A/D
Film Archive
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Credits
Director
Normen McLaren, Claude Jutra
Music
Ravi Shankar, Chatur Lal, Maurice Blackburn
Animation
Evelyn Lambart
A wooden chair rejects a man who wants to sit down on it and starts to move with a will of its own. After the first consternation, the man’s ambition is kindled and the two begin a bizarre dance which ends in mutual consent.
“A Chairy Tale” developed the pixilation technique with which McLaren had already experimented in his surprise hit “Neighbours” further. He created alternative versions of the text editions that were also published by the NFB for this extraordinary dance film. The music was the contribution of a then largely unknown Indian musician: Ravi Shankar.
---Annegret Richter
“A Chairy Tale” developed the pixilation technique with which McLaren had already experimented in his surprise hit “Neighbours” further. He created alternative versions of the text editions that were also published by the NFB for this extraordinary dance film. The music was the contribution of a then largely unknown Indian musician: Ravi Shankar.
---Annegret Richter
Blinkity Blank
Normen McLaren
Audiences can expect a firework of colours and sounds in this film, arguably the most important work of Norman McLaren’s career. Its motifs, scratched and drawn directly on the film, and the decision to intersperse them with blank frames make it a brilliant experiment on the human eye’s abilities of perception ...
Credits
Producer
Normen McLaren
Director
Normen McLaren
Music
Maurice Blackburn
Animation
Normen McLaren
Sound
Roger Beaudry, Joseph Champagne
Audiences can expect a firework of colours and sounds in this film, arguably the most important work of Norman McLaren’s career. Its motifs, scratched and drawn directly on the film, and the decision to intersperse them with blank frames make it a brilliant experiment on the human eye’s abilities of perception. McLaren’s best-known quote is based on this concept: “Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame.”
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Canon
Normen McLaren, Grant Munro
The combination of image and sound was a vital part of McLaren’s work. In addition to his experiments with soundtracks he drew upon he created a few films like “Canon”, in which he tried to visualise theoretical concepts, in the 1960s ...
Credits
Director
Normen McLaren, Grant Munro
Music
Eldon Rathburn
Cinematographer
Robert Humble
Animation
J. Gillissie
Sound
Ron Alexander
The combination of image and sound was a vital part of McLaren’s work. In addition to his experiments with soundtracks he drew upon he created a few films like “Canon”, in which he tried to visualise theoretical concepts, in the 1960s. Here he uses rhythmic animation and live action to demonstrate, in collaboration with Grant Munro, how a canon works. Toy blocks, stick figures and real humans serve as visual aids that move to a strict rhythm to form, by means of additional animation, a brilliant and original demonstration of the different types of canons.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Credits
Producer
Robert Verrall, Joseph Koenig
Director
Eva Szasz
Music
Pierre F. Brault
Cinematographer
Tony Ianzelo, James Wilson, Wayne Trickett, Raymond Dumas
Editor
Roger Lamoureux
Animation
Eva Szasz
Sound
Karl Duplessi
In the spirit of discovery that pervaded the 1960s, this animated documentary explores the endless spaces of the micro- and macrocosm in only eight minutes, from the universe to the smallest unit of our body. It starts with a boy who rows across a lake with his dog. The imaginary camera first “zooms” away from him and then into his body. The film was one of seven short NFB animations bought by the US broadcaster ABC in 1971 for its children’s show “Curiosity Shop”.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Free Fall
Arthur Lipsett
In “Free Fall”, Arthur Lipsett, the NFB’s “boy genius”, who inspired directors like Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Stan Brakhage, edited a fast-paced montage of modern stereotypes. Film footage, photos, animations accompanied by fragments of words and music ...
Credits
Producer
Tom Daly, Colin Low
Director
Arthur Lipsett
Cinematographer
Arthur Lipsett
Editor
Arthur Lipsett
Sound
Arthur Lipsett
In “Free Fall”, Arthur Lipsett, the NFB’s “boy genius”, who inspired directors like Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Stan Brakhage, edited a fast-paced montage of modern stereotypes. Film footage, photos, animations accompanied by fragments of words and music, live sounds of all kind grow into an associative maelstrom of images modelled on Dalí and surrealism. The mundane is juxtaposed with symbols charged with meaning, concrete faces with abstract figures, rapid movement with stagnation, the old with the new. The closing image is that of a cell from which everything grows. Lipsett himself said: “An attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the throes of creativity – the transformation of physical phenomena into psychological ones – a visual bubbling of picture and sound operating to create a new continuity of experience – (…) strange shapes shine forth from the abyss of timelessness.”
