The Buildings Already Begun
1967 · 17m · Canada
Directed by William Pettigrew
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Archival images trace a century of building Canada's Parliament in Ottawa despite doubts about completing the project.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A century-long construction project sounds like the world's most boring archival essay, but Pettigrew somehow weaponizes doubt and delay into genuine suspense—the film knows that incompletion is more interesting than triumph, and refuses the expected triumphalist narrative.
Pettigrew positions this archival assemblage within a lineage of structural documentary practice, using temporal layering and the accumulated weight of images to argue something formally—that the building's hesitation *is* the subject, not incidental to it.
The decision to let gaps and stalled moments breathe rather than accelerate through them gives the archival material an almost sculptural weight; Pettigrew trusts that the viewer will feel the resistance in the images themselves.