A

Norman McLaren

Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren (1914–1987) revolutionized his field with his hand–drawn and hand–painted animated films. He also pioneered the use of pixilation—a filming technique that creates a stop–motion effect—which he used in his Academy Award–winning film Neighbors. McLaren created many of his projects for the National Film Board of Canada, where he was employed for more than 40 years.

McLaren was born on April 11, 1914, in Stirling, Scotland, the youngest of three children born to William McLaren, an interior designer, and his wife Jean (Smith) McLaren. In addition to his father, many of McLaren's other relatives on his father's side were house painters and interior designers, while his mother's family were farmers. McLaren's first introduction to animation came at the age of seven, when he first viewed Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse cartoons, as well as Walt Disney's "Silly Symphony" series. McLaren did not become interested in film until he was a teenager, however, and grew intrigued by the work of Russian filmmakers Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein.

McLaren entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1932 with the intention of studying interior design. He began making films during his first year at the college and so impressed the local newspapers with his work that he was called the "young genius of the Glasgow School of Art." Soon, he shifted his attention to animation. McLaren saved himself the expense of buying a camera and new film by purchasing a worn–out 35mm commercial film, soaking off the emulsion of the images in his bathtub, and painting new color images directly onto the celluloid to create animation. "The less money there is, the more imagination there has to be," he later remarked, as quoted in his obituary in the Los Angeles Times. The technique had another advantage, McLaren once noted, as recounted in a 1993 issue of Americas: "If I don't like what I've done, I can wipe it out with a damp cloth and begin again." He continued to paint and draw directly on film for the duration of his long career. "Handmade cinema is like watching thought, if thought could be seen," he once said, as quoted in Americas.

Experimented in Student Films

McLaren's next project was Seven till Five, a silent, black–and–white film shot on 16mm documenting the activities at the art school between the hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. His next two films were created in 1935. Camera Makes Whoopee, featuring a school dance orchestra with self–propelled instruments, utilized pixilation, a stop–action filming technique that exaggerates the movements of the subject. The technique gained widespread recognition in the 1980s, when it was used in musician Peter Gabriel's music video "Sledgehammer." Color Cocktail, another hand–painted work, followed. This film earned McLaren an award at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, which was presented to him by John Grierson, a celebrated British documentarian who judged the festival. In 1926, McLaren and Helen Biggar produced Hell Unlimited, a critique of arms trading, utilizing both camera less animation and photography of diagrams, animated maps, and puppets. McLaren also traveled to Spain to serve as a cameraman on Defense of Madrid, a documentary on the Spanish Civil War created to raise money for international aid. In addition, while in school he produced a series of advertising films for a local meat store which were shown in the company's window display.

McLaren found regular employment in the film industry in 1936 when Grierson, who headed the British General Post Office Film Unit, offered him a job. The film unit's staff was known for producing highly regarded experimental work, and McLaren trained with filmmakers Alberto Cavalcanti and Evelyn Cherry. At this time, he began to experiment with animated sound, creating percussive elements on a film's audio strip using pen and ink. McLaren's first film for the post office was a ten–minute, black–and–white documentary on the printing of the London telephone directory shot in 35mm and titled Book Bargain. The film was followed by News for the Navy, a documentary for the military branch. Many a Pickle, which featured animated furniture and used pixilation, promoted the post office's savings bank. A five–and–a–half minute film promoting airmail, Love on the Wing featured hand painted images of a lock and key, fork and spoon, and moth and flame, dancing through a landscape inspired by the surrealist paintings of Yves Tanguy. According to Americas, the British postmaster suppressed the film, declaring it "too Freudian," and it was not viewed widely until later years when it became popular among fans of underground film. McLaren left the post office in 1939 and briefly worked for the Film Center, a London company that made industrial films. His only project there was The Obedient Flame, an animated and pixilated piece on gas cooking.

The political consciousness McLaren exhibited in art school continued to develop along with his career and he leaned first toward communism, then socialism, and eventually, pacifism. As World War II approached, he feared he would be required to produce war propaganda films in London so he moved to the United States. Upon his arrival in New York, he first painted murals for wealthy homeowners and directed a New Year's greetings film for NBC. Soon, he was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to create a series of abstract shorts for $100 apiece. With no money for soundtracks, McLaren furthered his exploration of "synthetic sound." He first worked on perfecting the method he had developed at the post office, whereby he drew dots and dashes on an audio strip. Later, he photographed sequential index cards marked with specific sound patterns, which he then printed directly onto the audio strip.

