A Defense of Norman McLaren’s Place in Experimental Film History in Canada

This essay charts the curious resistance to including animator Norman McLaren in histories of Canadian experimental animation, reading the pattern of exclusion as symptomatic of broader discursive tendencies in English language experimental film scholarship. Structured as a discussion of hypothetical charges against McLaren, the essay examines how the filmmaker has been taken as too widely known; insufficiently modernist; and too enjoyable; and too didactic. The separation between scholarship on animation and experimental film and media is also explored in addition to the conflation of McLaren’s film career with the institution of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The institutional taint of the NFB runs counter to the dominant ethos of twentieth-century experimental film and media filmmakers as individual artists working at an artisanal scale outside external constraints and obscures the possibility that experimental artists might negotiate agency and artistic freedom in relation to these constraints.