Uploaded 12 November 1999
The adjudicator at the Third Glasgow Amateur Film Festival held in January 1936 was to be the renowned John Grierson. From 1929, when his film Drifters was screened at the British premiere of Battleship Potemkin, Grierson had been a vociferous and vigorous advocate of the new mass-medium of film. He also had risen to head the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit. The GPO was the government organisation that not only operated the mail system and post offices but also the phone system, a savings bank and even the meteorological office. The GPO’s main function was communication so it was apt that it should set up its own means of communication (the GPO Film Unit) and that the Unit was in the vanguard of film-making. As the Unit’s head, the forceful and pioneering Grierson was able to put his film ideas into practice. [1]
Norman McLaren, then a second year student at the Glasgow School of Art, submitted two films to the Festival’s competition. One was Colour Cocktail, a five minute abstract film using live action, slow motion and shots showing the interplay of lights on coloured paper. [2] Although the film was silent, its accompanying gramophone record married so well that the film was perceived as a sound film. However, it was his other entry on which McLaren pinned his hopes. In Camera Makes Whoopee the young film-maker had used every trick-effect offered by his newly acquired Ciné-Kodak Special camera – the use of which was the outcome of McLaren’s success in winning the first prize at the previous year’s Festival.
The aspiring film-maker however was devastated as Grierson subjected Camera Makes Whoopee to severe criticism. McLaren recalled what happened; “[Grierson] said, ‘Technically it’s very competent, but artistically it’s nothing but a jumble and a mess. It’s got no sense of form or organization, it’s got no development and is totally zero as far as being a work of art.’ I was counting on this occasion, so I thought well there it goes, I had hoped to work in films for the rest of my life, and that’s it. I’ve had it.” [3] Having obtained his desired effect on McLaren, Grierson then went on to award the Festival’s first prize to McLaren’s other film – Colour Cocktail , one which the film-maker had viewed rather as a make-weight entry. After the formalities were over Grierson invited McLaren for a drink. During this talk, which gave Grierson the opportunity to assess the young man’s commitment to film-making, the visiting film authority offered McLaren a job at the GPO Film Unit in London. [4]
This episode demonstrates Grierson’s provocative and shrewd way of achieving his ends: Grierson knew that any offer of a job by him would be eagerly accepted. [5] By prefacing the offer with a stinging, deflating condemnation, he ensured that the new recruit would not take the position for granted. He also ensured that his own reputation and position would be enhanced. A third consequence was that he gave McLaren a filmic lesson that the young man never forgot. [6]
In early November 1936, that is within weeks of his starting work at the GPO Film Unit (as a humble editor in the cutting-room), McLaren received a summons from Grierson. Again Grierson delivered a shock. This time he suggested (and John Grierson’s way of suggesting was so compelling and enthusiastic that seldom could he be refused[7] ) that McLaren take leave of absence and go to Spain as Ivor Montagu’s cameraman to make a pro-Republican film of the Spanish Civil War.
McLaren accepted the challenge. He went to Spain and within a few weeks he and Montagu had returned to London having captured the footage of warfare that they required. Even though Montagu edited the film, Defence of Madrid shows that McLaren had already started to apply the early lesson supplied by Grierson: the shots are simple and direct; no distracting trick-effects were attempted.
By sending McLaren to Spain Grierson achieved several ends:
1. McLaren received an early experience of film discipline. He was also able to make a significant contribution to a finished film at an extremely early stage in his professional career. He was also able to work on what he perceived as a worthy project, for McLaren held strong left-wing sympathies (he had joined the Scottish Communist Party in his student days in Glasgow and was still a member at this point[8] ). For McLaren Defence of Madrid also underscored a fundamental Griersonian belief: that film has an over-riding social purpose;
2. Ivor Montagu obtained the requested assistance for his project;
3. The GPO Film Unit benefitted because McLaren, one of their employees, received extra-institutional training;
4. With the screening of Defence of Madrid , the Republican side of the Civil War got a rare airing;
5. The advancements of the Republican cause, the GPO Film Unit, and McLaren also served John Grierson’s own political, social, professional and institutional interests.
