The Jean Richard
1963 · 29m · Canada
Directed by René Bonnière, Pierre Perrault
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
Craftsmen on the St. Lawrence build the Jean Richard, a wooden goélette coastal freighter, using traditional methods even as steel ships begin to replace such vessels.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two filmmakers watching men build a wooden ship while the world moves to steel—it's almost *too* elegiac, too reverential toward tradition. But there's a defiant refusal to sentimentalize here that gets under your skin; Perrault and Bonnière aren't making a eulogy, they're documenting a kind of quiet resistance.
A masterclass in observational restraint—the film knows exactly where it sits in the documentary lineage of Flaherty and the Quebecois cinéma vérité tradition, and it earns that lineage through patient, formal composition and an editing rhythm that lets craft speak for itself.
The decision to shoot the construction itself—the hands, the wood, the tools—as the entire emotional argument of the film, rather than layering interview or narration, transforms what could be a historical footnote into something tactile and present; it's economy as aesthetics.