Pas de deux

It's really hard to describe this work of art, so I'm not going to try. Suffice to say that whether or not you are a fan of ballet, I doubt you will be able to watch this without becoming enthralled. Monochrome throughout, and using some very effective stop-frame photographic techniques, we follow Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren's gorgeously choreographed duet take shape. The panpipes from Dobre Constantin are hauntingly effective at enveloping this inspired presentation of symmetry and imagery and it's simplicity has got to be a key to it's success. Give it ten minutes, you will enjoy it.

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.

Stunning, enthralling, captivating, breathtaking.

A visual masterpiece composed from two dancers, clever back-lighting, a pan-pipe and some stop motion/multi-exposure effects. Proof that in the hands of an artist the sum surpasses the parts, must be seen to be believed! The progression from the simplest expression of human motion into a cascade of frames and forms draws the viewer from first to last image. The beauty of the initial simplicity turns into a delicious betrayal of epectations as subtle new effects are thrown into the mix. The music, passionate and stark, is a perfect match and even the synchronizing between aural and visual ebbs and flows is impeccable. Should be seen by anyone who enjoys film as art.

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.

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.