The Days of Whisky Gap
1961 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Colin Low
Genres: documentary, historical, western
Tones: contemplative, mythic
Photographs and sketches recount the North-West Mounted Police trek of 1873 from Fort Dufferin to Fort Whoop-up, bringing law to the North-West Territories.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1961 NFB historical doc about mounted police feels like the safest possible pitch, but Low's decision to build the entire narrative from *photographs and sketches*—refusing to animate or dramatize—is genuinely weird; it trusts the image-space itself to carry myth, which most filmmakers would've chickened out on.
This is exactly the kind of film that defines the NFB's documentary lineage: painterly compositions of archival material, a mythic sensibility grounded in meticulous formal restraint, and the conviction that images of settlement and frontier *themselves* constitute historical argument—situé perfectly in the tradition of picturalist nonfiction.
The choice to let still images breathe in real time, moving the camera through photographs rather than cutting between them, forces the viewer into a completely different temporal register; it's a single formal decision that transforms a police history into something almost elegiac.