Strange Doings
1964 · 9m · Canada
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A three-part magazine film reports on a Canadian fisheries patrol capturing a huge basking shark in the Pacific, a helicopter stringing a power line over Banff mountains, and the new Arctic town of Inuvik built on stilts.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A National Film Board industrial triptych from '64 that could've been stultifying boilerplate—except it treats Canadian infrastructure like three separate ontological riddles, each one weirder than the last (a basking shark *captured*, a helicopter as a tightrope walker, a town built on alien stilts). Boring premise, genuinely uncanny execution.
This sits precisely in the lineage of the NFB's mid-century documentary pragmatism—three discrete subjects woven into a unified formal meditation on human intervention in landscape—and the contemplative pacing and compositional restraint suggest a sensibility aware of its own tradition; it's the kind of film that reveals itself through considered editing and the spaces between acts.
What elevates this from civic boosterism is the decision to hold on landscape shots long enough that the human drama (the shark, the cable, the stilts) becomes almost incidental—the real subject is the way the land absorbs our ambitions, and that choice of tempo does the work no voiceover could.