Norman McLaren
Norman McLaren never made a full-length feature movie or documentary but his work with Canada’s National Film Board has won more than 100 international awards — including a Hollywood Oscar and prizes at numerous global film festivals. Most of his productions, in fact, are no more than ten minutes in length, yet he is considered to have been an artist, animator, filmmaker, scientist, inventor, and technical genius.
Born in Stirling, Scotland, in 1914, McLaren, the youngest of three children, became interested in film while studying interior design at the Glasgow School of Art. Lacking the funds to purchase equipment, Norman obtained a used 35mm film from a local moviehouse, washed off the emulsion, and used coloured inks to create a short sequence of dancing colour patterns.
Encouraged by his teachers, McLaren then produced two documentaries at the school that impressed judges at a local film festival and won him some financial support from the school to create two more productions. These were shown at another local film festival where they were seen by the legendary John Grierson, head of the General Post Office film unit, who offered McLaren a job that he accepted before graduating in 1936.
Later that year McLaren was loaned as a cameraman for a film expedition covering the Spanish Civil War, an experience that increased his already firm views about the futility and misery of war. Returning to England, he made several more films for the post office before emigrating to New York in 1939.
Jobs were hard to come by but he eventually managed to attract the attention of the director of the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art who financed McLaren to make several abstract films using cameraless animation and hand-drawn sound. Later he landed a job with an industrial film company until Grierson, now in Canada as head of the government-backed National Film Board (NFB), recruited him in 1941 to set up an animation unit. At age 27 McLaren moved to Ottawa and thence to Montreal where he spent the rest of his life.
His first films at the NFB encouraged the purchase of war bonds, promoted early mailing at Christmas, and condemned war gossip. He also taught young artists animation techniques, created illustrations for a series of popular French-Canadian folk songs, and, in 1949, worked with jazz pianist Oscar Peterson to make Begone Dull Care. The film won top prizes at festivals in Venice, Italy, and Durban, South Africa as well as awards in Canada, Germany, and the United States.
At the request of UNESCO, McLaren went to China in 1949 to teach animators how to create films that would teach illiterate villagers about health and sanitation. While he was there, Communist forces overran the village; this gave McLaren his second taste of the horror and futility of war and led inexorably to his creation of Neighbours in 1952 as a protest to the Korean conflict.
Neighbours contrasted sharply with McLaren’s normally whimsical and humorous approach. A political fable using his innovative technique of stop-motion cinematography called “pixilation,” Neighbours involves two men building homes beside each other, erecting a fence, and planting a flower that winds around the fence and ultimately leads to conflict that culminates in the violent killing of their wives and children as well as each other.
McLaren included the murder of the families to emphasize the killing of innocent women and children in war, but distributors in the USA and Europe refused to show the film unless that sequence was removed. At first McLaren refused, but when the distributor for US schools showed McLaren a revised version, he relented and Neighbours went on to win an Academy Award as the best short subject of 1952/53 as well as numerous other prizes in the USA, Italy, and Canada. Following the outbreak of the war in Vietnam, demands were made to include the offending footage. That sequence is retained in the versions shown today.
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Norman McLaren was a film pioneer who was also an accomplished artist whose genius lay in his practice of drawing directly onto each frame of the film to be projected. Individual frames of some of McLaren’s short films are worthy of any art gallery. This sophisticated innovation was accomplished by McLaren’s use of a magnifying glass [The Toronto Star]. |
In 1953, McLaren again went on a UNESCO assignment, this time to teach animation in India. On his return he produced Blinkety Blank (1954) in which he varied his technique of drawing on every frame by consciously skipping some to create a subliminal effect and firmly establish his reputation as a “manipulator of motion.” Awards were showered on the production from Germany, Great Britain, South Africa, Uruguay, the United States, and Italy, and more were heaped on other McLaren-made NFB productions such as Rythmetic (1956), A Chairy Tale (1957), Le merle (1958), Lines Vertical (1960), Lines Horizontal (1962), and Mosaic (1965). For over thirty years he produced approximately one film per year.
A Chairy Tale was considered another work reflecting McLaren’s pacifist views, but like most of his work, it was interpreted many ways. This witty, humorous story is about a chair that refuses to be sat upon until the actor, played by noted Canadian filmmaker Claude Jutra, allows it to sit on his lap. Students of one high-school classroom felt it represented a student-teacher relationship that “makes it clear the teacher has to give more consideration to the pupil.” McLaren, after having made it, realized “it was a kind of therapy to overcome the feeling that I was being sat upon by friends too much.”
In 1967, McLaren turned his genius to a totally new animation concept when he photographed two ballet dancers performing a pas de deux, and then, according to biographer Maynard Collins, shaped “each movement into a fantasy of his own creation.” Collins further explained that “The technical virtuosity of this film, its ethereal beauty, its lovely Roumanian pan-type music, made it a joy to watch, even if — perhaps especially if — you do not care for ballet.”
Awards for Pas de deux were even more worldwide than for his thematic productions of Neighbours and A Chairy Tale. Film festivals held in various countries of Europe, Asia, North and South America all recognized it with various awards and honours for its creator who, five years later, made a second film using ballet dancers.
Ballet Adagio was originally intended to illustrate the movements of ballet to students through slow-motion photography. McLaren’s ingenious skill created, according to Collins, “an aesthetic experience,” one that showed not only the concentration demanded by formal dance but also examined “the human soul and found it beautiful.”
Ballet Adagio was one of McLaren’s last major works with the National Film Board. Always somewhat frail in health and gentle in demeanour, he eased his way out of the demanding role of constantly being sought out by visitors from around the world to teach his animation skills or discuss his concept and objectives for productions. “He was a kind of good will ambassador at the NFB,” recalls Herb Taylor, a former colleague and friend, pointing out that for two years after his death on January 26, 1987, the External Affairs Department was constantly asked to send an expert to numerous film festivals around the world so that the creativity and genius of Norman McLaren and his animated films could be discussed.
