Trafficopter
1972 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Barrie Howells
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Montreal is surveyed from a radio station's traffic helicopter, its freeways, bridges and downtown streets reduced to a teeming miniature while the onboard traffic reporter comments on the flow below.
Picked by Margot
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A traffic report sounds like the most boring conceivable premise, and Howells leans into it so hard he loops back to something genuinely uncanny—Montreal's gridwork becomes a living organism viewed from on high, stripping the city of humanity until it's pure system. It's deadpan enough to work as conceptual art, which probably means most people will hate it.
Trafficopter sits comfortably in a lineage of structural documentary and city symphonies—Vertov, the Lumière brothers—but Howells' discipline is what elevates it: the radio commentary as score, the aerial frame as formal constraint, the patient refusal to sentimentalize or mythologize. It's a film about perspective that understands itself as precisely that.
The choice to keep us tethered to the traffic reporter's voice—mundane, informational, utterly unadorned—while the image transforms the city into an abstract pattern is what makes this work; it's the tension between those two registers that creates all the strangeness and beauty, no budget required.