Original subtitles

Our guest today may look young

for a pioneer,

but a pioneer he is.

A pioneer in motion picture techniques.

Norman Mclaren

of "the national film board of canada"

creates

some of the most unusual movies.

Many people, like me, think they're wonderful.

Other people don't understand them.

This is where I spend most of my time in filmmaking,

in front of this machine, and by this bench.

Without taking the film out of the machine,

I can just pull it out here,

and I can draw or scrape away images here,

and as soon as i've scraped away a few,

sometimes just one that I scrape, I can run it.

[Narrator]: This is a photo of Norman Mclaren, the filmmaker,

taken at his christening in stirling, Scotland, in 1914.

19 years after the birth of cinema.

[Mclaren]: If there's a technical thing invented,

a person with an artist's nature is likely to take it and use it.

You're getting young artists using computers,

they make a new kind of animation, a new type of film.

That's the way it should be.

if I was growing up now,

I would go right in and try

to do things with a computer.

But one is a child of one's age.

one is born at a certain time,

one uses certain things.

Mclaren's conscious interest in the arts

was awakened

in his early teens when he read

a modern poem breaking the rules

he was being taught at school.

Excited by a cartoon in "Punch" magazine

satirizing modern art,

Mclaren began to abstract

his school drawing and painting projects.

At 18, Mclaren enrolled in the "glasgow school of art".

[Mclaren]: I didn't get enjoyment from drawing

from plaster casts, or life models,

or from what I learned.

[Narrator]: So, after one year, Mclaren decided to specialize

in interior design,

and produced, according to one teacher,

fantastic schemes for interior decoration, furniture,

and goodness knows what else.

This multi-sensory cocktail bar

incorporated coloured smoke fountains, scents and sound.

[Mclaren]: But I discovered

great works of cinema, those of pudovkin and eisenstein.

I know they did have a terrific impact.

The intimacy of the intercutting,

the wide variety of viewpoint of the subject matter,

cutting from one thing to another

is similar to the mental process.

It's instantaneous.

A sudden juxtaposition of two things

very different from each other,

as in a dream.

Its spirit's able to jump around

with extreme rapidity

in spite of the laws of logic.

[Narrator]: A filmmaking club had been started at art school

and, galvanized by Mclaren's energy,

it produced several films over three years.

Mclaren's first film was "seven 'til five".

[Mclaren]: My very simple camera

couldn't do animation,

so I just relied upon discontinuous cutting

to cover one day

in the life of an art school.

And I realized that here is a new area

that's not really been explored.

It had just been invented

about 20 or 30 years ago.

So much has been done in drawing and painting

for thousands of years.

So many styles that I considered it at that age a dead art--

drawing and painting.

The new art of the future was movies.

And I thought I will make movies.

On the second film

I got a camera which could do fade-ins, fade-outs,

double exposures, split frame, and a single frame at a time.

That was the first opportunity I had to animate.

Objects usually,

plates from the table,

the instruments of the orchestra coming out of their boxes...

At the end of the film, the camera goes to bed.

The bed clothes come up over it.

These came just spontaneously to me.

I just thought in terms of animation.

[Narrator]: At the third "Scottish Amateur Film Festival",

the adjudicator was documentary filmmaker John Grierson.

He was scathing in his criticism of Mclaren's joy,

"camera makes whoopee".

[Mclaren]: Grierson said: "you've got lots of imagination,

"trying new things, but totally undisciplined, unharnessed.

"you don't know how to make a film,

we're going to knock some discipline into you."

These were his very words:

"knock some discipline into you."

[Narrator]: Mclaren worked for Grierson

at the "british general post office".

Mclaren learned the craft and discipline:

editing, writing and directing documentaries.

In october 1939, he emigrated to the USA

to continue his work in experimental film.

In 1941, he moved to canada.

Grierson, the founding head of canada's government film agency,

the "National Film Board",

asked Mclaren to come and make films of an experimental nature.

Mclaren would stay at the "NFB" until his retirement in 1984.

during those 43 years,

he founded the "NFB animation department",

made 50 films and received over 200 awards for his achievements.

In the early 1700s

a jesuit priest, louis Bertrand Castell, wrote:

"What stranger exercise could be inspired

"in the whole field of art than to make sound visible,

"to make available to the eye

those many pleasures which music affords the ears."

In 1953, Norman Mclaren wrote to a friend in Scotland:

"More than anything in the past years,

"what has moved me most and to tears

"has been the death of Kathleen Ferrier.

"first when I heard of it, and the other evening again,

"when there was a memorial program on the air.

"I can't express my feelings,

"except to say that I weep bitter tears of the sadness

when I hear her sing and think of it."

Music was the central love

in Mclaren's life and work.

Music of all sorts and across many cultural boundaries.

[Mclaren]: In my teens, before the "Art School",

I used to hear music, for the first time,

coming from the radio stations of europe.

As I shut my eyes, I saw the play and dance of forms.

[Narrator]: Yhis multi-sensory reaction to stimuli

is called synaesthesia.

[Mclaren]: Music can do all kinds of things.

The tempo can be slow or fast, can accelerate, decelerate,

can be pianissimo or fortissimo.

I could visualize the equivalent of these things

in the picture area.

Things could skip and leap about joyfully

or they could drag themselves tragically around.

There's lots of adjectives that you can apply to music

and to the movement

of the shapes and forms in an abstract film.

The pieces that excited me, i wanted to express them visually.

[Narrator]: Debussy's "L'apres-midi d'un faune"...

Cgany interpretation of hungarian folk music...

Scottish rhapsody...

[Mclaren]: It was only

when I joined the "Film Society in Glasgow"

that I saw the first abstract film,

Brahm's fifth hungarian rhapsody,

made by Oscar Fischinger.

I said: "that's it,

film is the medium to express my feelings about music."

What may be half of my whole output of films

is the expression of the spirit of music.

"Je la menai aupres d'une fontaine"

"Je la menai aupres d'une fontaine"

A long time ago,

in the thirties, shortly after I began making movies,

I discovered surrealist painting.

One of the surrealists whose work I very much admired

was Yves Tanguay.

So one day in 1944,

I decided to improvise a moving growing landscape

in a surrealistic manner.

And this is it.

