A life in four dimensions By David Morgan Take a piece of paper and a pencil and draw a cube. Draw another cube next to it, slightly higher on the page. Now connect all of the vertices on the first cube with all of the related vertices on the second cube. The diagram that you have just created is known as a Tesseract or Hypercube. In the same way that the act of drawing a cube on a piece of paper creates a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional structure, the Tesseract is used by mathematicians to create a twodimensional representation of a four-dimensional structure. The diagram creates a kind of mathematical map charting the movements and metamorphoses that a geometric form undergoes over time and relies on the same optical illusion that leads us to believe that the avenue of trees in a painting is actually receding into the distance. For this reason it has held a special fascination for both artists and mathematicians throughout the 20th century. When you look closely at one of these diagrams you tend to experience sudden and disorientating changes of perspective – is one shape in front of the other, or behind it? You also start to realise that you have actually drawn more than just these two connected cubes. In the same way that joining up six squares makes a cube, joining up eight cubes creates a Tesseract. The top of one cube simultaneously becomes both the front, and the side, of another –
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depending on which way you decide to view the angles. Ever wondered why they started referring to Picasso’s work as Cubism? When the Canadian filmmaker George Dunning introduced the concept of the Tesseract to his mentor, Norman McLaren, the whole idea immediately struck a chord. The early 20th century had seen the kind of convergence between science and art that has been witnessed only a few times in history. It had occurred once before, when artists first seized upon the concept of perspective and helped to drive its development. In the 1920s and 30s it was relativity theory that was breaking new ground and providing a fresh impetus for both disciplines. Cinema, with its ability to simultaneously express both space and time, was propelled to a leading position within the arts. The two men first met when McLaren interviewed Dunning for a position at the National Film Board of Canada’s animation unit, and it soon transpired that the two of them had a great deal in common. Both of them shared a passionate love of surrealism, and neither of them made a particular secret of their homosexuality – a fairly bold stance in the conservative atmosphere of North America in the 1940s and 50s. Following his time at the NFB Dunning would also eventually emigrate, although his journey was to be in the opposite direction from McLaren’s – from Canada to
Britain. It was here that his love of surrealism would lead to him working on the Beatles TV series and eventually lead to his best-known film Yellow Submarine.
awards and prizes reads like a catalogue of the film world’s honoraria: an Oscar, Palme D’Or, Silver Bear, and first prizes from dozens of other film festivals.
McLaren, on the other hand, would continue to work at the NFB for the rest of his career. He would spend a total of 43 years at the Board, producing approximately one new film a year. By the time he retired in 1984 he had won more awards than any other filmmaker in history, but in his spare time he would often return to the mathematical enigma that Dunning had introduced him to. He would produce doodles, sketches and models exploring the phenomenon, and in his later years he even created an exhibition of four-dimensional sculptures, at least one of which is still held by the NFB.
Having left Britain at the start of the Second World War he eventually settled in Canada and rose to become one of the country’s leading citizens. His adopted homeland eagerly celebrated his achievements and, following his retirement, he was awarded the Order of Canada – the Canadian equivalent of a Knighthood. In his letter of congratulation the Cultural Minister of the day didn’t feel as if he was damning McLaren with faint praise when he repeated John Grierson’s famous maxim that ‘Canada’s two biggest exports are wheat and Norman McLaren’.
In order to appreciate why mathematical form should hold such an enduring fascination for an artist like McLaren it is obviously necessary to learn a bit more about the life and work of one of the most influential, and utterly neglected, Scottish artists of the 20th century. And in many ways his life is rather like the Tesseract itself – a thing made up of numerous different facets and dimensions.
In many ways it was an apt (if not particularly flattering) choice of quote. Out of all of the people that McLaren worked with throughout his life Grierson was the most influential. He provided McLaren with his start in the film world, and he reached out a helping hand again when McLaren found himself adrift in New York following a self-imposed exile from Europe. Although he may not have been aware of it at the time Grierson was also largely responsible for McLaren’s exile in the first place.
