Pas de deux

This term could sound strange. a ballet show, mixture of white and black, an impressive director, inspired choreography. what could surprise ? at first sigh - nothing. in essence - something who is a sort of version of pure magic. not for technical solutions. not for the meet of silhouettes. but for a reason escaping from a precise definition. because it is one of animations who are more than a simple experience. but a comprehensive explanation of every day beauty of life.

Yes, this is one of the great Canadian shorts, etc. etc.

I'm more interested in why someone could find this film boring, insisting that one had to have an interest in the dance and/or music in order to find something to like about it.

I'm not a "dance person" myself and in fact admittedly rarely have anything to do with dance performance, dance films, etc. This film is not about the dancing, though.

It's about human movement in particular, with the form of this dance being used as a means to a much more imaginative end. By utilizing dance as a mode of discovering the beauty of human grace and movement, McLaren can explore these movements in fascinating ways, using optical printing to trail print or multiple-expose their movements, using still imagery as well.

The result is an effect of three-dimensionalizing the movements (not the dancers, who are obviously already 3-D) - giving substance and shape to otherwise intangible, time-sensitive events. This film is just as incredible and breathtaking as the chrono-photographs of Etienne Jules-Marey, and in fact Pas de Deux is very much a brother of Marey's work. McLaren even lit his dancers similarly to Marey's subjects, to get an almost line-drawing effect from his subjects.

To dwell on the dance itself and whether or not you "like it" is completely missing the point of McLaren's filmmaking and artistry here. He had an incredible sense of the potential for movement and beauty, often to be found in unique and unlikely places.

See this film at all costs and try to look beyond the dance content/music content (if that bothers you), and you will hopefully find that Norman McLaren created a masterpiece in his exploration of time and motion, mined entirely from the particularly graceful movements of ballet dancers.

In 1969 I went to a middle-class matinée showing of "Easy Rider". At the break, we all got up to leave, happily surfeited with the phony, sad (and politically correct for the times) ending. Any southern redneck would shoot a hippy on sight. Okay. We bought that and started shifting around in preparation to leaving.

Then as I remember it, a single word appeared on a dead black screen. "Duo". A back-lit ballerina pirhoutted across that screen and danced away from her own still image. She did it again. We were mesmerized.

Ten seconds of stunned silence followed the last frame. The applause that followed had a quality I can only describe as "awed".

Breathtakingly beautiful, that's all.

The thing about this film is that yes, it is a little hard to approach. It was made in the context of the world of animation in 1968. No one had ever done anything like this before. McLaren chose the dance as the subject for his film not necessarily because he loved ballet (though I would guess he probably _did_ like ballet) but because the form of the dance very much lended itsself to the technique being employed (among other less craft-oriented and more art-oriented decisions). The technique used in this film had never been seen before. We look at it now and it seems like nothing special, but no one had ever thought of this multiple-exposure technique before McLaren. This is generally considered to be McLaren's magnum opus, and it is valuable viewing by any student of animation. Wathing it not as entertainment, though, but with an eye toward composition, staging, timing, and so on.

I heard that Norman McLaren , the Scots born Canadian animator was a leading pioneer in his field and is famous the world over . Somewhat typically even a Scottish film buff like myself had little awareness of him until I chanced upon this musical short

PAS DA DEUX is a monochrome short featuring a pair of ballet dancers . Exactly , I was thinking the same " Oh a black and white film featuring a couple of dancers . Can things get anymore tedious . Wake me up when it's finished " but there's something rather hypnotic about the way the music and the choreography merge together . I'm also reliably informed that this was the very first time that " after image " had been achieved on film , something that became very popular years later in everything from DOCTOR WHO to MTV pop videos .

It seems somewhat bitterly unfair - though again typical - that everyone in the world is aware of BRAVEHEART , a Hollywood movie filmed in Ireland , starring an American brought up in Australia , but not even Scots are aware of their compatriot who made such an innovative and much copied visual technique