It's much influenced

by the way tanguay uses space and forms in his paintings.

I must confess I don't really know what any of it means.

It all comes out of my subconscious.

I call it "Tanguay landscape test".

It never got any further than what you see now.

A problem with making a surreal film

is keeping up the inspiration while constantly improvising.

[Narrator]: The surrealist idea of subconscious

as a source of artistic inspiration

was the major force in Mclaren's creative process.

It would remain an influence through his career.

[Mclaren]: Surrealism meant

cutting down the conscious control of what was happening.

I had tended to be an improviser in earlier films,

so this fitted in with the idea of surrealism.

You let what's next come out of your subconscious.

Having seen just one or two surrealist paintings

released me to make films

Iike "Love on the wing" where the image keeps metamorphosing.

[Narrator]: "Divertissement", by Jacques Ibert,

was the musical inspiration for "Love on the wing".

Mclaren's loud entry into the world of experimental cinema,

his first professional step as a maker of fancy and fantasy.

[Mclaren]: A sudden juxtaposition

of two things very different from each other as in a dream.

The spirit is able to jump around with an extreme rapidity

in spite of the laws of logic.

[Narrator]: Mclaren used

a technique of filmic metamorphosis,

or continual change, to make his surreal cinema.

He had discovered metamorphosis in 1937

in films by Emile Cohl.

The french animator had used the technique as early as 1908.

Here, in the film "Fantasmagorie".

Mclaren said Cohl's animation was a revelation

which impressed him deeply, and greatly affected his work.

Here was animation at its purest and best,

unadulterated and unaffected by the ideas and methods

of other media and earlier times.

It rejoiced in the fact that it was drawn with a line

and that the line could move.

It breathed with this knowledge, and it followed the logic of it.

The "British postmaster general" forbade the distribution

of "Love on the wing".

too freudian, he said.

The fore-ground images in "Love on the wing"

were made without a camera

by drawing directly with a pen onto the film.

Mclaren would perfect this technique in new york.

Mclaren had emigrated to the USA in 1939

with Guy Glover,

his lifetime companion and creative confidant.

several years later,

Mclaren spoke of those new york days in an interview.

"I had a terrible time during my first trip there in the 30's,"

he recalled with a smile.

"I made those guggenheim films while I was nearly starving

"in a little room on 1 25th street.

"all I had was a pen, some dyes, a plain table,

"a sloping bench with a groove for sliding film

"and a wire coat hanger.

"but later", he mused, "I moved to the oldest house in flushing.

it had lovely fir trees and birds."

Mclaren bent a surprisingly muscular wrist

slowly flexing five tapering fingers.

"it had birds

Iike silver falcons."

during his two years in new york,

Mclaren drew seven films directly onto film.

he was encouraged

by hilla von rebay,

curator of the "museum of non-objective painting",

now the "guggenheim".

the museum bought most of these films,

featuring them on programs of non-objective cinema.

it's a very simple machine,

not much to it.

this is the film.

it runs through a holder over here.

and there's a light

that shines through glass in my holder.

I use pen and india ink --

just an ordinary pen.

I draw on each frame of film,

making each drawing slightly different from the one before.

after drawing that, I pull the film up

and draw the next second.

[interviewer]: it sounds most interesting.

it seems to be a most satisfying business,

painting straight onto a film like that.

[Mclaren]: don't let the complexities of filmmaking

get you down.

I try to preserve in my relationship to the film

the same closeness and intimacy

that exists between a painter and his canvas.

in normal filmmaking,

there's a series of optical, chemical, mechanical processes.

and these stand between the artist and his finished work.

how much simpler it is for an artist with his canvas.

so I decided to throw away the camera and work on the film.

and if I don't like what I do, I rub it out.

[interviewer]: it sounds simple.

it must be simpler for you than for me.

[Mclaren]: well... yes. um... um...

you can turn me into anything you like:

Ioaf of bread, bike, stylish hat, roastbeef,

thrilling book, comfy seat, yard of cloth, pound of cheese,

ticket to a movie or anything you please.

[Narrator]: Mclaren once said

"handmade cinema was like watching thought.

if thought could be seen."

[Mclaren]: I wasn't aware of the general line

of what was going to happen 1 0-20 seconds from now.

I was always aware of how things were developing:

this is going to happen in the next five seconds.

but a minute from now in the film, I didn't know.

the subconscious plays a very important role.

it perhaps has the whole thing pretty well formed

from start to finish.

it's a matter of the consciousness

not knowing that form but creating it

and getting uncomfortable, nervous or neurotic even,

if it's going wrong.

[Narrator]: when Mclaren was 18,

he wrote a story about life in 2066.

the function of art in Mclaren's brave new world

was to make life gloom-proof.

Mclaren looked back with amusement

on this fantasy of a teenager,

excited by anything that was new.

for the most part, Mclaren's public art was one of fancy,

of wit and of hope.

rarely did his films show his suffering.

this he kept for his private drawings.

this surreal footage, "the head test",

dates from the 1940s and was left incomplete.

the hand-drawn films were the expression of his idea of cinema

as an art of movements designed through time.

Mclaren also thought of cinema

as motion and change painted with light.

this footage dates from 1943

and is the first test for the technique

in which he metamorphosed light and shade in a pastel drawing.

he called this technique "chain of mixes".

this test led directly to the film "la-haut sur ces montagnes".

Mclaren's interest in the metamorphosis of light and shade

was aroused by the scottish environment

of his formative years.

[Mclaren]: our house,

it had a big square garden.

this is a square lawn,

a path around it, and my mother's sunniest flower beds,

she gave over to roses.

her great interest was in gardening.

at adolescence, the big change came over me.

I remember the day and the experience where it hit me.

it was a lovely, brilliant, sunny morning

going out into the back garden of the house.

suddenly everything seemed magical.

the drops of dew on the grass

and the shapes of the flowers.

but that morning it just overwhelmed me,

and I went indoors

and tried to write a poem expressing this.

Iike in my bedroom, the first thing I did

once I became adolescently sensitive

was to jump out of bed, -- the window was wide open --

Iooked to the east and to the west,

to the distant hills with a few clouds over them.

the play of light and shade on the hills

continued to affect me very much.

