Norman McLaren Revisited

This project will examine the work of Scottish-Canadian experimental animator Norman McLaren through close analysis of the film production infrastructures and cultural programme of nation-building in Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Understanding McLaren as a complex figure caught between contradictory political, aesthetic and social conditions, this project will look at the strategies of complicity and subterfuge which enabled McLaren and his contemporaries to produce a remarkable body of film work against the odds. This research will draw upon new archival research undertaken in Toronto and Montreal to form a live, event-based output delivered in Canada. On return to the UK, this will be followed by a period of research in Scottish archives with a view to the later development of a journal article.