River (Planet Earth)
1977 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Peter Raymont
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, humorous
Presented as a student project for a hard-to-impress professor, a playful yet serious survey traces how river water sustains ecosystems and communities while also powering industry, irrigating farms, and carrying pollution.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1977 NFB doc that frames itself as homework for a pedantic professor—cute cover, but the film itself just does the obvious thing: rivers are important, they do many jobs, also pollution bad. I wanted it to twist the premise into something weirder, to make the framing device actually *mean* something subversive, but instead it's earnest survey work dressed up in a student film conceit.
Raymont's essay operates in a lineage of pedagogical documentary that understands form as argument—the measured accumulation of river functions (ecosystem, industry, pollution vector) builds a philosophical case about interdependence through patient observation and tonal modulation between contemplative and wry. It's a film aware of what it owes to the essay tradition, with the formal discipline to sustain a 27-minute thesis on water.
The genius move here is using the professor-assignment frame not as irony but as permission structure—it lets Raymont toggle between tones (earnest ecology lesson, then sudden dry humor) without the documentary ever winking at itself, and that tonal control on a modest budget does more conceptual work than you'd expect from a piece that could've been purely instructional.