---Grit Lemke
---Grit Lemke
Credits
Producer
Norman McLaren
Director
Norman McLaren
Animation
Norman McLaren
A hen performs an exuberant and wild dance to Canadian country music. Sometimes it’s an egg, sometimes it has a leg missing and occasionally it falls apart. Norman McLaren had a fascination for chickens and eggs because he believed they lent themselves easily to simple drawings, so they became quite popular figures in his films. “It is not so important what is moving as how it moves.” Again, McLaren painted the animation directly on the film.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Credits
Producer
Norman McLaren
Director
Norman McLaren
Animation
George Dunning
The photographic representation of a human cranium turns into an animated skull, its eyes become swastikas, while the enemy, personified by a Hitler-spy, learns important war secrets from its mouth. A drastic appeal and an intermediate stage on the filmmaker’s path from the concrete to abstraction.
---Grit Lemke
---Grit Lemke
Neighbours
Normen McLaren
There is a controversial debate about the political component of this multiple award-winning work in film studies even today. Many call it banal, others highly political, while McLaren himself used the term “rather a moral film. (…) It can be used for political purposes.” ...
Credits
Producer
Normen McLaren
Director
Normen McLaren
Music
Normen McLaren
Cinematographer
Wolf Koenig
Animation
Normen McLaren
Sound
Clark Daprato
There is a controversial debate about the political component of this multiple award-winning work in film studies even today. Many call it banal, others highly political, while McLaren himself used the term “rather a moral film. (…) It can be used for political purposes.” He even agreed to make a change for US distribution and edit the dead women and children out of the film. When the Vietnam War had started, however, he insisted on the original version to show the momentousness of such conflicts.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
The Romance of Transportation in Canada
Colin Low
This was the first joint production of what were to become the key players of Unit B: Colin Low, Wolf Koenig, Robert Verrall, and of course producer Tom Daly. Conceived as part of the “Canada Carries On” series, the ironic distance of the creative heads of Unit B towards Canadian culture and history already shines through in this entertaining animation ...
Credits
Producer
Tom Daly
Director
Colin Low
Music
Eldon Rathburn
Animation
Wolf Koenig, Robert Verrall
Script
Guy Glover
Sound
Clark Daprato, Kenneth Heeley-Ray
Photographer
Lyle Enright
Speaker
Max Ferguson
This was the first joint production of what were to become the key players of Unit B: Colin Low, Wolf Koenig, Robert Verrall, and of course producer Tom Daly. Conceived as part of the “Canada Carries On” series, the ironic distance of the creative heads of Unit B towards Canadian culture and history already shines through in this entertaining animation. National historical developments are explained through technical achievements, while the film frequently and with a certain degree of self-mockery satirizes the Canadians and their cultural myths. At the same time, it is the first NFB film to use the fairly commercial cel animation technique instead of the experimental techniques developed by Norman McLaren and others.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Universe
Roman Kroitor, Colin Low
As early as the 1950s, the directors of Unit B stood for quality and success within the NFB. So it’s no surprise that Roman Kroitor and Colin Low got approval for a 30-minute educational film that required the at the time immense budget of 60,000 dollars ...
Credits
Producer
Tom Daly
Director
Roman Kroitor, Colin Low
Music
Eldon Rathburn
Cinematographer
Denis Gillson, Wolf Koenig
Editor
Tom Daly
Script
Roman Kroitor
Sound
Joseph Champagne, Kathleen Shanon
Speaker
Stanley Jackson, Douglas Rain
As early as the 1950s, the directors of Unit B stood for quality and success within the NFB. So it’s no surprise that Roman Kroitor and Colin Low got approval for a 30-minute educational film that required the at the time immense budget of 60,000 dollars. Their idea was to explain the structure of the universe to inspire a fascination for space and an adventurous spirit in school children. Colin Low’s experience as an animation filmmaker was essential for the realisation of this difficult documentary project, but “Universe” fulfilled all expectations and became one of the most successful films ever produced by the NFB.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Credits
Producer
Colin Low, Tom Daly
Director
Arthur Lipsett
Arthur Lipsett’s very first film established him as a talented avant-garde filmmaker and was nominated for the Academy Award. It is a brilliant montage of film fragments with an extraordinary soundtrack picked up from NFB editing room floors in July 1961. Mundane everyday situations like shopping tours are shown again and again, while the soundtrack, except for an occasional “very nice, very nice”, remains a diffuse collage of voices and sounds.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
