Rhythmetic: The Compositions of Norman McLaren

One of my interests is the weird electronic (or otherly avant or just nuttily absurdist) music on animations and experimental short films, sometimes done by a composer or someone the animator-director knows who has institutional access to synths and such, but quite often made by the animator-director. 

Prime example: Norman McLaren of Canada's NFB.

I have made compilations of soundtracks and scores having liberated them from their cinematic context. Most of the time the audio - often mixing music with sound FX and cartoony voices - has no existence separate from the film, has never been released as records. 

Prime example: Norman McLaren of Canada's NFB.

Until now! with the release of Rythmetic – The Compositions of Norman McLaren

Daryl Worthington reviews Rythmetic at the Quietus as Reissue of the Week

" Born in Stirling, Scotland, McLaren started making films when studying at the Glasgow School Of Art. After his stint at the GPO, he relocated to Canada and worked for the country’s nascent National Film Board. He was acknowledged as a pioneering animator in his day, winning an Oscar and a Palme d’Or. Pablo Picasso and George Lucas were fans, the former describing McLaren’s work as “something new in the art of drawing”. 

...Central to many of them is a symbiotic connection between sound and image.... It hits with dazzling effect on 1949’s Begone Dull Care, an animated accompaniment to the Oscar Peterson Jazz Trio. McLaren didn’t always use other people’s music to score his films however, as documented on Rythmetic: The Compositions Of Norman McLaren, the first collection of McLaren’s audio work. Spanning 1940 to 1970, the compilation pulls together eight of his film scores, four unreleased compositions, and, intriguingly, the entire audio for his 1961 film Opening Speech. Most of the tracks capture a process dubbed ‘hand-drawn sound’. Just as his movies often involved him drawing on film, McLaren’s sound works involved him drawing shapes and patterns.

"As the detailed liner notes for the compilation explain, after noticing the glue on spliced film reels produced a sound as it passed through a projector, he began measuring and collating the frequencies and tones different cuts and notches would produce. Over the years, he created a series of cards containing symbols and patterns corresponding to eight octaves of notes, which he then deployed in his sonic compositions. Often, both animation and soundtrack would be hand drawn side by side on the same reel of film."

The blippy micro-syncopated percussive scores that McLaren etched by hand into his celluloid  do sound startling and contagious when listened to separately: at times more like demented Morse Code, flurries of dot-dash pointillism, than music. But after a bit I found myself wondering whether they actually worked best in their original visually kinetic context.

Worthington feels the same: 

"Sometimes, something does seem to be missing when the hand-drawn soundtracks are isolated. The absence of visuals is a reminder of how integral sound and image were to each other in McLaren’s films. That’s brought home most directly by the compilation’s third track, ‘Neighbours’, originally created for the 1952 film of the same name which won McLaren an Oscar. The short film sees two neighbours get into hyperreal fisticuffs after one erects a fence to claim a flower that has sprouted between their houses. What starts as a farcical punch up descends into disturbingly violent scenes. An overblown conflict which leads to mutual destruction, Neighbours is a scathing lament of war’s violent futility, likely taking aim at the absurdity of the Cold War that was simmering away when the film was released. Left with the sound alone, that uncompromising critique is lost."

While overall feeling the move to issue the music separately was a good idea;

While some things are lost, just as much is gained through the magnifying glass Rythmetic shines on McLaren as a brilliantly unique composer. A facet to his work which until now has often been hidden in plain sight in his films is given the attention it truly deserves.

Here are the original films that the tracks on the comp supported (with the exception of four unreleased compositions) 

John Hofsess - Palace of Pleasure (1967)

via Peter Stanfield 

 Watch The Looking Cure -  a mini-doc about John Hofsess's Palace of Pleasure - made by Stephen Broomer.

“See it and you’ll see a window on the future: a Joyce-Burroughs assemblage of bold, poetic surreal visions of physical love in every conceivable form." - Gene Youngblood

As Broomer writes in CineAction (the full essay reproduced here): 

Hamilton's McMaster University of the mid-1960s had a thriving campus art scene. The annual arts festival attracted prestigious and daring North American guests, such as Amiri Baraka, Cannonball Adderly, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and Leslie Fiedler among others. In 1966, mature student John Hofsess, a frequent contributor to the campus newspaper, began to produce 8mm and then 16mm films. Hofsess founded an organization of student filmmakers called the McMaster Film Board (MFB), a group funded by the student union. Hofsess's interests in sexual revolution and American underground art made for a tense relationship between the McMaster Film Board and the student union. Through the McMaster Film Board, John Hofsess began Palace of Pleasure (1966/67), a series of experimental films. Intended as a trilogy, only two parts were completed.

The films were designed as showcases for Hofsess's concept of 'cinematherapy,  an experiment that combined ideas from contemporary media--from Warhol and McLuhan--with ideas gleaned from writings on psychoanalytic liberation. His project was similar, if more in spirit than practice, to Wilhelm Reich's orgasm theory, wherein the organism was freed from its neurosis through the total release of dammed-up orgastic energies. Reich envisioned a healthy and functional mankind that could build a sex-positive society away from the tyranny of repressive institutions. 

Hofsess saw his films operating in opposition to a filmmaker such as Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), whose shocking work, in Hofsess's estimation, could only reinforce the alienation of the neurotic and their bond to the repressive institution. The ideas underlying the productions were Hofsess's own, but the first part (Redpath 25) was a collaboration between Hofsess, McMaster art community organizer Patricia Murphy, who starred in it, and Robin Hilborn, a science student who applied bleach effects during the film's processing.

