The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes
1968 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Bill Mason
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A lone canoeist journeys through imagined geological eras of the Great Lakes, surviving ice and flood only to confront modern human pollution transforming the waters into filth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mason refuses the obvious eco-sermon and instead does something weirder—a time-collapse fever dream where geology and human greed occupy the same frame, which should be pretentious but somehow isn't.
A formally sophisticated essay film that inherits from both the landscape documentary tradition and the structuralist avant-garde; the canoeist as witness is a deliberate formal conceit, and the editing moves with the precision of someone who understands what experimental cinema can do that narrative cannot.
The decision to compress deep time into a single canoe journey—to let geological transformation and modern pollution occupy the same visual plane without commentary—is what makes this work; it's all in the rhythm of the editing and that one recurring figure moving through it.