I. Am. Canadian.
Thanks to a friend at the Foundation for the National Archives, I attended “A Salute to the National Film Board of Canada” last night, hosted by the National Archives in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film. Yours truly, unfortunately, missed the reception but made it in time for the screening and panel discussion that followed, which included a number of Academy Award-winning and -nominated animation films produced by the National Film Board.
As Canadian, and a cinephile, I am truly embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t seen any of the films screened last night. Whenever I participated in any kind of Oscar pool every year, picking the shorts and animation categories always ended up looking like a blind guessing game. By the time I left the theater dabbing my eyes (yes you read that right - I cried - more on that later), I was swelling with pride that we have such a wonderful organization like the National Film Board of Canada that provides a sanctuary for filmmakers to explore the medium without having to sacrifice creativity for commercial viability.
And explore the medium, they did! The range of films shown last night yanked me right out of my cushy and comforting place that is the digital world, and see film again for what it can be. Norman McLaren’s delightful public service spot, “Mail Early (1941),” was hand drawn in pen and ink on clear 35 mm film stock, then photographed against a painted background. Ryan Larkin, whose works and life were chronicled in the Academy Award-winning film Ryan (2004), worked entirely with paper and ink to mimic and recreate movement that came delightfully alive on the big screen. For her film, The Street (1976), Caroline Leaf manipulated watercolor and ink on glass, frame by frame, to create animation. The way each and every one of these filmmakers put their hands, quite literally, on film, and reverse engineered movement and animation is simply magical, even to my jaded eye, living in a digitized world.
Oh, you wanted to know why I cried. Right. The film that ended the evening was The Danish Poet (2006) by Torill Kove, who won the Academy Award in the Animaed Short Film category for this film. It’s a jewel of a film at just under 15 minutes, describing a series of events that happened by coincidence that led to the birth of the narrator (who, most of us assumed, was Kove herself and therefore autobiographical, but she just happens to be a really, really great storyteller). The film begins and ends with animated squiggles of embrio, but everything that comes in between is as precious as a fairy tale. I probably don’t do the film justice by saying this, but think of it as the most beautiful and appropriate answer to a four-year-old’s question about “where do babies come from.” So yeah, I laughed and cried, because it was a story about love that was so simple enough for children to understand yet profound enough for adults (especially weepy and sentimental ones like me) to be touched by it.
I do hope you’ll get a chance to see some of these films someday soon. In fact, I know you will. In celebration of its 70th anniversay, the National Film Board of Canada will be opening its vault and stream some of its archival film online, for free. Now, that, mes amis, is a wondeful marriage of the old and new worlds.
(Image and Film Info: Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film, and the Foundation for the National Archives.)
***Crossposted from The Scarlett Cinema.
