Norman McLaren: Boogie Doodler

I think he was a pioneer of so many different things.

Norman McLaren will explain how that striking 3D effect was achieved,

and without special glasses.

I can't describe the excitement.

We talked film all the time.

Norman always went on about the "happy accident", you know?

But it was just fantastic.

A guy like McLaren always remained an explorer,

was always doing experimentation.

Each drawing is slightly different from the drawing before.

Virtually any animator, including animators in Hollywood,

he's one of their heroes.

Norman McLaren is one of the greatest pioneers of cinema.

Born in Scotland in 1914,

he revolutionised the world of animation

with his ground-breaking techniques.

When Picasso saw his films, he exclaimed,

"At last, something new in the art of drawing!"

French film-maker Francois Truffaut said,

"What he was doing was unique in the history of cinema."

He won an Oscar, a BAFTA, and the Palme d'Or,

and set up the now-legendary animation department

at the National Film Board of Canada.

He has been celebrated and applauded throughout the world,

yet, in Scotland, the story of the shy young man from Stirling

is relatively unknown.

Norman's love of film began in 1933,

when he went to Glasgow School of Art.

'Film was a relatively new medium at the time,

'and it was really capturing the avant-garde art movements.'

I think it's safe to say he was pretty seduced by it as a...

just as a material.

'One of the teachers at the school, called William McLean,

'had started a Kino club, which was to make films,'

and then McLaren joined it, then he would go to screenings,

and it was at one of the screenings he saw

films by Eisenstein and Pudovkin,

and he sat here and said, well, "Wow," you know?

"Cinema is the art, painting is dead!"

Norman and fellow art student Stewart McAllister

were determined to make their own films.

They managed to get hold of a 35mm film projector

and some film stock,

but they had one problem - no camera.

So the idea to say, "OK, I am going to do a film without a camera,"

so you have extremely strong constraints...

..so it pushes you to be, er,

completely... I mean, way more creative, in a way.

I, er, begged an old print of a commercial film,

soaked it in the family bathtub for about two weeks,

so no-one could have a bath for two weeks,

to get out the emulsion, to make it clear.

And then I painted on it.

That film was so popular in those kind of student societies

that it just got worn out.

It just... I mean, I don't think there's any record

of what that would have been like because it...just got knackered.

The Kino Club finally got their hands on a camera,

borrowed from a local butcher,

and set to work on live-action films.

Seven Till Five - A Day In The Life Of The Art School

caught the flavour of student life,

and was swiftly followed by Camera Makes Whoopee.

A film about the annual fancy dress ball,

it was full of cinematic tricks.

McLaren was starting to have fun with his new-fangled camera.

At art school, Norman experienced both a cultural and political awakening.

This was the era of the Great Depression,

and the slum conditions in parts of Scotland

sparked his social conscience,

further roused by a trip to Russia in 1935.

He believed in equality,

and the idea that he had become a socialist, a communist,

before he was 18,

and that his father had offered to send him to Russia.

You know, "Go and see Russia, and that'll sort you out."

But that didn't really help, because he...

Norman just sent postcards back from Russia saying, "It's great,

"Russia's so well run."

Back in Scotland,

Norman became a fully paid-up member of the Communist Party,

and demonstrated his political beliefs in his next film,

the anti-capitalist Hell Unlimited, made with sculptor Helen Biggar.

'Strangely enough, when you look at it,

'you know, it's very amateurish, but it was, basically, the only real

'independent work of political film-making written at that time.'

Everything was sponsored, it'd be the GPO,

or it would be, you know, the Pathe News.

There was no kind of independent film movement,

and particularly making political films,

and so Biggar and McLaren made this film.

'And it's still kind of recognised there

'as being an important piece of work.'

When Norman's films were shown at a local film festival,

they caught the attention of fellow Scot and film-maker

John Grierson, who decided to take the young McLaren under his wing.

He offered Norman a job at the GPO, you know,

telling Norman, you know, "You've got no discipline whatsoever,

"we'll knock some discipline into you."

McLaren arrived in London in the autumn of 1936

to take up his post at Grierson's GPO film unit.

Here's a departure message for the down postal.

Grierson wanted to teach McLaren his documentary approach to film

and despatched him to Spain, then in the middle of a brutal civil war,

to work as cameraman with Ivor Montagu.

