This well-designed set includes Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990), a documentary by Donald McWilliams, that gives an overview of McLaren's work and films, grouped more by theme and subject matter than by chronology, plus a nearly two-hour collection of the best of McLaren's short films and a booklet with notes on the films prepared by McLaren before his death in 1987.
Since Creative Process jumps about in McLaren's life, here is a more conventional chronology. McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland in 1914 and became interested in design before joining the Glasgow Film Society while attending the Glasgow School of Fine Arts. There he created the humorous avant-garde film Camera Makes Whoopee (1935) that brought him to the attention of John Grierson, the head of Britain's major documentary and experimental movie group, oddly enough, contained as part of Britain's General Post Office and, hence, usually referred to as the GPO Film Unit.
Hired by Grierson to, in Grierson's words, "knock a little discipline into him," McLaren came under the influence of another radical filmmaker, Len Lye, a New Zealander who was making his own films without a camera. Lye's technique was to paint directly onto clear film stock, creating kaleidoscopic, flashing images of color. McLaren would take this style and push it much further in his later pieces.
In 1939, fearing the war in Europe, McLaren immigrated to the United States. Grierson, meanwhile, was helping establish the National Film Board of Canada and, noticing the proximity of his old pupil, suggested McLaren as a resident artist. McLaren, intending to stay only a short while, spent the rest of his life there, becoming the major star of the National Film Board as his short experimental films were shown at film festivals and in classrooms around the world.
His early work used a variety of scoring, scratching and painting on film stock, all of it set to wild jazz or folk music in shorts such as Boogie-Doodle (1948) and Begone Dull Care (1949). From there he developed technique after technique; pixellation (the animation of living creatures) for his anti-war satire Neighbors (1952), multiple-image filming for his famous ballet work Pas de deux (1967) and creating soundtracks with direct applications and painting as in Synchromy (1971).
Norman McLaren: The Collector's Edition provides a wonderful overview of McLaren's career although even more could have been included. For instance, although McWilliams' documentary makes much of McLaren's work in the U.S. during World War II, with Hen Hop (1942) being singled out for praise by no less than Pablo Picasso, none of those films are included in the collection on disc two. Nevertheless, this is a marvelous set of works that still astound and can inflame the imaginations not only of movie lovers, but artists, graphic designers and video enthusiasts as well.
For more information about Norman McLaren: The Collector's Edition, visit Milestone Films.
by Brian Cady
