Around Is Around
1951 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Norman McLaren
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Oscilloscope patterns gain stereoscopic depth through separate left-eye and right-eye positioning. The 3-D experiment animates electronic waves in space.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
McLaren's oscilloscope experiments feel quaint now—pure formalism without the provocation; there's no subversion here, just a technician playing with the toys available to him in 1951.
A canonical work in the lineage of abstract animation and proto-digital image-making; the rigor of positioning left-eye and right-eye channels predates stereoscopic cinema by decades, and the formal restraint is exactly what makes it endure.
The choice to separate the oscilloscope patterns into two channels and recombine them stereoscopically is a deceptively simple decision that transforms static electronic waves into dimensional space—McLaren's constraint becomes the entire language of the film.