The names of Norman McLaren and Geoffrey Jones pop up quite a lot especially given my love of Len Lye – but apart from Geoffrey’s Snow I’d not seen their work. How wrong I was! These films would be dead certs for VJing sets, if I was still doing it.
Proving that Oramics was around years before Daphne did it, here Norman McLaren not only draws on the visual part of the film, but also creates electronic noises by drawing on the sound part as well (film until magnetic stripe use to have optically encoded sound down the side, a bit like a squiggly sound wave). There’s a demonstration of this technique here…and it sounds like dubstep!
Not just drawn films were animated by Norman, also the sort of stop motion fun you saw from Mr Nosey Bonk – but this was 1952:
Pas De Deux is his most famous film from 1968, which garnered 20 awards and an Oscar nomination – years before Zbigniew Rybczy?ski he was doing optical printing of movement. It’s very trippy, with an amazingly ambient soundtrack. It’s shockingly and startingly beautiful:
And Geoffrey Jones has a similar sort of flow, even if it’s live action, and or course there is the link via film optics and Daphne Oram who added to his film soundtracks…and I think Adam Curtis et al have taken a lot of inspiration from his style. His 1967 film Rail has amazing images of rail past and present, for the British Railways Board. Certainly I think editors can learn a lot from this film, even now:
Sadly it seems he only made a limited amount of films, mostly for BR, Shell (who Len Lye worked for earlier) and BP. Here is his film ‘Locomotion’ about the history of the railway. Tempted to buy the BFI DVD of his work, I love the film of trains, but more importantly the abstract imagery and editing. This is not just Modern Railways style train porn!
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