The Rise and Fall of American Business Culture
1987 · 57m · Canada
Directed by Kalle Lasn
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A 1987 analysis argues that United States manufacturing lost global competitiveness while clinging to past success, even as Japan and other Pacific Rim economies advanced and trade imbalances deepened.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 57-minute essay about American manufacturing decline sounds like the kind of PBS snoozefest everyone agrees is important—which is precisely why Lasn's execution matters less than the fact that he made it at all in 1987, before the consensus caught up.
Lasn's structural precision in framing industrial decline as a meditation rather than polemic places this firmly in the lineage of essay-documentaries that use contemplative pacing as argument; the film's formal rigor in 1987 anticipates a mode that would define serious nonfiction for decades.
What elevates this beyond policy-diagram territory is Lasn's decision to let silence and archival stillness carry the weight instead of narration hammering the point—a single choice that transforms data into genuine melancholy.