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Born in Stirling in 1914 William Norman McLaren went on to become one of the most critically successful filmmakers of all time. Although he may never have been a household name in Britain his work was well known and well respected around the globe. A list of his
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Their first meeting came towards the end of McLaren’s time at Glasgow School of Art, which is now commemorated by a small plaque mounted just inside the front doors of the GSA building. The plaque represents one of the few public traces of McLaren’s life in Scotland,
and carries a touch of irony from the fact that McLaren often claimed to have never graduated from GSA. As an aimless teenager McLaren had decided to apply on the simple basis that art had been his best subject at school. His parents encouraged him to enrol for Interior Design hoping that he would learn a practical trade, however this was soon waylaid by the obsession with film that was to shape the rest of his life. McLaren was lucky enough to be at GSA at a time when film was making a major impact on avant-garde art. In his second year at Art School he joined the Glasgow Film Society and began to encounter the works of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. At around the same time a group of tutors and students at the Art School set up the Kiné Society, an informal filmmaking group that continued to run for many years. One group served as a source of knowledge and inspiration, while the other provided him with the means and resources to put his ideas into practise. McLaren had long been dissatisfied with painting, seeing it as an outdated medieval art form that had become obsolete in the rapidly changing world of the 20th century. The arrival of film had transformed people’s perception of the world, and the mechanical nature of the medium made it an ideal way to capture the vibrancy and pace of the changing times. McLaren was not just interested in film from a modernist perspective however. As a teenager he had often experienced powerful bursts of synesthesia, in which one type of sensory stimulus would trigger a reaction in another sense. There are many varieties of synesthesia and McLaren experienced a particularly strong type of audio/visual synesthesia in which listening to music would trigger powerful visions. People with this particular form of the condition experience different musical tones as colours that flash across their field of vision in time with the music. Many people find the condition to be highly pleasurable, and McLaren very quickly realised that films’ combination of sound, vision and movement could provide an ideal means for him to try and capture the feeling of his teenage experiences. McLaren’s earliest works are abstract explorations of the way in which colour and sound could be combined. With absolutely no access to equipment he had to figure out some means of getting films made, and his solution was to start working with direct animation – drawing or painting directly onto the filmstrip itself. The production process could not be more perfectly
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suited to the needs of an aspirant filmmaker, since all that was required was some film stock and a means of making marks on it. In order to get his first film produced all that McLaren had to do was procure some scrap film and commandeer the family bathtub for two weeks in order to soak the emulsion off of it. The means of production may have been primitive but the film that resulted was so popular at Art School film screenings that it eventually became worn out and the picture faded to nothing through repeated projection. Once the Kiné Society had been established McLaren had the opportunity to access cameras and make connections with other enthusiastic students. When the Society came to produce its first film, McLaren successfully pitched an idea for a kind of observational documentary. 7 till 5 depicts a day in the life of the art school and draws heavily on the influence of the Soviet filmmakers in its shot selection and editing. The film was quite a success and McLaren decided to follow it up with Camera makes Whoopee, another variation on the same theme, this time conveying the excitement of preparations for the annual Art School Ball. The film displays a greater degree of technical sophistication thanks to McLaren’s acquisition of a Cine-Kodak Special, which allowed him to experiment with a whole range of special effects. Camera makes Whoopee features McLaren’s first full use of pixellated animation in which he brought life to inanimate objects through stop frame photography. However, McLaren’s urge to try out every feature on the camera meant that the film suffered from a lack of structure, a fault that was also evident in Hell Unlimited, an antiwar film that he was to produce with sculpture student Helen Biggar. A professional career began to beckon when McLaren entered some of his student films into the 3rd Glasgow Amateur Film Festival. Grierson was on the judging panel and was already renowned for his ability to spot talented young artists. Almost as soon as the contest was over he offered McLaren a job at the GPO, but not before giving him a good taste of the kind of treatment he could expect: When Grierson came to the final evening of the festival and gave his assessment of the films, he started with my fancy film [Camera makes Whoopee] and gave it hell. He said, ‘Technically it’s very competent, but artistically it’s a jumble and a mess. It’s got no sense
