Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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Norman McLaren was a genius. That's not just my opinion, Picasso thought so too, as did Francois Truffaut. McLaren was an animator and experimental film maker who created works that destroyed the limits of what was thought possible through the medium of film. He would create animations by scratching shapes directly into the film emulsion, or use live models as stop-motion animation props, or create multiple exposures that used dozens of interlocking images.

McLaren was the founding director of the National Film Board of Canada's animation division (a post he held for more than 40 years) and under his tutelage the NFB became the place for cutting-edge animation. Along the way hewon an Oscar, a Palm d'Or, and a zillion film festival awards.

The National Film Board has just released a stunning, seven-DVD set of McLaren's work, titled Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition.

Although his name is a hardly a household word, Norman McLaren ranks among the most significant figures in the history of world animation. Other artists created films; McLaren created ways of making films. He drew scratched and painted images directly onto blank film stock for "camera-less animation." He combined slow-motion photography and multiple exposures to reveal the patterns created by dancers' movements in Pas de Deux. He moved actors and full-sized props in Neighbors, his Oscar-winning parable of human aggression: Two friends turn into homicidal maniacs when they vie for possession of a single flower. He demonstrated the underlying structure of musical forms visually in Canon, and created artificial sound to accompany many of his films.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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In 1941, Canadian Film Commissioner John Grierson invited McLaren to head up the newly founded animation unit of the National Film Board of Canada. McLaren spent the rest of his life at the NFB, pushing the boundaries of animation and providing a place where talented artists from Canada and other countries could explore personal visions of what an animated film could be.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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The Master's Edition offers not only all of McLaren's extant films, but experiments, tests, and outtakes. Each film has been carefully restored to correspond as closely as possible to the artist's vision: The prints have had dust and dirt removed, but flaws that resulted from the limited technology McLaren employed have been preserved. New documentaries by Donald McWilliams and other Canadian experts provide introductions to McLaren's work and often arcane techniques. This handsomely packaged seven-disc set, which includes a booklet in English and French, is certain to be the definitive edition of the films Picasso once described as "something new in the art of drawing." (Unrated, suitable for ages 8 and older: tobacco use, stylized violence in a few of the films)

Charles Solomon, Amazon.com

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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I recently sent an email to a fellow movie buff pal telling him I was in the process of working my way through a mammoth boxed set of short films by Norman McLaren. He wrote back, "Must confess to ignorance about Norman McLaren. Who he?" This reaction is quite understandable. Though he tirelessly directed movies almost continuously over half a century, winning a Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award in the process, McLaren isn't exactly a household name, even in Canada, where the Scottish-born humanist animator-artist spent almost his entire career.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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But for those who have seen his work, McLaren's name is magic and his films unforgettable: he's like George Pal, Luis Bunuel and Max & Dave Fleischer all rolled into one. His name became synonymous with the National Film Board of Canada; today it's impossible to think of one without the other, and it's through the NFB comes one of the most important DVD sets of the year: Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition, a hefty seven-disc box set that includes McLaren's entire filmmaking output, including test films and unfinished shorts, along with 14 short thematically-linked documentaries and an impressive, Criterion-style booklet. This may be the first time the entire oeuvre of a single prolific filmmaker has been collected in one colossal package. (Well, there is Don Glut, but….)