[Narrator]: stirling landscape, painted by Mclaren in 1947.

[Mclaren]: 20 years ago I went over to visit my parents

and several of us took a walk.

it was windy, beautiful blue sky,

great scudding cumulus clouds,

and the play of light and shade, and the wind...

I was just utterly thrilled.

if "la-haut" had been in colour, it would have been like that.

[Narrator]: although "la-haut sur ces montagnes"

was inspired by Scotland,

it was one film in a series of french-canadian folk songs.

[compere:] when disney and his animators turn out a film,

they do thousands of individual drawings.

but that is not your technique.

[Mclaren]: no, in this film I used one drawing

and made thousands of changes on the one drawing.

this is the drawing I used.

it's a bit of cardboard, with a chalk representation on it.

I used black and white chalk,

and during the photographing of the film,

I would change the drawings.

if the sun was rising on this mountain scene,

I would add white chalk to highlight the mountains.

very edges of things.

I might lighten a whole area.

then, i'd stop drawing

and let the cameraman shoot part of the picture

in this condition.

he'd blend it into the previous condition.

we'd stop the camera,

and i'd start changing the picture again.

I might lighten up the sky.

it's a series of constant changes

to the same basic drawing.

that's right.

photograph each change.

yes.

and after I lightened up the sky

and the mountains a little bit more,

we'd photograph some more.

then we'd stop the camera again, and i'd add some more detail.

I might introduce some clouds in the sky.

and i'd change every part of the picture a little bit.

and then, say I was wanting to introduce a sunset,

I might rub the existing chalk away.

the cameraman would photograph the picture in that stage,

mixing it with the previous.

and so on it went;

Iittle by little, the picture would change.

[Narrator]: in 1966,

Mclaren began a metamorphic film, "the seasons",

in which he explored the light and colour of canada.

he feared this almost formless abstraction would be boring.

he put the film to one side, taking it out from time to time

in the hope of an inspiration, which never came.

Mclaren readily admitted to the painterly influence

of the 19th century english artist j.w. turner,

on his attempt to capture the seasons

in this impressionistic manner.

in the mid-1 940s, Mclaren and evelyn lambart

shot tests for a folk song film,

Ia poulette grise.

they made slides of hens,

which they projected onto undulating corrugated board.

they were unhappy with the results,

so Mclaren decided to use the chain of mixes technique.

picasso said:

"it would be very interesting to record, photographically,

"not the stages of a painting, but its metamorphoses.

"one would see, perhaps, by what course a mind finds its way

"to the crystallization of its dream.

"the picture is not thought out and determined beforehand;

"rather while it is being made,

"it follows the mobility of thought.

"finished, it changes further,

"according to the condition of him who looks at it.

a picture lives its life like a living creature."

[Mclaren]: when I see a painting done by some other artist,

I don't think of all the stages that led up to that.

but in my own experience of doing paintings,

i've been very conscious that I build the thing up gradually

and change it here and there...

it slowly evolves.

that process seems to be more important than the final result.

i'm not a good painter, that's one of the symptoms of it.

I don't know when to stop.

the changing around fascinates me more than the result...

which naturally led to trying to channel this into filmmaking.

and the film that, in my opinion, does that best

is "poulette grise".

[Narrator]: the roots of Mclaren's interest

in the metamorphosis of light and shade and imagery

Iay in the scottish environment of his youth.

but the idea to use film

to explore this interest came from seeing this film,

"night on bare mountain", in the late 1 930s.

[Mclaren]: I think an abstract, a so-called abstract film

can have human feelings.

in other words,

the things that you see on the screen may be abstract.

if you looked at a frame of film, you'd say:

that doesn't mean anything; there's no images there.

but once the thing goes into motion,

the things that are there,

no matter what kind of shape they may be,

can behave in a human or animal way,

which echoes something quite human in a person.

[don mcw.]: would you say there's a connection

between your films and dance?

in many of them, the abstract films, like...

good gracious, i've forgotten its name!

[don]: "fiddle dee-dee"?

[Mclaren]: "fiddle dee-dee", no.

"begone dull care" is more like wild folk dancing.

i'm confused,

because "begone dull care"

is more abstract

than "fiddle-dee-dee" which is sort of a dance melody.

[Mclaren]: it's a dance melody,

but it's a very simple melody and it's a very simple film.

it doesn't have all the features,

promontories and crags and lowlands

of "begone dull care".

when, in london,

I went to the ballet, i'd never seen ballet before.

I was utterly fascinated because I saw several types of ballet.

but I was more interested in the non-dramatic ballet,

the ballet of movement

and the creation of the choreography

and the changing forms and patterns on the stage.

even if i'd been born when I was born, in london,

and could have gone to the ballet

from the age of eight or ten,

I might have wanted to be a ballet dancer

and eventually a choreographer.

when doing "hen hop",

I felt that I was that hen doing the dance.

after all, before i went to make "hen hop".

I selected the music, and the music was a scratchiness

and its silly, fiddly tune made me think of hens.

I always think of hens as stupid, silly creatures.

I went to an experimental farm near ottawa,

and asked to spend a day in the hen houses, drawing hens.

I went in there, and caused the greatest disruption

between these 200 hens.

because they didn't accept me.

there was great cackling and fluttering

and flying from roost to roost.

they moved so fast I couldn't draw any.

but after half an hour they settled down,

they seemed to accept me as a hen.

I studied their postures and watched their movements,

and got imbued with the spirit of their henliness.

I think!

in a way, when you're animating a creature,

if the creature is moving, you are that...

you feel the motion.

your feet on the floor and your back to the wall

and over the left with your corner's all

a hand to your partner grand jangle

right go left

go right to the buggy left to the wheel

go all the way around on the ball of your heel

put your wooden leg up and your cork one down

hurry up girls you'll never get around

[Narrator]: in 1 946, picasso saw "hen hop".

he is reported to have exclaimed:

"finally, something new in the art of drawing!"

[m. isacsson]: where did you get the hen?

[Mclaren]: you're going way back.

ask my psychiatrist why I chose a hen!

I wanted a simple image,

not a human image because it's too complex

to manipulate, so many parts to move.

you can draw a hen in a few lines,

it's much easier to do hundreds of drawings.

birds idea took my fancy,

particularly hens because i'm always amused by hens.

they're stupid, they make funny sounds

and behave in a rattly way,

if they're running or scratching...