of form or organisation, it’s got no development, and it’s totally zero as far as being a work of art.’ I was counting on that occasion, so I thought well, there it goes. I had hoped to work in films for the rest of my life and that’s it, I’ve had it. Then he came to my little film [Colour Cocktail] and gave it first prize – the little abstract film. He said, ‘That is a work of art.’1 The encounter changed McLaren’s life and set the tone for his long relationship with Grierson, who would always continue to be critical of the frivolous streak that ran through McLaren’s films. Grierson would always encourage McLaren to push himself on to greater things, but first and foremost he had to learn the art of serious, businesslike filmmaking. The first lesson was to have a profound effect. Almost as soon as McLaren arrived at the GPO, Grierson decided to put him on sabbatical leave. He wanted McLaren to accompany documentary maker Ivor Montagu on a trip to film the Spanish Civil War. Grierson knew that as an avowed communist McLaren would be interested in the assignment, and the pressures of filming under fire would provide a much better lesson in the art of disciplined filmmaking than the mundane fare that awaited him on his return to the GPO. He was not wrong in this regard, but the trip was probably to have a greater effect on McLaren’s personal life than on his artistic development. The scenes of children’s corpses piled up in a hospital that he filmed for Montagu’s The Defence of Madrid instantly confirmed McLaren’s ardent belief in Pacifism and in turn triggered his decision to leave Britain for America at the start of the Second World War.
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Life in the US was difficult for McLaren, but he did not allow this to interrupt his filmmaking. He did not have a great deal of success in attracting job offers, but managed to earn some money by producing a short animation for NBC, and by assisting Mary-Ellen Bute on her film Spook Sport. In order to try and generate more interest in his own work, McLaren again returned to producing hand-drawn films. He produced Stars & Stripes and Allegro independently before discovering the Museum of Non-Objective Art (or the Guggenheim, as it was later to be known). He introduced himself to Baroness Hilla von Rebay, the Director of the Museum, and persuaded her to commission some films from him. He produced Dots, Loops and Boogie Doodle as quickly as he possibly could, adding sound to the images by drawing on the optical soundtrack of the film. Despite the fact that the Guggenheim commissions helped to boost his morale, the money that he earned from them could only sustain him for so long. He eventually took a job at Caravelle Films, a commercial firm that produced industrial and public relations films. The job may have ‘saved him from hunger’ but McLaren had to start at the bottom and work his way up. After several months of working there, he had just started directing his first major project for the firm when Grierson got in touch with him again. An opening had come up at the Film Board, and Grierson believed McLaren was the man for the job. *
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Pacifism is an ideology that can often be difficult to reconcile with other moral or political convictions. McLaren became a communist
who did not believe in armed struggle, and yet left the communist party when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. He only took up Grierson’s offer of a post at the National Film Board of Canada on the condition that he would not be required to produce ‘hard sell’ propaganda for the war, but wound up contributing to the war effort nevertheless. The wartime films that he produced were lighthearted affairs designed to bolster morale on the home front. A film like Hen Hop comes as a surprise because it makes no direct reference to the conflict up until you reach the end where a tacked on message exhorts the audience to purchase war bonds. Other films like 5 for 4 or Dollar Dance encourage viewers to bolster their savings in order to help prevent wartime inflation. As light-hearted and as non-violent as the message may have been, the irony was, of course, that McLaren was helping to finance the very same arms trade that he had condemned in Hell Unlimited. After the war McLaren became a strong supporter of UNESCO and signed up to help with education programmes, first in China and then in India. The projects that he worked on were based around teaching basic animation techniques to local artists so that they could then produce hand-drawn films and posters to help teach villagers about public health issues. The year that he spent in China found him caught up in the tide of history once more. Two months after his arrival in the country, communist forces reached the village of Peip’ei, where he was staying. They were greeted with open arms by the people of the village and the deplorable conditions that had horrified McLaren on his arrival began to change almost immediately. The fact that the communists took over the village without a shot being fired no doubt also helped to cement his affection for the new regime. But despite McLaren’s political convictions, and his direct experience of conditions in China, India and Spain, he was only ever an incidentally political filmmaker. When Canada entered the Korean War, shortly after his return from China, he felt motivated to produce Neighbours – the most overtly political film that he was ever to make. An allegorical tale, the film depicts the story of two neighbours living in suburban harmony. Things start to go wrong when a flower magically appears on the boundary line between their houses. Carried away with rapture at the beauty of the flower the neighbours begin arguing over who owns it. The argument rapidly descends into violence with the two protagonists