After the making of Defence of Madrid , McLaren returned to learning his craft at the Unit. Although he did not have much direct contact with Grierson during his ensuing three years at the Unit, he nevertheless found himself in sympathy with the atmosphere and attitudes emanating from the Director that were prevalent within the institution. [9] The staff recruited by John Grierson saw to it that the ethos of the Unit was maintained after his departure in 1937. In 1937-38 McLaren made his first animated film as a professional film-maker. Love on the Wing was a stunning flow of metamorphoses produced by drawing images directly on the raw film stock. Unfortunately for McLaren, some of his imagery metamorphosed briefly into (deliberate) phallic shapes. The content of this sexually suggestive material (which was termed Freudian) was too much for the Postmaster-General of the time who used his authority as the Minister of the Crown presiding over the GPO Film Unit to prevent the film’s release. [10]
By this time the genial Alberto Cavalcanti headed the Unit: he, for all his outstanding qualities as a film-maker, possessed neither Grierson’s canny and forceful means of persuasion nor his innate political sense. Had Grierson still been head, the outcome would have been, in all likelihood, very different. Grierson’s sensitivity to his political or bureaucrat masters, and his ability to achieve his ends, was demonstrated very early in his career by his astute and tactical choice of herrings as the subject of his film Drifters (1929). Grierson knew that the key to finance for the film was held by Arthur Samuel, the financial secretary to the Treasury who had written a book The Herring: Its Effect on the History of Britain . [11] Grierson’s ability to ascertain filmic qualities was also strongly developed and this he put to use not only in appraising potential recruits, but also in evaluating his own film-makers’ efforts at the Unit. Given these attributes, it is more than probable that Grierson would have either convinced the Postmaster-General to release the film or he would have spotted the sensitive nature of those brief segments of Love on the Wing and would have suggested an artistic compromise to McLaren himself. The consequence of either scenario would have been the release of the film. Be that as it may, the film’s suppression by the British authorities was a lesson to McLaren, so his first post-Grierson period contained at least one Griersonian lesson.
Grierson and McLaren’s third significant crossing-of-paths occurred in 1941. By this time Grierson had left the UK for Canada where he not only was a key figure in the establishment of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), but also became its foundation Commissioner. In the meantime McLaren had also left the GPO Film Unit and the UK preceding the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 – his experiences in Spain had confirmed his abhorrence of violence which he had earlier expressed in his student film Hell unLtd (1936, co-directed with Helen Biggar), and he felt he could not stand witnessing more. McLaren headed for New York. Despite weighty letters of introduction, energetic searches and the occasional piece of good fortune (by way of Baroness Hilla von Rebay at the fledgling Guggenheim Museum, then known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, who commissioned some films and screenings from the young immigrant), McLaren lived on the edge of poverty. [13] He eventually was forced to compromise his beliefs when he accepted work as a production-line animator in a commercial firm.
The desperation and bleakness of his position in New York had prompted McLaren to sound out Grierson for a job at the NFB as early as December 1939. [14] At that stage Grierson had only just established the NFB and was in the process of setting its direction by the importation of key personnel from his UK days: Stuart Legg (theatrical series), Stanley Hawes (non-theatrical series), Raymond Spottiswood (technical aspects and teacher) and J.D. Davidson (camera skills and craft). Grierson wrote back informing McLaren that there was “….no great prospect for anymore outsiders…” for work at the NFB. [15] McLaren, the maker of unorthodox animated films was not seen as an essential ingredient of the NFB.
