Small Is Beautiful: Impressions of Fritz Schumacher
1978 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Douglas Kiefer, Barrie Howells, Donald Brittain
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Economist Fritz Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, is profiled months before his death after turning against unchecked growth to advocate human-scale, appropriate technology through the Intermediate Technology Development Group in London.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 29-minute hagiography of an economist—sounds like a cure for insomnia, but Kiefer and Brittain somehow made a meditation on anti-growth feel genuinely subversive in 1978, which is its own kind of contrarian move.
A formally composed portrait of Schumacher that respects both subject and medium—the contemplative pacing and tender approach position it squarely in the essay-documentary tradition, the kind of measured inquiry that rewards close attention.
The decision to film Schumacher in his final months lends an elegiac restraint to the whole piece; that temporal constraint becomes the film's structure, and it's what prevents this from being just another talking-head biography.