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beating each other to death with planks from a white picket fence. The film was strong enough to win McLaren the Oscar for Best Animation, however McLaren acquiesced without much argument when distributors requested that he cut a scene in which the neighbours attack each other’s wives and children. In a letter to his parents he explained that he had never been happy with the scene as it did not fit in with the rest of the film’s formal structure. He promptly ordered the scene cut from all distribution copies and had the negatives burnt. He would only reverse his decision years later when the violence of the Vietnam War convinced him that he had been wrong to water down the film’s message. Neighbours stands out as a political film in a career that largely tended to shy away from expressing personal politics. However McLaren’s ready willingness to cut scenes that he felt were out of place showed that he had fully absorbed all of Grierson’s lessons about discipline and structure. As his career progressed McLaren became more absorbed with the formalism of filmmaking, and it is easy to see that as his films gradually become more minimalist and abstract any sense of political conviction also starts to evaporate. *
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When one comes to examine the range of films that McLaren produced over the course of his career, it becomes apparent that his political beliefs were not the only aspect of his life that seemed filled with contradiction. There is a marked stylistic difference between the hand-drawn films that he produced in the first half of his career and the more technical and precise films that he produced in later years. The direct animation techniques that he used in the early part of his career have an organic, visually explosive quality that relate directly to his personal experience of synesthesia. As his career progresses, he begins to employ different creative methods, resulting in a much more measured and contemplative approach in his films. When McLaren arrived at the NFB he had full access to a whole range of production facilities and was soon given the task of establishing an Animation Unit. He excelled at teaching and created an atmosphere of learning and experimentation that helped to accelerate the careers of all of the talented young artists that he recruited. However he found the
administrative aspects of the job cumbersome, and he wanted to spend more time pursuing his own ideas. When he decided to step down as Head of the Unit the level of respect that he enjoyed was such that he was essentially given free reign over the projects that he wanted to pursue. The fact that many of his films cost next to nothing to produce meant that he had no difficulty getting them passed by a selection committee, and the amount of research and experimentation that went into each one inevitably meant that he would produce a wealth of new techniques and ideas that could be used to further the teaching of animation. In Grierson’s words McLaren became ‘the most protected artist in the history of cinema’. This kind of freedom represented a complete shift from the days when McLaren was only able to rely on his own resources. He now had free access to optical printers and was able to call upon the assistance of a wide range of enthusiastic collaborators. After the end of the war he developed a whole range of new animation techniques that made full use of the facilities at his disposal. Films such as Là-haute sur ces montagnes, La Poulette Grise, and A Little Phantasy on a 19th Century Painting all make use of McLaren’s ‘chain of dissolves’ technique which he used to animate pastel drawings. By using overlapping dissolves McLaren was able to blend from one version of the still image to another creating a picture that seemed to be changing continuously in a seamless fashion. C’est l’aviron also makes use of a conceptually similar ‘chain of zooms’ in which the viewer appears to be travelling forwards through a landscape of
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infinite depth, but which is actually made up of a succession of flat images. These films marked both a distinct change of style, and a huge leap forward in the variety of animation techniques that McLaren was able to employ. This new strand of work helped McLaren to work through his frustration with painting by allowing him to bring depth and movement to static images. These films also marked a pivotal moment in McLaren’s artistic development, as he started to move away from the hand drawn films that he had already mastered during his years in Britain and New York and began to develop films entirely on the basis of technical experiment. This led to a shift from the frenetic pace and energy of the early works, through a more sedate and painterly exploration of light and colour, and on to a minimalist exploration of the most basic elements of movement and sound. The first public demonstration of this pared down minimalist aesthetic came in 1960 with the release of Lines Vertical. This six-minute film consists solely of a line that runs from the top to the bottom of the screen. The line moves from side to side across the screen before starting to split into a number of separate vertical lines. The only action in the film comes from the movement of the lines in relation to one another as they create a series of changing patterns across the screen. The film was created by simply etching the lines into a strip of film in a meticulously planned series of patterns. An optical printer was then used to produce changes in the colour of the background – the only other visual element of the film.