McLaren used his developing technique in almost all his Guggenheim films, and even produced one sound–only piece, Rumba, which featured only the sound forms painted directly on the film as visual effects. McLaren also contributed several hand painted animated films, including Color Rhapsodie, Dots, Loops, and Stars and Stripes, in which the elements of the American flag dance. Boogie Doodle also featured hand painted animation, alongside a boogie woogie soundtrack by Albert Ammons. In addition, McLaren collaborated with filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute on Spook Sport, an animated interpretation of composer Camille Saint–Saëns' Dance Macabre. The animation technique exhibited in the Guggenheim films was painstaking, requiring more than 4,000 separate, tiny sketches just to complete a three–minute production. McLaren earned the admiration of some of the most prominent figures in film and art for his pioneering work. According to Americas, esteemed French director François Truffaut once called a four–minute McLaren piece "an absolutely unique work bearing no resemblance to anything achieved in sixty years of cinema history."

Joined National Film Board

In 1941, McLaren was again recruited by Grierson, this time to head the animation department at the newly created Canadian National Film Board in Ottawa, Ontario. McLaren was first enlisted to create war propaganda, despite his best efforts to avoid such work, and he applied trademark innovation to shorts on such topics as war gossip and the benefits of purchasing war bonds. His film on the latter, titled Hen Hop, featured a chaotic mass of line–drawn chicken scratch movements. McLaren spent several days in a chicken coop to set himself in the right frame of mind to draw the piece. According to Americas, when Pablo Picasso viewed the film, the famous painter remarked, "Finally, something new in the art of drawing."

McLaren next produced a series of short pieces set to French–Canadian folk songs. C'est l'aviron utilized traveling zoom photography, a special effect that created a sense of headfirst movement through space. McLaren had developed the technique in the 1930s and it was later used by director Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The next film, La poulette grise, used a "chain of mixes" technique that involved shooting a still pastel image frame by frame, adding to or subtracting from the drawing in each shot. La Merle depicts a white paper cutout blackbird that loses his features then has them oddly rearranged. After McLaren completed the series, he worked with Evelyn Lambart, a collaborator on several of his films, to produce Begone Dull Care, an abstract piece set to the music of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. McLaren and Lambart took turns painting long test strips of clean film then spliced together sections that best accompanied the soundtrack.

McLaren revisited his political concerns in the pixilated film Neighbors, conceived after he returned from a 1949 visit to China with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. There, McLaren taught animation to children and also saw communism in action, which he recognized to be much less insidious than it was portrayed to be in the west. Neighbors employed actors in a tale of two neighbors who raise a dispute over a flower growing on a mutual property line to the level of war and, ultimately, destruction. In 1952, McLaren received an Academy Award for the film, which remains his best known work. McLaren believed Neighbors was his most significant work. "If all my films were to be destroyed except one, I would want that one to be Neighbors because I feel it has a permanent message about human nature," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1981. In 1955, McLaren was awarded the Palm D'or at the Cannes Film Festival for another short, Blinkity Blank.

Turned Focus to Dance

In the 1960s, McLaren turned his focus to dance, an art form for which he also felt a great affinity, given its emphasis on movement. "Animation is not the art of drawings that move but rather the art of movements that are drawn," McLaren once remarked, as quoted in Americas. "What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame. The basic substance of the cinema is movement—at its lowest physical level, the movement of lightwaves and soundwaves . . . it is the motion that speak to us." Pas de Deux, produced in 1967, and Ballet Adagio, produced in 1972, both incorporate step printing, a production technique that creates a strobe–like effect. While intended as instructional tools for dancers, the films are also highly regarded for their artistic merits.

McLaren revisited the theme of ballet in his final film, Narcissus, which he completed in 1983. The 20–minute film, McLaren's longest, offers a balletic interpretation of the tragic myth portraying its title character's destruction through self–love. The special effects are subdued in comparison to McLaren's earlier work, allowing a studied focus on the film's subjects. "Narcissus has the idyllic mood and spare movement of Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun rather than the epic quality of Martha Graham's Greek myths. Like all of McLaren's dance films, it points the way to a new, collaborative art," wrote Christine Temin in the Boston Globe.

McLaren retired from the Film Board in 1984. Long in poor health, he died of a heart attack in Montreal, Quebec, on January 26, 1987. Following his death, the International Animated Film Association–Canada established an annual award in McLaren's honor and in 1989, the Film Board renamed its main building the Norman McLaren Building. In 1991 the Film Board issued a video collection of McLaren's 40–year body of work under its auspices in recognition of its 50th anniversary.

Books

Richard, Valliere T., Norman McLaren, Manipulator of Movement, University of Delaware Press, 1982.

Periodicals

Americas, September/October, 1993.

Boston Globe, March 5, 1984.

Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1987; February 8, 1987.

Online

National Film Board of Canada, http://www.nfb.ca/e/highlights/norman–mclaren.html (November 16, 2004).