The Long View
1973 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Michael McKennirey
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
Satellite and aircraft remote sensing gives a new view of Earth from above, and the film details how Canada is applying the technology to manage natural resources and protect the environment.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1973 NFB doc about satellite imagery and resource management sounds like the most aggressively earnest institutional film imaginable — and honestly, that's exactly why it works; there's something almost punk about a state filmmaker trusting the subject matter this completely, letting the *view itself* become the argument.
McKennirey's film sits squarely in the lineage of mid-century documentary formalism — the NFB's signature marriage of technological wonder and careful observation — and the decision to let the remote sensing imagery carry the moral weight, rather than overlay it with didacticism, places this firmly in the tradition of expanded documentary thinking.
The crucial move here is trusting silence and scale: rather than narrate the implications of seeing Earth from above, the film lets the images accumulate and settle, which on a 1973 budget means the entire conceptual weight rides on one radical formal choice — restraint as revelation.