[Narrator]: Mclaren once said

he thought his mother thought she was a bird.

[Mclaren]: it's a form of dance.

that's my way of thinking about film.

there are other films, dramatic films,

where speech is important.

but I never use speech in my films.

I couldn't.

i'd feel it an intrusion of a very alien kind.

[Narrator]: Mclaren would send letters to friends.

sometimes fancy, rather than words,

would express his feelings.

[Mclaren]: one aspect of creativity

relates to esthetic value,

the making of something beautiful.

you can find that in flowers.

if you've ever imagined yourself a bee

and come in right close to an iris,

it looks terribly exciting...

all this little tube that gets narrower and narrower...

all the colours reflected...

it's really a wondrous invention

by the great inventor.

animals too, show this evolutionary creativity.

take for instance tropical birds of plumage.

take the bower bird of australia which make a nest...

the little hole and the little platform in front.

it decorates its nest with little berries,

beads and flowers, and little bits of coloured glass,

and a little platform for the bower birds

to dance a mating dance.

it's all very pretty.

what's the point of it?

the point is sexual attraction and reproduction.

so, I think in the world of plants and flowers and animals,

you get creativity.

it's built into them structurally.

mind you, I think maybe creativity in man

is structurally built into him,

because some men and women are more creative than others.

they have an urge to make not just beauty

but humour, tragedy, if it's literature, or fantasy.

they have an urge to make something.

[Narrator]: octavio paz once said:

"a chained man need only shut his eyes

to make the world explode."

paraphrasing octavio paz,

Iouis bunuel, that spanish master of cinema, said:

"the white eye of the screen need only reflect the light

that is properly its own to blow up the universe."

paraphrasing bunuel, we would say:

"the white eye of the screen need only reflect the light

that is properly its own to create a new universe."

in 1 969, glenn gould, canada's master of the keyboard,

had a weekly program

on the radio of the "canadian broadcasting corporation".

[Announcer:] the art of glenn gould, take 1 5.

a talk with the composer

of that intriguing bit of anti-melody,

filmmaker Norman Mclaren.

[gould:] it's the music track which he designed

for his six-minute masterpiece called "mosaic".

[Announcer:] I haven't seen it.

[gould:] in that film, a man walks in from the stage right,

and launches a spherical object

against no discernible background.

exeunt stage left, leaves the object to multiply

and to create a world of its own

until he reverses the stage directions.

I have a feeling that you have, if only tacitly,

been influenced by schoenberg,

or the schoenbergen principle of music,

because there is an inclination in your films to make one cell,

one cellular idea

responsible for everything that happens.

"mosaic" is like that, and "spheres" too.

one motion inaugurates all the other motions.

this was the principle in which schoenberg believed,

and the thing he strove for.

[Mclaren]: what's influenced me in that direction

has been my contact with hindu classical music.

because there you get one germ in the raga,

and that germ is developed and developed and developed.

and it builds all the time.

it's not an a, b, a, it's just a constant build.

you start on a film.

and once you make an initial statement,

it forecloses all sorts of possibilities.

you're narrowing down the channel

in which you can progress.

it's like starting off a melody in one key.

you could go off at a tangent,

then come back, and go off at another tangent.

it's a theme and variation built into the structure.

a great work often uses very few elements,

it may do a theme and variation, or a rondo form or sonata form.

many of the structures in music I found helpful as guidelines

for structures in abstract films or in films in general.

there are two kinds of abstract film.

one is pure abstract film.

the images, you cannot recognize them

as anything else than what they are.

they don't suggest human beings or any kind of creatures.

and they don't move with anything

but geometric kind of movement, like the film "lines".

"horizontal lines", "vertical", "mosaic" and "spheres".

the others are abstract films

where there are objects which are identifiable.

i'm thinking of "rythmetic".

there are numerals.

and in numerals, by their behaviour, and action,

perform as if they're animals or human beings pushing and shoving

and reacting and fighting with each other.

in my abstract films,

the elements, like a blue dot and a grey dot,

take on a personality by virtue of their movement.

the images or forms may be abstract,

but movement is non-abstract; it's humanly motivated.

the motion is separate

from the particular shape or form that moves.

it is this motion which is at the heart of cinema

and that makes film such a powerful medium.

[isacsson]: animated film is an illusion of movement.

[Mclaren]: all film is a kind of illusion,

because you have just 24 stationary frames a second.

so when it's screened, you get the illusion of movement.

if I were asked the definition of animated film,

it is where you can stop between any frame of film

and the next frame of film,

and make a controlled adjustment.

[isacsson]: that's what you have been doing?

[Mclaren]: it's manipulating

the difference in pure, straight animation,

where you move what's in front of you a little

and take another frame, move it again...

or if the movement has been drawn in advance,

you are in complete control of the frame to frame motion.

and for full animation you have to do 24 moves per every second.

[don]: is collaboration important in your process?

[Mclaren]: it's very important.

[don]: what about the role

that evelyn lambart played in your films?

[Mclaren]: her role was immense, except for the last ten years,

when she started making her own films.

we got together in the forties.

we worked out tests for "poulette grise"

before I arrived at the final decision.

she started kind of as an assistant,

but more and more we fitted in

and in some films she was co-directing them.

one thing was that she was very methodical.

terribly systematic,

had lots of things on hand,

protractors and compasses

and the other instruments.

we felt the same way about colour.

she came into the designing the use of colour

in "mosaic",

where there's little flickers...

when the dots crowd together,

you get a little clump of flickers.

so we shared ideas and opinions.

and... um...

and... um... she was a...

I felt the value of a second person

provided that other person

felt the same way about art and colour and about movie movement.

and there she was...

there's grant munro.

with grant, it's collaboration

and sometimes it's co-direction,

sometimes he's become the editor.

I think i've made more films with people than working myself.

in the early days, it was just myself.

but regardless of that,

the films carry your stamp.

[Mclaren]: maybe i've had the general idea.

that's so with eve lambart.

I said how about trying to make a minimal film...

this is before the minimalist movement in graphic arts...

I wanted to use a single line, moving, bending and wiggling it,

and try to keep up the interest.