'Grierson's relationship with Norman was very complicated anyway,

'but he saw Norman as a kind of dreamer,

'in a way, that he was not realistic.'

And I think he wanted, you know, the young Communist

to go and learn...something at the front.

CANNON FIRES

-REPORTER:

-'The Spaniards were the guinea pigs.

'Men, women and children.

'It was a long war, ended finally by hunger.'

Away from home for the first time,

Norman began writing to his parents,

a habit he diligently maintained for the rest of his life.

"December 2nd, 1936.

"It is terrible.

"And Franco is sending more and more aeroplanes

"and has bombed all the hospitals in Madrid, except one.

"The morgues are full of the bodies, children and women,

"who are the majority of the victims of Franco's aeroplanes."

'When Norman came back from Spain, he was so appalled by the experience,'

he didn't leave the Communist Party but he questioned now

this whole notion of the just war...

and became a pacifist.

Grierson's attempts to encourage him in the art of documentary backfired.

When asked to make a film about airmail,

Norman returned to animation

to create a love affair between a letter and an envelope.

'Well, what a great promotion for the Post Office!

'I gather the Post Office decided that they were not going to

'distribute it because they thought it was pornographic.'

Maybe that's what we all like about it.

It was true to its title, Love On The Wing, you know?

But, in London, love wasn't just in Norman's imagination.

Right, so it's a very naughty story.

HE LAUGHS

That is Norman...had fallen in love with ballet

and he went to the ballet and, apparently, you know,

you could stand at the back of the, er, the gods

because it only cost a shilling to get in

and also that's where the gays met.

And...and Norman said, "I felt this hand on my thigh."

HE LAUGHS

He said, "I turned around and there was this young man."

And he said, "We went and had a drink in the bar at the intermission."

And he said, "We've been together ever since."

The young man was actor and producer Guy Glover,

who became Norman's lifelong companion.

By 1939, Britain was heading toward another Great War,

and so, with his films in his suitcase and accompanied by Guy,

McLaren the pacifist emigrated to New York.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Norman may have escaped the war,

but, with no job, no money, and no interest in his films,

life in New York was tough,

until a chance encounter changed everything.

'It was hard, you know? And, as he said, "I was almost starving,"

'when he was walking along the street one day

'and he saw the Museum of Non-Objective Painting,'

which was the forerunner of the Guggenheim,

so he went in, you see.

"Wow! This is a gallery devoted to non-objective art!"

'And then he met the woman who ran the place,

'Baroness Hilla von Rebay.

'And, I mean, she supported all these artists, you know?'

She supported Jackson Pollock, when they had no money and nothing,

she gave every one of them money every week, 25 bucks a week.

'It saved Norman's life, you know, artistically.'

The Baroness commissioned McLaren to make two abstract films,

Dots and Loops.

Having secured a job in advertising,

Norman worked tirelessly on his hand-made movies at night,

returning to his camera-less technique

of painting directly onto the film, frame by frame.

'Well, I mean it's painstaking, but, as well,

'it's so rewarding that every single frame leads to a result.'

I think there is something unique even more

when you see Norman McLaren drawing directly on the film.

And, with no money for music,

Norman came up with another innovative idea.

'Well, if a sound will make a pattern on film,

'a pattern on film will make a sound.

'You can even create your own sounds by drawing directly on the film.'

'You've got this kind of synchronisation

'between the marks that he's painting onto the visual part

'and the sounds on the soundtrack.'

So, for him, this was a great opportunity to kind of...

almost make real his experiences of hearing music.

SOUND EFFECTS PLAY

'The synthetic music that he was making,

'he really wanted to try and work it all out.'

I don't think he was even conscious of exactly how important

some of these discoveries were.

Norman's unique ability to bring sound and image together

was expressed again with what is now one of his most popular films,

Boogie-Doodle, only this time Norman provided the doodle

and jazz pianist Albert Ammons the boogie.

BOOGIE-WOOGIE PIANO PLAYS

"November 30th, 1940.

"Someday, I hope that all my very own efforts and ideas

"about films will become something important."

Norman's dream would eventually come true, but not in New York.

When his old mentor John Grierson beckoned once more,

Norman and Guy set off for a new life in Canada.

