Roughnecks: The Story of Oil Drillers
1960 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Guy L. Coté
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A rugged oil-drilling crew bulldozes through wilderness in pursuit of petroleum wealth, showing the physical labour and tough culture behind bringing a well into production.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
1960 NFB doc about oil drillers sounds like exactly the kind of stolid industrial hagiography everyone ignores—except Coté shoots it like he's documenting the sublime collapse of something, not its triumph, and suddenly you're watching a film that doesn't know whether it's celebrating or elegizing the whole enterprise.
This is Coté operating within the documentary tradition at its most rigorous: the wilderness, the labor, the formal restraint—it sits comfortably alongside the best of the NFB's mid-century output, a film aware of its place in the lineage of work-focused cinema and executing that lineage with complete formal control.
What makes this work is the sound design meeting the image—the way Coté lets the drilling equipment's rhythm become almost musical against the landscape, a single sonic choice that transforms a straightforward industrial doc into something meditative and strange.