Deezone.com

The Vancouver International Film Festival continues to bless me. This time around it’s with the film Norman McLaren Retrospective where the festival describes the film as:

Esteemed by such diverse directors as François Truffaut and George Lucas during his 40-year career at the National Film Board, animator Norman McLaren (1914-1987) won more than 200 international awards. He revolutionized animation with his experiments, whether drawing directly on film with pen and ink, or working live with stop-motion, He was also a pioneer in electronic music and known for his impressive work in synthetic sound. His brilliantly inventive works constantly pushed the limits of handmade films and are today recognized as among the masterpieces of cinema. These films reveal McLaren as an artist of great range, both a master of pure abstraction and of physical comedy, but always an internationalist and intellectual sensitive to the endless transformations which make up life.

I have to confess that watching squiggly lines to the sounds of very primitive electronic music was not inspiring to say the least. In fact, the fellow beside me nodded off several times through the course of the film. It’s always hard to keep things in focus when someone is revered for efforts in the past that seem so primitive now - we must always remember where things come from.

The saving grace was the last clip done in 1968 called “Pas de Deux“. Animation wasn’t actually a part of this piece but rather some truly beautiful editing techniques. Dancers shot in high contrast are overlayed with the same sequence several frames delayed resulting in Spirograph visuals that touched the desire in me to do life drawing again.

I can only hope that I’ll be able to include some type of beauty in my projects.