Norman MacLaren

Norman MacLaren is the man who has made famous Len Lye's invention of direct films. He "passed from drawing images direct onto celluloid to drawing sounds by a similar method. Installed since 1940 at the National Film Board of Canada, he has not only trained and inspired many individual cartoon film-makers, but has himself built up a corpus of work in which virtually no possibilities of the motion picture medium have remained unexplored. To my mind he is one of cinema's purest geniuses, and in much of his work the relationship between film-magic and dream-magic comes so close they virtually combine," (Basil Wright). The Festival is showing a number of his shorts in one screening.