Two and Two
2009 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Abraham Côté
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Ordinary moments of paper use - a man reading a newspaper, a copier running - are intercut with trees toppling, until the passing hours reveal an entire forest gone.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like it should be a heavy-handed eco-sermon, but Côté's refusal to announce itself—just watching paper and trees in deadpan parallel—is genuinely unsettling in a way preachy climate films never are.
A precise formal essay that inherits from the structuralist montage tradition while finding its own logic: the intercut becomes a measured argument about consumption and consequence, each cut a deliberate term in a visual syllogism.
The masterstroke is the pacing—holding on ordinary office rhythms long enough that they feel monumental, then letting the forest collapse at the same tempo, so scale disappears and time becomes the only measure that matters.