Eighteen months later however, things had changed. The Canadian Government required cash for its war effort. Grierson had a proposal that would draw greater public interest to the Government’s efforts to increase savings. This in turn would achieve the desired result of increasing the money available to the Government for the war. Grierson argued that the public would have had a surfeit of films dealing with munitions production and supplies. He suggested that a different approach be tried. Remembering the success of Len Lye’s graphic films for the GPO Film Unit, Grierson set about persuading his bureaucracy that the Canadian public would be more receptive to a lighter approach. [16] Grierson knew that McLaren, whose work he perceived to be in a similar vein to Lye’s films, was in New York. McLaren’s subsequent move to Canada demonstrates that Grierson succeeded in convincing the bureaucrats. [17]
What is unexpected however, is that McLaren resisted Grierson’s overtures to come to Canada. What Grierson failed to realise was that just as his needs at the NFB had changed since 1939, so had McLaren’s view of the tenor of the NFB films. By 1941 the War had intensified. McLaren saw the danger of him going to Canada and being involved with making pro-war propaganda films. In spite of his sympathies for the allied cause, the young film-maker remained loyal to his pacifist views and explained that he did not wish to go to Canada if it meant making hard-sell war-propaganda films. [18]
Grierson reassured McLaren telling him that he would be free to do what he wanted. [19] Right from the beginning McLaren’s special role at the NFB was established. McLaren encapsulates:
He [Grierson] had an overall picture of the Film Board’s function. It was making a great lot of very factual documentary films and it needed a variety in its programming – a little lightness and fantasy. And that’s where he saw me fitting in. That’s why he said, “Come and do what you want.” [20]
“…you will see that you can make cinema as you understand it.” [21]
The need for the variety provided by McLaren in the NFB’s output was exaggerated by the programming arrangements the NFB had in that period. In order to reach as many Canadians as possible the NFB put on its own shows in factory cafeterias, community halls, school halls and the like. To avoid an avalanche of unremitting documentaries, work like McLaren’s which was humorous, in colour, fast-moving and essentially used linear imagery was included and provided the needed contrast and relief for the all-NFB programs.
Gradually, as the years passed, McLaren’s NFB role developed and expanded as did the NFB itself. The NFB’s post-War development however occurred without the direct involvement of John Grierson. Honouring a pledge he made when he became the NFB’s first Commissioner to look after the organisation only for the duration of the War, Grierson resigned in 1945. For the second time in the young animator’s career Grierson departed as his boss. McLaren himself however stayed at the NFB, remaining there for the rest of his professional life – for a further 39 years.
In contrast to the economic and consequent artistic difficulties he experienced during his independent New York years, life in Canada was reassuring for McLaren; the NFB provided him with financial and professional security. Of equal if not greater importance however, was that the NFB satisfied, with some qualifications, McLaren’s deep-felt need to perform a social service. Like most film-makers employed by Grierson during those dramatic times of depression, armament, warfare and cold-warfare, McLaren carried the optimistic view that, not only could society and the plight of his fellow be improved, but that it was his duty to contribute to this end. An important corollary of this obligation was McLaren’s attitude to his duties and responsibilities as a public servant. He was scrupulously honest to his employer, whom he understood to be the Canadian public. Further, he invariably strove to make his films not only as effectively as he could but also as efficiently as was possible. It is relevant to note that his films were usually amongst the cheapest to make since, being made largely by one person, the NFB only had to provide the film-maker with a room and some film-processing services. Even Neighbours (1952), which required more assistance than usual in a McLaren film since two actors were also required throughout the shoot, cost just $14,963 and was one of the cheapest films made at the NFB that year. [22] That it went on to win an Oscar and was – with 108,000 bookings up to 1987[23] – the NFB’s most popular film ever, demonstrates what good value McLaren was. Underscoring McLaren’s value and his scrupulous diligence is the fact that with the sole exception of his final film, every one of McLaren’s forty-plus films for the NFB came in under budget.
McLaren’s integrity revealed itself in other ways at the NFB. The NFB had a number of objectives, the first of which was “…to produce and distribute, and to promote the production and distribution of films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to the rest of the world.” [24] Fitting McLaren’s oeuvre into this objective was not as easy as fitting the traditional documentary output of the Board. McLaren was able however to satisfy a further NFB objective: “…to engage in research in film activity and to make available the results thereof to persons engaged in the production of films.”
