This short film from Arthur Lipsett is an abstract succession of unrelated views of the passing crowd. A commentary on a machine-dominated society, it is often cited as an influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars and his conceptualization of “The Force.”

This short film is a series of vignettes of life in Saint-Henri, a Montreal working-class district, on the first day of school. From dawn to midnight, we take in the neighbourhood’s pulse: a mother fussing over children, a father’s enforced idleness, teenage boys clowning, young lovers dallying – the unposed quality of daily life.

A candid-camera view of professional wrestling as seen in the Montréal Forum, where some of the biggest bouts are staged, and in back-street wrestling parlors where the warriors practice their art. Nothing escapes the probing camera as well-muscled tyros grapple, punch, squirm, roar and grimace, adding their own variations of showmanship to amuse and excite the crowd.

This short documentary records the celebration and ritual surrounding a snowshoe competition in Sherbrooke in the late 1950s. The film marked the beginning of a new approach to reality in documentary and prefigures the trademark style of the NFB’s newly formed French Unit. Today, Les Raquetteurs is considered a precursor to the birth of direct cinema.

This short 1966 documentary dedicated “to all victims of intolerance” depicts the dawn of skateboarding in Montreal. A new activity frowned upon by police and adults, skateboarding gave youngsters a thrilling sensation of speed and freedom. This film – the first Canadian documentary ever made about the sport – captures the exuberance of boys and girls having the time of their lives in free-wheeling downhill locomotion.

Compiled from some peculiar newsreel items of the last 50 years, the filmmaker calls this a time capsule yet his arrangement of pictures makes it almost explosive. There are hundreds of items, once front-page stuff, but all wryly grotesque when seen in this reshuffle of the past.

Arthur Lipsett’s first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, “Very nice, very nice.”

This masterful short is a cinematic allegory of modern America, during Cuban missile crisis. The poetic editing suggests both the aversion and fascination evoked by the Floridian Eldorado, a place to die and American ideal of progress.