Norman McLaren: "Begone Dull Care"

For today's post, we're going to change things up a bit. We've all heard of music being made for films. This music comes in the form of original songs or orchestral scores. Though, it's kind of hard to imagine a film being made for music, with the exception of concert DVDs of course. How would this relationship even work? Films are supposed to present a visual perception, and music and sound is added to films to merely enhance our experience. However, there was a Canadian filmmaker who seems to have achieved this seemingly impossible task. So, today we will be featuring a film, rather than an album. But don't worry, this is still a jazz blog, for the film that we're reviewing is a jazz film... Intrigued yet? Well lets start off with the filmmaker. Norman McLaren was born in Scotland, however, had a career based in Canada. He was most well known as an animator, as he pioneered various techniques such as draw on animation, and pixilation. Today, we will be discussing his 1949 short "Begone Dull Care". This film is characterized by McLaren's experimentation with draw on animation as each individual strip of film is in sync with the beet of an Oscar Peterson tune. We know...Kinda hard to rap your head around; you'll be able to see for yourself bellow. However, rather than the music enhancing the film, the film in this case enhances the music, adding a whole knew element to the Peterson composition. Furthermore, we apologize if you were expecting us to feature an album today, however we felt that this film has been sitting in the National Film Board of Canada's archives for far too long. We hope you all enjoy!