It could scarcely be possible to come up with any further refinement to the basic concept, and yet Lines Vertical became the basis for two further projects. Lines Horizontal followed on as the natural successor to the first film. McLaren instinctively felt that having the lines running across the screen would create an entirely different effect since the viewer’s impression of gravity would also come into play. He created the film by using an optical printer to rotate every frame of Lines Vertical by 90 degrees. A third film, Mosaic, was also created by superimposing the previous two films on top of each other so that only the points of intersection between the lines were visible. The pared-down aesthetic of the Lines films preceded much of minimalist film work of the 1960s and 70s and their success can be judged by the fact that even nowadays they feel as radical and as innovative as they were back then. For anyone who had been familiar with McLaren’s work up until that point, Lines Vertical must have been an exciting and inventive new departure by an artist who had already been creating films for almost 30 years. However, there was one underlying element that McLaren used throughout his career to structure all of his films. That guiding force was the use of sound. *
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Music was a passion for McLaren right throughout the whole of his life. While starting out at Art School he soon came to realise that the vibrancy and pace of his abstract films was ideally suited to a fast jazz accompaniment. One of the reasons why these films were so popular was because his fellow students loved the opportunity to revel in the jazz culture that McLaren was putting on the screen. This love of jazz was to carry over into McLaren’s years in Canada. In 1949 he learned that the Oscar Peterson Trio were performing in Montreal and, inspired by a recording of them that he had in his collection, he felt the urge to revisit the style of his earliest films. He took a trip down to the club where the group was performing, and over the course of two days he managed to persuade Peterson to create a soundtrack for Begone Dull Care. The group improvised a number of different phrases which McLaren was then able to take away and use to structure the film. Working with Evelyn Lambart he developed images in short bursts of four or five seconds and matched these up with the different musical phrases that Peterson had
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provided. The film itself stands as a wonderful testament to the strength of the collaboration between two great artists. It was certainly a huge leap forward from the days when McLaren had put jazz records on a gramophone to accompany his silent student films. His love of jazz may have been an important part of his student years, but it was actually an Art School screening of Rudolph Pfenninger’s Tönende Handschrift (Tonal Handwriting, 1929) that was to have a more important impact on McLaren’s whole approach to sound. Pfenninger’s film was famous for its use of a synthetic sound track that dispensed with recording and instead made use of the same kind of direct animation that McLaren was using to create his images. One of the main methods of incorporating sound into a film involves converting electronically recorded sounds into an optical waveform, which is then printed onto the celluloid as another narrow picture strip running alongside the individual frames of the film. Photoelectric diodes in the projector then convert the sound back into an electronic form that can be played back through the cinema’s sound system. Because these optical sound systems are based on converting an image into sound, it is possible to create sounds from any kind of visual material. Pfenninger’s film was remarkable because he dispensed with conventional recorded sound and instead created the soundtrack by photographing cards containing graphic representations of different sounds, which he then printed onto the soundtrack area of the film. Other artists in Germany and Russia were also experimenting with ways in which they could create artificial sound. László Moholy-Nagy incorporated the principles of direct animation into the creation of sound by drawing, painting and printing images on the soundtrack. Moholy-Nagy’s influence on McLaren may have been more direct as he later became associated with the social circle around the GPO film unit during the time that McLaren was there. McLaren also got to work with Jack Ellitt, an Australian musician who worked at the GPO and who had also carried out experiments in hand-drawn sound. These ideas were to prove invaluable to McLaren when he left for New York just before the outbreak of the war. Even during his most impoverished years in the US he was still able to add sound to his films by simply extending the animation from the picture track onto the sound track. McLaren started out with the basics, painting
