Setting Fires for Science
1958 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Donald Brittain
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
In evacuated Aultsville, Ontario, soon to be flooded for the St. Lawrence Seaway, National Research Council scientists deliberately burn buildings slated for loss. Instruments record each stage of the fires so firefighters can better limit future deaths and destruction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to call this a dry procedural, but Brittain's actually staging a controlled demolition of progress itself—watching a town burn for *science* while the seaway drowns it anyway is bleak as hell, and most scouts are too busy applauding the National Film Board pedigree to notice.
A masterwork of documentary restraint: Brittain positions the camera as witness to both scientific method and elegiac loss, the methodical documentation of burning buildings becoming a formal meditation on sacrifice and infrastructure—this is the kind of formally precise nonfiction that anchors a program and rewards repeated viewing.
The crucial move is Brittain's decision to let the instruments themselves become the subject—by training our eye on the measurement apparatus rather than spectacle, he makes us feel the distance between what science observes and what a community loses, all on what must have been a shoestring budget for controlled fire footage.