The Dikes
1955 · 22m · Canada
Directed by Roger Blais
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
A dike-keeper recounts how broken dikes along the Bay of Fundy flooded farmland, and how engineers and New Brunswick landowners rebuilt them to hold back the sea.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1955 NFB doc about dike maintenance sounds like the opposite of subversive, but Blais turns infrastructure into something genuinely strange—watching men negotiate with the Bay of Fundy has an almost absurdist patience that most experimental films fail to achieve.
Blais locates this film within the Canadian documentary tradition with real formal intelligence: the recounted testimony, the measured pacing, the way engineering becomes a kind of folk knowledge—it's craft aware of its lineage and executed with the rigor that defines the NFB's best work.
The singular choice here is Blais's commitment to the dike-keeper's voice as the sole narrator—letting lived experience drive the entire visual argument means every landscape shot, every archive frame lands as testimony rather than mere illustration.