| It’s no secret that there are many obscure Canadian artists out there, many of them obscure simply because they are Canadian.
Call me a lazy nationalist, but I had never heard of filmmaker Grant Munro before the release of Cut-Up, a new double-DVD retrospective of his work from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Milestone Film and Video in the United States. Most of us are reasonably familiar with Munro’s most famous collaborator, Norman McLaren, who revolutionized animation at the NFB in the 1950s and ’60s. But Munro – who was an actor, director, editor and cinematographer, as well as an animator – is only now getting his due with this package of 13 live-action and animated short films.
It’s easy to enjoy the spirit of playfulness that Munro and his collaborators brought to their experiments with cut-out and stop-motion animation, pixillation (or the stop-motion animation of live actors) and multiple exposures. For example, the jazzy Three Blind Mice (1945) offers a delightful approach to the industrial safety film through the story of three animated rodents. The Oscar-winning Neighbours (1952), directed by McLaren, is a humorous pacifist critique of nuclear arms proliferation that sees Munro battling a suburban neighbour over the position of a property line. Finally, the experimental short film, Canon (1964), co-directed by McLaren and Munro, saw the supremely clever use of at least four exposures at once.
Unfortunately, by today’s standards much of the rest of the material is a little corny. In Toys (1966), for example, Munro animates G.I. Joe action figures in an attempt to make a rather obvious and moralistic anti-war statement – his technique is impressive, with the little plastic soldiers burned and mutilated beyond recognition, but the finished product reeks of liberal guilt. Similarly, Munro’s anti-smoking commercial, the 60-second Ashes of Doom (1970), is equally heavy on the sanctimony, but at least it makes up for it somewhat with a genuinely witty punch line involving a vampire choking on his victim’s second-hand smoke. Still, as I watched Cut-Up, it gave me the same feeling I experienced seeing Stan Brakhage’s films for the first time last year – I recognize and appreciate Munro’s historical contributions to filmmaking, but much of the work just leaves me cold.
The most notable exception, and incidentally the film that Munro says he is most proud of, is the documentary Boo Hoo (1975), which follows an elderly undertaker on a semi-unauthorized tour through Fernhill Cemetery in St. John, New Brunswick. Our guide through the boneyard is a charming old codger with a genuine reverence and respect for the dead, but he also has his impish moments, reciting witty epitaphs from memory and generally looking on the bright side of… death. The film offers insightful revelations about human nature, grief and the inevitability of mortality, but does so with a heaping portion of mordant wit.
Cut-Up is also worthwhile for the interviews with Munro that make up the majority of the package’s supplementary features. Munro is a great raconteur who led a fascinating life and he knows how to turn a personal anecdote into a work of art in its own right. Certainly, his insights into the personalities and creative environment at the NFB during that institution’s most acclaimed era to date are enough to make Cut-Up an essential piece of little-known Canadian film history. |
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