comments on "Opening Speech"

Follow the link to find our more about Norman McLaren. It is a short write up summarizing his work. You may delve deeper into this inspiration if you wish.

the Canadian Encyclopedia

This second link is an actual film clip of McLaren drawing directly onto the film without the use of a camera. He has drawn each movement. This must have taken an incredible amount of time. I love the way the screen dances around; the movement is not a fluent flow. There are other films if you don't like this one, but this was my favourite.

Hen Hop

I thought the film “Opening Speech” was funny.  More intellectually I thought the movie was about how new technology is better performing than older technology.  The paper notes were very annoying to listen to and he was not very organized with them.  They were not in order and he had too many pieces of paper.  However, the mike was an improvement over the paper. We also know how annoying mikes can be with their whining noises and never in the right place. Some people can't hear them and you have to speak directly into them. If you don't speak into them then the speaker will fade in and out.    However, when he portrayed the animation it flowed smoothly.  He was able to be creative with different languages with a visually pleasing demonstration.  Nothing went wrong with the new technology giving people the feeling that it was more easy to organize and an improvement over the other two older technologies.    

Lets look at the same film from different views. The content of the film was to welcome everyone to the 1960 Montreal Film Festival, which I feel he did. Norman McLaren was an innovative film maker, so why not make it spectacular. Was his context the same as the content? I think not. You have to look at who he made the film for and why did he make that film in that way. His audience was personal from the film industries, directors, producers, actors, and audiences. He wanted to welcome everyone in a unique way that personalized it from all different countries. His choice of technological steps, each step improving from the previous one. He showed his media as being flawless, flowing, imaginative. He exaggerated the flaws in the previous two outlets. Which happens to also be the subtext, the hidden meanings. McLaren's uses technological determinism through creative processes to add to the original content. The meta-text of the short film was to show himself as the creator of this new technology of jumping into the film and using film as a innovative and captivating beginning.