His method of working meshed perfectly with this objective. He liked a technical challenge. Moreover, many of his films grew from meeting a particular challenge. To take a particular example, in drawing directly onto clear film, which was a technique McLaren had used in various ways from his earliest films, a constant problem was keeping the clear film clear, particularly of dust. McLaren’s solution to this technical problem was directly simple. Instead of drawing on clear film he decided to obtain his images by scratching on black (exposed) film. Drawing on black film however prevented the artist from seeing any registration guide. McLaren’s solution to this further problem was to use just clusters of three or four frame-images which did not have to be precisely registered as they would only be on the screen for a split-second. Between the clusters McLaren left ten, twenty, or thirty frames blank (black) before another cluster of images was scratched. The result was a series of stroboscopic explosions of imagery which could still be read as a continuous and moving image. Needless to say the film, Blinkity Blank (1955), was a visual revelation. Just some of the other McLaren films that resulted from a technical challenge are:
La poulette grise (1947): chain-of-mixes. This technique resulted from McLaren’s attempt to avoid the high numbers of only slightly varied drawings that are normally required to animate slow movements or gradual changes. McLaren’s alternative way of achieving slow change was to shoot a drawing, rewind the film in the camera a little, alter the drawing and then shoot again. This process was then repeated (In La poulette grise it was repeated throughout the film). The result of the process was a drawing that gradually metamorphosed in a series of dissolves:
Begone Dull Care (1949): frameless drawn-on film. This directly drawn-on-the-film-stock approach avoided the difficulties inherent in frame-by-frame registration from one image to the next. Paint, inks and dyes were applied to the film across and regardless of its frame divisions. Temporal structure was achieved by editing sections of film to accord with the sound track’s various changes from one musical phrase to another;
Lines Vertical (1960): use of only straight lines drawn continuously through the frame divisions. Once again this avoided the need for frame-by-frame drawing, yet in this case the result was stable imagery of near-vertical lines moving laterally;
Lines Horizontal (1961): The images of Lines Vertical were used. They were rotated in printing 90°, making the film one of near-horizontal lines that moved vertically;
Mosaic (1965): The images of Lines Vertical and Lines Horizontal were superimposed so that only their moving intersections were visible on the screen;
Neighbours (1952): pixillation. Instead of animating objects by moving them a little between shots, McLaren animated people. He was able to make them appear to glide, skate, spin and, by successively photographing them in mid-jump, they also appeared to fly.
McLaren was being continually asked how he had achieved his various filmic effects. He soon realised that the most efficient way of dealing with these inquiries was to prepare extensive notes, make copies of them and distribute them to those who inquired.
It is clear that McLaren worked using technical challenges because that method enabled him to produce the films he wanted. Similarly, the notes were prepared because of the demand for them. That he was also fulfilling the NFB objective of engaging in research and disseminating the results was incidental, although this fact would have helped to ease his conscience particularly when he felt, as he did from time to time, distressed at making so many films that were abstract and seemingly without social content. [25]
Regardless of these misgivings, which were to surface with more turbulence in the later stages of his career, McLaren’s success measured in terms of the numbers of rentals of his films from the NFB, or in the number of prestigious film and civic awards he collected, caused his name to become synonymous with that of the NFB. His recognition was international and it will be recalled that the first quoted NFB objective included showing Canada to the rest of the world. McLaren was certainly showing his NFB film-work to the rest of the world, but it was not obviously or brashly Canadian. His films generally included neither descriptive shots of the Canadian landscape nor presentations of rural or industrial might and/or dislocation. That, however, is the irony. The lack of obviousness or brashness can be seen as being characteristically Canadian. In those earlier NFB films in which he illustrated French-Canadian folk songs, the more overtly Canadian subject-matter is subsumed in the sense of joy and wonder that permeated almost all his film-work.
It would be fair to say that McLaren in his film-work was an internationalist. His work had an international appeal because he eliminated national or regional markers. McLaren, with one small exception in Opening Speech (1960), never used speech in his films. He felt it was “…an intrusion of an alien kind.” [26] How alien can be gained by viewing Opening Speech . In the film McLaren portrays himself attempting to make a speech and despite repeated attempts, he never gets further than the words, “Good evening ladies and g..” before the microphone rebels by moving off each time in a series of increasingly bizarre evasions. The lack of speech in McLaren’s films served two ends: it suited his way of working, and it accorded with his desire to make his films available to the widest possible audience.
