This Electronic World
1960 · 30m · Canada
Directed by Julian Biggs
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A documentary survey shows how postwar electronics engineering is reshaping everyday Canadian life, from long-distance telephone dialling and industrial automation to new techniques used in medical autopsies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1960 NFB doc about telephone dials and autopsy techniques sounds like the most aggressively boring premise imaginable—which is exactly why I'm suspicious I'm missing something; if there's a perverse charm lurking under that earnest postwar rhetoric, I want to know what it is.
This sits beautifully in the NFB's documentary lineage, a measured survey of technological transformation that trusts formal observation over editorializing; the elegance is in how it treats mundane infrastructure—dialling, automation, clinical procedure—with the same contemplative rigor as any aesthetic object.
The move to frame medical autopsy technique alongside consumer electronics—treating the body and the machine with equivalent visual interest—suggests a directorial confidence in juxtaposition that probably cost nothing but reveals everything about how Biggs sees the postwar world.