In 1938, John Grierson was invited to set up

a National Film Board of Canada,

and began recruiting talented young film-makers.

'The early Ottawa days, that was when it was really exciting,'

cos we were discovering things.

I mean, Grierson hired people

right out of art school, right out of college.

He didn't want them to have any experience.

And we learned that way.

'It's a family, and that's, I think, the critical thing,

'and Norman was part of that family,

'and he was sort of like an elder brother.'

And he loved the place, yeah,

because he helped to make it what it was, you know?

If you weren't doing your best, you really couldn't sleep at night.

His presence and the way he worked had that effect on you.

Within a year, Grierson asked Norman to create an animation unit,

ostensibly to make war propaganda films.

But Norman had other ideas.

Hen Hop is wonderful. The film only exists in a truncated version

because the last verse,

which is all about buying savings bonds,

Norman cut it off at the end of the war and threw it away,

the negative. He destroyed it

so it could exist more or less just as a film about a dancing hen

who... Who he imagined was Fred Astaire.

COUNTRY FIDDLE MUSIC

There's just an energy to those films, I think,

that was very inspiring.

And it's also quite inspiring that they're just

fundamentally about movement.

He was an extremely good animator.

He succeeded to keep the edge

and the raw aspect of the drawings

with something very flexible

and very bouncy.

which you have in Disney,

although in Walt Disney you don't have this sort of graphic rawness.

When you animate, particularly when you're doing hand-drawn animation or even cut outs,

but when you get down to the sort of thing he was doing, like drawing directly on film,

it becomes, you know, a direct expression of your...

of your muscles and your nerves. And so he was that hen.

Um... I mean, there's one moment in where the hen

wiggles its backside, and, well, that's Norman.

It was when he saw Hen Hop that Picasso made his famous remark,

"finally something new in the art of drawing."

And in the creative hub of the NFB, McLaren continued to innovate.

WOMAN SINGS IN FRENCH

While working on a number of animations

to accompany French Canadian folk songs,

he developed a new technique using pastel drawings.

During the photographing of the film, I would change the drawing.

Then I'd stop drawing

and let the cameraman shoot part of the picture in this condition.

He'd blend it into the previous condition of the picture,

and after he'd photographed this, we'd stop the camera

And I'd start changing the picture again.

I might lighten up the sky.

So it's a series of constant changes to the same basic drawing.

-That's right.

-And you photograph each change.

-Yeah.

Another film suggests that McLaren never forgot where he came from.

I think the horizon is like a replica of a Stirling horizon

after storm, where the light's beginning to come through.

And I think he'd grown up with it.

His bedroom window had a view of the horizon over to the hills.

So even though he spent most of his life outside Scotland,

I think those early visual memories stay with you.

I think they're part of your subconscious.

McLaren continued to have regular correspondence

with his family back home to tell them of his latest ideas,

including what we now know as 3D.

November the 27th, 1944.

"I have been very busy doing a new type of drawing and painting.

"It is absolutely revolutionary and all my own invention,

"it is called stereoscopic drawing and painting."

When I was invited to his place for dinner,

there on the wall were two mirrors,

and a drawing that he was doing.

And you had to put your nose up to these two mirrors

to see a thee-dimensional drawing. That was in 1945.

And so his interest in 3D

and the possibility of 3D in film, go way back.

At the NFB, Norman found a kindred spirit in Evelyn Lambart.

An animator in her own right, they proved a formidable partnership.

BE-BOP JAZZ MUSIC

In a way, a magical relationship,

Eve Lambart was a no-nonsense, "let's get the job done,"

and Norman was this dreamer who had these ideas

and the two of them together

developed a kind of chemistry that Norman recognised

as being very precious for what he wanted to do.

They did things like waving the film out the window,

and they used sponges,

and Evelyn got lace in a women's dressmaker's shop,

put lace on the film and rolled paint over it,

and then they painted on both sides of the film.

I think they must have been extremely happy when they made that.

BE-BOP JAZZ MUSIC

With a soundtrack by Oscar Peterson,

the images marry perfectly to the music,

giving fuel to the theory that Norman's films

were an expression of his synaesthesia.

He listened to music and he would see colour and forms.

And, of course, Begone Dull Care is, as he said,

"my colour music dream come true."