His efforts to remove other cultural-limiters from his films were more single-minded choices. The film in which this is most obvious is Chairy Tale (1957). There are two examples of attempting to eliminate culturally-specific references in Chairy Tale . One concerns the selection of the clothes of the man who is trying to sit on a chair (the chair, like the microphone in Opening Speech, is rebelling by moving away from the human protagonist). After much deliberation it was decided that the man’s clothes should be white since in much of the world white is the colour in which men dress and for many other parts of the world white is an impartial, acceptable dress colour. [27] The concern for neutrality also extended to the film’s chair:
We had dozens of chairs taking screen-tests. We were very aware of the anthropomorphic qualities of the chairs. We were talking about which was the sexiest and how sexy it should be. Should it have curves, straight lines, things like that. We finally decided on the humble, most ordinary looking, functional chair. Anybody who used a chair would recognize it as a chair with nothing special about it stylistically or culturally. [28]
McLaren’s desire for international comprehension of his films lead him to consider the titles and credits of his films. McLaren had been accustomed to using both Canada’s official languages in the titles and credits of his films. Indeed, accommodating Canada’s bi-cultural (as it was then perceived) nature was an initial requirement and McLaren’s natural disinclination to using film-speech enabled his films to be more readily accepted across all parts of Canada. By introducing titles and credits which were screened in a multiplicity of simultaneously-screened languages, the inter-cultural, international and inclusive nature of his films became unmistakable. The multiple languages were a signal and a recognition that McLaren’s films were aimed at an international audience.
McLaren’s internationalist outlook was also a prime factor in his acceptance of two sabbaticals for UNESCO to China (1949-50) and to India (1952-53) during which he taught visual communication (including fundamental film-making). [29] McLaren’s internationalist concern was a feature of the political outlook of those in the left-wing of politics – particularly of those who matured in the inter-war era. Grierson’s influence on the political views of McLaren were secondary. McLaren was a member of the Scottish Communist Party well before he journeyed south to work for Grierson at the GPO Film Unit in London. What Grierson with the GPO Film Unit and then the NFB did do was to confirm McLaren’s social conscience and provide him with the means to channel his views into something productive.
McLaren already appreciated the social function that films could perform before he left Scotland. Brief reference has already been made to Hell unLtd , which was produced in 1936 with Helen Biggar. It is a strident anti-war, anti-capitalist film that used live-action and animation. In the same year the pair also embarked on Homes v. Health , a project on Glasgow’s housing problems, which had to be aborted when the Glasgow Corporation refused permission for filming in Mearnskirk Hospital. None of McLaren’s previous six films had tackled social issues. The student film-maker however, was keenly aware of the non-animated genre of film, for he repeatedly cited the films of Pudovkin and Eisenstein as a cardinal influence on him. [30] He saw these and other pioneering films, including without doubt Grierson’s Drifters , at the Glasgow Film Society during his student years. It is reasonable to deduce therefore, that McLaren embarked on his own social-issue film-making immediately after meeting Grierson and being offered a job with the GPO Film Unit because he wished to prepare himself by making the GPO Film Unit’s type of material before going to London. As well, taking into account Grierson’s dynamic and persuasive manner, it is not unreasonable to assume that he had inspired his upcoming recruit as to the enormous potential of film to illuminate issues and thereby stimulate social change.
McLaren’s awareness of the film-medium’s potential and his well-developed concern for his fellow humankind caused him increasingly severe pangs of guilt as his career drew to a close. [31] During the post-war years, his film output oscillated between films that tended to be abstract and those that were more representational and carried a social message – usually about conflict. His inclination towards abstraction resulted in many magnificent films, however McLaren came to feel that there was a clear distinction between his two types of film activity:
For me, moral art is the greatest kind of art. Amoral art, such as abstract painting and decoration, many kinds of music and dance, fine cuisine, etc., is predominantly an appeal to our senses and although a very vital and essential part of human activity, is of a lower order. Moral art appeals not only to our senses, but through our senses to our whole being. The good moral work of art should have formal unity, balance, contrast and a sensitivity to the material out of which it is made. But it has an even more precious quality – a consciousness of the human intelligence, of the human spirit, that man is a social creature. [32]
It is hardly surprising therefore that on a number of occasions he should have nominated Neighbours as the film he most wished to be saved for posterity. [33] This film on greed and its ensuing, escalating conflict, veers from whimsy and fun to darkly disturbing violence. McLaren felt that this sort of film was not only of the higher order – moral art – but that it could be used to effect direct changes for the good in people’s lives.
