Script to Screen
1972 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Claude Delorme
Genres: comedy, documentary
Tones: humorous, theatrical
A staged comic incident is followed through every major stage of making a motion picture, from directing and photography to editing, sound, synchronization, and laboratory work. The process reveals filmmaking as a craft dependent on many specialized hands.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1972 NFB doc about filmmaking process sounds like the most aggressively inside-baseball thing imaginable, but Delorme's comic staging of the incident itself—treating the *subject* as a gag—actually subverts the earnest documentary tradition it appears to inhabit.
Delorme positions this film squarely in the lineage of didactic cinema and meta-documentary practice, using theatrical staging and humor to formalize the very mechanics of production; it's a film acutely aware of its own apparatus and how to make that awareness entertaining.
The choice to *stage* the comic incident before dismantling it through every production stage is elegant economy—one performative decision that justifies the entire structural conceit and keeps a potentially dry process film alive.