The Great Clean-up
1976 · 52m · Canada
Directed by James Carney
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Pollution in the Great Lakes prompts a massive binational effort to cut industrial emissions. James Carney documents the legislative changes underway on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 52-minute environmental doc from '76 sounds like homework, but Carney's refusal to sensationalize the Great Lakes crisis is genuinely provocative — he lets the bureaucratic machinery speak, which is either boring or radical depending on whether you trust audiences to think.
Carney situates this squarely in the observational documentary tradition, with the restraint and formal rigor of early NFB practice; the binational scope and legislative focus anticipate the eco-doc canon while refusing melodrama, placing it among the most principled environmental records of its decade.
The real lift here is Carney's decision to center the *administrative* work — the unglamorous meetings and policy shifts — rather than pollution itself, which gives the film an unusual intimacy with how change actually moves, and that choice alone makes the runtime feel earned.