The Golden Age
1959 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Richard Gilbert
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Fifty years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight, aviation's question has shifted from whether humans can fly to how fast and how far. Turbo-jets, stratocruisers, and supersonic missiles headline the late-1950s fleet.
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A mid-century documentary about speed records and jet engines sounds like the most conventional thing ever, but Gilbert's actually asking whether technological progress is even a coherent thing to celebrate—the film sits in that ambiguity without resolving it, which is properly weird.
Gilbert positions this within the documentary lineage of technological inquiry—think Flaherty and Grierson—but with a contemplative distance that feels distinctly post-war; the formal restraint in showing these machines is exactly how you document a civilization's relationship with its own acceleration.
The film's entire argument hangs on one choice: letting the aircraft *breathe* in the frame rather than fetishizing them, which on a 1959 budget means Gilbert trusts negative space and sound design over spectacle—that restraint is what makes the late-50s ambition about flight feel genuinely uncertain.