 The second and more substantial part of the trilogy (Black Zero) was announced in the student press as being co-directed by McMaster Film Board president Peter Rowe, who was primarily responsible for the cinematography. Hofsess had also cast members of the McMaster Dramatic Society, specifically its director David Martin, who would go on to make a film with the McMaster Film Board titled To Paint the Park (1968), a single-screen experimental narrative that was heavily influenced by Hofsess's work. Martin's performance in Black Zero, according to Hofsess's model of therapeutic film form, was "flattened out" in editing. The film was presented in dual projection: tension would dissipate between the two screens. 

The film acts as a sensual experience by emancipating the viewer from the expectations placed on them by the narrative tradition, their view of the film disrupted by the intentional compromise of performance elements as well as frequent obstructions of kaleidoscopic psychedelic images and appropriated magazine advertisements. Palace of Pleasure is an auteur work, supported through a manifesto that Hofsess contributed to Take One Magazine that expressed his unique aesthetic perspective ("Toward a New Voluptuary: From the Black Zero Notebook"), but it was made with conscious attention to the participation of others, in the spirit of collaborative practice. Hofsess showed a dedication to filmmaking as a social experience, here as well as in his community work as founder of the McMaster Film Board.

Interesting case study in the meeting ground / overlap between the avant-garde and pornography (see the famous Sontag essay), between libidinal liberation and titillation. 

Broomer says that " Hofsess's film aesthetic had been informed by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung and Norman O. Brown, and by the literature that had been issuing from Grove Press through the 1960s...".

But one of his partners on his next project was Ivan Reitman, who would later make National Lampoon's Animal House. 

That next project was titled Columbus of Sex. The makers were prosecuted. Some portions of that film were then turned into the arty erotica film My Secret Life (based on the diary of an anonymous Victorian sex maniac) by another director.  Traces of it appear to be only findable on sites like xhamster.  

The story is rather convoluted but can be found in this essay by Stephen Broomer. 

Jacques Drouin - Le paysagiste / Mindscape - 1976

                                            

"Pinscreen animation is not well-known among most animation fans, understandably: not very many films have been made using the painstaking medium to begin with, and even then they are far removed from standard mediums of animation aesthetically and thematically.... 

"The pinscreen is a device consisting of several (as in, up to over a million) small pins in holes; with some effort, the pins can be pushed into and out of their holes. The screen is then lit from an angle such that the pins create varying shadows, depending on how much they protrude from the screen; taken together, the shadows can create images that resemble engravings, complete with chiaroscuro (striking use of light and dark shadings). As the images are viewed directly at the front of the screen, the pins themselves do not affect any one given image more than they do another, no matter how far out they stick.

"There is one big problem, though: it is difficult and time-consuming to manipulate the pinscreen in order to create the desired images, let alone animate them. The device was created by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker in the early 1930s, and they would create a number of interesting films over a span of several decades, two of the most notable being Night on Bald Mountain (set to Mussorgsky’s famous piece as arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov) and The Nose (from the Gogol short story of the same name). In 1972, the National Film Board of Canada acquired a pinscreen, and Alexeieff and Parker were invited to demonstrate the device to the animators there.

"However, only UCLA-returned newcomer Jacques Drouin, who had been acquainted with pinscreen animation since seeing The Nose at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 60s, would use the pinscreen regularly and explore its capabilities. Carrying on Alexeieff’s legacy, between 1974 and 2004 Drouin made six films at the NFBC using the pinscreen (one, Nightangel, in collaboration with Czech stop-motion animator Břetislav Pojar), as well as a segment for Kihachiro Kawamoto’s collaborative film Winter Days.

"Perhaps his most well-known film, if not his masterpiece, is Mindscape, released in 1976....."

- from On the Ones (excellent animation blog) 

Here is the workshop in pinscreen animation given at Canada's NFB by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, as handily documented by Norman McLaren

Another Jacques Drouin pinscreen work "Imprints"

A documentary about pinscreen animation 

An interview with Jacques Drouin (en Francais) 

Examples of completely different styles of animation from Jacques Drouin

Ishu Patel - Perspectrum (1975)

This wonderful interpretive response to a piece of koto music is a cosmopolitan hybrid work – India-born animator, working for the National Film Board of Canada, responding to traditional Japanese music.

"Born in Gujarat, India, Ishu Patel studied Fine Arts and Visual Communication in India and advanced Graphic Design at the Basel Shool of Design, in Switzerland, before landing at the NFB in the 1970s, on a Rockerfeller Foundation Scholarship. Celebrated for his short animation, he is also an accomplished photographer, a passion he picked up during his stint as guide and photo assistant to Henri Cartier-Bresson in India....  Decidedly trippy, yet almost academic in its study of geometry and symmetry, this sweet kaleidoscope of a film [Perspectrum] features small squares, rectangles and lozanges that form, re-form, pile up and fan out against a silky black background. Twirling and pulsating at the rhythm of the koto, the 13-stringed Japanese instrument that provides the soundtrack, the diaphanous shapes begin assembling quite simply, before rapidly gaining in complexity, as more and more colours and patterns enter the dance. A truly dazzling display of skill, Perspectrum is an even wilder proposition when you consider it represents Ishu’s very first film." - NFB

"A masterpiece of abstract animation. On the one hand, the squares and their actions in themselves do not invite comparisons with anything in the natural world; they are, for all practical purposes, completely abstract. But at the same time they are not cold, mechanical, and calculated in their animation; there is an air of spontaneity and grace to how they move through the blank space, to say nothing of the beauty of their interactions and the formations they create, as though they were reflections of Ishu Patel himself. In effect, Patel creates a world that seems completely separate from the real world—but parallels it in terms of building up larger structures from simpler components, with both the squares themselves and their aural accompaniment in the arrangements of Sakura acting in this manner, and on top of that bears Patel’s personal stamp as an artist and person." - Toadette from On the Ones blog, from a very in-depth profile / career survey / filmography of Ishu Patel