Cinema
Neighbours
Norman McLaren · 1952
Synopsis
Two almost identical men, sitting in deckchairs in front of two cardboard houses, smoke their pipes and read newspapers with opposing headlines. A flower grows exactly on the boundary between their lawns. Each smells it, each wants it and draws the border so as to have it on his side; a fence of white pickets rises between them.
Context
The film was shot in the summer of 1951 near Rockcliffe airport in Ottawa, during the Korean War and on McLaren's return from his mission to China; he wanted an openly antimilitarist film. The two actors, Grant Munro and Jean-Paul Ladouceur, are filmed frame by frame like puppets, a technique that Munro is said to have named. The music is a synthetic sound, created on the film's soundtrack. An American educational distributor had a scene judged too violent cut; McLaren restored the full version in 1967 or in 1969, depending on the sources.
Who it is for
Eight minutes, without a word spoken; the technique is visible and part of the point. The full version is the only one in circulation today.
Prizes and reception
Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1953; inscribed in 2009, together with all of McLaren's work, on the Memory of the World Register.
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