Neighbours (1952 film)
| Neighbours (Voisins) | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Norman McLaren |
| Produced by | Norman McLaren |
| Written by | Norman McLaren |
| Starring |
Grant Munro |
| Music by | Norman McLaren |
| Distributed by | National Film Board of Canada |
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Release date
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Running time
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8 m 6 s |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | none |
Neighbours (French title: Voisins) is a 1952 anti-war film by Scottish-Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren. Produced at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, the film uses the technique known as pixilation, an animation technique using live actors as stop-motion objects. McLaren created the soundtrack of the film by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles which the projector read as sound. Pablo Picasso called this the greatest film ever made.
Two men, and Grant Munro, live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over the ownership of the single small flower.
The moral of the film is, simply, Love your neighbour Matthew 22:39. The moral is also shown in other languages, including:
Neighbours has been described as "one of the most controversial films the NFB ever made". The eight-minute film was politically motivated:
"I was inspired to make Neighbours 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
The version of Neighbours 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.
During the Vietnam War, public opinion changed, and McLaren was asked to reinstate the sequence. The original negative of that scene had been destroyed, so the scene was salvaged from a positive print of lower quality.
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Wikipedia