Some Aspects of Norman McLaren

By Robert Koehler

CANONS AND CATEGORIES

Just the sight of the thick, seven-disc-plus-booklet box set of the works of Norman McLaren produced by the National Film Board of Canada is enough to know how much has changed. From an animation filmmaker who was first seen by Canadians (many in rural cinemas) as providing amusing bits of relief during billings of NFB documentary features and featurettes, McLaren has now been officially canonized. Never mind that no other Canadian filmmaker has come within a light year of receiving such an elaborately presented, meticulously realized, and exhaustively presented survey (58 films, 15 original short documentaries, two complete film portraits, several excerpts from other nonfiction profiles, numerous retrieved fragments of unfinished or lost films, one audio sampling, and two films that amount to workshops on animation basics); no filmmaker anywhere else has either. Remember how thrilled we all were two years back when Criterion brought out their thoughtful and quite brilliant two-disc survey of Brakhage? It, too, thrust Brakhage up a few notches in the canon, or made some actually take notice of him for the first time—a stark example of the historiographic effect of DVD releases, a phenomenon becoming an area of inquiry in its own right. Criterion’s gift was nice, but the NFB’s is like some kind of national holiday gone berserk.

The French have done something like this for Pialat, the Japanese are doing it for Ozu, and Paolo Branco did it for Monteiro. (Americans have done it for nobody, not even Griffith. Nor have the Italians, even with all of their restoration activity.) It’s as if Claude Jutra’s declaration, made in his McLaren par Jutra (1961, on disc six), that McLaren “is the greatest of all filmmakers” is now not only not mad but a viable point of discussion. Most conventional film canons, and more than a few unconventional ones, typically exclude filmmakers in animation, experimental and/or short forms (in this case, all three). Possibly the most important first thrust of Norman McLaren: The Master’s Edition—even the title says so—is to declare that this bias is misguided at best. Even more: perhaps the canons have had it generally wrong all along, ignoring the most cinematic of film artists in favor of those more dependent on extra-cinematic forms. And yet even more: that we’ve been looking for “cinema” in all the wrong places.

It says much about common cultural and aesthetic attitudes that one of McLaren’s few live-action films, Neighbours (1952), the only one that involved something close to actors playing characters involved in a story, is his only Academy Award-winning work (Palme d’Or, too); it’s also the one most typically cited in detail in brief and long career surveys and film portraits, such as the BBC-produced The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees (1970, on disc six). Or conversely, it’s revealing that some of McLaren’s most abstract films, such as The Flicker Film (circa 1961), are marginalized to the point of being officially labelled as “unfinished,” even though what appears on disc one—an explosion of high-intensity strobing imagery created by rapidly alternating fields of black and white, coupled to infectious syncopation on the soundtrack—looks and sounds to be not only complete enough, but utterly mind-blowing. McLaren himself fell into the trap and further reinforced the standard categorization of his “greater” and “lesser” films, noting on one hand that had he to destroy all but one of his works, that one would be Neighbours, whereas he termed The Flicker Film as “too esoteric, even for me.”

MCLAREN VU PAR…

More than most filmmakers, where and how one sees McLaren has always profoundly affected one’s response. Although there’s virtually no remaining documentation of their initial reaction, many Canadians, including those in the under-served provinces expressly targeted by the NFB and its mission to spread the word and image of a proud, diverse and energetic nation, likely viewed such amusing early pieces as Hen Hop (1942) or even pieces designed with a wartime message such as Dollar Dance (1943) as mere cartoons and bits of relief between the “serious” stuff.

For their part, the international animation community, including leading innovators like Len Lye and Alexander Alexieff, took notice of the Scotland-born filmmaker when John Grierson, who had effectively scouted McLaren since his days as a student at the Glasgow School of Art, hired him first for the British General Post Office film unit, and then in 1941 plucked him out of the US (where McLaren, in self-exile, was barely scraping his rent money together, but where he devised how to make sound and music by making marks on the film strip’s soundtrack) to start up the NFB’s animation department. The fact that McLaren and Lye had independently arrived at the idea (in the mid-‘30s) of painting directly on celluloid also made him known as both an artist and innovator. Grierson thus knew that placing McLaren at the NFB was like honey to a bunch of young animator bees (such as René Jodoin), soon to buzz their way to or be recruited for NFB’s Ottawa headquarters in the early ‘40s.

