Journal of Film preservation

As the years have gone by I have come to feel a need to take a less detached view of McLaren, and his place in the story of cinema. Perhaps the best way for me to begin to address this issue is to quote from a 1977 essay by the British film scholar David Curtis:
Perhaps surprisingly, Norman McLaren has succeeded, as few other filmmakers have, in polarizing his critics; they either envelope him in a blanket of unqualified approval, or else totally dismiss him. Most authors of work on the history of animation see McLaren as the supreme champion of the “experimental” cartoon – a figure not so much to be emulated as admired from a distance; a man privileged to express the artist’s communion with “genius” far from the pressures of commercial reality. Authors discussing the avant-garde film – the area in which such artists should by rights belong – rarely give McLaren a mention. His work is too orthodox, too compromised, or evades too many questions. But these reactions are themselves an evasion of the difficult problem of locating McLaren’s position. Is he an avant-garde animator like Len Lye, Harry Smith, or Robert Breer, or does he
31 Journal of Film Preservation / 69 / 2005
belong more properly in the commercial camp with Borowczyk, Trnka, or perhaps his “pupil” Dunning, or is he some form of exceptional cross-breed like Alexeieff, Kuri, or Foldes? (4)
When I first read those words of David Curtis, sometime in the 1980s, I was taken aback. Compare that scepticism with what Claude Jutra said to me in the autumn of 1971:
Film has up till now been mostly a new kind of literature. Norman’s films are really the new medium; and now the medium is becoming accessible to more and more people, especially with computers – computational creation where a person alone using his hands and tools creates something which is absolutely new. Painting is like that, but cinema is somewhere between painting and literature; but there is a new medium which is being created, and Norman was one of those at the earlier points who made it come true and produced masterpieces in that area, which is still underdeveloped. I think the only masterpieces are his – what others in the history of animation? We talk about Emile Cohl, Reynaud, Fischinger – all of them don’t compare with the achievement of Norman’s; and he’s a lonely man. (5)

Source