| Neighbours (Voisins) | |
|---|---|
 Release poster | |
| Directed by | Norman McLaren |
| Written by | Norman McLaren |
| Produced by | Norman McLaren |
| Starring | Grant Munro Jean-Paul Ladouceur |
| Cinematography | Wolf Koenig (photography) |
| Music by | Norman McLaren |
| Distributed by | National Film Board of Canada |
Release date |
|
Running time | 8 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Languages | Various known languages at the final scene, the moral says love your neighbour in different languages which more than 13: see the plot below |
Neighbours (French title:Voisins) is a 1952anti-war film byScottish-Canadian filmmakerNorman McLaren for theNational Film Board of Canada.[1] In 1953, it won theOscar forBest Documentary, Short Subject.
The film usespixilation, an animation technique using live actors asstop motion objects. McLaren created thesoundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles which theprojector read as sound.
Two men, Jean-Paul Ladouceur (French Canadian) andGrant Munro (English Canadian) live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a single, small flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over the ownership of that flower.
The film ends with a moral, shown in multiple languages:
Neighbours has been described as "one of the most controversial films the NFB ever made".[2] The eight-minute film was politically motivated:
"I was inspired to makeNeighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (...) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war." —Norman McLaren[3][4]
The version ofNeighbours that ultimately won an Oscar was not the version McLaren had originally created. In order to make the film palatable for American and European audiences, McLaren was required to remove a scene in which the two men, fighting over the flower, murdered the other's wife and children.[5]
During theVietnam War, public opinion changed, and McLaren was asked to reinstate the sequence. The originalnegative of that scene had been destroyed, so the scene was salvaged from apositive print of lower quality.[6]
NFB founderJohn Grierson, who had invited McLaren to the NFB to form its first animation unit, would ultimately disparageNeighbours and McLaren's attempt at political cinema:
"I wouldn't trust Norman around the corner as a political thinker. I wouldn't trust Norman around the corner as a philosophic thinker. That's not what Norman is for. Norman is forHen Hop. Hen Hop. That's wonderful. And so many other things. That's his basic gift. He's got joy in his movement. He's got loveliness in his movement. He's got fancy in his changes. That's enough."[7]
The term 'pixilation' was created byGrant Munro to describe stop-motion animation of humans in his work with McLaren onTwo Bagatelles, a pair of short pixilation films made prior toNeighbours. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate, an effect achieved by having the actors repeatedly jump upward and photographing them at the top of their trajectories.
McLaren followedNeighbours with two other films using a similar combination of pixilation, live action, variable speed photography andstring puppets. The first,A Chairy Tale (1957) was a collaboration withClaude Jutra andRavi Shankar. The second,Opening Speech by Norman McLaren (1960) was made for the International Film Festival of Montreal, and starred McLaren himself.
Wolf Koenig served as cameraman on the film.[8]
(*A 2005 press release issued byAMPAS states thatNeighbours is "among a group of films that not only competed, but won Academy Awards in what were clearly inappropriate categories".[9])
Neighbours was designated as a "masterwork" by theAudio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada's audio-visual heritage.[10]
In 2009,Neighbours was added toUNESCO'sMemory of the World Programme, listing the most significant documentary heritage collections in the world.[11]
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Neighbours was the influence for the 1992 music video "Rest in Peace" by the American rock band,Extreme. In the originalmusic video for the song, the neighbors fight over a TV set showing the band performing, instead of a flower. The band was sued, but the controversy was quickly settled out of court. Extreme later released a new version of the video, consisting only of the performance montage of the band on a whitecyclorama which was displayed on the television set in the original video.
