Flocons

The scouts

Saint-Pierre pulls off the one move that shouldn't work—turning McLaren's own test footage into a ghost story about the man who made it—but the real subversion is how tenderly she does it, letting Tchaikovsky and celluloid mortality become something genuinely unsettling instead of clever.

A centennial essay that locates itself precisely in McLaren's lineage while interrogating it: the formal precision of his technique becomes the formal prison of Jutra's body, and the edit—those measured cuts between animation and archive—completes a conversation about animation as both liberation and entrapment that feels ancestral and urgent.

The decision to layer Jutra's performance against McLaren's own paint-on-celluloid marks—that moment where a body becomes inseparable from the medium trapping it—carries the entire emotional weight of the piece, and on two minutes and a shoestring budget, that single conceptual marriage does all the work.