Evelyn Lambart
2005 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Éric Barbeau
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Animator Evelyn Lambart, Norman McLaren's longtime assistant and co-director of six films including Begone Dull Care, is profiled. The short honours her central role in his celebrated work.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A five-minute NFB doc about an animator's legacy feels like the exact opposite of subversive—it's institutional memory canonizing itself, which means it'll probably bore me, but I'm curious if Barbeau found something genuinely strange in Lambart's erasure that makes the tribute sting rather than soothe.
Barbeau situates Lambart within the McLaren lineage while refusing to let her disappear into it—a formally delicate move that positions this short as a corrective within cinema history, the kind of essay-film that only works if the archive speaks with real precision.
What matters here is likely a single archival choice or a particular moment where Barbeau lets Lambart's own voice or hands move through the frame, the decision to let her *show* rather than narrate around her, which would transform five minutes of institutional biography into something that actually breathes.