Toronto Boom Town
1951 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Leslie McFarlane
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
This documentary contrasts turn-of-the-century Toronto with the booming 1951 metropolis of skyscrapers, heavy traffic, industry, suburbs, and Canada's first subway.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight historical document with zero irony or formal weirdness—the before/after structure is basically the blueprint for every 'progress' film since. McFarlane didn't even try to complicate the narrative, which is honestly kind of interesting in its refusal to be clever about it.
A canonical example of the NFB's documentary tradition at mid-century, where the form itself becomes a meditation on modernity; the juxtaposition of archival footage with contemporary metropolitan imagery sits squarely in a lineage of city symphonies and progress narratives that deserves serious reconsideration.
The editing rhythm—the way McFarlane cuts between horse carriages and streetcars, between low-rise quiet and high-rise sprawl—creates a specific temporal vertigo that costs nothing but makes Toronto's transformation feel visceral rather than just stated.