Pas de deux

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

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.

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.

Wow, am I glad I decided to give this animated short feature a second look. I only last two minutes the first time and thought to myself, "Unless you are ballet dancer or big fan of ballet, this film would be almost impossible to like and sit through." Watching 13 minutes of two silhouetted-illuminated ballet dancers do their thing against a black background would be unbelievably boring.

Well, I was wrong.

Norm McClaren proves once again you don't need bold colors to make an incredible visual feast. This is black-and-white and words almost are too difficult to come by in trying to explain, without getting technical, how beautiful this film looks.

One female dancer morphs into two and then back to one several times. After about five minutes, she is joined by a male dancers and the images really get wild. I don't think I've seen two more graceful figures than these two.

I admit my mind wandered off track a couple of brief times but for most of this, I was totally mesmerized. This movie was part of the DVD "Leonard Maltin's Animation Favorites From The National Film Board Of Canada.