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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Born in Scotland in 1914, McLaren was a Glasgow art student enormously influenced by Russian filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, as well as the great surrealist painters. After experimenting with the basic mechanics of filmmaking, he became a protegee of fellow Scotsman John Grierson, widely regarded as the Father of British and Canadian documentary cinema. In 1936 McLaren was commissioned to make a film for the British General Post Office but they hated it, regarding McLaren's animations too abstract and experimental.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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McLaren eventually immigrated to Canada, where in 1942 he rejoined Grierson at the newly-formed National Film Board of Canada. Over the next 40 years, McLaren and a team of close collaborators dabbled in and greatly refined almost every form of animation, from drawing, etching and painting directly on 35mm film (epitomized by 1949's Begone Done Care and 1955's Blinkity Blank, which eminently expand upon ideas introduced in Disney's much more famous predecessor, Fantasia); pixilation, the technique famously used in his Oscar-winning Neighbours (1952); and two lovely but rarely-used, time-consuming forms of animation, one involving chalk drawings in which images are slowly added and removed (as in 1945's La-haut sur ces montagnes), the other involving animating pins (as in 1973's Pinscreen) to create an abstract sense of depth.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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McLaren was especially interested in combining abstract images with music and dance, as the NFB's own notes put it, his style was rooted in "a choreographic concept that essentially defines animated film as a kinetic art form unrestricted by theatrical or novelistic influences. Nonetheless, in this last category of films, McLaren does not stray from abstract expressionism. In fact, his work is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman."

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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The region-free boxed set, all 15 hours of it, is rather intimidating, especially a first glance at the menu screens and back covers of the seven thin cases, which at least initially are as daunting as a map of the Tokyo subway system. Essentially what the NFB has done is to divide each disc up into between one and four themes. These themes range from styles of animation (as in "Paper Cut-Outs"), subject matter ("War and Peace," "Dance"), stylistic concerns ("Painting with Light," "The Art of Motion"), and collaborations ("Evelyn Lambart," "Maurice Blackburn"). To accommodate this, some movies are repeated from one disc to the next; Blankity Blank, for instance, appears in its entirety on Discs 01, 02, and 05, while Neighbours can be found on Discs 03 and 04. Tossed into the mix are test films, outtakes, and unfinished works, while each theme includes its own short documentary, most of which run about five minutes.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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All by themselves the documentaries are extremely valuable, as their mix of film excerpts, archival film of McLaren talking about (and frequently showing the production process of) the very films being discussed, while collaborators and scholars put the work into context. These documentaries are enormously enlightening and entertaining, and the serve their purpose in the most fundamental way: they make you want to watch all the movies excerpted.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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Not that long ago about the only way to see movies by Norman McLaren was to rent 16mm prints from educational film distributors or the NFB directly. That all his movies are now available in a boxed set about the size of an almanac. This is a set for anyone with a serious interest in art and cinema, and its one of the best releases of 2006. A DVD Talk Collector Series title.

DVDtalk

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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When asked how he would like to be remembered, Norman McLaren said, with characteristic modesty, as 'an innovator of new techniques, some of which led to a few distinguished or interesting films'. A dip into any one of the seven discs in this highly covetable set of his collected films, which ranges from his work for (and even before) John Grierson's GPO Film Unit, through his wartime work, his joyously free interpretations of music from Oscar Peterson to Québécois folk song, his experiments with synthetic sound and his sublime late-career ballet films, reveals the complete inadequacy of this statement.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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The films are augmented by new introductions and fascinating archive documentaries, and audio clips of McLaren discussing his films. Also included is his five-part series Animated Motion, made with Grant Munro in the 1970s, ‘in which McLaren comments on, demonstrates and classifies aspects of motion which the animator employs in his everyday work’. That such basic, methodical techniques (all demonstrated by means of a white disc on a black background) can be transmuted into the rhythmic wonders and emotional content of McLaren’s work borders on the miraculous.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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His universe is one of constant flux and metamorphosis, and in joining image with music in such a primal way, by painting directly on a frameless filmstrip as if it were a long, thin canvas, it's impossible not to watch films such as Boogie Doodle, Blinkity Blank or Begone Dull Care without a joyful reaction that takes the form of a large 'YES!' - preferably hand-scratched into black leader, and accompanied by the crackle and pop of synthetic sound as the word flares up in a momentary cascade of fireworks, impressing its after-image on the retina.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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I began with a quote from McLaren; I'll end with a quote from John Grierson, the man who was instrumental in allowing him freedom to experiment at the GPO Film Unit and the National Film Board of Canada. He said, 'If there is such a thing as pure movie, be sure that McLaren has been one of its greatest exponents'.

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Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition [2006]

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