I said: "I don't think we can keep it up

for more than a minute."

we tried various things, and it just became boring.

we decided we'll start with a single line,

then make it two, then four, seven and more complex buildup.

[don]: are you thinking about boring the audience

or boring you?

[Mclaren]: boring the audience.

there's an audience somewhere in my mind,

but for "lines", "vertical", "horizontal" and "mosaic",

it would interest people who were interested

in art maybe, a limited audience.

[don]: does that worry you

that the audience may be limited?

[Mclaren]: no, most people can't be interested in everything.

they tend to be interested in, say the dance or something,

rather than sports or golf, or interested in cooking.

but if they're interested in film and movement

and art in general,

there'd be a fair number of them interested in those films,

I thought.

but we were doing it more to amuse ourselves, I think.

[Narrator]: it is possible a seed for Mclaren's minimalism

was planted during his 1 935 trip to russia,

where he saw paintings by the constructivist movement.

they astonished the 21 year old Mclaren.

[Mclaren]: the russians...

interestingly, logically related in the gallery,

starting from a realistic painting to simplified realism

to semi-abstract to completely abstract

to getting sparser and fewer geometric forms.

and at the end of the gallery, was this black canvas.

[Narrator]: in 1 961, a mathematician called briggs

saw "lines vertical" and "lines horizontal"

at the "cork film festival".

he wrote: "these films seem in many ways

"the culmination of Norman Mclaren's search

"for the ultimate in an art that he has made his own.

"he has stripped the animated film to its barest essentials,

"in the same way that the more advanced abstract painters

"have stripped pictorial art.

"but in his march along the last ridge to the summit,

"he may have left behind his popular touch.

he is likely to find himself almost alone on everest."

all I can say is that...

maybe it is the spirit of the times,

the era, the age you live in, affects you.

it's difficult for an artist to escape the effects of the art

that's going on around him and being done.

he's part of the movement.

[don]: bussoni wrote once that

"creative power may be more readily recognized

the more it shakes itself loose from tradition."

[Mclaren]: on the whole that's a correct statement.

but there are exceptions.

one great exception is bach.

he was by many of his contemporaries

considered an old fuddy duddy,

still rummaging around in those counterpoints.

[don]: do you think an artist should recognize a tradition?

[Mclaren]: it's a matter of his own feeling.

if he finds other possibilities within that tradition,

he should pursue them.

if he gets tired, as I do making a film in one style,

when it's finished,

I want to do something completely different,

with a different technique and a different theme.

[don]: you are a filmmaker, a 20th century art form.

where is the tradition for you to break?

[Mclaren]: that's why I chose film.

because there are very few traditions

in filmmaking...

here's a medium that's full of possibilities.

it's just beginning to be explored...

Iong after I realized that, I saw the work

of early french pioneers doing trick film work, I realized

that they'd realized some of the possibilities immediately.

[Narrator]: the opening moments of Mclaren's "pas de deux".

there are two sections.

in the first, the awakened girl dances narcissistically.

in the second section,

a young man appears,

and gradually she realizes

that her happiness lies in the love of another.

the growing love is expressed with the multiplied image

created by Mclaren on the optical printer.

he consciously took his inspiration

for the multiplied imagery

from earlier attempts in photography and painting

to capture all the phases

of a motion in a single instant.

this multiple image photograph of a fencer

was taken by french physiologist etienne-Jules marey

in the late 1 880s.

marey also took this diagrammatic photo

of a man walking.

duchamp described his 1 91 2 painting

"nude descending a staircase"

thus: "a static composition of indications of various positions

taken by a form in movement."

harold edgerton's 1 930s stroboscopic photographs

were a major influence in the gestation of "pas de deux".

this edgerton photo of a drum majorette

was pinned to the outside of Mclaren's office door.

Mclaren's first multiplied image tests were done in the mid-50s.

he multiplied in the optical printer marks

which he had engraved on black film.

he used that technique briefly in his 1 955 "blinkity blank".

in 1 961, Mclaren and grant munro

applied the multiplied principle to live action.

an action was filmed in slow motion.

this filmed image

was superimposed upon itself several times,

but always with a delay of a few frames,

so that the viewer sees all the stages in the movement,

as in stroboscopic photography.

in 1 965, Mclaren did further tests

with dancers from "les grands ballets canadiens"

in order to perfect the lighting

and to establish the ballet steps, movements and tempi

best suited to his theme and technique.

only after these final tests

did Mclaren feel ready to carry out

his transformations of the common place into "pas de deux".

[Mclaren]: a work of art has to have

cohesiveness and consistency,

but not so much cohesiveness and consistency as to become boring,

and not so much non-cohesiveness as to fall apart...

it has to be organically linked,

and yet it must have surprises in it that you don't expect,

but surprises that are relevant to the whole work.

he was looking at his rushes,

Iight had got into the camera.

so these original rushes were spoiled.

everybody was kind of sad about it...

except Norman.

Norman was saying: "but you notice how,

"when it gets that light colour, it becomes kind of ghostly...

if we would want to do that, I know what to do now..."

he was thinking what it was instead of what it wasn't.

[Mclaren]: this x-ray of my head was taken in 1 955.

i'd gone to

hospital because I was suffering from headaches.

they took many views of my head.

they gave me the plates afterwards.

I was going to fling them out...

it is sort of a portrait of me.

I filled the head with doodles.

I improvised anything that came into my head.

of course, there are very few things drawn here,

while my head is swirling with thoughts.

I was working on a film called "one, two, three",

which I got stuck on.

i picked it up again, that became rythmetic.

there's a noughts and crosses game

that represents my interest in things that are puzzling.

also you notice there's the clocks.

that indicates my obsession with time in filmmaking:

the number of seconds,

the number of frames and 24 frames in every second.

the chain of film from my eye

that goes up and turns into letters...

at that period, I was getting mail from all over the world

wanting to know about my techniques.

that disturbed my process of filmmaking and thinking,

so I wrote technical notes on every film I made,

which could then be sent out.

there's a stairway which turns into film.

that meant I was trying to get better and better

with every film I made.

of course, this being 1 955,

I was keenly aware that the atom bomb

might destroy not just my films,

but all the films that filmmakers have made.

right at the very top is a little flower with wings,

that represents hope, I think...

coming up from my neck are the feelings of my heart,

which don't seem to be very strong...

that represents a hope that my films

would move people,

not intellectually but emotionally, more.

