»… Play-rew-forward-stop …« Audio ”“ video music series 1.1

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
21 March 2009, 17.00
First session: The animator as musician

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.