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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63147 Medium Norman McLaren: animation without a camera and a film about conflict

Read the following passage.

A. Norman McLaren was travelling in India when a telegram reached him with the news that his short film Neighbours had won an Oscar. He wrote back that he was happy to win an award, but asked "who was this Oscar?" Hardly anyone had expected the nomination. Most American theatrical distributors had turned the film down, calling it "too gruesome and of a poor technical quality." Oddly, the award was for best short documentary, although the film contained no documentary material at all.

B. McLaren was born in Stirling, Scotland, in 1914. In his early twenties he worked at the British GPO Film Unit, run by John Grierson, where he noticed that knife marks on a film's soundtrack played back as sounds. He then moved to New York. Grierson, by then head of Canada's National Film Board, invited him to join the Board, and McLaren came to Ottawa in 1941. In 1943 he became head of Studio A, the animation department, and he recruited a group of future filmmakers, among them Evelyn Lambart and René Jodoin.

C. Much of his work did not need a camera at all. McLaren scratched and painted images directly onto film stock, and he treated sound in the same way, marking the soundtrack with pencils, pens, brushes and razor blades. With Lambart he developed a deck of pitch cards, a kind of keyboard that allowed the exact notes of a piano to be photographed onto the soundtrack. His films in this style include Begone Dull Care (1949), set to the music of jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, and Synchromy (1971), the high point of the card method.

D. Neighbours was McLaren's response to the Korean War, which had cast the Chinese as the enemy. He filmed live actors one frame at a time, a technique called pixilation, in a story of two neighbours fighting over a flower. In Canada many viewers disliked the film, and some asked theatres to withdraw it. An American educational distributor cut the scene in which women and babies are attacked as too violent, and the Board distributed this shorter version for years. In 1967, as the war in Vietnam grew, McLaren decided to restore the full film, because he felt its images of innocent people being attacked made a strong statement against war.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Together with a co-worker, he found a way to record precise musical tones as pictures on film.

- 2.
Before settling in Canada, he had already worked for a British film organization.

- 3.
He was visiting India when he learned that one of his films had received an Oscar.

- 4.
Soon after joining the Board, he was put in charge of its cartoon studio and hired young talent.

- 5.
One of his films was made to accompany another artist's music.

- 6.
For a number of years, the version most people saw was missing its harshest scenes.

- 7.
Neighbours was filmed outdoors near an airfield in Ottawa.

- 8.
The award went to a category that did not fit the film he had made.

- 9.
Outside Canada, Neighbours became more popular than any other film the Board made.

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