I was conscious that I had a tendency to become too abstract,

and there was the urge lurking in my subconscious

of wanting to put more human emotion in my films.

and of course the hens' feet

which start from the feet of a man

and grow into a bush or a flower, I suppose...

I don't know.

these are just random interpretations

of the things I doodled.

[Narrator]: the teenage Mclaren read a book about

a synaesthetic art, colour music,

in which sound and colour

were believed to be directly equivalent.

he was greatly influenced by this idea.

his high school painting, "the walls of jericho",

was conceived of as music,

the curves representing tempe,

the area and saturation of colour

representing volume and pitch.

in 1 949, Mclaren and evelyn lambart

made "begone dull care"

in which they totally ignored the frame line

and painted and scratched directly onto the film.

Mclaren once said "begone dull care"

was his colour music dream come true.

it was painted to a musical script

improvised by oscar peterson.

[Mclaren]: many people wrote theories

about colour, music and pitch.

I have no precise theory about this,

but with sections of music which are very low in pitch,

I will use dark colours.

if there is high pitch music,

i'll use light colours like

yellows, whites, very pale blues.

in "begone dull care", I was conscious

of manipulating colours this way,

but you can't push it too far

or you end up with an impossibility.

[Narrator]: Mclaren's first hand-made film experiments

were done at art school.

Mclaren, the art student,

could draw and paint

the motions and colours he saw in his mind's eye

directly onto movie film.

[Mclaren]: everything was projected

at a frantic motion.

but we found that when we used very fast popular music,

and what was in front of the eye was so fast

that there's a more than 50% feeling of synchronization.

it had no form.

it wasn't a work of art.

it was an endless

band of effects,

but since it was startingly new at that time, in 1 935,

everyone was interested in it.

[don]: were you surprised the first time you saw it?

[Mclaren]: happily so...

we found the reaction very stimulating.

if you can do something so simply

with movie as to excite people,

with movie you've got a field of excitement

Iying there to be explored,

compared with in a painting...

in fact, I felt that painting was a dead or a dying medium

which to me is partly true, I still believe that.

[don]: why?

I think fewer people take interest in it

and with the advent of tv, even more so.

we don't experience the same thrill

as a medieval church-goer would have

when going into church and seeing a stained glass window

or a painting of a biblical scene.

something new in their experience.

there's always an element of newness in a work of art.

if it's not new, it's a refinement of something old.

for instance,

I consider a jackson pollock,

no matter what its size and price,

to be of the same ilk as a piece of marble.

superb graining and colouring and detail.

people of the 20th century are not the first to appreciate

a jackson pollack kind of art.

in the villas of pompei during the first period of decoration,

the walls were panelled with just...

they weren't marble.

they were painted to imitate marble.

just as jackson pollack wasn't imitating anything,

but he was creating his own marble.

[Narrator]: in the early 1 940s,

Mclaren was introduced to the tesseract,

or the hypercube, by fellow animator george dunning.

Mclaren was always fascinated by "trompe l'oeil",

and the tesseract particularly caught his fancy.

he made several over the years out of balsa wood.

they would hang from the ceiling in the homes of friends,

and in 1 971, he designed this large aluminum tesseract

for the lobby of "The National Film Board".

Mclaren used the tesseract

as the basis for the design of many things,

Iarge and small, including a house.

I go in the west door,

you go in the east.

I walk down the corridor

and go into the second room

on the right on the ground floor.

you go up one flight

and take the first room on the left.

we find ourselves in the same room,

the one with the broken window pane.

you are one floor higher than me,

but we are also in the same room.

are we therefore also on the same floor?

this incompleted film, "the corridor",

uses a technique invented by Mclaren in the 1 930s,

the travelling zoom.

his intention was gradually to make the corridor disappear,

so that the viewer's initial imprisonment

would give way to the freedom of the infinity of space.

Mclaren once said his fascination with space

came from being accidentally locked in a cupboard

when he was seven years old.

some years after,

he pooh-poohed this explanation, saying his fascination was,

rather, aroused by surrealist painting

and also by those cartoons

in which disney created an illusion of deep space

with the multi-plane technique.

"a la sante de ses soeurs et de ses freres"

"a la sante de celui que son coeur aime"

"c'est l'aviron qui nous mene mene mene"

"c'est l'aviron qui nous mene en rond"

Mclaren's first film based entirely on this technique

was the 1 944 "c'est l'aviron".

on large flat black cards,

I painted small details

of the landscape.

a tree here and a house there.

on each card

there was a separate detail.

here a cliff, there a tree.

we photographed these cards

by approaching the camera gradually towards it,

what's called a zoom.

instead of photographing all these cards,

one after the other on the same bit of film,

we overlapped the photographing of each card.

[gilmour]: the feeling of a canoe.

how did you get

the canoe effect?

the canoe is very simple...

very economical.

to put the canoe into the film,

we wound the film in the camera back to the beginning again

and photographed the entire length,

with me holding the canoe and moving it up and down.

with the motion of the water...

to the rhythm of the song...

he would invent a new world, for instance, in "spheres",

everything goes at the same rate,

it never changes rate.

and the effects are the result of making everything move

according to the laws of that world.

most people will pretend to invent a world,

and then put events in that world

that belong to this world.

the same old drama...

he visualized what would be a real event

that could only happen in that world.

and then dramatized that.

[Narrator]: in 1 949, Mclaren and rene jodoin

animated a film, "chalk river ballet",

in which metal cutouts represented atoms in space.

they had decided to animate entirely in constant motion.

it would be an experimental abstraction

with none of the animal-like or anthropomorphic movement,

at that time so characteristic of Mclaren's films.

the shooting completed, they thought it boring

and put it aside.

Mclaren looked at it from time to time,

and it was always boring.

but when watching the film in 1 967, it no longer seemed so.

Mclaren combined the cutouts with backgrounds,

including a travelling zoom shot originally for "c'est l'aviron".

he asked glenn gould to provide the music,

three of bach's 48 preludes and fugues.

