to do but shouldn't—let people talk—and somehow the constraint becomes radical; watching English Montreal tear itself apart over the October Crisis feels like eavesdropping on a society's autopsy, which should be boring and is instead genuinely unsettling.
This is essential cinema vérité that knows exactly what tradition it's operating in; Spry's refusal to narrate or editorialise, his commitment to let argument and contradiction sit unresolved, places it in direct lineage with the observational documentarians, and the formal discipline of that choice—no scaffolding, just voices—is what makes it endure.
The decision to record in the immediate aftermath, to capture people still raw and divided rather than reflective, gives the film its particular electricity; it's a structural choice masquerading as mere documentation, and it's what separates this from a hundred other talking-heads docs about political crisis.