Grierson’s famous comment that Canada’s two great exports were wheat and Norman McLaren is no exaggeration. As an American growing up in Los Angeles in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I heard of only one Canadian filmmaker—McLaren. Schools from elementary on up clamoured for the NFB’s visually and sonically clever shorts, and those shorts almost always meant McLaren. But perhaps unlike other students whose teachers screened the films as amusements, my high-school media teacher—who had organized a film society—presented him as an artist who could both experiment and engage an audience. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I enjoyed a rare and ideal context with which to take in the films, although I was distinctly aware that this was my first contact with experimental film. And not just Neighbours (everybody screened that one, even if most Americans weren’t aware at the time that they were seeing a censored version which excluded the warring neighbours’ vicious murders of the other’s wife and baby), but Hen Hop; Begone Dull Care (1949), his radical painted film experiment with chief collaborator Evelyn Lambart set to Oscar Peterson’s trio; Fiddle-De-Dee (1947), which is surely the only case of jaunty Québecois fiddle music married to the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism; Blinkity Blank (1956), possibly his greatest film, in which McLaren discovered the effect of not drawing on every single frame; his dynamic play on the numbers one-through-five in a film he expressly made for young people, Rythmetic (1956); A Chairy Tale (1956-57), his live-action masterpiece starring a Keatonesque Jutra; and Mosaic (1965), perhaps the most widely shown of his more abstract works. And even with his fine stroke of cinema pedagogy, my teacher failed to show us the two films that would have put Mosaic in its proper context: the two previous works with Lambart, Lines Vertical (1960) and Lines Horizontal (1962), born out of an experiment of drawing a single vertical line down a long strip of clear celluloid. Just as Lines Horizontal was ingeniously made by re-printing Lines Vertical at a 90 degree angle, so Mosaic emerged from combining the previous two, blanking out the lines and creating a kinetic webbed effect.

The wide distribution of NFB and McLaren shorts on 16mm in schools lent him a fame second only to Walt Disney, but a later decline in 16mm and in school-based screenings of animation sent McLaren back into general obscurity. During this rise and fall, little was ever made of the fact that he had made virtually all of his work on 35mm and rarely on 16mm, and that the well-travelled rental reels of 16mm typically left the films in scratchy tatters. I can recall only one instance, at Filmex in the late ‘70s, where I ever viewed a McLaren film in 35mm. (A selection of the films in restored 35mm prints debuted at the Cannes film festival, and now appears as a modest touring show timed with the box set’s release, showing at Canadian film festivals in the Fall.)

The option that the new set provides for viewing the films goes beyond having access to all of the available work; putting aside the obvious drawback that this (still) isn’t 35mm, the viewer is able to see the work restored to its original colour tones, cleaned of all but the original “dirty” artifacts that existed on the original prints and, just as importantly, at full screen size. This last point has stoked a minor controversy on the website www.mastersofcinema.org, which has proven extremely helpful in explaining the issues of overscan (a syndrome on standard CRT monitors that fails to include the entire original image) and underscan (a technique meant to compensate for overscan, often by windowboxing the image) of films viewed on video. In a June entry, the site warned that the apparent underscanning used by NFB technicians had produced an image of less than optimal resolution.

With all due regard for the perspicacious cinephiles at MOC, there is no real problem. Having viewed the complete contents on all seven discs on either my (relatively new) large, flat-screen Sony monitor and my Mac computer screen, I could spot no detectible loss of resolution due to the window-boxing—not, to be sure, like I have on some recent window-boxed Criterion releases, about which the MOC folks have been rightly complaining. More notably and usefully, the DVD format for McLaren’s films permits playing with slow-motion, pausing, and other manipulations at will—something that nearly anyone who sees the work wants to instinctively do, and a possibility that allows the viewer to come as close as possible to McLaren’s own experience while running his reels back and forth or at stop in his Moviola or on his lightboard table where he drew.

INDEXING AND CATEGORIZING

As a work of DVD cinephilia, The Master’s Edition proposes several possibilities for future DVD projects, especially those concerned with comprehensive surveys. Except for the final disc—which contains the uncut version of Andre S. Labarthe’s and Janine Bazin’s 1967 Cineastes de notre temps profile (whose title is mislabelled on the disc sleeve), an amusing excerpt from McLaren par Jutra and a 38-minute NFB-produced workshop film on Alexieff’s and Claire Parker’s pinscreen animation technique, plus a brief explanation of the restoration project that may or may not satisfy the window-boxing critics—each disc is organized according to a series of themes which include concepts (dance, surrealism, war and peace), methodology (paper cut-outs, painting with light) and collaborators (composer Maurice Blackburn, Lambart, performer and fellow animation filmmaker Grant Munro, and that other NFB legend, René Jodoin). Sometimes, this has the confusing result of including some films in more than one thematic category on a disc. Each of these themes has a corresponding NFB-produced documentary that averages five minutes’ running time and leans toward the bland, though they contain astounding nuggets such as disc one’s theme documentary noting that, as a precocious student at the Glasgow School of Art, McLaren hadn’t viewed any Dziga Vertov films before making his wildly Vertovian and orgasmic display of montage, Camera Makes Whoopee (1935). Better, each film has an accompanying “dossier” file that can be clicked to obtain precise technical data (including materials used), a relevant McLaren quote, and, quite often, an audio file clip of McLaren further commenting on the film at hand.