[gould]: I was flabbergasted by the degree to which you came

with a prepared concept.

you told me that you concocted the visual track 20 years ago...

you then decided to make it assimilate three bach items,

which were not in your mind at the time of its composition.

it was so remarkably done that one couldn't imagine

that they hadn't grown out of one initial idea.

I admit that ears and eyes can be generous...

but this wasn't generosity.

the pivotal idea on the screen allied with changes of harmony

that were the significant ones.

what plotting goes in to make it happen?

[Mclaren]: the essential thing is that I had 48 to choose from.

and that's a lot.

[gould]: so a ratio of 1 6 to 1 applies...

[Mclaren]: the picture was worked out rhythmically,

and it so turned out

that I found those particular fugues and the prelude,

which seemed to vibe.

[Narrator]: a major art movements of the 1 960s

was minimalism.

upon reflection, Mclaren no longer found "spheres" boring

because it was a minimalist film,

and expressed an aspect of the artistic spirit of the 1 960s.

in the mid-1 940s, Mclaren began "dans un petit bois",

a fiendishly complicated film which combined non-stop zooming

with a multi-plane setup.

"the little wood" was made of cutouts,

animated on 1 2 panes of glass.

as the camera travelled,

panes of glass were removed.

the shooting was "wearing him down with cares".

he had completed an introduction and two verses when,

one day, he was liberated from all those cares.

evelyn and I were working

in a very hot studio

above the "metropolitan store".

we were working at the front.

we didn't see Norman,

but he climbed up the ladder

to reach the camera,

fell off the ladder

through the sheets of glass...

we ran in expecting the worst;

Norman was sitting in this mess

Iaughing and laughing...

he said: "thank god, now I don't have

to make the damn thing."

"dans un petit bois"

"voulez-vous savoir mesdames"

"dans un petit bois"

"voulez-vous savoir ce qu'il y a"

"il y a un petit arbre"

"un petit arbre d'amour mesdames"

"il y a un petit arbre"

"un petit arbre d'amour joli"

"dans ce petit arbre"

"voulez-vous savoir mesdames"

"dans ce petit arbre"

"voulez-vous savoir ce qu'il y a"

"il y a un petit nid"

[broken glass]

I remember the "NFB" picture

about cancer...

there was one remarkable shot in that about a scientist

exploring cancer, and going into a cell of a human body.

[Mclaren]: the principle of animation behind that

was the same as in "c'est l'aviron".

[gilmour]: a little paddle song first and,

in the same technique, a cancer film.

each new technique

created by Norman, perhaps in the form

of an entertaining trifle,

is very soon after adapted and used

by other film workers,

so that the screen is increasingly used

for more serious purposes.

[Narrator]: in 1 986, "mcgill university" established

the "Norman Mclaren award" to be presented annually

to the student whose work demonstrates social concerns

similar to those of Norman Mclaren.

i'm very touched about this, and I appreciate it very much.

[Narrator]: this Mclaren painting

dates from the late 1 920s, when he was in high school.

it is full of optimism as he traces the history

of the era of invention and industrialization,

and the promise of a prosperous future.

on the back of this 1 939 pastel are written the words

"drawn the night hitler invaded poland".

[p. raymont]: were you inspired by the politics

of these russian films?

[Mclaren]: certainly I was.

born in 1 914, when I grew up...

I was a teenager during the great depression.

and I had my first experience of the slums.

I met a communist in stirling by chance.

he said: "i'd like you to come

"from your middle class home

to see how most of the people live."

I was shocked, that's when I started thinking politically.

what can be done about it?

the economic system was wrong.

Iike many young people, in the great depression,

our minds went to russia

as a possible experiment along new economic lines.

my father,

a staunch conservative and pillar of the church,

was greatly concerned about my left-wing thoughts and feelings.

I wanted to go to russia...

he said: "fine, i'll give you money,

"you'll see how they live, and you'll be cured

from thinking that communism is a good thing."

I went to russia

for a film and theatre festival.

I had a marvellous time!

I wasn't cured

but I began to get cured when the purges happened in russia.

[Narrator]: returning from russia and still at art school,

Mclaren and helen biggar, a sculptor, made "hell unlimited".

the left wing in britain was now joining

with liberal and conservative groups against fascism.

biggar and Mclaren stood apart.

they accused capitalism,

whether in germany, in japan, or in the democracies,

as flourishing from the sale of arms

to all sides in a potential conflict.

unpolished though the filmmaking was,

the courageous and unequivocal

positions taken by Mclaren and biggar

have given it a unique place

amongst british political films of the 1 930s.

in 1 936, when I was working at the "gpo" film unit,

Grierson called me and said:

"would you like to go to spain

"as a cameraman with ivor montagu?

"we want you to go there for three weeks,

"and record the civil war,

"go to alicante

and then to madrid."

we filmed, brought the footage back very quickly

and edited it very quickly

into a film

ivor montagu did.

and we showed it around trade union meetings,

and liberal groups in order to collect funds

for "the red cross" and the "international brigade".

Iife was hard; there was very little bread,

no meat, no heat.

it was in november, very cold.

there was bombing of civilian citizens.

this was the first time.

we would have a taxi,

as we were travelling, we would notice

if there was smoke coming up,

we'd go to where the smoke was

and photograph the results of the bombing.

people being pulled out of the houses,

dead bodies, people wounded...

and we'd try to... we were newsreel photographers.

[Narrator]: money was raised at screenings of "defence of madrid".

the public discovered commercial newsreel companies

were not telling the full story of the war in spain.

the horror of the civil war profoundly affected Mclaren.

back in london,

he was plagued by nightmares.

when, in 1 939, germany and russia

signed a non-aggression pact, Mclaren, with many others,

felt betrayed.

he embraced pacifism and,

following the outbreak of world war ii,

he emigrated to the USA and later...

during the war years in u.s.a. and canada,

Mclaren's films indicated none of these emotions.

[Mclaren]: I realized the necessity of the war

because of what hitler was doing to the racial question.

so I cooperated with the war effort,

but no more than I had to.

I wasn't an enthusiastic cooperator,

the cooperation I was asked to do was very simple:

make light films with wartime messages

Iike buying savings bonds,

keeping your mouth shut...