simple lines and blobs alongside the picture elements. Over the years, however, he gradually pulled apart the whole visual mechanics of the sound. Working with Evelyn Lambart, he adapted Pfenninger’s system and built up a whole card file of geometric patterns corresponding to all the notes of the musical scale. By photographing these cards and printing the image onto the soundtrack, McLaren was able to use pictures in the same way as a composer would use the keys of a piano, arranging notes one after the other in a temporal structure that he could use to piece together the visual elements of the film. These synthetic soundtracks featured in many of McLaren’s films no matter what style they were in. They provided the joyous bounce of films such as Loops and Dots, and the disconcerting and slightly disturbing aura that undercuts the potentially comic elements of Neighbours. The finest expression of the technique, however, comes with the 1971 film Synchromy. Another of McLaren’s minimalist films, it was created by simply reversing the whole concept of the process and printing the optical soundtrack onto the image area of the film. The result is a perfectly synchronous display of light and sound, as the geometric patterns of the soundtrack are recreated in a host of colours. Once again McLaren had successfully managed to convey the feeling of simultaneously seeing and hearing the sound. *
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Right throughout his career McLaren’s guiding principle was that ‘animation is not the art of drawings that move, but of movements that are drawn’. Over the course of 30 years he had explored new ways of breaking movement
apart and piecing it back together again. He had managed to turn sound into vision, and yet the more he understood about the underlying structures of his work, the less satisfied he became. In his later years he came to view his early hand-crafted works as basic and in many ways immature. For McLaren filmmaking was always about the next idea and the new technique – an ongoing quest for a better means of expression. He explained to biographers that he rarely, if ever, watched his films again once they had been completed. It was a painful irony that the harder McLaren strived to find the perfect means of expressing movement, the harder he found it to work within the confines of celluloid. Having boiled movement down to its barest essentials with his minimalist films, he was forced to start looking at other types of art for inspiration. His lifelong love of music had already provided the structure for numerous projects. It was only natural that he should turn to dance, his other lifelong passion, to find his new means of expression. Ballet had always held a fascination for McLaren, ever since he was a young man. He had met Guy Glover, his lifelong partner, at the ballet in London in 1937. The two of them were instantly attracted and remained together up until McLaren’s death 50 years later. In interviews McLaren speculated that if he had been born in London rather than Stirling he would almost certainly have become a choreographer rather than a filmmaker, and for the last 15 years of his career he set about trying to become both. Pas De Deux and Ballet Adagio, the two earliest ballet films, follow on directly from McLaren’s minimalist works and, in keeping with most of
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his films from the 1960s onwards, narrative tends to take a back seat. In order to capture the essence of the dance McLaren went back to basic principles. The dancers wore plain outfits of either beige or black, and danced against a plain background. Slow motion was the only technical device that was used during filming – none of the ballet films feature significant camera movement, and most of the action is captured in a single set-up. The only edits that are included are those that can help to give us a better appreciation of the movement by taking us closer to the action. Having abandoned every other means of manipulating the image, McLaren allowed himself only one type of intervention. He had already used the optical printer to create films such as Lines Horizontal and Synchromy, and in his last series of films he would use it to break down, analyse and replicate the movement of the dancers. This was important since part of the original idea behind the films was that they could be used as training aids for professional dancers. Pas De Deux features the most complex and intricate use of the optical printer that McLaren was ever to undertake. Shot in black and white, the film starts off in darkness with a female dancer lying in the centre of the screen. Her figure is strongly cross-lit so that we can only discern her outline, but not her features. She rises and begins to dance, before coming to rest for a moment. As she moves off, she leaves an imprint of her image behind her on the screen. After a few moments this doppelgänger image also begins dancing, and merges back with the original dancer when she comes to rest once more. Eventually she is joined by a male dancer and, as they enter into the Pas De Deux proper, the use of optical printing grows
