The Power of Matter
1960 · 59m · Canada
Directed by Graham Parker
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
Larry Henderson guides a two-section survey of atomic energy, moving from civilian nuclear uses abroad to Canada's wartime beginnings and the research installations at Chalk River.
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A 1960 NFB atomic energy doc sounds like the most anesthetized institutional propaganda imaginable, but Henderson's refusal to editorialize about Chalk River—treating nuclear infrastructure with the same patient formalism as a hydroelectric dam—becomes genuinely strange, almost perverse in its neutrality.
Parker and Henderson position this within the grand lineage of Canadian documentary pedagogy, where the survey form itself becomes a meditation on post-war technological progress; the structural choice to move from global civilian application to national security backstory reveals a filmmaker acutely aware of how narration shapes historical consciousness.
The decision to hold on industrial landscapes without romantic scoring—letting the hum of the reactor and the flat light do the work—transforms what could have been dry technical exposition into something genuinely unsettling, where restraint becomes the entire argument.