A few years ago, for example, I found our title department making the title for Neighbours in several different African languages [the multiple-language titles on standard prints could not include all languages]. It turned out they wanted to show the film to a number of warring African tribes with the hope of convincing them of the futility of war. That’s the kind of recognition I most appreciate. [34]
Although his social conscience was well developed before he met Grierson, McLaren’s hierarchical elevation of films of the Neighbours type and the guilt he felt about not having made more of those may be traced to his early contacts with Grierson. Also stemming from those early years was McLaren’s willingness to compromise in order to maximise his audience. Neighbours once again may be used as an example. When Neighbours was first released, the culminating violence was envisaged by one important foreign distributor to be too much for the USA’s school children while another feared Italian audiences would be vulnerable. As a result of these and further objections, McLaren agreed to those offending scenes, which showed the attacks on the two mothers and their babies, to be removed from all prints. [35] His wish to see his film widely distributed and his memory of the suppression of Love on the Wing may be seen as the underlying reasons for his decision to censor Neighbours . McLaren’s desire to see the film released over-rode any misgivings he may have had concerning the removal of the structural and emotional climax of the film, the elimination of which ironically lessened the film’s pacifist impact.
The most tangible of McLaren’s Griersonian inheritance goes back to the first meeting. McLaren carried Grierson’s lesson about the need for a film’s structural unity right through his career. Not long before he died he spoke on camera describing his views on structure. He had refined the concept, of course, but Grierson’s influence is plain: “A work of art has to have cohesiveness and consistency, but not so much cohesiveness and consistency as to become boring, and not so much non-cohesiveness as to fall apart. It has to be organically linked, and yet it must have surprises in it that you don’t expect, but surprises that are relevant to the whole work.” [36] McLaren’s NFB film-work reveals the consistency with which he applied this theory of structure to his films; it also thereby further reveals the extent of McLaren’s indebtedness to Grierson.
The McLaren-Grierson inter-action was a complicated one. Although this paper has attempted to show some of that relationship, focusing on those aspects which emanated from Grierson, it should be borne in mind that the two men inherited much from a third common source; their shared background. They each came from the same small Scottish town of Stirling and attended, albeit at different times, the same High School. Both Grierson and McLaren, despite coming from privileged middle-class homes, witnessed as children the poverty that not only blighted the lives of the mining communities but also those of the rural poor. It is not surprising therefore that each developed a strong social conscience. They expressed their opinions through their professions in vastly different ways; Grierson mainly as provocative organiser, advocate and persuader and McLaren as a maker of always-startling films. The careers of the two men intersected with profound and remarkable results. For McLaren the outcome was the production of an unequalled body of film-work. Important as these works are, as both Grierson and McLaren would acknowledge, the primary worth of either of the two pioneers’ legacy lies in the effects such works have had on us.
Footnotes:
[1] James Beveridge, John Grierson: Film Master (NY: Macmillan, 1978), 43-50.
[2] The film no longer exists (its only version was worn out by repeated screenings at the Glasgow School of Art) so the accuracy of the “abstract” label, used in Maynard Collins, Norman McLaren (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1976) 23, can only be surmised. See discussion in Terence Dobson, The Film-Work of Norman McLaren Unpublished PhD thesis (University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1995) 44.
[3] McLaren, quoted in Beveridge, 80-81.
[4] McLaren, in Beveridge, 81.
[5] Grierson had already had the opportunity to assess McLaren and his work. Moreover, his assessment of potential recruits was aided by considerable experience – Grierson made a practice of attending amateur film festivals looking for talent; Basil Wright, for example, was also recruited to the GPO Film Unit after Grierson saw an amateur film screening of one of his films. See Basil Wright, quoted in Beveridge, 63.
[6] See, for example, McLaren’s statements of many decades later: in Collins, 66; in Donald McWilliams and Susan Huycke, Creative process: Norman McLaren , dir. Donald McWilliams, National Film Board of Canada, 1991, script 3; and in “Interview,” Norman McLaren: Exhibition and Films (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 1977) 8.
[7] Evans’ appraisal of Grierson’s persuasive personality as well as McLaren’s own experience of Grierson endorse this scenario. Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1984) 3; and McLaren, in “Interview”, 8.
[8] See McLaren: in “Interview”, 9; in Donald McWilliams, Creative Process Proposal, unpublished ts (National Film Board of Canada Archives, July 1985) 40; and in Collins, 67.
[9] See Irving Jacoby, in Beveridge, 93; and Basil Wright, in G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-makers (NY: Anchor, 1971) 39, 40. McLaren shared the views of his colleagues concerning the nature of the problems facing society and the potential of film in answering those problems. One of his last student films, Homes v. Health (early 1936), which had to be aborted, was on the squalor of British slums and is even paralleled by a landmark GPO Film Unit production – Housing Problems (Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey, 1935).