I have synaesthesia. Let's say before you fall asleep

you have, sort of, dots and colour bits

you see when your eyelids are closed.

So I always pay very much attention to that.

The NFB was not only home for McLaren,

but also provided a safe haven for him and Guy.

In Canada in the 1950s, it wasn't easy being homosexual

with a communist past.

It's probably testament to how respected McLaren's work was,

not just at the National Film Board Of Canada,

but with the government of Canada,

that his communist associations

were kind of swept under the carpet during that time.

Other heads rolled at the NFB

due to the witch hunt, but Norman stayed.

Norman was often concerned that most of his work lacked

any political dimension, so it is perhaps no surprise that when asked

if he could save just one of his films,

his response was - "Neighbours."

The story of two men who fight over a flower

develops out of all proportion

and is one of the few films that reflects his pacifism.

He made it after spending time doing educational work in China.

Two months after I went to China, the communists took over

and I saw what was happening in our village because of them,

and a lot of good things happened.

And so I became fairly sympathetic to the new regime

and when I came back to Canada

it was just at the beginning of the Korean War,

and I felt myself estranged to some extent,

or being pulled between one culture and another

and one side and another side.

And the tension that built up in me because of this produced Neighbours.

Norman introduced yet another pioneering animation technique,

pixilation, where live actors are used as stop frame objects.

We'd done a lot of pixilation tests

and the things that seemed to look fairly easy were the most difficult

and the difficult ones were fairly straightforward.

There is something very violent and gory in this film,

which is very much in contrast to all the rest of his work.

My wife is in it. She gets roundly booted out of frame.

And in fact she's holding our six-month-old son,

and it was dear Grant Munro who lifted him above his head

and threw him to the ground, and then kicked him,

and then kicked my wife out, and all that was done frame by frame.

I found it rather troubling, yeah.

In 1952, Neighbours won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short,

and is still widely regarded as Norman's most successful film.

Towards the end of his career,

Norman moved away from abstract animations to pursue live action,

marrying his two great passions film and dance.

The idea of constructing a film, a dance,

was very, very difficult because the dancers literally could not see.

They were, sort of, side-lit at the back,

and the male dancer, Vincent Warren, told me it was terrifying.

You leap in the air and have no idea where the ground was.

And so Norman had hung, they had sort of black...

They had some sort of cords so they'd could hit,

when they jump, they'd hit their head and they'd know where they were.

He experimented with the after-printing of the film

to give all these layers so that you see where the dancer has been

and where they're going to at the same time.

And I think there's an incredible strength in seeing

the movement of the dancer across the space.

And a lot of people just are blown away by that film

because of that playing with space.

Pas De Deux received 17 awards

including a BAFTA for Best Animated Film.

Dance was again the subject of Norman's final film,

where he attempted to deal with the demons that had burdened him

throughout his life.

His very last film, Narcissus, is dealing with conscience,

and so McLaren, in spite of his reputation as a squiggly artist,

had a deep and abiding conscience about moral values.

With Narcissus, McLaren made extensive use of the blur,

a photographic technique he had developed almost 3 decades earlier.

The film is very bleak, it has a terribly bleak ending,

because it expresses, unfortunately,

this feeling of guilt that he had about being homosexual,

about not having made the films he felt he should have been making.

If he'd grown up in New York, for example,

he may well have been given an opportunity to dance.

But in Scotland, growing up in the '20s,

that wasn't really something that boys got a chance to do.

But then, when he was introduced to film, it's like he was given

an opportunity to make movement that he'd never been given before.

Shortly after completing Narcissus, Norman retired from the NFB.

While he enjoyed a quiet life at home with Guy,

this footage of him in 1986 shows that even in retirement

Norman couldn't resist experimenting.

He died of a heart attack in Montreal, January 1987.

In a career spanning more than 50 years,

Norman McLaren pushed the boundaries and possibilities of animation,

from hand painting on film to pixilation.

He was a pioneer of new technologies,

from electronic music to 3D,

influencing generations of film-makers.

"That's the first drawing," he said, "you can do the rest of it."

He would not take the pen off the paper.

He talked about skating figures of eight...

And then when they touch each other,

-you have to go in another direction.

-..and balancing.

-Let me mail your something.

-He would just keep it going.

-I mean, it's rubbish!

-HE LAUGHS

That's Norman McLaren.