Neighbours

What it means

Two men sit in identical lawn chairs, reading their newspapers. Then a flower pushes up exactly on the line between them. That flower is the whole story. Norman McLaren's Neighbours is a parable about how a trivial dispute over possession can grow into mutual destruction.

Both men notice the flower at once, and in that exchange of looks the conflict has begun. A thing of nature has become something to own. Then come the fences, each retaliation only slightly bigger than the last, each step almost reasonable, until both households are wiped out. Neither man holds the moral high ground. They are mirrors, and the film suggests enemies are often more alike than they admit. Many viewers read it as a comment on the nuclear-age arms race and on how nations guard their borders. The closing message, the one moment of direct speech in a wordless film, states the moral outright.

Why it mattered

McLaren, a committed pacifist, made the film against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Korean War. He used pixilation: live actors, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro, hold a pose while the camera exposes one or a few frames, then move a little and hold again. It isn't a cartoon, yet the men slide across the grass, hover above the ground and move with impossible speed.

The same trick that makes them playful at first makes them eerie later, as they move less like people and more like machines. The symmetry of the opening is broken piece by piece, so the picture itself tracks the quarrel. McLaren also drew on his long experiments with making sound directly on the film strip, which gives the score a handmade, unnatural tone. It all came from the National Film Board of Canada, which backed experiment as public-service filmmaking.