[Narrator]: an interview in "liberty" in 1 947:

"once, I took a very lively interest in politics

"and in the world around me.

"things were wrong,

"I wanted to do something.

"I joined a radical party in Scotland,

"and was fair set to become a reforming young zealot.

"then, as time passed, my passion for creative work

"grew so strong it usurped my active political interests.

"now,I feel I can be of more value making an artistic

"rather than a political contribution to society.

is that bad?"

in 1 949, however, Mclaren found himself in china

at the climax of their civil war.

it would be a watershed in his life.

Mclaren's reputation as a filmmaker

who made much from little,

had been noted by the chinese government and "unesco".

he ran the audio-visual section of the "healthy village project".

in 1 953, he went to india in a similar capacity

with edward ardizzone.

Mclaren trained artists and teachers

to produce materials for use in rural areas

in conjunction with the work

of medical and agricultural experts.

Mclaren realized that the use of indigenous means

of communication was the key to a successful rural education.

so he and the chinese artists invented ingenious variations

on the wall poster

and the scroll.

[Mclaren]: I taught them some things,

but they taught me more

about communicating with people of other races

and languages.

[Narrator]: although "the healthy village project"

took place during the chinese civil war

between the nationalists and the communists,

it had an impressive impact.

its philosophy became the basis for "unesco" projects.

[Mclaren]: three months after I went there,

communists took over our particular town,

so I was living under the new regime.

I saw what it was doing,

talked with many people and heard their stories,

particularly people between 20 and 30.

I tended to identify myself with what was going on there

because I thought what was happening was very good.

almost the day I left china,

the korean war broke out.

I came back to north america and felt great tension

about war in general.

the tension that was produced from my experience in china,

plus my return to an environment

where the newspapers were saying something totally different

from what i'd been used to,

that tension produced the film "neighbours".

[Mclaren]: I can't judge my films,

but if all my films were to be destroyed, except one,

I would prefer to have "neighbours"

because it has a strong social message

about the covetous of man,

about the irrationality of using violence

to solve problems;

it's a human statement which reveals human nature,

which none of my other films do.

winning an oscar didn't mean anything to me,

I didn't know what it was.

it's not important, but the film is important.

[Narrator]: thirty years later,

"neighbours" is still capturing audiences universally.

it was not, however, John Grierson's favourite.

[Grierson]: he was proud of making "neighbours".

he thought it was an important film.

I thought it was very naive.

I wouldn't trust Norman as a philosophic thinker.

Norman is for "hen hop".

Iet's face it, "hen hop" is wonderful,

it's an absolute joy to me.

that is his basic gift, he's got joy in his movement,

he's got loveliness in his movement,

fancy in his changes.

that's enough.

[Narrator]: in 1 971, Mclaren was asked

why he hadn't made any more films like "neighbours".

that's because the life I lead here

doesn't bring it out of me.

I shuttle back and forth between home and the "NFB",

and lead a relatively quiet existence

with a few intimate friends.

i'm not out in the world meeting people,

or in a different culture.

and the only films which concern human beings,

apart from some very early films,

is "neighbours, "chairy tale" and "pas de deux".

[millar]: "chairy tale" is the story

of a man who goes to sit in a chair,

and the chair responds by not wanting him to sit on it.

yes.

do you feel sympathy for inanimate objects

as much as for animate ones?

I have sympathy for things that are sat upon.

Iike chinese villages?

yes, the exploited,

the underdog.

yet, your films have not really exploited this theme very much.

is it because you're a fatalist?

no, it's because I get interested in abstraction.

i've always been interested in abstraction

since the age of about 14 or 1 5.

it's a very important area.

it's like music, which is an abstraction.

it doesn't refer to things outside of itself.

[Narrator]: in 1 972, Mclaren made "ballet adagio".

during the same period,

he observed that if he were to make any more abstract films,

it would be to the detriment of his soul.

[Grierson]: Norman is not a person who is tragic.

he suffers, but to suffer is not to be tragic.

he suffers because, like all artists,

he finds it difficult to get what he wants

or to get the effect that he wants.

the ease of his life at the "film board"

makes his esthetic life difficult.

he is the most protected artist in the history of the cinema.

he's under no great pain and suffering.

and that makes him suffer.

that's one of the paradoxes.

the certainty of his life may not be good for him.

I don't know...

[Narrator]: this is Mclaren's visual outline

of his 1 983 film "narcissus".

he first proposed a film based upon this myth in 1 959.

it was to be a half-ballet, half-pantomime film to music.

a youth wrestles with all the aspects of his personality

in his search for maturity, for friendship and love.

technically, Mclaren intended to use

the optical and mechanical processes of cinema in new ways.

the proposal evolved into two films: "pas de deux," 1 967,

and "narcissus", 1 983.

central to both these films

was Mclaren's conviction that narcissism,

an excessive self-love or self-concern,

was the major personal contemporary sin;

that the wages of narcissism

was separation from one's fellow creatures.

Mclaren followed the traditional outline of the myth

in which a youth rejects

the love of woman...

and man...

then falls in love with his own self.

as he was making plans for "narcissus",

Mclaren spoke to a journalist:

"the film is a reflection

"that i'm coming to the end of a whole span of my life.

"I have been very narcissistic myself at one level,

"though not on the surface.

"once I had many potentialities,

"but the one I developed was narcissism.

"and maybe that wasn't so bad.

every artist must be somewhat narcissistic."

during the production of "narcissus",

Mclaren observed that, nowadays,

there are artists who are alienated

from the general public.

and yet they create great things.

they are primarily in love with their capacity as artists.

they have fallen in love with their art.

but the narcissist can turn into

a great contributor to human culture and to human society.

in june 1 986, two years after his retirement from filmmaking,

Norman Mclaren was still improvising

for the camera.

action!

in a conversation with his friends

Guy Glover and Claude Jutra, Mclaren observed:

"an artist may be like a person

"who hears music and starts to dance.

"he may be dancing for his own satisfaction,

"but what motivates him to dance

"also motivates hundreds of other people to dance.

"the artist is only speaking some kind of common language,

"speaking to himself, expressing something.

"yet, other people recognize it

"and realize that, in this person's dancing,

there is something new and different."

captions performed by cnst, montreal