The Mad Canadian
1976 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Robert Fortier
Genres: documentary, sports
Stuntman Ken Carter performs on the stock-car track, driving over ramps and rows of parked cars as he prepares his act.
Picked by Zoe
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A stuntman prepping his act sounds like the most straightforward sports doc possible—until you realize the film is *about* the gap between preparation and performance, between the man and the myth he's building. Fortier refuses to mythologize; he just watches Ken do the thing, which somehow becomes genuinely strange.
Shot with the observational clarity of 1970s NFB documentary practice, *The Mad Canadian* sits comfortably in a lineage of films examining labor and spectacle—the formal restraint of the cinematography lets the absurdity of the subject matter speak for itself without editorial hand-wringing.
The decision to keep the camera static and patient while Ken runs the same stunts over and over—never cutting away, never punching it up—transforms what could be exhibition footage into something meditative and quietly hilarious; that durational commitment to the mundane repetition *is* the film.