[10] McLaren, “Interview”, 13.
[11] Evans, 31.
[12] Wright, in Levin, 38-39.
[13] Dobson, 103-127.
[14] McLaren letter to Grierson, 12 Dec. 1939, 1-2, Grierson Archives, Univ. of Stirling, GAA 4:23:54.
[15] Grierson letter to McLaren, 15 Dec. 1939, Grierson Archives, G4:23:56.
[16] Grierson’s efforts to get McLaren to help the Canadian war effort through the NFB, and his reasons for this, are contained in an exchange of memos and letters, all held in the NFB Archives, Production Files: John Grierson, NFB memo 2 July 1941; John Grierson, letter to John Devine, American Film Center, 2 July 1941; John Devine, letter to John Grierson 7 July 1941; D.B. Mansur, War Savings Committee, letter to John Grierson, 15 July 1941.
[17] This, and Grierson’s pulling-of-strings to get McLaren released from his USA commitments and thereby free to go to Canada, are further evidence of Grierson’s astuteness and persuasiveness when dealing with both government and non-government institutions. See McLaren in Guy Glover, McLaren (Montreal: NFB, 1980) 10. There is a fuller account of McLaren’s move to the NFB in Dobson, 128-132.
[18] McLaren in Glover, 10.
[19] McLaren speaking in Gavin Millar, The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees , NFB/BBC Film, 1970.
[20] McLaren speaking in The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees .
[21] McLaren in Glover, 10.
[22] Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada, 1949-89 , unpublished manuscript, 1990, 20.
[23] Evans, In the National Interest , 71.
[24] This – and associated objectives – are taken from Guy Glover, Creative Film Making in a Government Organization , Text of Address to the New York Film Council, New York, 24 April 1962, p.2, NFB Archives, McLaren Files, 1184 D-112.
[25] McLaren’s utterances serve to illustrate these points. For instance: “…apart from any artistic value, my work has been supported [at the NFB] on the grounds that the technical innovations attempted in it have been of potential value to other film-makers…” (McLaren in Ivan Stadtrucker, questionnaire, 7 Mar. 1975, p.4, NFB Archives, McLaren Files 1184 D-112). Further, in his acceptance speech at the inaugural presentation, in 1986, of McGill University’s Norman McLaren Award (to be presented annually to the student whose work demonstrates similar social concerns to those of Norman McLaren) McLaren alluded to the tensions he felt throughout his film-making career: “I had a lasting social conscience and feeling about the humanity around me and I have felt very frustrated, often, at never being able to do much about it in my films because I’ve had other tendencies as a film-maker” (Norman McLaren speaking in Donald McWilliams, Creative Process 1st Assembly (film) 1989).
[26] McLaren speaking in The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees .
[27] Claude Jutra, who was associate director and the actor in Chairy Tale , described the decision process and its reasons in McWilliams, Creative Process, proposal, 26.
[28] Jutra quoted in McWilliams, Creative Process, proposal, 26-27.
[29] See McLaren’s report to UNESCO for the China project: Norman McLaren, The Healthy Village: An Experiment in Visual Education in West China, Monographs on Fundamental Education 5, Art Department report (Paris: UNESCO, 1951).
[30] See McLaren in “Interview”, 5, 6; and in McWilliams and Huycke, 2.
[31] McLaren speaking in McWiliams, Creative Process , 1st Assembly (film).
[32] McLaren as quoted in McWilliams, Creative Process , proposal, 35.
[33] McLaren in Collins, 69; and in McWilliams and Huycke, 28.
[34] McLaren quoted in Susan Carson, “Bore people? Fat chance, Norman McLaren,” Toronto Telegram Weekend Magazine , 30 Mar. 1974, 20-21.
[35] Later, during the Vietnam War years, the climate was such that McLaren’s decision to remove Neighbour ‘s strongest scenes was questioned. McLaren then determined to restore the scenes to the film. However, because no original negatives of the scenes remained, the re-inserted scenes were copied from some old prints which still contained them, hence the grainy appearance of these scenes in prints which have been distributed since the re-insertion.
[36] McLaren, in McWilliams and Huycke, 19.