The Friendly Fifties and the Sinister Sixties (1850-1863)
1968 · 58m · Canada
Directed by Ronald Dick, Pierre L'Amare
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Episodes from 1850 to 1863 interweave the tangled relations among Great Britain, Canada, and the American North and South. The film follows those ties before, during, and after the Civil War.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 58-minute historical documentary about diplomatic chess moves between empires—the kind of thing that sounds like obligatory curriculum until you realize it's arguing something genuinely strange about neutrality and complicity during the Civil War, which is exactly the kind of premise most scouts would shelve.
Dick and L'Amare position this within the lineage of essayistic documentary history-making, where archival material and editorial juxtaposition become the argument itself; the formal restraint here—letting 1850s and 1860s speak through their own documents—is the whole conversation.
The film's central coup is treating diplomatic correspondence and period imagery as a kind of found-sound composition, where the rhythm of overlapping claims and counterarguments does the narrative work that voiceover would have murdered—a single editorial choice that transforms archive into argument.