Norman McLaren: Hands-on Animation

As filmmaking, A Chairy Tale is a virtuoso piece. A mélange of single-frame animation of a chair and an actor, multi-speed shooting, reverse shooting, moving time exposures, and the chair-as-marionette, being operated with black nylon thread, for the most part by Evelyn Lambart and Herb Taylor. A chair refuses to let a man sit on it. After many trials, the man (Claude Jutra) realizes that the chair wants the same privilege. The man concedes. Only then does the chair agree to accept his role in life, that of being sat upon. The film, with an improvised score by Ravi Shankar, was a big success, yet co-directors McLaren and Jutra were uneasy. Brilliant though it was, they realized they had in fact made a film about assimilation. The chair was still the loser.

I met McLaren in 1968. I soon understood that the frequency of birds, chickens and chickens’ feet in his films was no accident. He identified with birds, particularly chickens. I was very puzzled and asked his friend Evelyn Lambart about it. She looked at me with astonishment. “We’re all an animal. I’m a horse. What are you?” I was speechless for perhaps a minute. Then I saw. “You’re right, Evelyn. I’m a squirrel.” I would then see that McLaren’s animation of chicken movements and behaviour had much in common with his own movements and behaviour. Knowing he was a hen made it easier to work with him. Hen Hop features a dancing hen. McLaren told me that he pretended the hen was Fred Astaire.

As a teenager, McLaren became interested in Colour-Music, an art form in which moving patterns of coloured lights were projected. When he was at art school, McLaren and fellow student
Stuart McAllister tried to create colour-music by painting abstractions directly onto 35 mm movie film. McAllister would later become a great editor of documentary films. McLaren was delighted with the experience but knew the results were primitive. Then, in London in 1936, he saw Len Lye’s revolutionary hand-painted-on-film Colour Box. It did not influence McLaren but it gave him the confidence to continue drawing directly on film. He had to wait ten years, however, before he would have access to a three-colour film printing stock, which would allow him to copy a multi-hued hand-painted original. And what an original it is! For me, it is hard to imagine a more satisfying jazz film – in this case, a marriage of hand-painted improvisations to the piano improvisations of a young Oscar Peterson.

This is a film about a (white) blackbird who loses body parts and gets them back three fold. This bird with three of everything dances to the old folk song. What is amazing about the film is that one only sees essentials – highly stylized and disconnected bits – the body parts are small paper rectangles, the eyes little paper circles. Here is what McLaren said to me about the film. “That sort of thing is Marcel Marceau [the French mime whom McLaren much admired]. Le Merle is full of that; you’re leaving out things; the bird is not structured like a bird. There are a lot of gaps but you assume it’s got a neck – so the viewer has to supply a lot of things which are not visible, but which are referred to by the motion. The fact that Marcel Marceau goes up a flight of steps – there are no steps there, he remains on the ground. I think it is the same thing when the bird bounces the eye in the clouds. You imply a floor. You’re given clues and I’m sure there’s a great variation in how much some people fill in compared with other people.”

This is not a film record of a dance. The choreography, per se, is not memorable. The important thing is that the choreography was created strictly for McLaren to work with on the optical camera. There he transformed the dance into something of heart-stopping beauty – technology at the service of art.

What McLaren did was multiply the imagery up to eleven times, each of eleven passes staggered by a few frames. The dancers are followed by his and her own waves. The story is the old one of Narcissus. In this case, it is a female Narcissus, in love with her own self, until a young man appears and wins her. For McLaren, it fulfilled a need to make a plea that we must look outside ourselves and love others – the same theme which underlay his anti-war film, Neighbours. It was a very difficult film to dance, since Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren had to dance in almost total blackness with only side lighting. The soundtrack is fascinating. Maurice Blackburn took a two-and-a-half-minute pan pipe recording and by looping the music with the addition of a harp stretched the music to 13 minutes. Otherworldly music for otherworldly imagery.

Caroline Leaf made this tour de force in the technique pioneered by McLaren – that of etching directly into the emulsion of the film. Leaf herself pioneered the techniques of animating sand and oil on a light box directly under a camera. A legendary perfectionist, Leaf said that she was tired of working for an eternity locked away in dark rooms. If she scratched directly into film stock, she would be able to make a film quickly. For Two Sisters, she decided to use 70 mm Imax film with different coloured emulsions, e.g., black or green. Perfectionism, however, reared its head and Leaf was still stuck in a dark room animating for two years. But it was worth it. This story of the relationship between two sisters, one disfigured, which is disturbed by the appearance of a male stranger is wonderfully animated and profoundly emotional. In 1974 I watched the silent test print of another Caroline Leaf film – The Owl that Married a Goose– with Norman McLaren. I was speechless. McLaren wept.