The utility for researchers, critics, students and academics is fairly unlimited, and as a methodical indexing of a filmmaker’s work, The Master’s Edition serves as a model of DVD-making as a critical act that operates in an entirely different vein than the uses (and abuses) of the commentary track—until now, the main method that critical approaches and thematics could be applied on disc. Interestingly, the more than 15 hours of material is free of commentary tracks; on the other hand, the accompanying booklet (that other forum for criticism in the DVD format) includes a disappointingly thin summary by McLaren collaborator and author Donald McWilliams (though with an invaluable set of indices for the discs, including a long chronology and short bibliography). While it may be that the set’s indexing structure works best for surveys of short-format filmmakers, particularly for artists like McLaren who declared several disparate and defined areas of interest (most notably music and dance, which reaches its climax with late-career works like 1968’s Pas de deux, and his finale, 1983’s Narcissus), there’s no reason why this or a similar organizing principle can’t work for DVDs of comparably eclectic and wide-ranging artists.

DROPPED FRAMES

Maybe it comes from being positioned as the definitive edition, but the set can’t help but draw the viewer’s attention to certain aspects of McLaren that are missing. Perhaps they’re unavailable or lost, but his two early ‘50s experiments in 3-D would have been interesting inclusions demonstrating yet another case study of tinkering, testing, and exploring. At least one substantial essay by a McLaren critic or scholar should have been included—two that come immediately to mind are Terence Dobson, whose book The Film Work of Norman McLaren was published this August, and Bill Schaffer, whose essay, “The Riddle of the Chicken,” on Senses of Cinema, has a vivid grasp of McLaren’s various animation tendencies. The most glaring omission from the cluster of films on McLaren is McWilliams’ own Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990), which can be found on Milestone’s two-disc set, Norman McLaren: The Collector’s Edition. In a manner strikingly reminiscent of Jacques Richard’s interesting but intensely frustrating bio-documentary, Le Fantome d’Henri Langlois (2004)—which went out of its way to avoid discussing Langlois’ homosexuality—not a word is mentioned in any of the materials of McLaren being gay, save passing mention of his longtime companion Guy Glover (noted by McWilliams in his essay as being “with McLaren from the moment they met at the ballet in London one night in July 1937 until [McLaren’s death] in January 1987.” Searching for homoerotic signs in McLaren’s opus can lead nowhere, but finally, with Narcissus, he did depict and refer to male love. (Ironically, such signs were at one point read into the physical actions of Neighbours’ warring men, but only by those unaware that they were reading from the censored version released in the US and Italy, which excluded the crucial shots of their families.)

This lack of discussion is in contrast to conversation that crops up in both the BBC and Cineastes de notre temps portraits of the clear tension in McLaren’s art between his leftist politics of engagement (he actively worked for the Scottish Communist Party in the mid-‘30s, and served as one of Ivor Montagu’s cameraman on the pro-Republican The Defence of Madrid [1936]) and his supposedly apolitical abstract films, along with his positioning in NFB programming as providing “the light entertainment” on the bill. McLaren is repeatedly asked by his interviewers why he didn’t make more political films like Neighbours, although one seriously doubts that these interviewers had had the chance, as viewers do with the set, of seeing a true piece of political radicalism like his crudely but enthusiastically made anti-corporate mix of model animation and live-action, Hell Unlimited (1936). He responds by helpfully pointing out that while his films seem like antic romps—in A Chairy Tale, a man and a chair battle each other, with the chair refusing to be sat upon—they do contain political subtexts. (Fighting against submission, in the case of Chairy.) McLaren’s fascination with machines and tools, as well as the precisely scientific thinking he applied to solving animation problems and challenges, interacts with and sometimes contradicts his equal obsession with surrealism (particularly Yves Tanguy) and dream logic manifested in his visualizations of metamorphosis. But such a contradiction doesn’t extend—as some of the material here would imply—to his films, whether they are abstract, aesthetic or overtly topical. War and the struggle for genuine liberation runs solidly through McLaren from start to finish; he may happen to adopt dance here, a fiddle there, scratches on the film stock or soundtrack there, but the commitment never wavers.

Norman McLaren

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