»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« Audio ”“ video music series 1.4

The first part of the »… Play-Rew-Forward-Stop …« cycle is the » Play «
review on the Canadian-Scottish film-maker/composer/animator, Norman
McLaren (1914-87).

Venice, Palazzo Cini at San Vio
18 April 2009, 17.00
Forth session: Painting with light

Norman McLaren was a great – discreet, reserved, even shy – innovator
and inventor of the audiovisual arts. He was one of the most original
creators of the communicative ideas, techniques and procedures that
most dominated the modernity and post-modernity of the twentieth
century.
Already a documentary maker at a very young age, McLaren then became
one of the mainstays of the Grierson team, on which he worked first in
England (with a foray into the Spain of its fateful war), then in New
York and subsequently Canada, where he guided the National Film Board
(of Canada). Finally, he was the legendary creator of experiments with
animation and film music writing, applied directly onto the film
without cameras or microphones.
A large part of his creations, which were highly recognised at all the
festivals, including an Oscar in 1952, are a kind of optimistic hymn to
direct, dazzling communication, to faith in the poverty of the media as
great stimulators of the imagination, to the pacifist dictum and to the
liberation of all the repressed playfulness of acoustic-figurative
thinking.
The current review is intended to present the figure of McLaren, more
precisely his work, in five thematic sessions, with the aim of
highlighting five of the many facets of his enormous creativity.