The best label might be "market-free" film, since avant-garde cinema can only be categorized, if at all, by its abhorrence of exactly the sort of theatrical storytelling and dramatic construction that have made movies a mass entertainment. Still, some slices of this century-long loaf are available boxes of between-the-wars Modernists, Criterion's Stan Brakhage collection, Facet's new Broughton box, the occasional release from Other Cinema and among them, the collected shorts of Norman McLaren could be the most accessible to a mass audience. Which is to say, McLaren himself is avant-garde lite, a cinematic abstractionist for people who hate cinematic abstractions. Born a Scotsman but a Canadian institution for over 40 years and longtime beneficiary of the National Film Board of Canada, McLaren made over 70 films in a vast variety of modes, forms and styles, but rarely did he ever make what could be called a transgressive or seminal work.
Truth be told, McLaren represented the Canadian establishment's idea of "safe" art cinema, and as such personifies a certain middle-class, mezzobrow unadventurousness that is famously Canadian. There's no indication, however, that McLaren might've trundled off into riskier territories had he not lighted down in Montreal in 1941 at the invitation of John Grierson. The man possessed a singularly tame, almost quaint, craftsmanlike sensibility, entranced by movement and color for their own sake, as a child might be. McLaren's films are distinguished by their playfulness, their catholic design interests, their utter lack of gravity or significance, and, sometimes, their simplistic morals. His most famous film, Neighbours (1952), is a gripping animated-actor lark, illustrating the folly of territorial greed as if from a grade-schooler's perspective (and with a deliberate grade-school design). McLaren was the entertainer among the world's mid-century "poetic-painterly" short-form filmmakers, fastidiously avoiding asking aesthetic questions even as he indulged in the arbitrary dance of lines, loops, patterns and paintbox bravado. Perhaps his best and most respected abstraction, Begone Dull Care (1949) is a frameless, painted ribbon-film that plays like a Brakhage film reconstituted for kids, with plenty of geometrics and visual echoes, its ocular acrobatics carefully choreographed instead of spontaneous and expressive.
McLaren loved fairy tales, dance, and photographic gimmickry, too, and his archive is overflowing with lushly brushed fantasias and real dancers swirling in double, triple and quadruple exposures. This is an alternative cinema digestible enough for PBS, public school rentals and the Oscars® (Neighbours won, oddly, Best Documentary Short Subject in 1953 while being nominated as well for a generalized Best Short Subject trophy). Adept as an animator, light-hearted and inventive, McLaren was nevertheless no heavy hitter on the small international stage set aside for non-narrative "experimental" work, otherwise crowded with relatively abstruse, interrogatory and culturally dangerous figures like Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Michael Snow, Bruce Conner, Jack Smith, Peter Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and so on.
The seven-disc Home Vision DVD box - Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition - isn't definitive (a dozen or so films are missing), but it encompasses 50 years of work and holds 15 hours of film, from tests and commissioned TV network logos to "personal" doodle-movies. It certainly is worshipfully and artfully packaged, perhaps to a fault the discs are divvied up into thematic sections (The Art of Motion, Dance, War and Peace, Painting with Light, The Animator as Musician, etc.), and some of the films appear on more than one disc, depending on their content, style or McLaren's partner in production (Grant Munro, Rene Jodoin, etc.). There is also, in a home-video fete that Brakhage has yet to receive, an inordinate amount of film *about* the mild-mannered McLaren, who is far from a fascinating creative personality; what's more, every film is prefaced by McLaren's shrugging explanations, which often serve to make the thin seem even thinner. As a classroom instrument, the set could certainly be useful; otherwise, it seems a model for the mainstream DVDing of more challenging artists.
To order Norman McLaren: The Masters Edition, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
