Trans-Canada Express
1944 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Stanley Hawes
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative
Canada's railroads and their contribution to the Second World War effort are celebrated, mixing a sequence from Buster Keaton's The General with a re-enactment of the driving of the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1944 NFB propaganda film that's almost *too* dutiful to be interesting — earnest wartime boosterism wrapped around a Keaton clip feels like the exact kind of consensus-approved historical document everyone else would pick, and that's precisely why I'm passing.
Hawes's formal decision to intercut the CPR's founding myth with Keaton's cinematic anarchism creates a productive tension between nation-building and cinematic mischief, situating documentary within a lineage that questions its own solemn authority.
The choice to splice *The General*'s comedic chaos into a straightforward war-effort doc is a genuine risk — it destabilizes the whole genre contract, though it's unclear whether Hawes fully knew what he was doing with that collision.