With the R.C.A.F. in Europe
1958 · 30m · Canada
Directed by Walford Hewitson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A brief guide introduces Royal Canadian Air Force personnel posted to Europe to the behaviour expected of them and the adjustments of living abroad that their assignments require.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1958 military deportment film sounds like the opposite of subversive, but Hewitson's deadpan delivery of behavioral codes to Canadian airmen abroad is so earnestly weird—treating culture shock like a solvable bureaucratic problem—that it becomes accidentally hilarious, a document of postwar anxiety dressed up as institutional common sense.
This is the kind of archival gem that reveals itself through formal restraint: Hewitson's measured instructional voice and the film's careful cataloging of social adjustment protocols sit squarely in the tradition of wartime and postwar institutional documentary, a document that knows exactly what it is and executes that function with unshakeable craft.
The choice to frame cultural displacement as a series of correctable etiquette problems—to let the gap between what the film thinks it's teaching and what it actually shows about anxiety and belonging do all the work—creates a kind of deadpan tension that transforms a modest educational short into something genuinely haunting about conformity and dislocation.