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ever more complex. Their dance starts to take on a sculptural aspect as every one of their movements is repeated over and over, filling the screen with light. The last film that McLaren ever made was Narcissus, a dance version of the Greek myth in which a young man falls in love with his own reflection. At 22 minutes it was the longest film that McLaren had ever made, and by necessity it also involved a final return to traditional narrative structure. In stylistic terms it is very similar to Pas De Deux, with all of the dancers performing in a darkened void. The first section of the film is taken up with a straightforward dance sequence in which Narcissus is wooed by first a female admirer and then a male admirer. There is no use of any form of special effects throughout this whole sequence, which lasts for the best part of 10 minutes. It is only once Narcissus has rejected the advances of both his suitors that he comes across a pool of water and falls in love with his own reflection. The reflection comes to life, and it is here that McLaren’s art comes into play. Once again he turns to the optical printer to create a fantasy world in which Narcissus dances with his own reflection. Sometimes the two dance separately and sometimes they dance in a perfect reflection of each other’s movement. In one section McLaren also blurs the dancers movements using an in-camera technique that he had originally developed for A Chairy Tale. In the earlier film the blurring of movement had been used to artificially emphasise a sense of speed, but here it is used to slow things down, and it lends the dancers’ movements a painterly quality. It would be easy to view these later dance films as a retreat away from the experimentation
and innovation of the earlier works. It could be argued that, by reverting to ballet,, McLaren was abandoning the avant-garde film work that he had grown tired of, and was wiling away the last years of his career indulging his own interest in an essentially comfortable bourgeois art form. To do so, however, would be to completely ignore the whole function of experimentation in art. Very often when we talk about art being ‘experimental’ what we are actually referring to is work that has been derived from the results of earlier experiments. By its very status as a work of art, the piece already has structure and form imposed upon it. Unless the piece is being created through live improvisation, there is no sense in which it can be truly experimental, since every aspect of it has already been tested out and rehearsed beforehand. McLaren was an experimental filmmaker in the truest sense of the term. In many cases he might spend years researching a new technique before going on to use it as the basis of a film. When the NFB released Norman McLaren:The Master’s Edition in 2006 it contained a wealth of material including almost all of the surviving test films that McLaren produced throughout his career. Many of these films involve McLaren and other collaborators such as Grant Munro performing in front of the camera purely for their own pleasure. When one comes to survey these films it becomes apparent that the dance films are actually the logical culmination of McLaren’s lifetime of experiments in capturing motion. With a mathematical precision he breaks down and analyses every aspect of each movement, capturing each moment in time and separating it out from the rest of the structure. In Narcissus the adoption of a classical myth allows McLaren to display all of the techniques and ideas that he has developed throughout the course of his career. In doing so, he doesn’t just create a mirror image of his protagonist – he also holds up a mirror to the whole of our thoughts and feelings about animation. Instead of using film to bring life to inanimate shapes or objects, he focuses on the human form and uses it to provide us with a new appreciation of life itself. And in doing so we finally come to realise what he was trying to show us all along. Endnotes 1 Norman McLaren quoted in Beveridge. James John Grierson: Film Master. NY: Macmillan, 1978 pp 81 -81, and cited in Dobson, Terence The film work of
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Norman McLaren. Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2006, pp 46 - 47