McLaren, Norman

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Origin: Stirling, Scotland - Hudson, Québec, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Norman McLaren was one of the rare artists who could make film sing and dance, treating the medium not as a vehicle for stories but as a living score of sound and motion. Born in Stirling, Scotland, in 1914, he studied interior design at the Glasgow School of Art, but quickly discovered film after seeing Oskar Fischinger’s abstract animations. Within a few years his own works were winning prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where he met John Grierson, the visionary of British documentary. Grierson invited him to London’s GPO Film Unit, and McLaren’s surreal Love on the Wing (1938) hinted at what was to come—abstract imagery, direct work on film stock, and a willingness to defy conventions.

In 1939, unwilling to face another European war after witnessing the brutality of the Spanish Civil War while filming Defence of Madrid, McLaren emigrated to New York. He continued his experiments with cameraless animation, scratching, inking, and painting directly onto film, producing small jewels like Dots and Boogie-Doodle. In 1941, Grierson—by then the first Government Film Commissioner of Canada—brought him to Ottawa to work for the newly founded National Film Board. There McLaren found the freedom to explore without compromise. He directed wartime films and soon established Studio A, the NFB’s animation unit, training a generation of artists including Evelyn Lambart, Grant Munro, René Jodoin, and George Dunning.

McLaren’s brilliance lay in his refusal to separate image and sound. Discovering that spliced tape and scratches on optical tracks produced tones, he developed with Lambart a precise system of “drawn-on-sound” that allowed him to compose music visually, frequency by frequency. Years before synthesizers, he published technical guides that explained how to generate pure tones, chords, and rhythms directly onto film. In Synchromy (1971), the soundtrack’s jagged striations become the picture itself, so the audience literally sees the sounds it hears. His films anticipate the aesthetics of electronic and glitch music by decades, which is why Milton Babbitt called him “the first electronic musician,” and why John Cage counted him among his circle of avant-garde heroes.

The films themselves were playful and profound. Begone Dull Care (1949), painted and scratched in time to Oscar Peterson’s jazz trio, bursts with colour and rhythm. A Chairy Tale (1957), co-directed with Claude Jutra, turns a stubborn chair into a sly dance partner, scored by Ravi Shankar. Pas de deux (1968) stretches ballet into ghostly tracings through optical printing. And Neighbours (1952), his Academy Award-winning pixilation parable, depicts two men destroying each other over a flower—an unforgettable anti-war allegory later added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Over his career McLaren won more than 200 international awards, including the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Blinkity Blank (1955). Yet he remained modest, more concerned with the craft than the acclaim. He described himself as “a filmmaker who made some interesting films,” but to his colleagues he was also a generous teacher, offering opportunities to the young and the untested. He was discreet but devoted in his private life, sharing four decades with his partner, NFB producer Guy Glover. His final major film, Narcissus (1983), brought his fascination with dance, myth, and mirror imagery to its fullest flowering.

Norman McLaren died in Hudson, Québec, in 1987. He left behind not just a body of films but a set of ideas—that sound can be seen, that images can be heard, that animation can embody music itself. His methods remain in circulation through the NFB archives, and his influence continues to reverberate in electronic music, experimental film, and every frame of animation that dares to move to its own rhythm.
-Robert Williston