Spontaneous frames of movement.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Canadian Norman McLaren's work

WITH INNOVATIVE HANDMADE TECHNIQUES, OSCAR-WINNER NORMAN MCLAREN SET A PRECEDENT IN THE FILM INDUSTRY AND INSPIRED ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD

WHEN CANADIAN FILMMAKER Norman McLaren died in 1987, the world of animated cinema lost both its technological pioneer and its conceptual pathbreaker. He left behind sixty films, two hundred international prizes, dozens of innovative techniques and countless audiences over the globe all deeply touched by his universal language of movement, image and sound.

"I never use speech in my films," he said. "I'd feel it an intrusion of an alien kind." Indeed, it was McLaren's genius to give pure abstraction--lines, squiggles, smears and splashes--a human face, to turn the non-objective image, whether a dancing red dash or a blushing blue dot, into a living being with instantly recognizable feelings and values.

Born in Scotland in 1914, McLaren moved to Canada at the age of twenty-seven to found the Animation Department at the National Film Board, that unique federal institution charged with "interpreting Canada," in the widest creative and communicative sense, to both Canadians and foreigners abroad. There is no doubt that McLaren was successful, for his name still comes up when people from Montreal to Monterrey and Mendoza talk about Canadian cinema.

McLaren proved so adept at communicating across cultures that he was invited by UNESCO to design simple teaching materials for health and sanitation projects in China and India. Throughout his life, whether making instructional films about cooking with gas, buying savings bonds, or mailing early for Christmas, he could always be counted upon to cast an aesthetic eye upon the merely mundane. The complete antithesis of a big organization man like Walt Disney, to whom he was often mistakenly compared, McLaren eschewed extensive planning, fancy equipment, and assembly line production in favor of spontaneous creativity, simple tools and intense collaboration. Some of McLaren's greatest films run barely three minutes, made at a single workbench without camera or microphone.

From the earliest age McLaren was moved by the principles of synaesthesia, the experience of all the senses melding into one. As a boy he listened to music on the radio and, closing his eyes, imagined forms and colors "jumping, leaping, wobbling, squirming." Later he collected smells by filling test tubes with odoriferous tinctures and setting them in specific sequences in order to simulate melody.

At the Glasgow School of Art, he painted visual interpretations of Debussy's musical suite "L' Apres Midi d'un Faun," itself based on the Mallarme poem. However, he opted to major in interior design because it allowed him more room to innovate--one of his projects was for a synaesthetic cocktail bar where colors, tastes and odors blended into one coherent experience.

While in art school he first saw films by the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, known for his dreamlike intercutting between multiple points of view, as well as the trick and animated films by the early French experimenters Emile Cohl and George Melies. McLaren soon switched his creative energy to cinema--the only art form other than dance, with which he was equally smitten, which combined sound, movement, image and color. Later attempts to bring scent into this equation met with humorous failure.

A talented painter and draftsman himself, McLaren felt conventional painting and drawing were dying arts, although he continued to practice both and revered the immediacy of their creative act. About his frustration with filmmaking's inherent delays, he said, "it's all a matter of not letting the complexities get you down. I try to maintain in my relationship with the film the same level of intimacy as exists between a painter and his canvas."

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